Random Thoughts

Okupant X by Gary Panter (140x216mm)

This is a most curious book. It was published in 1979 by Diana’s Bimonthly Press, with a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts. It’s offset-printed (I think; very shiny ink) and stapled. I tried googling the publisher, and I’m finding things like:

And:

But nothing that says what the press actually was…

Anyway, the book is about Jimbo playing Occupant X in a play in Dal-Tokyo, and that’s the first of many references here to other works by Panter elsewhere. Dal-Tokyo was a strip Panter published in the LA Reader starting in 1983, so this is before that.

The Jimbo-on-stage/text-below thing gives this a children’s book vibe, sort of.

Panter experiments with different rendering techniques, and on this spread, he’s doing an almost super-hero inking job with Jimbo’s hair.

We touch upon Invasion of the Elvis Zombies, published in 1984.

And this was used as the cover of Raw #3, published in 1981:

If Okupant X had been published later, then you’d think of it being very referential, but instead it seems like Panter would cannibalise ideas from it over the next few years? Or perhaps Dal Tokoy/Elvis were things that he had already started working on, and just included here, too?

Dale Luciano interviews Panter in The Comics Journal #100, page 217:

LUCIANO: Tell me about Okupant X. 1
haven’t been able to locate a copy, but people
tell me it’s an important book.
PANTER: Yeah .
LUCIANO: Uhh, what is
PANTER: Okupant X is a book did in
. .uhhhhh… [Gets up, starts rummaging
around in search of a copy] Lemme see if I can
find a copy here.. .Oh yeah, I told you I
had a Xerox of that, and I do. [Thumbing
through the book) I can’t remember what
year. . ’79, ‘SO, something like that .
published on really good paper by an art
publisher in Rhode Island, from Diana’s Bi-
monthly Press.
LUCIANO: Gary, what it??
PANTER; It’s a 28-page book about this
guy, OkupantX. It’s kind ofa puppet play.
It’s just about this guy who goes for a walk
and happens onto this corporate property
where this giant monster attacks him.
LUCIANO: A giant monster, did you say?
PANTER: Yeah, a large germ. It was an
excuse to draw a ’50s monster with lots of
eyes and arms and stuff, and write some-
thing sort of Kabuki-like.
LUCIANO: That occurred to me, at least on
a subliminal level. At one point, looking at
“Jimbo,” I thought, “This is like Kabuki
Drama.’ .
PANTER: Yeah, it is Kabuki-influenced
in a way. I’ve really studied and looked at
Japan to see what their view of the West
was, to see another view of things.
LUCIANO: Tell me more about. working in
this child-like style.
PANTER: Well, it’s just following tradi-
tions. I don’t think of my stuff as looking
like children’s drawing, really. In some
ways, I’m just working to”fill in a gap. If I see
everyone doing slick, air-brush, beautiful,
really • ‘finessed” drawings, then try to do
something that’s not being done as much.
That’s where my work comes from. But
now, lotsof people are drawing ratty.
LUCIANO: (Laughs) Drawing ratty? That’s •
What call it?
PANTER: Yeah, ratty. That’s pretty
much what I call it. Ratty drawing.
LUCIANO: But you like ratty drawing, cor-
rect ?
PANTER: Oh yeah, it comes right out of
the human being. Ratty drawing is natural,
like the marks people make on crates when
they write the numbers on them to ship
them off, or like bathroom graffiti when it’s
just scrawled onto the walls. The line has
some kind of content. It’s got the emotion
of the person doing it. It’s a testament that
the person exists and that they made the
marks.

[…]

LUCIANO: You use the word “marks, i’
where hear most cartoonists or artists talk
about “lines. What’s the difference?
PANTER: (Long pause during which he con-
siders the question) I think lines are the kinds
of things an artist uses to construct an illu-
sion. A line is a tool for making or defining
an illusion. A mark is more ofa thing that
exists for and by itself. It’s more abstract as
a building block. I think the idea of
“marks” is •somehow closer to the natural.
Marks get away from the sophisticated
reality of an illusion of depth toward the
reality of something that’s closer to the
natural order of things. Yeah, marks have
the look of nature.

It was apparently also published in a different format:

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Lost Faces by Mark Beyer (138x122mm)

This little 12 page booklet (apparently drawn in 1995) comes in a little sleeve, making the book feel a little more luxurious.

Amy & Jordan have gotten a bit chunkier? Other than that, everything is as usual:

It all ends as well as you’d suppose.

This was published in Switzerland in an edition of 350 copies.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Raw One-Shot #2: How to Commit Suicide in South Africa by Sue Coe and Holly Metz (268x360mm)

I’ve had this book for a few years now, but I’ve never read it — I thought it would just be too depressing.

Spoilers: It is.

We start off with a poem by Bernadine…

… but then the rest is very factual. We get a historical overview…

… but the main text is mostly newspaper excerpts. I had expected a more subjective approach, really, but the text is quite distanced. On the other hand, Coe’s artwork is anything but.

Oh, fuck them.

It’s all pretty relentless, and the only thing that seems almost… whimsical… is this thing about tsotsis.

Centrefold.

Even the descriptions of torture are remarkably unemotional.

And then there’s a bibliography, of course.

So this wasn’t really what I’d expected at all — it’s more a compilation of facts about Apartheid and South Africa than anything else. They depend on the sheer weight of all of this to make the reader angry (and depressed) than telling us how we should feel, which is great.

Wrap-around cover.

Dale Luciano writes in The Comics Journal #108, page 40:

It’s not a comic book but HOW TO Com•
mit Suicide In South Africa, a 1983 “‘one-
shot” from RAW’ Books and Graphics, has
been appearing in some comics specialty
shops. The title is an allusion to the fate
awaiting those, black and White, Who dare
to challenge the apartheid laws or strike for
better working and living conditions for
native South Africans. Introduced by a
poem that bitterly indicts the travel bureau
image of South Africa as a frolicsome
paradise for white,’ European tourists, How
To Commit • Suicide is a collection Of Sue
Coe’s disturbing and grotesque images of
torture and repression in contemporary
South Africa. Coe’s images are dark,
violent, and expressionistic, vividly com-
municating a sense Of the horror and
madness that are the legacy Of South
Africa’s past as they dwell in the apartheid
present. These images have the same tone
of outrage and moral indignation that
characterizes the plays of South African
dramatist Athol Fugard. (There is one draw-
ing, Of an African miner hunched low in
a cave and gazing plaintively ahead, that
communicates a sense of an oppressed
people’s spiritual longing; it’s an image—
the only one of its kind in the book—that
calls to mind the lingering hope for justice
in Paton’s Cry, The Beloved Country.) The
accompanying text by Holly Metz provides
an ovet”v’ie.v Of South Africa’s turbulent and
troubled history, the continuing effects of
apartheid on education and employment Of
the native population, a gruesome account
of acts of detention and torture by the
South African security police, and a primer
on U.S. investments in South Africa.
Reading through this book is a harrowing
experience.
The “-page HOW TO Commit Suicide is
published in a format similar to, but slight*
ly smaller than RAW magazine. The stated
purpose of How To Commit Suicide is “to
spark further interest and action”: accord-
ingly, a bibliography of materials is included.
The book was designed by Francoise Mouly
and Art Spiegelman. The production and
promotion of this book are clearly acts of
political conscience.

Artforum:

Coe is a closet lighting technician, and her use of light runs through all the gambits from a clinical application of it, in the clean and well-lit room where some members of the security police force, BOSS, are gently thrashing Steve Biko to death—in an apparent suicide—to its metaphysical embodiment of secret conversation or its ability to emanate from within the subject instead of being reflected inward to the soul. Efficient treachery is the only way to describe Coe’s use of light, and of shadow.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Painting onto cel plastic by Mark Beyer.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.