Random Thoughts

We’re Depressed by Mark Beyer (327x330mm)

This is a physically pretty unique book — it’s square and has these very thick pages — like a children’s book, I guess.

It’s published by Water Row Books, who’ve done a bunch of high end publications.

Bruno Richard does a… unique… introduction to the book (which is a collection of Amy & Jordan strips printed in 1983 in the British music paper New Musical Express).

There’s one strip per page with these huge margins in the middle. It’s very odd, eh? But it kinda makes sense in this context: The printing quality is perfect, and this size makes the strips seem more… well… weighty.

Slightly unusual for Beyer, the narrative here makes sense, sort of. I mean, it ends pretty abruptly, but is a fun/depressing read.

And the artwork is just amazing.

And a nice colour image on the back.

The Comics Journal #144, page 11:

Mark Beyer Art Stolen
RAW contributor and Agony creator Mark Beyer
Often draws stories about people in the throes
of despair. Now, Beyer himself is worried about
the fate of his original art, much of which was
stolen sometime in early June.
Beyer has traveled the world in recent years,
and had entrusted his originals to a storage
locker at Budget Store & Lock Village in Allen-
town, PA. “The robbery took place sometime
between June I and 5,” Beyer told the Journal.
“There were several hundred Old drawings
stolen from the period of 1970 to 1975 (not old
comic strips). Also, an old hand-bound chil-
dren’s book I did from 1974 called A Green
Nose. Also, a big box of my original comic art,
including quite a few published and unpublished
stories, numerous illustrations, and drawings.”
In addition, there were “10 or 12 handmade
dolls, made by me, which were also stolen, in-
cluding an Amy doll, a Jordan doll, Tony Target
and Thomas House” among other characters.
Beyer said he was worried that some of the
art might be sold to collectors. “Basically, the
only person I ever sold comic art to was (New
York-based collector) Alfred Bergdoll. I know
he would never sell those pages. I sold two other
pages to a Chicago man several years ago, and
also two pages to the Library ofCongress. That’s
it. So, in other words. if things started turning
up at comic book conventions or anyplace else,
it would be very suspicious.”
People with information about the stolen art
can contact Beyer at P.O. Box 2304, Lehigh
valley, PA or call (215) 820-9017.
Here is a partial list Of the stolen material:
• Agony (all the book’s art except for the cover)
• The Mistake (8-page Amy and Jordan story)
• Danger in New York (3-page Amy and Jor-
dan story)
• An Afternoon at Fish City Airport (Amy
story)
• Amy Machine (3-page Amy story)
• I Like to Inugh (4-page Tony Target story)
• Amy Tilsdale Visits the Thomas House Rest
Home (3-page Amy and Thomas House story)
• Fine Arts Page (I-page story)
• Tony Target (First Tony story for Arcade)
• Radiator Relationships (I-page story from
I.Æmme Outa Here)
• Derelicts (2-page Amy and Jordan story)
• The Glass Thief (3-page story from RAW)
• Outside Out (6-page story from RAW)
• We’re Depressed (12-episode story from
Dead Stories)
• I Like Paris (2-page Tony Target story from
Metal Hurlant)
• I Fell for a Fish (Unfinished, unpublished
3-page story)

Wow. Has the artwork ever been recovered?

Here’s another report of the theft:

Artist Mark Beyer told police on Tuesday that thousands of dollars’ worth of artworks he has done and memorabilia he has collected over the past 20 years had been stolen from a storage unit he rents in Allentown.

He said the theft occurred sometime during the last few days.

But I can’t find anything more.

Well, that sucks.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Picture Story 2 edited by Ben Katchor (214x276mm)

Picture Story Magazine #1 was published by Katchor in 1978… and just eight years later, we have the second issue.

This is a 64 page magazine sized book with cardboard covers and thick interior pages. Jerry Moriarty does the mysterious wrap-around cover.

We start off with some pretty gnomic excerpts…

… and then shorter and longer pieces by a variety of people — here’s Dizi and Martin Millard. Many of these pieces mention somebody named Christian Morgenstern, who turns out to exist.

There’s a page of er ads, like The Toy Cigarette by Katchor, and Wartime Experiences by Martin Millard. Which also seems to exist. It’s difficult to tell sometimes with arteests…

There’s about a half dozen of these gorgeously reproduced spreads by Jerry Moriarty. My guess is that the stories came after the paintings?

Peter Blegvad does a thing on imagined/observed/remembered…

What is it this book reminds me of… Oh! It reminds me of Ben Katchor! It’s got this vague, strange logic flowing: It’s hard to pin down just exactly is going on, but it makes sense anyway.

I’ve seldom seen an anthology reflect the editor to this degree. It’s delightful to sit here reading this thing.

And then Katchor shows up himself, with the decidedly longest piece in the book. It’s 26 pages long, and it’s absolutely prime Katchor. It’s got all these characters and plots that intersect, but it’s never entirely clear just what it’s all about. I read it twice this time over, and I’m still not sure just what the repercussions were for Mr. Laszlo… the printer was going to print something for him, but… what…

Anyway, it’s called The Printer’s Disease, and I don’t think it’s never been reprinted? It’s insane! This thing is amazing!

Frank Santoro interviewed Katchor:

Santoro: When I read one of your stories that’s six to ten pages in length … I feel you have a little more room to create that believable setting you were talking about. I get the same feeling with the strips, but … the sense of place, the believable setting that comes across in the longer stories…

Katchor: Well, hopefully with all the weekly strips it does that by accumulation. I think if you show someone one strip, they might not get it. And some people only understand it when they see it in book form. They read eighty of them in one sitting.

Santoro: (laughs)

Katchor: And some people never get it.

Santoro: Y’know, that story The Printer’s Disease, for me, it was the first story of yours that I had ever read. I had seen your strips here and there, but that story really knocked me on my ass. I felt as if I was given a key of some sort to look at your work in a different way. Then I approached the strips and they really began to sing.

Katchor: Yeah, I don’t know. All I know is that 90% of the people who contact me are not comic readers. They say, “I don’t know anything about comics, but I like your strip.” So, I don’t know what it is … I mean as a child, I was a comics reader. So I don’t know what that is, why that is. I don’t know if it doesn’t appeal to people who read comics, I just know it’s a demographic fact.

There’s even an uplifting Mark Beyer story in here. (Yeah, yeah, you can guess how it goes.)

The first Picture Story magazine had its charms, but this one is amazing.

The Comics Journal #119, page 46:

I missed the first issue of Picture
Story, but the second issue—edited
and published by Ben Katchor—fea-
tures an array of unusual graphic
material by such New York graphic
talents as Katchor. Mark Beyer, and
Jerry Moriarty. I mention this trio in
particular among the contributors only
to solicit name recognition. (Each has
had work impressively showcased in
RAW over the past years.) In addition,
Beyer has published his own work in
various underground comics (Dead
Stories), and Moriarty has had a col-
lection of his painterly. evocative Jack
Survives strips published by’ RAW
Books.
I was most impressed by the
residual power of the longest piece,
Ben Katchor•s 26-page story, “The
Printer’s Disease.” The story—about
a printer whose life disintegrates when
his health fails and his wife runs off
with another man—is almost painfully
banal in outline, but Katchor unfolds
the tale with unexpected and subtle
narrative twists. (The story alprs to
trail off in a number of meandering
visual and aural asides, though all the
elements cohere by the story’s close.)
It’s an affecting. moody piece of
naturalism, executed in a style of
visual storytelling that is distinctive-
ly Katchor’s. It’s all of a piece.
Moriarty contributes a number of
short pieces—more like highly con-
densed image poems. actually—that
describe violent. sometimes surreal
incidents and events. In one, “Spoilt
Milk.” a farmer climbs aboard a
World War II-vintage Spitfire that has
landed in his yard and machine guns
a barnful of cows. (That one was my
favorite.) In another. “Sex is A
Memory.” a man climbs a tree, sees
his wife making love to a neighbor-
hood girl and falls from the tree. thus
crippling himself sexually and other-
wise forever. The unrelievedly glum
disillusioned tone of these pieces pulls
Moriarty into the domain of self-
parody. (It crossed my mind that the
self-parody might be intentional.)
Moriarty does create a number of
eeries. unsettling images, and you
discover a different perspective on the
satirical sensibility of the Jack Sur-
vives strips in these stories.
Mark Beyer’s four page Tony Target
strip, “Destiny,” the title character
run the gamut of panic. nausea, and
paranoia within the context of a frac-
tured narrative. The images are
rendered in the startling outlines of
Beyer’s expressionist mode of
representing an intimidating reality.
Other features include two wordless
graphic tales, “Truck Jouney” and “A
Trip To Wales” by Martin Millard; a
series of meditations (edited by
Moriarty) on the aesthetic contours Of
sound, and a series of intriguing,
skillfully drawn images that are “im-
agined, observed, remembered” by
Peter Blegvad.
Picture Story has been impressive-
ly printed on high-quality stock. The
color values of Moriarty’s cover
image—which is impossible to
describe but somehow features an
American Indian. a lesbian seduction
scene, and the Church of the Holy
Rabbit—are wonderful. as are the
muted tones of interior color in the il-
lustrations that accompany his short,
short stories.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Big Baby by Charles Burns (235x312mm)

Oh, the edition I have has a glued-in signature sheet, as well as a screenprinted print.

Anyway, this reprints all of the Big Baby things — starting with the first two-pager from ram #5. It’s definitely the creepiest one, and Burns says (in the back of this book) that he didn’t really want to go further down that road…

… so in the second piece here, The Curse of the Molemen (reprinted from Raw One-Shot #5), Big Baby is more of a bystander.

The larger format for this story doesn’t look quite right? I mean, Burns always looks great, but it looks even better in the smaller Raw edition. And look at the difference in printing here — the ink is so much blacker in the Raw book.

The bulk of the book reprints the Big Baby comic strip that Burns had serialised in various alt-weeklies. The first part (Teen Plague) is basically a dry run for Black Hole, Burn’s magnum opus about teenagers and sex and teenagers having sex.

The artworks still super sharp, but the faces, as odd as they are, look a lot less striking and alien than his earlier work.

The last section, Blood Club, is the weakest one: All the creepy subtext seems to have disappeared, and this is basically a (quite good) straightforward horror story.

We finish up with a history of Big Baby, as well as several pages of various ephemera — this is a very complete Big Baby collection, which is nice.

But… reading these pieces all together, it’s weird how much that lessens their impact. The first two-pager is still perfect, but the other three stories which I remember having a pretty big “whoa” impact on me at the time, now seem almost… er… is there a positive word for “pedestrian”? They seem almost ordinary?

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Drawing in ink and gouache? on paper by Mark Beyer.

I remember where I got this one — it was at the Lambiek comics store, and it was the most expensive thing I had ever bought. I was a student, and I really couldn’t afford it, but I had to have it.

I think. Or did had I just started working? Oh, yeah! I had bought a poster of this drawing a couple years earlier, and it was hanging in my “work area”, but then I saw the real thing on display at Lambiek, and I asked whether it was for sale.

He took it down from the wall and said “six thousand guilder”, so I guess this was before 1999, when Euros became a thing? I said “gulp” and he said “cash” and I had to go and get money from various ATMs around Amsterdam.

So that was… about… three thousand Euros? Wow. I really couldn’t afford that at that time.

At all.

Everything for art! It was probably the first expensive-expensive thing I ever bought?

(Or did he say “five thousand guilder for you?” He may have. I didn’t haggle or anything, but I seem to remember him lowering the price spontaneously. Perhaps because of my *gulp* and general fashionably sloppy me-ness.)

This drawing was made into a poster and was part of a postcard set, too… which I used to have, but I can’t find it now. Here’s a copy from the interwebs:

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.