Random Thoughts

Raw One-Shot #5: Big Baby: Curse of the Molemen by Charles Burns (158x236mm)

The end papers set the scene: We’re in a 50s child’s world.

Well, that’s nice! “To my Big Baby — Jeffrey”. Or… is it?

(I’m not sure whether snapping pics like this is an invasion of privacy or not, so I’ll just not mention even the possibility.)

This is a little hardback volume, and it feels so well designed. Yes, it’s a very mid-80s design, with Futura and all, but everything, from the covers to the binding to the end papers to even the indicia and the page numbers just show the care and dedication that has gone into this. And the printing: It’s so razor sharp it feels like you can cut your fingers on those lines.

Big Baby’s insectile design is something to behold.

In some ways, Charles Burns was the odd man out at Raw — his stories are very 50s influenced and not very “punk” or “new wave” or whatever at all. But he’d be the odd man out in an Underground Comix setting, too — sure, he’s having fun with this material, but there’s also something unnerving about it all. This isn’t Eraserhead by any means, but it’s tapping into some of the same things.

Some EC references in that lower left hand panel…

Anyway, it’s a solid read, and very satisfying as an object.

Dale Luciano writes in The Comics Journal #113, page 45:

In Big Baby: Curse of the Molemen (a
recent RAW on&shot), Burns relates the
story of how a young kid (Big Baby, Burns’s
version of the typical American boy as
bizarro) witnesses the killing of a jealous,
wife-beating neighbor by the neighbor’s
downtrodden wife. Thisis the indirect out-
come of a plot which, as the schlock title
cleverly implies, promises a more conven-
tional follow-through of the story’s B-movie
origins. Burns initiates the Story from the
kid’s point of view—Big Baby sees a monster
crawling out Of a hole being excavated for
a swimming pool in the neighbor’s yard
and, later, sees the monster carry a human
victim back into the hole. We anticipate that
Burns will somehow deliver on the basic
horror storyvremise.
He does, but in shrewdly conceived, unex-
pected ways. Big Baby is a good example of
the displacement that occurs in the best hor-
ror stories. What Big Baby enconters When
he finally ventures down into that hole may
or may not be the product of a hyperactive,
hysterical imagination, but the horror of the
mean-spirited, suburban who
feels he has license to use his Wife as a
punching bag overshadows anything else in
the story. When Big Baby learns that the
Creatures are “lady monsters” Who kidnap
human males for their own sexual purposes,
the metaphor for the perversion Of natural
impulses within the constraints of middle-
class marriage is eerily brought to the fore.

Uhm… OK…

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Slash volume 3 number 4 edited by Claude Bessy and others (290x380mm)

I thought it might be fun to have a look at a random issue of Slash — it is the birthplace of Gary Panter’s Jimbo, after all.

Slash was published in LA, so we get a bunch of local in-jokes, like labelling pics with “famous local combo members” and the guy up there to the left getting a blow job by SF police. (Not to mention mislabelling The Clash and Public Image Ltd.)

It’s fun.

It’s slightly on the insidery tip — here we have an editorial ranting about something that’s not quite clear, but I surmise that Gary Panter had been featured in New West magazine the previous month, and New West was totally un-punk and very establishment? So there’s a backlash, but the editor (Claude Bessy, perhaps?) responds basically with “WE ARE NOT SCARED OF BEING Co-OPTED, BOUGHT OR BUTTFUCKED like the insecure rabble you represent”. I.e., fuck “cred”, which is all very rozz tox.

While it’s a local LA magazine, we also get some stuff from other cities…

… but it’s mostly interviews with people who are visiting LA, naturally enough. Here we have 8 Eyed Spy, or “that other band Lydia Lunch was in” to most people.

It’s a very open magazine — it’s got all kinds of stuff, like Johanna Went, who was more of a performance artist.

And an interview with The Jam, who didn’t have much cred at all at this point, I think? (And the interview doesn’t go well. It’s quite amusing.)

*gasp* A review of Phranc’s first singer/songwriter concert? Wow.

And then we get a whole bunch of album reviews, and again — it’s a surprisingly unorthodox mixture of things being talked about, from reggae to African music to avant garde stuff to (yes) a lot of punk stuff.

I think this is, like, the best music magazine ever? Basically all the featured artists are pretty interesting, the writing is lively (sometimes snide, but mostly not), the layouts are good…

It’s charming? I think that’s the word. And somebody has scanned all the issues, so that you can read them if you want to.

But what about Gary Panter?

Yes, he’s in here, too… but with a non-Jimbo page (not reprinted in any of the Jimbo books). Instead Panter takes the opportunity to talk directly to the reader, and yes, it’s about that New West magazine thing: “The enemy”. And Panter tells all the haters off.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Psycho Comics #1-2 edited by Daniel Clowes (216x280mm)

What’s this then? Surely this book doesn’t fit the theme of this blog series?

No, it doesn’t, but I’m including it for two reasons: It’s from New York in 1981, and, er, I kinda bought these by mistake recently.

Both excellent reasons!

It’s also a contrast to the other books in the series? Does that make sense? No? Tough.

This is edited by Daniel Clowes, who was attending the Pratt Institute:

Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, where he earned a BFA in 1984.

I’m assuming Pratt wasn’t as arty as the SVA.

The inside front cover is kinda fun (it’s “psycho”), so I wondered whether this would have some sort of crossover appeal with the Raw crowd anyway…

… but, no, it’s just sophomoric (and I mean that almost literally) riffs on EC comics: We’re solidly in Underground Comix territory, only with “cool nihilist violence”.

This is by Daniel Clowes, and doesn’t really look anything like his later work — but he’s a teenager here, I guess?

Some of these comics almost have something graphically interesting going on, like this one by “Dr. Death”, but it could also just be an accident.

The EC references come swift and hard, like this thing by Pete Friedrich.

The first issue is 28 pages long, which is something I haven’t seen before. 24 and 32 are the usual sizes (based on 8 page signatures)… and it’s all unremitting dreck.

But, hey, it’s by teenagers who even self-published this thing — Rick Altergott and Clowes (and Friedrich?) set up Look Mom, Comics themselves, which you have to admire.

The second issue, published in 1982, is a lot more assured artistically (and is 48 pages long). Gone is the most “shocking” violence, and instead it’s a more good-natured silly riff on ECs. And Clowes, in particular, has grown enormously as an artist — it’s very Kriegstein-influenced, but you can pretty much see his mature style in here.

Altergott’s artwork is pretty wonky, but I guess that’s true to this day — all bobble heads and stuff.

And there’s one story here that’s actually readable!

Hey… er… “fun”…

I have to agree with D. King from N. Y. C..

That page to the right, by P. Redding, kinda stands out here, in that it doesn’t use a traditional page layout.

Apparently, all comics published around this time had to have a booklet insert. (See Raw, Bad News, and… er…) This one is about something called “The Ultimates”? It reads like it’s an ad or something? “Totally Intense Tales”? It’s a parody of something?

It’s pretty much unreadable, so… I don’t know…

Dale Luciano writes in The Comics Journal #66, page 37:

psycho Comics is a sort of left-handed
attempt at mordant satire of bourgeois val-
ues, stressing explicit, graphic horror as an
antidote to the sanitized, official optimism
Of American middle-class culture. It’s an
attempt, I think, to distill the essential
subversive message of ’50s EC horror
comics, that beneath the placid surface
of Eisenhower serenity lies a disturbing
horror. A case in point is the lead story,
“The Pleasantville Tragedy” (art and story
by Dan Clowes), in which Cathy, a prcv
totypically pleasant, well-scrubbed, small-
town girl (“a third-year cheerleader at
Pleasantville High”) returns to her pleas-
ant home one pleasant afternoon to find
her pleasant dog, Floppsy, hanging upside-
down and headless above the stairwell;
proceeding on into the remainder of the
house, Cathy discovers Mom lying dead on
the kitchen table, not to mention her
father and brother, Chris, both hacked to
pieces in the basement. The masked
murderer appears and proceeds to rape and
perform God-knows-what perversions
upon poor, pleasant Cathy. Not only is this
cheerful stuff, but the sardonic end panel
advises us that Cathy was later deemed
“criminally insane” and charged with the
family’s murder, “as well as one count of
severe animal negligence and mistreat-
ment” (page 3).
That’s it. There’s no subtext or plot,
simply a three-page delineation of Cathy’s
horrific discoveries (in grisly detail) and the
sour irony Of the ending. (We are spared
the actual rape.) Several elements highlight
the distanced point of view taken by
Clowes toward the subject matter: the
heerful banner that initially identifies the
story as “a fast-moving tale of adventure”;
the reiteration of the point that “nothing
of interest” has ever happened in Pleasant.
ville or to Cathy; the coda which indicates
Cathy’s insanity and incarceration in
“Plasticville State Penitentiary.” Along
with several others in Psycho Comics, this
feature leans heavily on a hard-core detail-
ing of the bloody remains of the victims,
yet smirks at the middle-class banality of
the victims. In this regard, Clowes pictures
certain details in a gruesomely tongue-in.
cheek way: Dad’s pipe is still in his mouth
(though his head is severed from his body),
and Mom had been stabbed to death with
What appears to be a curtain rod. A press
release from the publisher, Look Mom,
Comics! draws prideful attention to other
details of Americana in the story, in-
duding Mom’s steaming apple pie on the
stove and the “hotel style wallpaper”
adorning the house. Pretty punk, all this.
The peculiar effect is akin to watching
an episode of Happy Days transmogrify into
a blood-curdling episode from In Cold
Blood crossed with Halloween.

[…]

Frankly, I’m still not certain just What
to make of this book. A cheerful press
release from Look Mom, Comics! pro-
claims that Psycho Comics is aimed at the
collectors of 1950 Horror, Terror, and
Crime Comics, “especially EC fans,”
among others. I wonder. Executed with
remarkable skill, the EC horror books
belong to the era Of conformity and un-
questioning belief in the material progress
of the American future; they belie the of-
ficial optimism of that era. Psycho Comics
simply calls attention (in a rather artless
way, for the most part) to some of the hor-
rors so persistently in our midst. (One
piece, Pete Friedrich’s EC-inspired
“ShockSubway Stories,” has no other
point beyond documenting some pur-
portedly authentic subway horror stories;
similarly, Clowes’s “Dear Ann Landers”
documents in one page the evolution of a
high school senior from a practical joker to
a raving lunatic. ) The tone Of psycho Comics
is a revelling in squalid horror for squalor’S
sake, the kind of material designed to of-
fend cultural guardians, weak sisters and
well-meaning suburban hausfraus. Not my
cup of tea, I’m afraid.

The Comics Journal #83, page 53:

The cheerfully demented folks at Look
Mom, Comics! Have published a second
issue of Comics. Ostensibly aimed
at fans of EC-type horror stories, psycho
Comics is an anthology title featuring
stories that mix a sardonic, tongue-in-
cheek approach to storytelling with liberal
doses of gross-out humor. The book is
clearly the work , of energetic amateurs.
Most of the features are short sketches,
with writers quickly setting up a premise
and aiming for a pungent or surprise finish
in the EC mode. While not credible on
their own merit, one or two of the stories
work up to some marginally effective
moments Of EC-parody. Though his work
is a patently awful approximation of Wally
Wood’s style, for example, Rick Altergott
creates a few panels in “Terror Trauma
that are daffy-bizarre send-ups of EC
writing and pictorial styles. With the ex-
ception of a contribution by Gene Fama in
this issue, though, the writing and artwork
in psycho Comics are ineptly or crudely
managed, or both. None Of the writers
seeks to build up any sympathy for or iden-
tification With character. The attitudes
toward humanity in general are cheerfully
misanthropic, and the cynicism Of a piece
like “Buster Learns the Hard Way,” which
portrays one Of the book’s only sympa-
thetic characters as a shlemiel who dies
when the plug on his fron lung is acciden-
tally pulled, pervade most of the stories.

Well, OK, doing this book in this blog series was a bad idea. I know!

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Dead Stories by Mark Beyer (216x280mm)

The odd thing about this book is that it looks so normal. It’s standard magazine-sized, with a heavier paper stock and white, matte paper. Beyer thanks Françoise Mouly, and she did have a printing press, but this surely can’t have been printed there? It’s so… professional.

This copy is signed by Beyer and dedicated to somebody named Yoko.

Looks at the perspective in the middle panel! I absolutely plotz with adoration.

This is a mix of stuff created between 79 and 82, so we get a series of “daily strips” called We’re Depressed, but it’s mostly shorter, full-page stories.

These are pretty early Beyer works, but it’s fascinating how basically everything’s here already. It’s hard to know how to related to these strips — do we laugh? Despair? Both? The pages are so gorgeous, and that muddles the water further.

Well, OK, this Tony Target strip is pretty goofy, but it’s still… unnerving.

T-shirt, poster and mini.

The book was reprinted by Water Row Books a couple decades ago. This time it’s a hardback book, but it’s otherwise pretty much identical.

It looks like it’s a facsimile edition shot from a printed copy of the book — the stippling is a bit uneven, but it’s a good reproduction.

Dale Luciano writes in The Comics Journal #108, page 39:

A FEW RECENT CLASSICS
Dale Luciano on Dead Stories,
How to Commit Suicide in South Africa,
Bright Ideas, and The Survivors!:
The Eyes That Burned

In Dead Stories, Mark Beyer uses a
meticu lously worked-out expression-
primitivist style to create bizarrely comic
fantasies that speak of paranoia, death,
nausea, ennui, dismemberment, and a
generalized depletion of spiritual resources.

Dead Stories is a collection of some 14
stories, most of them dealing With Beyer’s
two favorite characters, Amy and Jordan
(who have appeared in RAW magazine);
most of them are short, though one am-
bilious epic entitled “Agony” runs seven
pages. In each, Beyer etablishes a situaion
Of elemental simplicity—Amy and Jordan
“go downtown,” for example, or Jordan
wakes up and doesn’t feel like going to
that day—in which the characters do
little more than react, more or less passive-
IM, to the harsh terms of a given, Often
bizarre reality. Not untypical Of the sense
Of despair and ennui that infuses the stories
is “We’re Depressed,” in which Amy and Jor-
dan, suffering from acute anxiety about
their bug-infested apartment and poverty-
stricken lives, decide to lie down on the
sidewalk and die. End of story? No. They
get up before they die and keep making the
difficult effort to survive—though nothing,
save momentarily, fleeting pleasures (like
eating or floating downstream on a river)
alleviates the shared perception Of their lot
as a dismal and hopeless enterprise.
Everything that transpires in the charac•
ters’ lives revolves around their inescapable
anxieties concerning death, and in Beyer’s
Amy and Jordan, the lead characters ot Dead
Stories.

[…]

There’s a disturbing absence of belief in
the possibilities for constructive or self-
determining action in many of these pieces.
Two of the stories inwlve a character named
“Tony Target.” In one of the stories, Tony
is struck down by an automobile following
the deaths Of his brother and a good friend;
while recuperating in the hospital, Tony suc-
cumbs to a fatal heart attack. In the other
tale, Tony is haunted by the sensation Of
people staring at his face; after trying plastic
surgery and finding the results less than
satisfactory, he inserts a stick of dynamite
in his mouth and blows his head Off. It’s
guignol, but guignol aware Of its Own macabre
implications.

[…]

In terms Of style, Beyer creates the surreal
dreamscape Of a nightmare and reveals the
elements of the dream (the images of
snowmen, giant birds, a house crossing a
road, attacking dogs) in the incipient forms
Of a child’s caricatural rendering Of reality.
The effect is simultaneously eccentric and
amusing, and Beyer’s extravagantly formal-
ized expression of the reality distances the
essential frightening tone and spirit of the
dream. And yet. , . there is a deep and
brooding melancholy to these images of
Amy and Jordan’s world that is often more
than a little disquieting.

[…]

Mark Beyer’s is an extraordinary vision,
and Dead Things is a remarkably consistent,
cohesive piece Of work. This is a vastly more
abstracted account Of human reality than
has probably ever been seen in comic books.
(Many will certainly dismiss it outright as
an embodiment Of the Outre.) It’s a wildly
original comic-horrific vision of things,
though, and it would be incorrect to allege
that Beyer hasn’t sorted Out. the complex
fears and anxieties that permeate these in-
tricate fables. As an excusion into the realm
Of shroud-wearing fantasy, Dead Stories is an
astonishing collection of work.

Richard Sala is interviewed in The Comics Journal #208, page 68:

I had never stopped writing. I would take the
BART train to work every day, writing, then at home,
rd draw pictures to go with the stories. The main
influence on me was not so much or Weirdo, but
Mark Beyeds Dead Stories; when I saw that, it was a
revelation. I really related to his feeling of negativity
and his primitive art style. I looked through it to see
who the publisher was. I couldn’t find the name ofa
publisher, and it dawned on me that this guy did this
himself. I followed Mark Beyer’s format with the card
stock cover, magazine-size, for Night Drive.
If I haven’t said it before, I should say that I never
thought I would make it to 30. One of the reasons I
couldn’t really imagine becoming a successful artist in
my 20s was that I had been thinking about suicide
every day since the time I was a teenager.
SULLIVAN: Seriously thinking about it, or romantically?
SALA: There were times when I felt really bleak, and I
just felt negative all the time. I couldn’t see a frture.
When I was living in Arizona, that
was another thing — I didn’t relate
to any older people.

[…]

So when I read Dead Stories, it
reallyhit a chord, that whole feeling
Ofhelplessness, hopelessness. ltwas
almost a validation that a person
with my attitude, my feelings, could
do something like that. Of course, it was the time of
punk, evqthing
“tas sort of do-it-yourself, and I
thought, m going to do it myself. I II do my own
Like I said, I had no knowledge at all of how the
market worked. I knew about Bud Plant, because I’d
seen his name around. I remember ordering Crumb
undergrounds and Rick Griffn undergrounds from
him when I was in high school. The only other thing
that I knew was I saw Raw being sold at City Lights.
So I went into City Lights with Night Drive, and they
took wrne copies. So there was a time when the only
comics being sold at City Lights in San Francisco were
about 10 copies of Night Drive and a bunch of copies
of Raw. I was really proud of that.

Bhob Steward writes in The Comics Journal #89, page 14:

Boredom With Mainstream Spawns
“As-yet-Unnamed” Cartoon Movement

A Cover story in the Washington
D.C. weekly City paper finds
underground comics
“practically dead,” recent
independent companies such as
Pacific “mean-spirited retreads
Of 1950s EC,” and mainstream
comics a situation of “boys
drawing for other boys (the
same old story).” The three-
page article, in the January 6
1984 issue, concludes that
“enough kids are bored by the
space barbarians and skintight
suits to make a small market for
some more adventurous maga-
zines” and spur an “as-yet-
unnamed cartoon/art movement
that will have increasing
repercussions in the hip graphics
that we will all pore over in the
next five years.
Author Matt Groening, artist
of “Life In Hell,” sums up the
current mainstream/ independent
company titles: “Death, blood
and decapitation are back in
style, along with an
unprecedented preoccupation
with impossibly huge breasts
and male muscles bulging
everywhere except in the crotch.
The comic book industry may
someday redeem itself with a
well written book, but right now
things are in as pulpy a State as
.. ” In contrast, writes
ever.
Groening, “The new cartoons
say: All that technique by the
big guys doesn’t matter if you
don’t have anything to say.”
This reactionary cartoon/art
movement, which embraces
“punk, new wave, newave,
artoons, scratch art, messy art,
ugly comics,” is dated by
Groening as beginning in 1977.
‘ •The new cartoonists,” states
Groening, “offer a humanistic
reaction to media slickness and
an almost technophobic disdain
for the future, portraying in
their crude markings the
clumsinesses of everyday life
and all its little lumps.” They
• ‘work to please themselves
first,” and their output is
sometimes characterized by an
“unashamed amateurishness.”
According to Groening,
“dozens, perhaps hundreds” Of
artists “began drawing Oddly
for the first time in the
mid-’70s, some of them aware
of each other and others
creating in isolation. ” He cites
Pennsylvania artist Mark Beyer
(Dead Stories), Lynda J. Barry
(Girls & Boys, “Ernie pook’s
Comeek”), Flick Ford (cartoon
editor Of the East Village Eye),
NYC artist Mark Marek (New
Wave Comics), “the Harvey
Kurtzman-intluenced cartoons
of J.D. King and John
Holmstrom” (Punk, Stop!) and
LA artist Gary Panter (Jimbo).

Titled “Why Cartoonists
Can’t Draw Nice Or Think
Clear Or Write Good
Anymore,” the article is
illustrated with front covers
from the French comics
magazine Viper, Beyer’s Dead
Stories, Japanese cartoonist
Yoshikzau Ebisu’s My Man Is
punk, Lynda Barry’s Big Ideas,
the Spanish comics magazine
Makoki, and Stop!, plus
Eraserhead director David
Lynch’s “Angriest Dog In the
World” comic strip (L4
Reader) and a drawing by
Raymond Pettibon from
Capricious Missives.

[…]

In attempting to define the
Nu Mutant art sensibility,
Groening often achieves a tone
highly reminiscent of Susan
Sontag’s famed 1964 Partisan
Review essay, “Notes on
•Camp’. Sontag prefaced her
notes with the comment, “Taste
has no system and no proofs.

Heh. Nu-Mutant.

Bill Mason writes in The Comics Journal #93, page 34:

I immersed myself in Dead Stories, the
Second collection of Mark Beyer’s work,
with the slightly guilty pleasure of an
Elizabethan Classicist devouring the latest
installment of Spenser’s Faerie Queen or an
Edwardian parent sitting up with one of
Andrew Lang’s anthologies of fairy tales
(“with numerous illustrations by H.J.
Ford”) after the kiddies have had their bed*
time story. Beyer, that is to say, appeals to
the childish side of me thaf has persisted
into adulthood: I accept Amy Tilsdale, Jor-
dan Levine, and Tony Target as “real?
characters; want to read stories about
them (with Beyer providing the “numerous
illustrations”) over and over again; and I
don’t want their adventures ever to end.
Beyer’s rare gifts as a mythopoeic
teller and draftsman, his use of word bal-
loons as positive shapes in his composi-
tions, his interpolation of allegorical figures
and decorative motifs between his panels
and his use of eccentric/symmetrical page
breakdowns (these last two devices inspired
by Lyonel Feininger’s Wee Willie Winkie’s
World) have already been ably described by
David Kasakove in his Panels review of
A Disturbing Evening, Beyer’s earlier collec-
tion. can add only that there are . no
negative shapes either in Beyer’s comics
pages or in his splendid paintings on glass,
a fact which accounts for their hothouse,
fever-dream, Byzantine-icon quality; and
that Beyer uses his Feipingeresque tech-
niques as iconic binders, which both inten-
sify the narrative flow and turn every page
where they appear into a single, simulta-
neous image. Some examples of “simul-
taneous” pages from Dead Stories: Tony’s
anxiety attack on page 4 of “Bad Days”;
Amy’s severed arm on page 2 of “Dere-
licts”; and “Death,” originally published
by Beyer as a one-panel-to-a-page booklet
in two colors, here reprinted as a two-pager
with interpolated figures and illuminated
borders. (l can’t make up my mind which
version of “Death” I prefer: I love them
both
I am not trying to be cute or perverse. I
love Beyer’s work for the same reasons that
I love the unexpurgated version of “Cinde-
rella” and the wonderfully inept attempts
porary and touches the reader at the primary level of past art.
of Lang and Ford to bowdlerize world
folklore for English nurseries, Beyer has
created a world Of fear, violence, death,
and love that is both unmistakably con-
temporary and that touches us at the pri-
mar y level of the mythic and allegorical art
of the past. •It is in this profoundly
imagined variant of Our Own world that
Amy, Jordan, and Tony live and move and
have their being.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.