Random Thoughts

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.

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.