Random Thoughts

Raw #7: The Torn-Again Graphix Mag edited by Françoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman (265x360mm)

This is the infamous “torn” edition of Raw: Every cover is hand-torn… although this edition seems to be more torn than others. (I don’t think they’re usually torn in the left-hand bottom corner, too?)

*gasp* This copy is incomplete! The torn-off bit is supposed to be sticky-taped above the “Save what you destroy!” text — which it was in the copy I had as a teenager, but hangs framed on a wall now. I was fascinated at the time to note that the bit that was taped to the page wasn’t the bit that had been torn off of my copy. So I guess they had a bit of mix’n’match action going on when they were assembling the issue.

Just one page of these stylish ads this issue. I think Danceteria were the most consistent advertisers? I think they’re in all the issues (as well as many other comics magazine from New York around this time).

Perhaps the most surprising inclusion in this issue is a Blues thing from R. Crumb. And… it reads like any Crumb story from this era, so he didn’t really adapt the artwork to the larger format.

Sue Coe and Lloyd deMause do a long thing about nuclear war and stuff…

… Charles Burns does a pretty amusing Dog Boy thing…

There’s the required Maus insert, of course, and here we have (again) Spiegelman’s dad and step-mother complimenting him on how good his comics are.

In his father’s story, they’re still hiding from the Nazis, but they’re eventually caught and sent to Auschwitz, so this is perhaps a natural place to take a pause. Which is what Spiegelman did, sort of: Pantheon would publish a collection of the chapters completed so far next year as Maus I, and that changed everything, of course.

But Auschwitz isn’t how the volume ends: It ends with Spiegelman discovering that his father has burned his mother’s diaries… and this is really the emotional clencher.

And I mean, it is: It’s a horrible thing to have done. But this leaves Art Spiegelman as the primary victim here, and that’s pretty eh?

I’m sure I’m not saying anything original here.

Charles Burns, Ever Meulen and Spiegelman collaborate on the centre spread… which has been loosened from this copy, so I guess the previous owner had it on his wall or something?

This is an unusually chatty issue of Raw. While the previous issues had kept the editorial voices to a minimum, here they’re spilling out all over the place. Here they explain that they had all these drawings by Scott Gillis around, and then they got Greil Marcus to write a text to fill out all the blank bits on the pages.

The thing about the plastic straw had me scratching my head as a sixteen-year-old.

And then! A bunch of pages of Japanese comics. Terry Yumura starts the party off…

And then we get a lot more chatter from the editors about Japan, and they explain everything about Japanese culture, like how racist it is etc.

And there’s a Gary Panter Square in Nagoya?

And there’s another booklet! This time by Yoshiharu Tsuge.

And even that doesn’t stop the splainin! Do we really need to have the editors splain at us that that girl is a bit aggressive in her sales technique? It seems pretty obvious…

This issue of Raw doesn’t seem as meticulously put together as the previous issues. For one, it’s got sixteen text-dominated pages, and that seems pretty lopsided. The Crumb strip doesn’t seem to communicate with anything else here, and then there’s the Japanese stuff that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with anything.

Individually, all the pieces in the issue are good, and it’s the most extravagant production (ripped cover with taped in detritus, two booklets, different paper stocks and colour pages), but it seems less like a cohesive magazine than “let’s just put all the stuff we have in here”.

They were apparently publishing 20K copies of Raw at this point — growing each month. It must be starting to become pretty exhausting…

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Hypnotic Tales by Richard Sala (213x276mm)

OK, I seem to be digressing from the putative subject matter of this blog series more and more… I originally planned on focusing hard on the Raw period of comics (so, 1978-89… ish), and the artists around Raw, really. I wasn’t going to do anything newer than 1990, and avoid artists more aligned with Underground/”alternative” comics.

But the time period thing is blown now, of course, and here I’m reading a Richard Sala book.

But! Sala was obviously influenced by people like Mark Beyer and Charles Burns, and he did appear in two Raw books, so while more aligned with the Blab/Fantagraphics crowds, it’s not that much of a stretch.

These are stories produced over the previous half dozen years for $ALL_THE_ANTHOLOGIES. Sala’s style was basically established before this, and he just refines it over the years.

Stumbling over one of Sala’s stories in an anthology was always a delight: The artwork’s super stylish, and the stories are short and punchy. (And usually pretty amusing.)

There’s so many … weird things in the stories. Here we have a guy obsessed with a woman, so he paints her into lots of famous paintings, and then he has to kill all the art critics so they can’t blab about the alterations. Isn’t that just amazing? I mean, coming up with a plot that convoluted?

However, many of these stories come off as if Sala just doodling away without any plan, so he gets to draw all this cool stuff, but it doesn’t really add up to much (except a vague feeling of unease).

Right, this is the story from Raw #8… I wonder how it was printed there?

Reading this collection, there isn’t really much of a cumulative effect… except slight boredom. Because every story is basically the same. Reading one of these is amazing; reading a dozen in a row is less so.

I think Sala is mainly going for a dreamline effect (plot wise), but they feel less like real dreams and more like Freudian examples of dreams.

There’s helpfully a bibliography at the end. I’ve tried getting hold of Sala’s self-published Night Drive book, but it’s impossible to find.

Darcy Sullivan interviews Sala in The Comics Journal #208, page 67:

SULLIVAN: When did you do the stories that appeared
in Night Dream.
SALA: Night Drive.
SULLIVAN: Night Drive.
SALA: You’re not the first person to make that mistake.
The guy at Bud Plant who rejected carrying it said,
“Four dollars is a little expensive for Night
Dreams, don’t you think?”
SULLIVAN: When didyou do those stories?
SALA: I did those stories when I was 29 years
old, believe it or not. Right now to me it look
like juvenalia. I was a really late starter. Night
Drive was the start ofa certain period and The
Chuckling Whatsit is the start ofa new period. I
look at my work from that first period and all I
see is the struggle. If people like the work I’ve
done, I’m glad. But I think the best is yet to
come. You know, Chester Gould was in his
prime in his 40s. Thads when he created Flattop
and some of his best characters
But as far as Night Drive, I wasn’t sure ifl
was doing art or popular culture. I think I
thought I was making art. There is a clue in
there as to the direction I would eventually go.
At the very end, there’s a story that I almost left
out, called “Invisible Hands,” which was my
take-offon my love ofpulps. It was non-linear,
it was broken up, and I didn’t really bother to
end it. I thought it didn’t need an ending. ltwas
supposed to be a chapter from a non-existent
serial — i€s like Andre Breton and the surreal-
ists. They loved stuff liked Fantamo$. Andre
Breton did this famous thing where he’d walk
into the middle ofa movie and watch a part Of it, and
get up and go into another theater and watch part of
another movie, and would never see the entire movie.
So I did this thing, “Invisible Hands,” which was
not meant to be taken seriously. The rest of Night
Drive has more to do with the world offine art than the
world of comics.
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.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Devin and Gary Go Outside

This is a CD by Devin Flynn and Gary Panter, published by Picturebox, apparently.

It’s far out.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

World War 3 Illustrated #1 edited by Seth Tobocman, Peter Kuper and Christof Kohlhofer (202x270mm)

When starting this Raw-focused blog series, I wondered whether I should do some World War 3 Illustrated, too — it was another anthology started in New York around the same time, and with as much claim on the phrase “punk comix” than Raw has, really… But it’s virtually impossible to find any of the early issues. It’s not that they’re very expensive when they do pop up on ebay, but… they never do! It took me half a year to score this issue.

What about the traditional comics sellers?

One issue (out of 50) in stock.

I think that grid from Mile High Comics means that they never had it.

So World War 3 Illustrated has existed in a world separate from the comics and traditional bookstore worlds — I’m guessing it’s been distributed in anarchist bookstores and stuff? And then people just threw them away? It’s not a “precious” art object like Raw Magazine, that’s for sure.

But I did find #1, so let’s look at that.

Heh heh.

Wow, that’s gorgeous… S Montano? That’s a name I’m not familiar with.

Hm… ah! The production for this was done at Brooklyn Bridge Publications, who published the first Picture Story magazine. (I’m guessing Brooklyn Bridge was mainly just Ben Katchor.)

And an ad? For a radio station? With an EC-is sci-fi illustration?

OK, this is more like it. (Seth Tobocman.)

And I think I’ve read this story by Peter Kuper somewhere before? It’s a good little story about those weird thoughts we have, but it’s not what I’d expected to find here, really.

This Bill Hillman two-page is more like what I expected.

What the!? Peter Bagge!? Doing a “boy, conservatives are evil” thing that he probably regrets now? (He’s a “Libertarian” these days.) Hah hah!

This is also Peter Kuper, and it’s a longish sci-fi story about a boy and his mutant dog. Rendered in a kinda… Corbenish way? I had no idea!

Finally, Kristof Kohlhofer pipes up with something that’s more like I expected to find here…

So… About two thirds of the pages in here were done by Kuper and Tobocman, and few of the pieces were directly political. Very different from later issues of the magazine, I must say. It’s… it’s pretty good? I’d say it shows “great promise”, but then I know that both Tobocman and Kuper had major, major careers ahead of them after this. But it’s less “Raw adjacent” than I had expected. I mean, it’s not even “Weirdo adjacent” — it’s more like a random Underground comix from ca. 1973.

So now I’m even more curious and want to read the subsequent issues, which is… difficult. But I guess I’ll just have to keep trolling ebay, because I imagine it became a lot more punk pretty fast? But I may be wrong again.

Ted White writes in The Comics Journal #81, page 36:

At virtually the opposite end of the spec-
trum lies World War 3 Illustrated, a $2.00
black-and-white magazine. WW3 is a real
curiosity: a throwback to the earliest days
Of the underground comics, obviously both
ambitious and amateur, an failure
but an interesting artistic failure.
The magazine is clearly published for
love rather than money, and has thus far
appeared only once a year, which may well
be all its publishers can afford. Both and
‘2 brim with a nearly incoherent and only
sometimes focused energy which draws in
part from punk nihilism and in part from
youthful idealism. There is a lot Of rage and
anger let loose in these pages, and some-
times it overwhelms the available talent of
the artists and writers. The best of these are
Peter Kuper, Seth Tobocman, and Milton
Knight, Jr., each of whom shows real abil-
ity, although none appears to have yet
gained suffcient discipline.
In terms of production WW3 is flawed.
Apparently some of the artists worked with
collages and mixed media, even charcoal,
and ,the printer didn’t have it fully under
control, shooting halftones that printed as
smudged grays and insufficiently masked
areas.
If World War 3 Illustrated falls short of
professional quality its ambitions soar far
higher than those Of any professional com-
ics, and that contrast may contribute to
the tensions that energize it.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.