Random Thoughts

How To Go To Hell by Matt Groening (226x229mm)

Big changes afoot — Groening has taken the book from Pantheon to HarperPerennial, and this is the first collection without staples. This is also the first collection that doesn’t dip back into deep Life In Hell history — all the strips are from recent years. And finally, there’s no theme at all, so this is more of a straight-up collection of recent strips.

And it’s also the first collection I didn’t buy myself at the time, so I’ve never read this myself before now. I don’t remember why I fell out of the habit of buying these? I mean, the previous collection (Akbar & Jeff’s Guide To Life) was totally spiffy? But I did. Was there a connection to the ubiquitousness of The Simpsons that turned me off? Sounds pretty odd to me, because I really liked The Simpsons (like everybody else).

Was it the lack of staples? Let’s go with that one.

I should vacuum the floors. That’s hairy, dude.

Anyway, this is a lot less dense than previous collections — many of the strips are simple variations on a theme like this one.

It’s still amusing, though.

Groening does put in a lot of work on a fair number of strips, but it’s a less intense reading experience than back in the early 80s.

D’oh!

Another new development is that Groening is dropping in a whole bunch of straight-up autobiography (where Binky plays Groening). They’re all … well, anecdotes, but they’re good anecdotes.

Oh yeah… wasn’t there a big kerfuffle about Fox going after bootleg Simpsons t-shirts in a big way at the time?

That’s a great anecdote. Now I’m really curious to see whether Groening kept developing the strip in this direction in the following years…

The book ends with a bunch of Akbar & Jeff strips like this, about the first Iraq war.

Groening was too optimistic, unfortunately.

Indeed.

The Comics Journal #141, page 15:

Cartoonists Respond to the Gulf War
As the last issue of the Journal was being com-
pleted, the United States went to war against
Iraq. In the six weeks since then, the war came
to affect nearly every aspect of American life,
including comics.

[…]

Matt Groening’s Iåfe in Hell depicted Akbar
and Jeff staring at one another through gas
masks, finally sharing a single flower in the last
panel. “The gas masks seemed like the first
reminder that there are apsects of this war which
can get incredibly ugly and don’t seem to have
been taken into account,” Groening told the Ex-
aminer. A doll of Groening’s most famous crea-
tion, Bart Simpson, was dressed in camouflage
by troops at the Saudi front and presented to
Defense Secretary Dick Cheney. Groening’s
response: “It’s always sad when a 10-year-old
gets drawn into a war.” Groening told the
Associated Press that he was “very opposed to
the war,” but that the Simpsons probably sup-
ported it: “I’m not the Simpsons. I’m smarter
than they are.”

Gary Groth interviews Groening in The Comics Journal #141, page 89:

GROTH: One of the things that occurred to me about Life
in Hell is that the politics of the strip usually center on
what I call the private realm, that is, personal relation-
ships, the work place, schools. Unlike something like
Doonesbury, you don’t address national politics.
GROENING: The last few weeks of Life in Hell have been
devoted to the Gulf War, but you’re right. When I got the
opportunity to draw my comic, I wanted to do what was
on my mind, the stuff that keeps me worried: love, work,
sex, death — the basics. I was always amazed that so many
cartoons either dealt with political ideas in a very heavy-
handed way, or concentrated on the trivial inconsequen-
tialities of life, while the hellishness of most people’s jobs
and love lives and fear of death remain unexplored.
GROTH: Would That suggest that you ‘re not a highly poli-
ticized or ideological person ?
GROENING: If I could get my political point of view
across and be funny, I’d do it. But when I’ve tried to do
political humor, it’s just not very funny. I’ve done political
strips from time to time — and there are politics implied
in all of my stuff — but part of my stance is to let people
find the message and decide about it themselves rather
then me declare it. In fact, that’s about as far as I’ll go
in talking about my stuff. It’s not for me to say, but if other
people find it there, I’m glad.
GROTH: So you ‘ve fell compelled to address the Gulf war
in your strip.
GROENING: I was just about to begin a long series of car-
toons called “Binky’s Guide to Love,” a sort of rvised
and expanded look at Is Hell. Then the war started,
and I’ve been doing strips with Akbar and Jeff in gas
masks, talking about the war.
GROTH: This may become evident once I dig Out those
strips, but what’s your take on The war?
GROENING: I think it’s a disaster. I think it’s bad for the
world, it’s bad for the United States, and will not achieve
the stated goals used to justify the war. The comic strip
I just finished begins with the question: “l don’t mean
to be impertinent, but how do we know when we’ve won?”
I’m certainly glad the war seems to be as successful as
it is, but we don’t really know what’s happening because
everything’s censored.
GROTH: Is this the first time you ‘ve actually tackled a ma-
jor Current event in a series of strips?
GROENING: I did some stuff knocking Reagan. In fact,
Efe in Hell started in 1980, the time of Reagan, and I swore
that if Bush hadn’t been elected president that I would have
changed the name of the strip to Life Is Swell. It didn’t
happen that way.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Raw Vol 2 #1: Open Wounds from the Cutting Edge of Commix edited by Françoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman (153x224mm)

I stumbled upon somebody on the intertubes talking about Raw a couple weeks back. Can’t find it now, but they said essentially “Man, Raw was good… I’m talking about the real Raw — not the fake one they had pallets of at the airport.”

This is that fake one they had pallets of at the airport, presumably.

After self-publishing Raw for almost a decade, Mouly and Spiegelman took Raw vol. 2 to Penguin, and shrunk it down into the same size as Maus. Both presumably astute commercial choices, but since it only lasted three issues, I’m assuming that Penguin come to the same conclusion as Pantheon: It’s just really hard to get people to buy any art comic that’s not actually Maus itself.

(Well, at least at the time.)

I don’t remember what my reaction to these smaller Raw books were — I was at the university, and I didn’t pay as much attention to comics as before. I mean, I was still buying comics, and I bought all three of the Raw Penguins as they were published, but I think I’ve never re-read them since? I have absolutely no recollection of anything in them, except… wasn’t there a Mark Beyer piece written by Alan Moore in one of these things?

Hm.

So I’m approaching this book with some trepidation, but also with a fair bit of excitement, because I haven’t even looked at these books in 30 years — they’ve just been in various boxes…

Well, the design aesthetic hasn’t changed… it’s just been shrunk down. (“Futura — and you’re done”, as the saying went in the 80s. It’s true.)

There’s only three longer pieces in this book — Charles Burns, Spiegelman’s Maus chapter, and a thing from Ben Katchor, and they take up less than half the page count.

It still seems kinda lopsided — the sheer number of smaller pieces first feels like a cornucopia, and then starts getting exhausting…

The people appearing here are lean heavily into Raw veterans… but there’s also a surprising number of underground types appearing here, like Justin Green.

I mean, the bits are pretty funny and stuff, but there seems to be a greater disconnect between the pieces than in previous issues. (Newgarden/Friedman and Joost Swarte.)

And I’m not sure they were all originally meant for this smaller format? (Kaz and Mark Beyer.)

Kamagurka/Seele and Tom de Haven.

It’s all so random! And many of these pieces are very slight. (Newgarden and Kim Deitch.)

*gasp* “Here” by Richard McGuire, which was originally meant for Bad News #3, but which was incredibly influential, er, here instead. It’s just mind-blowing — and it’s not just a formal exercise, but manages to be quite moving, too.

I guess that perhaps what the editors were going after was a feeling of richness? It’s like… “here’s an anthology that shows you everything comics can be. Look at it. JUST LOOK AT IT!” And I can’t really fault any of these pieces. (Loustal.)

But there’s no cumulative coherent reading experience here. (I love Krystine Kryttre’s scratchboard artwork. It’s more underground, though, right?)

Pascal Doury’s previous longer piece (in… Raw #… 5? 6?) had all the penises censored, but apparently Penguin had no problems with the penisnessness of it all. (So meticulous.)

Mattotti’s artwork is amazing, but it’s perhaps not the best printing it’s gotten here…

The longest piece here, by far (twice as long as anything else) is the Maus chapter (and this is probably why Penguin wanted to publish Raw at all). Spiegelman helpfully reprints all the pages from the previous chapter (which wasn’t included in the first Maus book), so the assumption here is definitely that people will have bought the Maus book, and then the Penguin Raw.

And this is the first chapter Spiegelman did after Maus was published, so it deals a lot with the repercussions and reactions to the book.

Spiegelman also has his analyst telling him that he’s the real survivor for growing up with an exasperating father.

Most of the story takes place in Auschwitz, and it’s heart-breaking.

Reading this book, I think I was disappointed by the lack of surprise? It’s basically “all the Raw regulars, and some of Spiegelman’s underground friends”. In one way, that’s very sympathetic — I’m guessing it meant that all these people were finally getting paid real Penguin money — but it’s also disappointing, because there’s little that’s fresh here (except the McGuire piece). But you can’t really complain about getting some Mariscal…

Basil Wolverton.

I love Ben Katchor, but I just couldn’t get into this piece. Perhaps I was just exhausted by this point? So. Much. Stuff.

Commix. Spiegelman gives us the hard sell on the back cover.

Kim Thompson writes in The Comics Journal #210, page 84:

After eight self-published tab-
loid-size issues in seven years,
Spi egelman and Mouly re-launched
Raw as a Penguin paperback. Even
though this second “Volume” was
designed in a more mainstream-
friendly format, there were no
creative concessions; in fact, by
making impossible the graphic in-
dulgences Of the tabloid-size
editions, the “new” Raw handily
rendered moot the most frequent
criticism — that its emphasis on
design overshadowed narra-
Unfortunately,
Spiegelman and Mouly called
it quits after three issues. At
that time, Raw had become so
infrequent (those three Pen-
guin editions took six years to
produce) that its disappearance
didn’t carry a sting — more
like a long, slow, creeping dis-
appointment as the ’90s
continued on with no new
releases. But by that time, Raw
had launched so many careers,
defined (and in some cases ex-
hausted) so many trends, and
opened so many possibilities
that its job had arguably been
done.

Michael Dooley writes in The Comics Journal #135, page 60:

Let’s play comics critic butcher and
carve up the new RAW magazine.
After all,’ it’s been garnering high
praise for over a decade. Worse, it’s
now receiving accolades from outside
the comics world. It’s even become
a book-of-the-month club selection.
So, O.K. Let’s start slicing:
First, let’s accuse the once self-
published RAW of going establish-
ment. This latest issue, the 200-page
volume two, number one, now car-
ries the Penguin logo. Wearing
Mickey Mouse ears, no less. And it’s
no longer a “sporadical. ” Rather than
release dates based on Art Spiegel-
man’ s inner compulsion and the avail-
ability of worthy material, a new
volume is scheduled to be delivered
every nine months. And, in a blatant
ploy for respectability , the back cover
pompously categorizes RAW as
‘literature/cartoons. ‘ ‘
And let’s mourn the passing of the
luxurious bomb-shelter coffee table
format, modeled after Wet and other
avant-garde magazines of the late
1970s. RAW has been shrunk down
to Maus size so it fits tidily on shop-
ping mall bookstore shelves and
folding TV trays.
And let’s bemoan the loss of the
angry, abrasive cover illustration, like
Kaz, Mark Beyer, and Charles Burns
used to do. The latest is certainly a
relatively mild concoction, from
“Buy or Die” Gary Panter of all peo-
ple. It’s a goofy grafting of five comic
strip characters into one head, and one
that he did quite a while ago. A Print
Casebook article about the creation of
RAW’s cover for issue three shows it
as a sketch — is there any Other kind
of Panter drawing? — which was re-
jected for being too static and
understated. But that was in 1981,
back before Panter became the Em-
my Award-winning designer for TV’s
Pee- Wee ‘s Playhouse.
And let’s note how the overall
cover design is no more shocking than
its apparent inspiration, the 1954
MAD comic book simulation of life
magazine with Basil Wolverton’s
Lena the Hyena.
And let’s claim that the material in-
side, billed as “Open Wounds from
the Cutting Edge of Commix,” is
simply a collection of the usual gang
of idiosyncrats, suffering from tired
blood. Their work is just Soho-hum,
designed to be easily accessible to the
trendy set.

[…]

If RAW is running the risk of
becoming the darling of yuppie
hipsters it’s certainly not because it
caters to their huge egos. Witness the
inclusion of “The Single-Minded
Pursuit of More,” Georgeanne
Deen’s painting, in violets and
yellows, on the inside back cover,
positioned opposite Catalan’s full-
page ad for RAW-related merchan-
dise. Looking like a record album
cover that was cropped on the side,
it shows a material girl from hell with
a blobby Jag, tiger skin toreador
pants, pointy tailfin breasts, Woody
Woodpecker hairstyle, and eyes lit
with a fierce, determined, insatiable
hunger to have it all. While not ap-
proaching the brutally awesome pow-
er of RA W s past painter-contributor,
Sue Coe, Deen’s vicious portrait
radiates a savage electricity.
But these are just appetizers. Let’s
dig into RAW’s main course, the
eighth chapter Of Maus.
Spiegelman has an amazing talent
for subtly injecting his cerebral humor
into the most personally horrifying
circumstances. The tide of this install-
ment, “Time Flies,” is a complex
pun involving anthropomorphism and
EBticides. He has, however,
the “M” from “Mauschwitz.” It’s
as as if, now that he’s arrived at that
actual point in the story , his vision Of
the place has become too real for him
to continue to indulge in flippant
wordplay.

[…]

More’s the pity that Spiegelman’s
acute characterizations are severely
weakened by his casual sketchbook
renderings. This style, while it has an
appealing spontaneity and vitality, is
too understated, too easy to dismiss.

[…]

Psychosis reaches a strident pitch
with “The Glass Thief,” in which
Mark Beyer, comix’s conductor of
gloomy tunes and mortuary melodies,
reprises his usual notes of discord.
Amy and Jordan get Out of to find
all their pets are dead. Killed by a
green man dressed like a clown who
leaves more corpses all around. “I am
nothing,” the green man cries. He
threatens to kill them, but then he
dies. We’re just getting bopped with
the beat of the same old song Of
alienation, desolation, and despera-
tion, played out like shattered Philip
Glass.

[…]

Given the same number of pages,
Krystine Klyttre’s ‘ ‘Social Butterfly”
also portrays a world careening
hysterically out of control. Yet, she
manages to maintain our interest
throughout.

[…]

Bob Fiore’s comments in Comics
Journal #132 notwithstanding, RAW
is now using much more Of the con-
ventional sequential image method of
storytelling. And, in doing so, it’s ac-
commodating the expectations of new
readers drawn in by word Of Maus.
Despite post-MTV claims Of a new
visual literacy, people are uncom-
fortable with abstract narrative as
racticed by Mouly, Cathy Millet,
Patn•cia Caire, Bruno Richard, and
Joe Schwind. These very talented
contributors, when mentioned at all,
are unjustly dismissed with derisive
accusations of pretentiousness,
obscurantism, and such.
Will RAW continue to dish out
vapid and lukewarm fare from Beyer,
Friedman, Green, and Katchor? Or
will it serve us yet more spicy and
succulent cuisine to surprise Our
palates, such as it has with “Dead
Dick,” “Poop Deck,” “Zephyr,”
‘ ‘Paul,” and “Here”?
Whatever Spiegelman is ccxyking up
for the future, for the here and now,
R4Wis still the best meal in town.Ü

R. Fiore writes in The Comics Journal #132, page 49:

The problems with RAW, such as
they are, have to do with Art Spiegel-
man and Francoise Mouly’s difficul-
ties in adapting to success. I don’t
knmv where you’re going to find a bet-
ter 200 pages of comics in one place,
but just about everyone I’ve heard talk
about it has expressed some disap-
pointment with it, including Spiegel-
man. (RAW’s new term for the medi-
um, incidentally, is “commix.” Spie-
gelman has tied himself to the mast
of this uglyism and is apparently will-
ing to go down with it.) The editors
have said in previous interviews that
one of the original ideas behind RAW
was to do something new with each
issue, and as they’ve gotten to the tenth
issue they’re discovering that there
aren’t that many new things to do.
Spiegelman has complained of a lack
of new talent of RAW caliber, which
suggests that he was counting On new
talent to regenerate the magazine. But
can you really expect that much new
talent every issue? There was a lot of
new talent about in the beginning
until RAWthere was no place
for it to be published. The problem
is not only that this RAW has the same
people, but that it has the same peo-
ple doing the same things. The danger
is that RAW will start coming out
because there has to be something to
wrap around the new Maus chapter.
There is one untried direction for RAW
to progress in, though, and that is nar-
rative. I don’t think this was ever con-
scious policy, but the effect of the way
the editors choose material for RAW
has been that the only one allowed to
use the techniques of conventional
narrative and characterization is Spie-
gelman. Now that everything is the
same size, this begins to 100k more
and more like privilege.

Ah, so there really was a general disappointment with this book at the time. Spiegelman’s complaint about the lack of new, exciting artists totally undermines my guess that they were just including in familiar faces as a favour — and the late 80s was a weird time for art comics. I’m not intimately familiar with the French(ey) comics scene, but looking from outside, after the semi-collapse of many reliable anthologies, it seemed like the only thing coming out of that scene was science fiction, porn, and science fiction porn. (This changed in the … mid 90s? when (for instance) L’association and Le dernier cri (etc) got cracking and made it possible to publish interesting stuff in France(y) again.

And in the US, things were also in the doldrums in the art comics scene. The next generation wouldn’t arrive until a few years later (Julie Doucet, Chris Ware, etc)…

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Omega the Unknown by Jonathan Lethem and Farel Dalrymple with Karl Rusnak and Paul Hornscheimer (170x259mm)

I know, I know — this is really off topic for a blog series about early-80s avant garde comics. But Gary Panter drew the cover to one issue, and I just found the idea of Panter being published by Marvel too amusing, so I bought the series the other week, and now I’m reading it.

I think I’ve read some Lethem stuff (short stories? a novel?), but if so, it hasn’t really made that much of an impression on me. Dalrymple, on the other hand — I love his stuff. I snap it up whenever I see it.

He’s very restrained here — he’s usually wilder…

They’re going for a very “modern” (i.e., 1987) storytelling style: Dropping us into the middle of the action, not explaining anything, and it works. Make the reader work a bit harder; get more involved in the book… it works if you’re confident that it’s going to be worth it.

It also leans a bit much into the “Oh aren’t super-heroes assholes?” schtick that was so popular in the 90s (Bratpack etc), so it’s nostalgic in different ways.

But… but… they aren’t standing up? They’re kneeling?

Confusing messaging, U. S. Army! Confusing!

Another confusing thing is the way Dalrymple draws the main character. That guy up there? The guy who’s obviously in his mid-forties? Yeah, that one? He’s supposed to be fourteen.

I know, no biggie — but I had to remind myself on every other page, because my mind automatically slipped into the “why’s that old guy talking so awkw— oh, fourteen. Right.”

So things are moving along nicely — that is, very confusingly — and then Lethem does The Forbidden Thing: He just drops in this omniscient character that just tells us what’s been going on.

And the weird thing: Even this works. Writers usually do this because they’re afraid that we don’t understand what’s going on, displaying a lack of confidence in both the readers and their own storytelling skills… but here it’s just amusing.

Dalrymple’s artwork becomes more like Dalrymple artwork as the series progresses.

Hey, cool.

And then we come to issue seven: The Gary Panter Cover Issue:

What the… it’s not just the cover! Panter does four interior pages. It’s a comic within the comic: Omega the Unknown drew this to explain the sitch to that super-hero guy.

Strangely enough, I don’t see Panter’s name mentioned anywhere in this issue? In fact, I can’t find any credits in this issue at all? Perhaps they just hid them.

Oh, that lower right hand panel looks exactly like one of the classic Panter things from the olden days?

This one.

Oh, hang on… is this a version of the drawing from this comic? I mean, it has the Omega headband? So I’ve got the chronology wrong? Hm. Well, I don’t know.

The omniscient guy turns up to explain everything to us again, and it’s less successful this time. Especially since he does it as a… country song or something.

So there you go. It’s totally the best thing Marvel has published this millennium… no, hang on. The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl is also pretty good. OK, it’s up there; it’s an enjoyable read.

And I have no idea what really happened in the final issue. They should have brought that guy back one more time to explain it!!1!

Kent Worcester writes in The Comics Journal #297, page 145:

When Marvel invited the novelist Jonathan Lethem (Eor-
tress of Solitude, Motherless Brooklyn) to play in their four-
color sandbox, he asked after Omega Unknown, an ob-
scare, limited-run title from the resulting
10-issue miniseries and hardcover collection represents
one of rhe more intriguing Marvel releases in recent years.
Lethem’s obvious affection for the source material, and
for Inwood, the New York City neighborhood where his
story takes place, lends the project a patina of real-world
solidity that has become all too uncommon in the Marvel
universe. Admittedly, the plot is a little convoluted, with
good robots, bad robots, confused aliens, egotistical su-
perheroes, giant hands, food vendors and magical salt all
vying for supremacy in the upper reaches of Manhattan.
But the central conflict, between a precocious teenager
and the unfamiliar urban setting in which he unexpect-
edly finds himself, helps pull the reader into a larger Story
that just about works on multiple levels.
Lethem’s confident prose is nicely complemented by
Farel Dalrymple’s pencils, and Paul Hornschemeier’s col-
Ors. Dalrymple, probably best known för his Dark Horse
series Pop Gun Ivar, brings a spare and somewhat dead-
pan style to these pages that suits Lethem’s ironic take
on 1970s comics subculture. At the same time, Horn-
schemeier’s fine work as a colorist pretty much guaran-
tees that no one could mistake this book for a standard-
issue Marvel product. More so than DC’s recent Bizarro
volumes, this collection effectively straddles, and com-
plicates, the line between mainstream superheroes and
indy comics. It’s the kind of high-prestige, low-sales
project that attracts the attention of book critics and gets
editors fired.
highlight of this generation’s Omega the Unknown
is the dream-like sequence of five pages by Gary Panter,
who also drew the cover to the seventh issue. Panter’s
cover offered a riot of color and cartoon violence, as ma-
levolent space robots rain destruction on the world’s cit-
ies. If anything, his two-tone inside pages are even more
inspired, as red-caped heroes cope with invaders from the
bcwond. Farel Dalrymple has a likeable drawing style, but
sharing space with Gary Panter must be a little like play-
ing guitar on stage with Jimi Hendrix. I hope Dalrymple
won’t take it personally if I point out that Panter blows
Omega the Unknown $7 (June 20081 written by Jonathan Lethem and
Karl Rusnak and drawn by Gary Panter. (02008 Marvel Characters. Inc.)
him Out of the water. He blows everybody Out of the wa-
ter. •Ihat’s what Gary Panter does. For a handful Of pages,
this book really sings.

I think it was generally well-liked:

For “Omega the Unknown,” Marvel let Jonathan Lethem, Karl Rusnak, and Farel Dalrymple go off on their own wavelength, and the end results are much more interesting because of it. The book, though incredibly odd, has a warm heart and strong message to it. The thing is fun in the way a superhero comic ought to be fun (seriously, still love the giant hand running around on little legs) but loaded with interesting insights from a strong novelist. Books like this are what I wish Marvel, and DC, would take bigger chances on.

And:

Voyeurism continues to pervade the storytelling; even the statue in front of Edie’s apartment seems to be watching and taking part. Dalrymple’s art perfectly complements the impressionistic, surreal story, in which mental illness blurs the line between fantasy and reality. Lethem’s retelling fulfills the promised complexity of the original, all the while adding his own self-aware bent. One wonders if a kinder, hipper Marvel will be able to tolerate a new realization of the postmodern fable it canceled in the seventies.

We can only hope.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Painting by Mark Beyer on semi-spherical glass from 1997.

I’m not sure whether this is a thing that people do? I mean, do a painting on the back of half a glass globe? It seems like something that should be in every tourist shop, but… I’m not sure I’ve seen something like this there? Probably just my sheltered life style.

I think Beyer did a number of these, though.

This is what it looks like on the back.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Read Yourself Raw edited by Françoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman (267x357mm)

This book reprints Raw #1-3 — but not in full. I’ve already covered those three Raw issues in this blog series, so I’m not going to re-read this book once again… instead, I’ll just see if there’s anything interesting about what they’ve kept and what they’ve left out? OK? Ok.

This collection is printed by Pantheon, which is natural (since they’d just had a monumental success with the first Maus book)… But Raw vol 2 would go on to be published by Penguin instead. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I guess this book was designed by Mouly? It doesn’t totally look like it…

But this looks more like it. It says that the “contents” are designed by Mouly and L. Fili… perhaps that’s everything but the covers?

*gasp* It’s not set in Futura! MOULY! WHAT WERE YOU THINKING!!!

Spiegelman does a very chatty (and amusing introduction). Raw itself mostly eschewed this sort of stuff — the introductions were often more … conceptual, but I guess it’s time to shift to Elder Statesman and look back upon Raw as a youthful folly.

He does go into details about some issues, like the Mark Beyer trading card situation…

And he explains about the “Raw Deal”: Copies of Raw, and then profit sharing, which comes out to about $100 a page. And explains the ineffable thing about Raw: “Although many of the artists didn’t seem to have much in common with each other, either geographically or stylistically, they all seemed to recognize something in each other’s work. It was elusive — maybe it was just the seriousness of their commitment to the form — but they were enthusiastic, and gave us a mandate to do Raw again.”

The section reprinting Raw #1 is 22 pages long, and Raw #1 was 36 pages (including covers). I had imagined that they’d dump the text pages, but they included this Alfred Jarry-related text…

… but dumped this Kaz page…

… and this Fifi page that surrounded the Two-Fisted Painters booklet (but the booklet itself is included).

Also gone are Patricia Caire and Lynne Tillman. Did any women (except Mouly) make it into this book? (These two may well have been dropped for rights issues, of course — the Caire is based on a Barth text, and Pantheon may have wanted to be more careful…)

Gone is also this Mariscal, but another Mariscal piece from the same issue survived.

So… did Pantheon just have a target page length in mind, or did the editors just dislike the stuff they left out? Raw #1 is a very strong unit; it’s a great reading experience. With almost half cut, it’s less compelling. (Although the pieces that did make it are great, of course.)

Onto Raw #2 — only 18 of the original 36 pages (including covers) make it. Raw #2 is the weakest issue (until #8), so that’s understandable, but it’s still… a lot.

One thing that did make it was Mark Beyer’s City of Terror trading cards! Which is great, because I’ve never seen a copy of #2 that still had them.

They’re very difficult to enjoy here, though, because of the way they’re glued into the book… still fun.

So what was cut? Well, I’m not going to list all the cut pieces, but Rick Geary is gone…

David Levy’s long text piece is gone…

Cathy Millet’s thing is gone…

And fortunately Drew Friedman’s racist goof is gone. Which made fun of Spiegelman, so … perhaps that was a contributing factor? Or just because it wasn’t very good?

*gasp* The Ben Katchor thing is gone! The outrage!

Almost everything is included from the third issue — 42 of 48 pages (including covers). Gone is Kierkegaard…

Rick Geary again…

And the apparent Jihad against women continues — Patricia Caire did one of the few pieces to be removed from #3.

Now I have to look at the credits to Read Yourself Raw again — did any women make the cut?

A Kiki Picasso page made it… a Cathy Millet page… a couple of Mouly pages… and that’s it.

Dale Luciano writes in The Comics Journal #119, page 42:

Pantheon Books’s recent publication
of Read Yourself RAW—a splendid
compendium of material from the first
three issues of RAW, the avant-garde
graphic showcase edited by art spieg-
elman and Francoise Mouly—is a
happy occasion on several counts. Its
appearance is yet another indication
of the enhanced marketability of so-
phisticated comics in America. (Pan-
theon, a division of Random House,
published spiegelman•s Maus, whose
success surpassed expectations, and is
planning several future ventures into
comics.) Read Yourself RAW’ also
make possible a further dissemination
of some superb comics that would
otherwise remain unavailable to many
readers. Finally, on some level it
vindicates the faith and persistence
Spiegelman and Mouly demonstrated
in publishing RAW against what must
have seemed insurmountable ob-
stacles.
The first issue of RAW made its ap-
pearance during an especially dreary
period in recent comics history. (To
be exact, the date was July 1980.) As
published and edited by spiegelman
and Mouly. RAW’s boldness and vital-
ity—its blissful and complete disre-
gard for the constricted American no-
lion of what “comics” are supposed
to be—set off some immediate shock
waves. As I noted in a review of the
first two issues of RAW in Journal
#64, spiegelman and Mouly’s intent
was “to shake things up, to move
beyond accepted conventions into new
areas of expressiveness and idiosyn-
crasy… RAW is a Jarryesque toying
with the arrangement of the car-
toonist•s mode of imagining.” More
than anything else. RAWS appearance
offered a corrective. In the face of so
much that is contemptible in our
popular culture. RAW was and remains
a forthright declaration that comics are
a sophisticated, adult medium. cap-
able of producing joy and pathos and
worthy of thought and contemplation.
The comics themselves attested to the
enormous, untapped potential of the
medium.
That RAW came into being at all is
a tribute to the tenacity of spiegelman
and Mouly. They set out to create a
“prototype” (their term) that would
serve “to show what someone ought
to be doing.” Given the track record
of the undergrounds in the preceding
decade, spiegelman and Mouiy had
little reason to anticipate that RAW
sales would be good In fact, they
were surprised when demand con-
tinued to exceed supply over the
course of increasing print runs for the
first four issues—the last published in
1986—RAWs audience and influence,
to everyone’s surprise, continued to
My sense is that RAW: which dev-
eloped out of spiegelman and Mou-
ly’s simple desire to see a magazine
that “would print the kind of uork that
interested us,” fulfilled long-disap-
pointed hopes among many for a
renaissance of understanding that
comics were something more than the
juvenile stuff dominating the mass
market in 1980 Having suffered the
pangs of a slow, prolonged death, the
undergrounds lost most of their econ-
moic base by the early 1970s and
ceased to be a major fixture on the
American comics scene.

[…]

Four years later. RAW #1 appeared.
If you weren’t among a select few who
had glimpsed the work of various
European comics artists, the spectacle
of these large, impressively repro-
duced pages—featuring the stark,
naturalistic cityscape of Jacques Tar-
di’s “Manhattan”; the exuberant com-
ic vigor of Joost Swarte, who has been
aptly described as the “warped step-
child of Herge (fintin) and McManus
(Bringing Up Father)”; the startling
expressionism of Munoz and Sam-
payo’s images of despair and human
isolation. “Mister Wilcox. Mister
Conrad” (in RAW 3); and the goofy
mayhem in Mariscal’s epic cartoons—
came as a revelation. There were
samples of other work, short pieces
by the Parisian Cathy Millet, the
Canadian Gerry Capelle, and the
Belgian Ever Meulen. that were in-
triguing suggestions of new
possibilities for the comics medium.
RAW also featured two lovely hom-
mages to the tradition of early com-
ics when it ran pages from Caran
d’Ache and Winsor McCay. These
served as a reminder of the honorable
and distinguished heritage of the past.
And there were the Americans.
Of special note, of course. were the
installments of spiegelman’s Maus that
began in the second issue Of RAW
These are not, of course, included in
Read Yourself RAW: which does repro-
duce spiegelman’s “Two-Fisted
Painters.” This is a playful tinkering
around with color registrations, abet-
ted by some amusingly melodramatic
contrivances, including an alien with
a color syphon, that justify the tinker-
ing. It’s wonderful stuff, and entirely
a propos of the magazine’s hip, arty
From Mark Beyer, there were his
disturbing strips featuring the child in-
nocents, Amy and Jordan, wandering
through a world of nightmarish land-
scapes and ominous, unpredictable
threats from all directions. (The
notorious Amy and Jordan bubblegum
cards have been included in Read
Yourself RAW.)

[…]

Finally, there was Gary Panter’s
memorable image of Jimbo staring out
from the cover of RAW #3. Panter’s
cartooning has generated its share Of
controversy in the intervening years.
His influence has been considerable
and undeniable. and when many
readers ran across the Jimbo “Run-
ning Sore” strip in RAW 3, they were
encountering an unusual of self-
expression or sensibility. Panter has
termed his “ratty” or punk approach
a calculated reaction against “seam-
less illusion,” and many have attacked
his work for a variety of reasons. My
own estimation is that Panter’s work
is painterly and, in terms of its aspira-
lions, often inspired. In RAW’: Panter
found the perfect outlet for a brilliant-
ly radical, uncompromised, “new”
approach to comics. (See the inter-
view with Panter in Journal #100.)
Read Yourself RAW reproduces a
majority of this material, including the
wonderful covers, exactly as it ap-
peared in the original issues. As a
special treat. there is also a wonder-
ful new Read Yourself RAW cover by
spiegelman. All of this is good news
for those who missed out on RAW’s
early issues and have found collector
prices for those early issues beyond
their means.
Missing are a few pieces that have
not been included in the collection.
Mark Newgarden’s “Mutton Geoff’
from RAW I was a good use of
familiar icons (Mutt and Jeff) for pur-
poses that brilliantly transcended
parody, and I was sorry to see it ab-
sent here. Drew Friedman’s ‘ ‘Comic
Strip” from RAW 2 is missing as well.
A happy choice might have seen
Friedman’s friendly satirical jabs at
spiegelman and Mouly exchanged for
the tiresome Andy Griffith satire,
which is included. (The Griffith satire
also appears in Any Similarity To Per-
sons Living Or Dead, but, to my
knowledge, “Comic Strip” has not
reprinted from its initial appearance
in RAW.) Some Rick Geary material
that has been reproduced elsewhere
has been dropped, along with some
pages from Kaz that will soon appear
in Buzzbomb. Several text-oriented
features, a handful Of more purely
conceptual pieces. and a few less ac-
cessible strips (like Ben Katchor’s
“The Atlantic Ocean Laundry”) have
also not made it into the collection.
These are not quibbles, just notations
for those who observe such editorial
matters closely.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.