Random Thoughts

Casual Casual #19/20 edited by Peter Dako (214x279mm)

I blogged about Casual Causal some before, and in those issues, Peter Dako talked about putting on a travelling show exhibiting a bunch of artists. And now he’s finally gotten money from the gummint, so he’s doing it, and this 200 page magazine-sized publication is the result. It’s also the final Casual Casual issue.

So we get a whole bunch of introductions, one after the other, trying to explain how all these artists somehow relate to each other…

… and we get a “graphzine index”, which doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the show…

And then… another introduction by Paul Gravett?

Bruno Richard apparently had written an introduction to some of the artists for a previous show, so we get that, and then an updated version.

And then an overview of all the artists appearing here.

And then an interview with John Waters!? Sure! Why not! Everybody likes interviews with John Waters.

And then finally the artwork starts, and … it turns out to be just two random pages per artist. (See images for names.)

Some of it’s pretty cool!

Not much thought has been given to reproduction.

Most of the artists choose to eschew actual comics, but some of the pieces are fun, anyway, like this Peter Bagge thing where the characters gets cubismoised.

There’s a sizeable Japanese contingent in here, and it’s all from the punkier side of the scale.

Carel Moiseiwitch is one of the few people to do comics.

Hey! Gary Panter.

This is one of those books that have two covers, so when we get to the middle, we flip the book over and start from the other side. And … then we get most of the introductions again, but in French. Which is natural for a book financed by the Canadian gummint.

Most of the artists on the “other side” are French, too.

Wow, that’s pretty cool…

Heh. Chester Brown also sneaks in here, doing a sort of recontextualisation of artwork from Yummy Fur. Trey cool.

So… I guess it’s fine for what it is? I mean, a catalogue for an art show? It’s not much of a reading experience, though.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

The Road to Hell by Matt Groening (226x229mm)

I hadn’t planned on doing all the Life in Hell collections in this blog series, but there’s just a couple more books to go, so what the hey.

This collection mostly covers 1991, and it’s a very cohesive collection…

… but that’s mostly because half of them are Akbar and Jeff variations like this.

In previous years, Groening had experimented with bringing in more autobio stuff, but this time around, this is as close as you get.

I don’t mean to be so negative — it’s a pleasant read, but there’s just so little new that I don’t really have much to say.

Perhaps Groening is going after a zen thing by repeating this argument so many times (with small variations).

I mean, it’s fine, but every previous collection had something new and exciting, and I think this is the first one that doesn’t have that?

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Mark Beyer screen printed poster.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Do You Hate Your Hips More Than Nuclear War? by Libby Reid (216x152mm)

I’ve covered a few books that have been “adjacent” to the purported subject matter of this blog series… but I don’t quite know why I meant to do this book. I mean, it doesn’t look very… adjacent?

Hm… *ponder*… Oh yeah, I think it’s coming back to me now, but it might be a fake memory: Was there an ad for this in an issue of Raw? It’s published by Penguin, who had recently published the first Maus collection, so perhaps that’s what prompted the connection.

Or…

OK, I just don’t know. At some point, a month or so ago, I bought this book because I thought it would be pertinent or something, so let’s read it.

So — it uses a pretty standard format — topical (or not) jokes arranged by subject.

Er… is this a Christian book? Or is this an anti-Creationist joke? Americans are so confusing.

But there’s not a lot of religion in the rest of the book. It varies between observational humour (to the left: “aren’t fridges full of stuff, eh?”) and absurd stuff (to the right: “anti-gravity spray”).

I think both approaches are pretty successful here? I mean, those are two solid gags. I mean, I’m not laughing out loud, but I’m amused…

And here’s a mixture of observational humour and absurd humour.

Oh yeah — I’d totally forgotten that this topic was so major in the 80s. I think the discussion has totally flipped these days, eh? These days it’s all about them there poor incels instead.

Author portrait.

So, this was totally off the topic of this blog series (neither artwork not writing have anything to do with anything here), but at least it’s a look at what else Penguin was publishing in the comics dept. at the time.

Doesn’t seem to be much in the ways of reviews of this book out there… Hm! That’s odd…. OK, here’s her web page.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.