Random Thoughts

Cheap Novelties: The Pleasures of Urban Decay by Ben Katchor (202x193mm)

By this point, Penguin had taken over publishing Raw, so this is a kinda stealthy Raw One-Shot — it’s not presented as such on the front cover.

This is a collection of Katchor’s alt-weekly comic strip Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer. (Which isn’t mentioned on the front cover, either.)

The contents page is mysterious…

… but it all becomes er clear: Each strip is headed by some cheap novelty (also presented in the first panel of each strip with Knipl’s name on it). So these are trinkets Knipl give out to people to publicise his business.

So this all makes sense, but it makes me wonder whether those trinkets were also present in the original strip? I’m guessing so, but they eerily become part of the plot in the last section of the book.

But the bulk of the book are these one-pagers that have a certain calmness about them, and a sense of the absurd.

I mean… just imagining a newspaper weight industry…

Many of the strips have a kind of vague punchline of sorts — I mean, they’re funny. Others are more simply evocative.

Katchor’s artwork melds perfectly with the subject matter… kinda nostalgic for an imaginary age, with Knipl frequently striding forth in that determined manner.

Some of the strips are just beyond fabulous.

But as usual when reading these Knipl stories, it takes me a surprising amount of time. I find myself zoning out, and I have to re-read each strip several times to understand what’s happening. And I can’t read this entire book in one sitting: It’s like poetry; it takes a lot out of you.

The final section in this book is new stuff made specially for this book, I think? We finally get to visit the Cheap Novelty District, and we follow Knipl on a (thwarted) job, as well as a Venetian blind salesman. Their stories intertwine in oblique ways, and it’s all rather thrilling.

The Comics Journal #156, page 17:

Penguin Ceases Publication of
comics Albums

Penguin Books, one Of the few mainstream
American book publishers to print comics al-
bums. has decided to temporarily stop pub-
lishing them, according to Senior Editor David
Stanford. Penguin, which published such books
as From A to Zippy by Bill Griffith, Skin Deep
by Charles Burns, “tarts and All by Drew and
Josh Alan Friedman, Cheap Novelties by Ben
Katchor, and the anthologies Thisted Sisters and
RAW, will publish only tuo more comics col-
lections in 1993. Twisted Sisters II, originally
intended for publication by Penguin, will now
be published elsewhere.
Stanford, who has been with Penguin for
four-and-one-half years, edited the company’s
more avant garde comics projects (previously,
he worked at Henry Holt and Company, where
he edited books by Garry Trudeau, Charles
Schulz, Jeff MacNelly, Skip Morrow and Other
cartoonists). He cited a energy crisis”
as one of the main reasons Penguin is discon-
tinuing the publication Of comics collections,
although modest sales was also a factor.

Yeah, the first “Biff bang pow! Comics aren’t for kids any more!” wave of comics for adults from mainstream publishers (spurred on by Art Spiegelman’s Maus (especially Part II in 1991) from Pantheon) fizzled very quickly — I think by 1993, they’d all lost interest when they saw how little this stuff sold, and it wouldn’t be until Fun Home and Persepolis hit over a decade later that they realised they should get back in on the game again. (But less Avant Garde this time and more (auto-)biography.)

Drawn & Quarterly published a new version of it recentlyis:

In 1991, the original Cheap Novelties appeared in an unassuming paperback from the RAW contributor; it would become one of the first graphic novels of the contemporary graphic novel golden age and set the stage for Katchor as he is now regarded– a modern day cartooning genius.

They’re selling it short!

Drawn & Quarterly’s 25th anniversary edition will be a deluxe hardcover reformatted to Katchor’s original vision.

Oh, that’s interesting… Katchor didn’t like the design of the Penguin book?

Right, the new version doesn’t have the big novelties on each page, and everything’s reproduced in a larger size. Yay. I should get a copy of this, too…

People still like it:

The staccato vignettes, where narration and dialogue noisily intermix with one another like the cacophony of a busy street, are about pure pleasure.

Indeed:

Katchor reminds readers of the ever-presence of a past: no matter where — or when — you are, there is always something missing. But if you look closely, and wait for the newspapers to fly by, and for the new concrete to set, you might be able to bask, bittersweetly, in its former, fleeting glory.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Silkscreen onto transparent acrylic by Mark Beyer.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Raw #5: The Graphix Magazine of Abstract Depressionism edited by Françoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman (265x360mm)

The Raw editorials started out pretty … er … abstract, but we’re solidly in chatty territory now. We’re told that the Pascal Doury piece in this issue has been censored — all the penises are replaced by white boxes, but don’t worry — you can write in and get them as stickers and stick them on yourself.

I remember reading this as a teenager and thinking that that had to be a joke? In any case, I did not send away for the stickers.

Also… look at the design of this spread. It’s so 1983! I love it! Sue Coe’s riff on The Message to the left; the inset covers of the stuff you can buy, and then all the overlays on the right hand page. Somebody has really spent time on this, and I guess it’s Mouly?

Fletcher Hanks is well-known now — all (?) his work was reprinted in two handsome volumes just the other decade. And I love the juxtaposition here with Spiegelman’s tough guy page: It’s incongruous, but there seems to be some communication going on here.

And the Hanks stuff is printed on a more newsprint-like paper, which also seems logical.

Wow, that’s a lot of ads… Hm… Danceteria again — they had ads in a lot of the stuff I’m covering in this blog series.

And a single page from Gary Panter.

So here’s that infamous Doury thing. Oh, I remember those first panels there, with the guy driving his car up the steps. It’s a recurring dream of mine — driving around in houses in my little car. I love the sort-of detached text under the panels with the wild artwork…

…

But… what… THERE”S PENISES HERE!!!! THEY”RE HERE! What!?

Oh, they’re stickered in? This copy belonged to somebody that sent away for the stickers and glued them in?

Oh, yeah, I forgot that the copy of this I had as a teenager now hangs in the hallway, along with three other Raw issues, and I didn’t feel like… “unframing”… them, so I got a new copy off of ebay.

Oops!

Anyway, thank you very much to whoever got stickering.

Anyway, the Doury piece is absolutely insane, with or without penises. Just look at this two page spread. LOOK AT IT!

And then we get a Tardi piece; excellent as always. And the editorial said that they were planning to publish a longer Tardi story as Raw One-Shot #2, but that didn’t happen.

This was translated by Kim Thompson, who would (two decades later) publish half a dozen Tardi things via Fantagraphics.

But this is a slightly odd issue of Raw — it’s dominated by three longer pieces (Hanks/Doury/Tardi), and the remaining pages are bite-sized pieces from people who’ve already been in the magazine (one page from Sue Coe, two from Francis Matte, one from Gary Panter)… everything is fabulous, of course, but the issue seems lopsided somehow?

So then we get to The Raw Comics Supplement, which seems like a deliberate acknowledgement of the problems with the rest of the issue: Here we get a bunch of very short, wild, funky stuff, and with that, the issue flip back into “perfect” territory again.

And the comics supplement makes the Maus insert even more harrowing… and this is the chapter where things really starts getting heartbreaking.

Bill Mason writes in The Comics Journal #93, page 31:

In Ad Reinhardt’s How to Look series (done
as a comics feature for the leftist New York
newspaper PM in 1946+7) there was a run-
ning gag about a man being stared down by
an abstract painting.
Man: Ha ha, What does this represent?
Painting to man: What do you represent?
One of the few generalizations I can make
about Raw is that reading it always makes
me feel like Reinhardt’s man. Whatever my
initial reaction to a given piece in
Raw—and they range from love at first
sight to “Something is happening here, but
I don’t know what it is,” to “What in God’s
name did Francoise and Art ever see in this
find myselfreturning to each issue
until some sort of articulate response to its
contents begins to emerge and continuing
to return as the process of articulation,
once begun, deepens and unfolds. In an age
of throwaway art, instantaneous eyeball
kicks and trumped-up emotion, Raw (like
the austere non-objective paintings
Reinhardt created when he climbed down
from his comic-strip soapbox) invites con-
templation, continued study, and—What
do you
A second generalization, prompted
largely by the issue under review, is that
the work of artists who appear regularly in
Raw must be judged by its cumulative ef-
fect, not piecemeal. I can hardly imagine,
for example, how a reader coming to Raw
5 without exposure to earlier issues would
react to ghe two short contributions by
Francis Masse. My own response would
probably have been, “Here is a Don Mar.
tin for grownups who knows how to draw.
When will he get around to -offering us
something more substantial?,” had not
Raw 4 already given me Masse’s 12-page”A
Race of Racers,” a blend of Qallic whimsy,
allegorical social satire, and visual poetry
(including the most beautiful •and accom-
plished work I have ever seen).
After this massive helping of haute cuisine,
Masse’s Raw 5 offerings went down like a
baba au rhum served with
coffee. My advice to anyone who liked the
dessert is to go back and try the main
course.
The same observation applies more
forcefully to Charles Burns’s “Big Baby”
and to Gary Panter’s “Jimbo” page. I first
encountered Burns and Panter in Raw 3,
and my initial reaction to their work was
strongly negative. Burns, in particular, irri-
tated me out of countenance: his one-pager
broadening the readers perspective.
about a woman reading an SF comic in bed
And I Pressed My Hand Against His
Face.’ struck me at first reading as
Strenuous attempt to raise comics to the
level of “real” art. while keeping at a safe
distance from it. Burns’s graphic style, a
compoundÅa’ it then seemed to mu of riffs
lifted from Ai Fel&tein, R.H. Webb, and
H.G. Peter, confirmed this impression:
• I’Let the little bastard do something as
good as ‘Seeds of Jupiter! or Frankenstein
(Classic Comics version) or a vintage
Wonder vgman story before he bresunies
€0’ condescerid to his betters,” I snarled
vGnwafdly. Well, he has. The two feature-
length stories by Burns I have since read
‘C’The Voice of Walking Flesh” in •Raw 4
and “Robot Love” in the •January 1983
Heavy Metal) reveal him as an artist of great
.originålity and authentic, if mannered,
narrative and graphic power, and as the
firs! American comics artist since Kim
Deitch to use science fiction effectively as a
vehicle for social and political satire.

[…]

Like previous
issues, Raw 5 intersperses comics pieces
done in a wide variety of styles and formats
with full-page reproductions- of drawings,
paintings, prints, and (this time around) a
page of real ads laid out like a grid of comics
panels. The point is neither to show that
comics are up there with painting and
graphic art (or, as in previous issues, with
illustrated text pieces) nor to show that
visual and literary formsalready acknowl-
edged as serious art are down there with
comics, but to create an artistic continuum
which includes comics as ,one of the arts
and which promotes fresh, raw ways of
looking, reading, hearing, feeling. If works
of art can look at us—What do you repre-
can look at one another as
well, and the choice and arrangement Of
material in Raw 5 (subtitle: i’ The Giaphix
Magazine of •Abstract Depressionism”)
maximizes the amount of looking done by
all parties concerned. This editorial
strategy can be playful or menacing or both
at the same time. Even after repeated view.
ing, some Of the juxtapositions in Raw 5
still make me feel like a live target in
visual shooting gallery.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Flashmarks by Carel Moiseiwitsch (212x274mm)

I covered this comic in the Fantagraphics Floppies blog series, too, but I couldn’t do a “punk comics” series without Moiseiwitsch, now could I?

I see that I drew some comparisons between this work and Sue Coe in that blog post, and… I totally agree with myself. But it does seem to come from a parallel line of development, not quite intersecting the Raw crowd? I guess it’s … more akin to World War 3 Illustrated? Which reminds me — I should do a couple issues of that, too, to compare.

Anyway, this is totally amazeballs, and it’s insane that this is still the only collection of her work available. She’s appeared mostly in anthologies and stuff, but nobody has published a comprehensive retrospective.

She was interviewed in 2017:

In your bio at the end of your collection Flash Marks, you mention that punk rock was a gateway into other types of art for you.

Oh, yes. When I got to Vancouver, the general function of art seemed to be comforting, decorative, pretty, beautiful … basically consoling. Things that would fit in nice in your office or next to a sofa or whatever it was, you know? That was still the idea. There was a certain amount of class. Then suddenly there were these punk posters up and zines around. I thought, “Wow! This is it!” Just fantastic.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Big Ideas by Lynda Barry (216x139mm)

I’ve got the reprint edition (from HarperCollins) of this book, but I assume the contents are pretty much the same as the Real Comet Press edition?

Hm… “The Fun House”? I don’t have that book! Ebay shopping break!

*two minutes pass*

Yay! Got a copy. And I thought I’d read everything by Barry. That was a nice surprise…

Anyway, the strips in the first collection, Girls + Boys, were (almost all) two-pagers. (I.e., four square panels.) This collection is mostly three-pagers (six panels), with a smattering of four page and two page strips. Which makes me wonder how these were originally printed — the three-pagers were presumably printed in a 3×2 panel arrangement? And the four-pagers in a 4×2 arrangement vertically? Hm.

In any case — this collection is even funnier than the first one. And so informational! I didn’t know that that’s what those words appearing on my car meant!

“Later after that I’m gonna have me a premarital sex”. Such tough talk.

The artwork’s a delight here, too. Barry’s still trying out a lot of different styles, like this thing that looks like something Beto Hernandez would do a bit later.

And there’s some real surprises in here… Look at this strip. Just gorgeous. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her use this rendering technique before or since?

This is sort of in the same vein, but more graphic.

The book is mostly strips from 1982, but there’s some earlier ones, too, and they’re a lot denser. I mean, they’re also funny, but they’re harsher.

Oh! There’s that strip from the issue of Comics Journal — the first Ernie Pook Comeek strip I ever saw…

Funny, but not just funny.

It’s an amazing little book.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.