Random Thoughts

Everything in the World by Lynda Barry (230x149mm)

“Love the hurly ding-dong.”!?

Anyway, it’s been fun reading these early Lynda Barry books chronologically — I sorta knew that her style had changed a lot during her first (say) five years… but now we’re kinda getting near to the style she was going to use when her strip had the major mainstream breakthrough (which happened a couple years later). Gone are most of the angular, aggressive lines, and everything’s kinda rounded and busy…

In some of these strips, she does seem to be casting about for something new to write about — sometimes more successfully than others…

This book is divided into themed chapters and I think it’s pretty obvious what her prime subject matter was going to be:

Childhood.

The strips that focus on childhood and teen-age stuff are both funnier and sadder than the rest of the book. Not that the rest of the book is bad or anything, but this stuff positively sparkles.

I don’t think anybody else does this thing with their linework — you have the figures and faces outlined in a pretty solid, thick line, but then there’s a plethora of thinner, more tentative lines inked on either side of the more solid line.

Barry wouldn’t really become a megastar until she hit upon writing about the Maybonne/Marlys/Freddie family (i.e., using continuing characters), but in this book we see some tentative steps taken towards slightly longer continuities… and she uses herself (as a teenager) as the focal character. It’s kinda thrilling to read these, because you can just tell that she knows that she’s uncovering a seam of material here that she’ll be mining for years to come…

Anyway, it’s another fabulous collection. I don’t plan on covering her entire career in this blog series: She’s moving away from the “punk comix” thing I’m vaguely nattering on about here, so I think I’ll just be doing a couple more and that’s it.

Rob Rodi writes in The Comics Journal #114, page 59:

As with Groening, two trade-paperback
collections of these early strips are available
at bookstores. But her newest collection,
Everything in the World, also incorporates
some Of her strips on a new theme: the
tribulations of growing up. Like Groening,
Barry has moved on (or moved back) from
the sexual frontline to the realm of
childhood, (That Groening and Barry are
friends and occasional collaborators may ex-
plain this simultaneous shift in focus.)
She •seems to have little to say about
romance any more, and looking over her
phenomenal coverage Of that sphere you
don’t wonder—there may be in fict, nothing
left to say. Ever. But she has plenty to say
akX)ut her juvenile days, and the remarkable
thing about that is how her style mellowed
so abruptly; astonishingly, she writes about
the terrors and humiliations of childhood
without bitterness, without rancor, almost
without judgment. Despite the unpleasant-
ness of some of her memories, despite the
fact that again, there is pain here, and she
must feel it, she’s utterly honest about grow-
ing up. She seems to want to record exactly
what happened, exactly what she felt, ex-
actly what shaped her. This isn’t situation
comedy, as is the case with John Stanley,
or even at times with Groening; the humor
in her reminiscences is never that forced.
Everything has a natural ambience; it’s her
juxtapostion of events and feelings, her time
ing, and above all her uncanny gift for the
vernacular that make them funny. “Bit-
tersweet” is a debased word, having been
lent too Often to phony romance movies,
but it applies, in its original sense, to Barry”s
current work.
Her art style, too, has softened, has
become distinctive. It’s rounder and more
careful, still earmarked by the appealing
crudity, but with a real cartoonist’s eye for
faces and body language. When she relates
how the boys in her neighborhood fell in-
to an obsession with “pimp walking” (“Boy’s
Life”), the slack jive of their bodies is
hilariously realized; despite the crudity of
the rendering, you can, after you’ve read it,
get up and do the “pimp walk” yourself; it’s
that complete a picture. •And when Barry
gets down to faces, her prejudices can’t be
hidden. If there is a villain in this series of
strips, it’s her cousin, Marlys, who figures’
as a spoiler in just about every scheme
Barry’s gang devises; Marlys’ face iS like a
mass of boils with pigtails. Ugly is as ugly
does—as just about any kid knows
instinctively.
The strips themselves run the gamut of
childhood experiences, to a much greater
extent than Groening’s; Barry relates her
adventures from her earliest childhood
through her teen years, and occasionally
does a strip with a child protagonist Other
than herself (including boys.) As such, she
has a much broader scope than does
Groening, whose Bongo is more-or-less fixed
in the fifth grade.
And whereas Groening is interested in
youthful alienation, Barry is much more in-
terested in the entire social Structure that
surrounded her. She was part of her world
in a way that Groening perhaps was not.
One Of her most telling strips in this respect
is “How Things Turn Out,” where she deals
with social class. “In school,” she tells us,
“there were the queen girls and then there
were the rest and at the bottom of the rest
were the ones, whatever you want to call
them, the ones you Would be ashamed to
have to touch.” Okay, nothing we all didn’t
know already; we’ve live it. But she goes on
to examine this particulai-ly hierarchical
phenomenon inadetail, discussing the fixi-
ty of social position (“Occasionally someone
could get lowered for, say, wetting their
pants on a field trip, but it was almost im-
possible to move up”) and concluding with
an analysis of the origins of class assignment
that is nothing short of brilliant, and which
would have shaken Karl Marx to his very
bootstraps: It had nothing to do with how
smart you were. And even if you weren’t that
cute’, if you were a queen, people would copy
you. It was just something decided between us,
even though it wasn’t us who decided it. It was
something we all knew about. It was Our main
rule of life.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Hercules Amongst the North Americans by Mark Marek (218x279mm)

Marek’s previous book was published by a New York design firm… but now “new wave” comics is starting to become a thing, commercially, so Penguin dips their toes into the waters with this book.

Wow. That’s the most accurate map of the US ever.

I like the design of this book — it’s very unpretentious. Marek letters (almost) everything himself, down to the indicia, and it’s printed on thin, off-white paper. Not quite newsprint, though.

These strips originally appeared in The National Lampoon and/or High Times, and the vast majority are one or two pages long, and have a sort of punchline. The central gag — Hercules living in the US now — is open to an almost endless number of variations, and Marek doesn’t repeat himself at all over these pages.

Some of these strips seem to be reproduced more enlarged than others…

We’ve all been there.

These are very funny strips, and I love how clear Marek’s storytelling is, even if the pages initially look like total chaos. It’s a neat trick.

I wonder whether this was initially meant to be saddle-stitched instead of squarebound: If I counted correctly, this spread is in the middle of the book, and it would have been perfect there as a two-page spread. With a squarebound book, the middle of the painting disappears, and it’s all rather disappointing.

But Penguin doesn’t publish spine-less books, so I dunno.

I mean, these are gag comics, but there’s an underlying pathos and melancholy on these pages… Even if there’s no “plot progression” to discern in the book, it feels emotionally coherent, and it reads like a cohesive book anyway.

And then we end with some pages of reviews of Greek restaurants. As one does.

Dale Luciano writes in The Comics Journal #110, page 70:

[…]

If Pekar makes a significant contribution
to the medium by means of the superbly
rnanaged naturalist approach, Mark Marek
brings a wholly different sensibility to Her-
cules Amongst The North Americans. Gary
Panter once described his own work as a
form of “protest against seamless illusion,”
a sharp break from conventional forms Of
comic representation toward an idiom that
values spontaneity, idiosyncrasy, even the
“rattiness” which is part of an unpolished,
untutored style. Mark Marek has a visual
style—it’s a primitive, scrawly mode, a
child’s goofy, silly way Of looking at reality
—but it is a style. The fact that Marek has
found an audience in National Lampoon and
now see+ his work gathered in this slick
Penguin volume seems evidence that the
impact and influence of Matt Groening,
Lynda Barry, and Gary Panter ‘has been
absorbed into a specific subculture of artists
and readers that is large enough (or grow-
ing large enough) to sustain the commer-
Cial hopes Of a major publishing house like
Penguin for this volume.
The stories in Hercu!es The North
Americans are hioek-faéetious in the terribly
hip, self-amused manner of an artist who
revels, Zippy-like, in the inanities and absur-
dities of Arnerigan culture. rvlarek’s basis for
humor is the intongruity of the classic
Greek hero-god (Hercules) being plunked,
uninitiated and at a hopeless disadvantage,
into the middle Of middle-class American
culture. Marek is mostly interested in wring-
ing “dumb humor” from that incongruity.
By “dumb humor,” I mean humor that is,
to a large extent, calculatedly stupid; it’s a
carefully worked-out clunkiness. The inten-
tionality behind the monumental inanity of
the strips testifies to a hip sophistication on
the part Of the creator—but you do have
wondering whether a gifted, semilunatic kid
on a cartoon rampage could have created
most of these strips. There are episodes with
Hercules wreaking havoc in a “Midas”
muffler shop, mistaking a giant Bullwinkle
balloon in the Macy’s parade for a Trojan
horse- like treachery—that last is my favorite
strip—slaughtering football players (whom
he mistakes for gladiators), etc. The satirical
overtones are implicit rather than formu-
lated: the concept Of Hercules is lampooned
(and diminished) by the action, as the
American pop culture machine diminishes
and devalues anything that is fed into it.
And’ it’s all presented as a child’s slapstick
spectacle.
Like Panter, Marek approaches comix
from a painterly perspective That might not
seem obvious until, making your way
through Hercules, you encounter an epic
IX)rtrait Of Hercules tied to the masts Of a
Texonn ship making its way through a
blustering, -storm-tossed sea. It’s broad,
punk-style, kitchen-sink lampooning, but
the composition, control of color, and the
boldness Of the execution in that single
image are excitingly managed. I found the
pure experience Of the painterly’ vision
here more viscerally powerful than anything
else. in the book.
I’m not without a measure Of respect for
the Jarry/schoolboy-jokester mentality
behind such arts of comic dada, but I con-
fess to finding the strips, intended as a
“lark,” cramped, adolescent, and tiresome.
Hercules Amongst the North Americans
intrigues me more for what it represents as
a marketable commodity than for what it is.

Dude.

This book has never been reprinted, which is darn strange. I can’t find any copies for sale on ebay, either (I’ve had my copy since the 90s).

It looks like it’s a sought-after item? That’s a ridiculously high price, I would have thought: I mean, it’s a Penguin book, so surely there has to be tens of thousands of these in circulation?

Mark Marek hasn’t done a lot of comics after this, and is mostly known for the cartooning work. But as this reddit thread points out, beware if you’re googling his name: There’s also a different Mark Marek that runs a gore site, and you don’t want to go there.

It seems like many people are rather ambivalent about the book:

Marek’s artistic approach can best be described as “hurried.” His ratty, meandering line recalls both Gary Panter and Lynda Barry, maybe a touch of Nicole Hollander as well. It’s deliberately ugly, and yet it kind of works. It feels like something scribbled on a napkin between bites of souvlaki, but there’s an urgency and sincerity to it that’s actually kind of appealing.

But others aren’t:

This is a f^&*ing funny book. It’s also incredibly rare these days. If you’re lucky enough to get your hands on a copy, grab it!

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

The Previous Future edited by Pete Friedrich (215x275mm)

This is published by Look Mom, Comics — the same people who published Psycho Comics. So I wasn’t going to cover this magazine in this blog series, but I had already bought it, and the cover looks pretty intriguing… so let’s give it a go.

Oh, well: It’s more of the same amateurish stuff, except for the cover, which is done by a French guy called Eric Cartier, which kinda sounds like a fake name? But isn’t.

As with Psycho Comics, this isn’t so much “adjacent” to the comics I’m covering in this blog as stuff presumably by teenagers in New York. Here’s Daniel Clowes — he’s perfected his signature, but the artwork’s pretty rough. But it’s a somewhat amusing story.

Is that a parody of one of these scam ads, or is it one of those scam ads?

The most timely story here is the one about the dangers of using that new-fangled “Walkman” technology.

The most successful story here is this one by Gene Fama. I mean, it’s an O. Henry story, but it’s pretty inspired.

The editor explains that, yes, they’re doing ads, but only if they’re of the same professionalism and attractiveness as the contents of the book.

I think this ad for… “Vonozat”?… nails it.

(I’m not sure whether that’s a joke or not? It seems too on the nose for it not to be a joke?)

… Oh! It’s “Sohozat”! And it Existed!

The American version of Axiom is not really a store, but a stall located in the back of Sohozat, 307 West Broadway, a New Wave emporium where one can buy thrift-shop-grade smoking jackets or old monster magazines.

So it’s not a joke?

Sheesh.

The Comics Journal #73, page 47:

From the same EC-inspired band of writers
and artists that released Psycho Cornics
last year (see the Journal #66) now comes
the first issue of Look Mom Comics pre-
sents, subtitled The Previous Future. It’s
a loose-knit assemblage of pieces coming
under the various headings of “Urban Fan-
‘tasy,” “Science Fantasy,” “Urban Fiction”
and “Science Fiction.” (The Look Mom
staff is infatuated with genre designations.
Promised for future release are such special
“theme” issues as True Psycho Romances,
psycho Crime Stories, and Psycho Animals On
parade; also, Look Mom Comics Presents #2
will have as its theme, “All-Genre Comics
…all the genres comics have been through
and then some! Editor/ Art Director Pete
Friedrich has a taste for the bizarre and
the apocalyptic, as evidenced by the fancy
title which, truth be told, doesn’t accurate-
ly mirror the various moods Or thematic
preoccupations of the pieces. (I’m not
certain whac title would.) Most of the
contributions are short, pungent tales of
the macabre that build toward an “unex-
pected,” twist ending; there is an attempt
in each story to . end with @ touch of
irony.
Because I had such ambivalent feelings
about psycho Comics I approached The
Previous Future with particular interest,
hoping to glean more of creators’
motives and aspirations as they ventured
into these new realms (“Urban Fantasy,
“Science Fantasy,” etc.); I also hoped for
more evidence of solid, sustained achieve.
ment than was apparent in Psycho Comics
Alas, the results are mixed—promising
ideas only half-realized in the execution.
The material ranges from Eel O’Brien’s
frenzied, Lurid writing and Mort Todd’s
overwrought art in “Eddie’s
space jockey is transported back through
time by his “empath ship,” the Oedipus,
and fathers himself—to the naturalistic,
sordid, “Paranoid,” a tale of a “prize panty-
waist” who, tormented at every turn
throughout a dismal life, comes to a miser-
able end in a violent subway incident. This
latter piece could easily have appeared in
Friedrich’s “ShockSubway Stories,” in
Psycho ComicS.) A lot of energetic, promis-
ing talent is expended on material that isn’t
nearly so daring, imaginative or engrossing
as Friedrich and company may suppose.
Here’s something, though. The Belgian
artist Gene Fama contributes the seven-
page “Squirrel Juice,” a nightmare fantasy
of a man who confronts his “davof reckon-
ing” aboard an airliner. He is offered the
alternatives of Hell or reincarnation,
chooses reincarnation, becomes a fly, and
is subsequently dispatched from this Earth
in a most unpleasant manner by the foot of
a passenger strolling to the bathroom.
Fama’s violent black-and-white imagery is
disturbing and grotesque, involving distor-
tion and metamorphosis. The piece is an
authentic slice of dementia; its fear and
despair are not easily dismissed. It’s bizarre,
grotesque stuff, probably an apt indication
of the kind of overt weirdness that
Friedrich is looking to capture in the book.
There’s an amusing trifle from Daniel
Clowes that features private eye Bill Trou-
ble,” in a story that has the baby-faced
hero searching out the whereabouts of a
girl for Death, then challenging Death to a
game of checkers for the girl’s life. (Natural-
ly, Death loses, and says, “You must have
cheated!”) It’s a bit humdrum in the actual
telling—Clowes devotes two pages to the
least interesting aspect of the narrative
—and the checker game with Death is a bit
anticlimactic. There’s a funny throwaway
bit early on in which Death, asked to
validate his identity, casually summons up
a creature that demolishes an entire city
street. (It feels like an homage to Steve
Ditko and Marvel horror comics.) Light-
weight but diverting.

[…]

The French illustratOr Eric Cartier con-
tributes an extremely handsome color
cover depicting an automobile graveyard,
countless wrecks piled atop one another in
a lumbering pyramid of junk. I trust I am
not alone in thinking this is an icon Of
that has lost much Of
its power through overuse. (A press release
from Look Mom Presents notes. “The cover
was a risk because it does nor your
usual Superhero or Woman with big T’s
and A’s.” This strikes me as an unwar-
ranted solicitation of approval—in essence,
seeking praise for Look Mom Presents’ virtue
in not doing something. Not is not
enough. )
The Look Mom crew is an enthusiastic,
spirited bunch, The Previous Future is
printed handsomely on very good quality
stock, and the anthology approach is
appealing. I wish the art work were more
skillfully executed and, more to the point,
the writing more effectively worked out
and sustained. On the plus side, there is an
NO superheroes or Women with
big Ts and As on the cover here,
folks, just wrecked cars.
obsessive, visionary fervor to the Fama
piece that redeems the surreal parable from
its more banal implications. And in
“Paranoid,” Friedrich and Michael Delle
Femine (“Dr. Death”) again exhibit their
fascination with aberrant, psychotic be-
havior. They have no wish to explore it,
but simply to document its more flam-
boyant, violent aspects. It is absorbing,
however, to see the results of their col-
laboration, even if it’s not fully satisfying
work,

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Buzzbomb by Kaz (280x380mm)

OK, here’s my deepest, darkest secret: I’m not really much of a Kaz fan. So I haven’t read this book since it was published, and I pretty much forgot that it existed — otherwise I would have covered it in the Fantagraphics blog series.

So: This is a big (Raw-sized) saddle-stitched collection of Kaz strips published by Fantagraphics.

The designer seems to be going after the Raw/punk/post-modern design aesthetic, but… kinda doesn’t get there at all? Wrong font and haphazard placement of the elements. Even the cover stock (very shiny and thick) just feels off.

On the other hand, Kaz looks exactly like you’d imagine.

Almost all if this is reprinted from various sources, but the sources aren’t specified and comics.org isn’t very helpful, either.

Raw reprinted the first three issues of the magazine as Read Yourself Raw around this time, and the Kaz strip(s) from those issues were left out from Read Yourself Raw. Perhaps because they’d just been reprinted, or… other reasons.

I do often like Kaz’ design sense (especially here, where he’s basically cribbed everything from Mark Beyer), and I like the stark graphic qualities in his rendering, but these are basically traditional underground gags in new dressing.

The vast majority of these pieces are strongly narrative, but the stories are pretty shaggy and not very well-though-out. There doesn’t seem to be any subtext here: These stories are as shallow as they come.

He was a student at the SVA at the time, which explains these exercises in exploring form, but he’s going over territory that’s pretty well-covered.

I guess “so what!” is pretty punk, but… so what.

Gregory Cwiklik writes in The Comics Journal #192, page 47:

Buzzbomb has some Of the artist’s earliest and
least accomplished work, but also some of his best,
like the expressionistic punk noir Tot,” and the
volume ‘s large-scale format and appropriately pulpy
paper stock show the better artwork to dramatic
advan tage.
The fledgling strips that Kaz produced in the
early 1980s are mostly single-page gag strips of the
sick humor variety and the artwork in them is rather
amateurish. Their saving grace is Kais creative page
layout, Often inspired by classic newspaper strips.
But even in these early pieces there is a clear the-
matic consistency With his later work; there is the
same concern with overtly “dumb” humor, the ma-
cabre (one early page irreverently illustrates frag-
ments of verse taken from old gravestone inscrip-
lions). and With the meaning or meaninglessness Of
life. Like many other alternative cartoonists who
emerged in the 1980s, Kaz’s work is also grounded
stories take place in the industrial swamplands of
New Jersey were the sky is eternally black above a
landscape dominated by bleak factories and chemi-
cal plancs and littered with trash and toxic wastes.
The plots are absurd, surreal things dripping
with attitude and film noiratmosphere. In one epi-
sode Tot is brainwashed and conditioned by an
ambitious priest tostab the local bishop at the sound
Of the theme music from •l Dream Of Jeannie.”

The Comics Journal #122, page 23:

TWO PUBLISHERS DELAYED
PRINTERS REJECT BOOKS
Two books from different
publishers—Buzzbomb. by Kaz, from
Fantagraphics, and Peter Hsu’s self-
published Hellrazor Graphic Novel—
were delayed by printers who agreed
to print the books, then refused
because of objections to the books’
content.

[…]

Buzzbomb, a graphic album Of work
by Kaz (Kazimieras G. Prapuolenis),
was already several months late when
it was sent to Griffin Printing early this
year. The Glendale, California firm’s
refusal to print the book delayed
publication at least another five weeks,
according to Fantagraphics Publisher
Gary Groth.
Groth said he sent the tmks to Grif-
fin’s sales representative, who told
him that the book had approved,
whereupn Fantagraphics Sent an
advance deposit.
About four days later, a sales rep
from Griffin called Groth and told him
that they uould not print the bCX)k. The
Griffin sales rep said that the company
does a lot of business with publishers
Of religious material. and it was feared
that printing Buzzbomb might jeopar-
dize those accounts.
In a subsequent phone conversation
with Griffin’s president. Groth said,
the president refused to confirm the
sales rep’s story, but did say that he
personally found the book immoral.
Groth said Fantagraphics• check was
returned. and a new printer was found,
although at a higher price than
Griffin’s.

Wow.

You can still pick up copies of Buzzbomb pretty cheaply on ebay.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Spy vs Spy by by John Zorn with a cover by Mark Beyer (1989).

It’s Zorn doing hardcore/jazz versions of Ornette Coleman stuff. It’s fun!

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.