Random Thoughts

Silkscreen onto transparent acrylic by Mark Beyer.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Raw #5: The Graphix Magazine of Abstract Depressionism edited by Françoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman (265x360mm)

The Raw editorials started out pretty … er … abstract, but we’re solidly in chatty territory now. We’re told that the Pascal Doury piece in this issue has been censored — all the penises are replaced by white boxes, but don’t worry — you can write in and get them as stickers and stick them on yourself.

I remember reading this as a teenager and thinking that that had to be a joke? In any case, I did not send away for the stickers.

Also… look at the design of this spread. It’s so 1983! I love it! Sue Coe’s riff on The Message to the left; the inset covers of the stuff you can buy, and then all the overlays on the right hand page. Somebody has really spent time on this, and I guess it’s Mouly?

Fletcher Hanks is well-known now — all (?) his work was reprinted in two handsome volumes just the other decade. And I love the juxtaposition here with Spiegelman’s tough guy page: It’s incongruous, but there seems to be some communication going on here.

And the Hanks stuff is printed on a more newsprint-like paper, which also seems logical.

Wow, that’s a lot of ads… Hm… Danceteria again — they had ads in a lot of the stuff I’m covering in this blog series.

And a single page from Gary Panter.

So here’s that infamous Doury thing. Oh, I remember those first panels there, with the guy driving his car up the steps. It’s a recurring dream of mine — driving around in houses in my little car. I love the sort-of detached text under the panels with the wild artwork…

…

But… what… THERE”S PENISES HERE!!!! THEY”RE HERE! What!?

Oh, they’re stickered in? This copy belonged to somebody that sent away for the stickers and glued them in?

Oh, yeah, I forgot that the copy of this I had as a teenager now hangs in the hallway, along with three other Raw issues, and I didn’t feel like… “unframing”… them, so I got a new copy off of ebay.

Oops!

Anyway, thank you very much to whoever got stickering.

Anyway, the Doury piece is absolutely insane, with or without penises. Just look at this two page spread. LOOK AT IT!

And then we get a Tardi piece; excellent as always. And the editorial said that they were planning to publish a longer Tardi story as Raw One-Shot #2, but that didn’t happen.

This was translated by Kim Thompson, who would (two decades later) publish half a dozen Tardi things via Fantagraphics.

But this is a slightly odd issue of Raw — it’s dominated by three longer pieces (Hanks/Doury/Tardi), and the remaining pages are bite-sized pieces from people who’ve already been in the magazine (one page from Sue Coe, two from Francis Matte, one from Gary Panter)… everything is fabulous, of course, but the issue seems lopsided somehow?

So then we get to The Raw Comics Supplement, which seems like a deliberate acknowledgement of the problems with the rest of the issue: Here we get a bunch of very short, wild, funky stuff, and with that, the issue flip back into “perfect” territory again.

And the comics supplement makes the Maus insert even more harrowing… and this is the chapter where things really starts getting heartbreaking.

Bill Mason writes in The Comics Journal #93, page 31:

In Ad Reinhardt’s How to Look series (done
as a comics feature for the leftist New York
newspaper PM in 1946+7) there was a run-
ning gag about a man being stared down by
an abstract painting.
Man: Ha ha, What does this represent?
Painting to man: What do you represent?
One of the few generalizations I can make
about Raw is that reading it always makes
me feel like Reinhardt’s man. Whatever my
initial reaction to a given piece in
Raw—and they range from love at first
sight to “Something is happening here, but
I don’t know what it is,” to “What in God’s
name did Francoise and Art ever see in this
find myselfreturning to each issue
until some sort of articulate response to its
contents begins to emerge and continuing
to return as the process of articulation,
once begun, deepens and unfolds. In an age
of throwaway art, instantaneous eyeball
kicks and trumped-up emotion, Raw (like
the austere non-objective paintings
Reinhardt created when he climbed down
from his comic-strip soapbox) invites con-
templation, continued study, and—What
do you
A second generalization, prompted
largely by the issue under review, is that
the work of artists who appear regularly in
Raw must be judged by its cumulative ef-
fect, not piecemeal. I can hardly imagine,
for example, how a reader coming to Raw
5 without exposure to earlier issues would
react to ghe two short contributions by
Francis Masse. My own response would
probably have been, “Here is a Don Mar.
tin for grownups who knows how to draw.
When will he get around to -offering us
something more substantial?,” had not
Raw 4 already given me Masse’s 12-page”A
Race of Racers,” a blend of Qallic whimsy,
allegorical social satire, and visual poetry
(including the most beautiful •and accom-
plished work I have ever seen).
After this massive helping of haute cuisine,
Masse’s Raw 5 offerings went down like a
baba au rhum served with
coffee. My advice to anyone who liked the
dessert is to go back and try the main
course.
The same observation applies more
forcefully to Charles Burns’s “Big Baby”
and to Gary Panter’s “Jimbo” page. I first
encountered Burns and Panter in Raw 3,
and my initial reaction to their work was
strongly negative. Burns, in particular, irri-
tated me out of countenance: his one-pager
broadening the readers perspective.
about a woman reading an SF comic in bed
And I Pressed My Hand Against His
Face.’ struck me at first reading as
Strenuous attempt to raise comics to the
level of “real” art. while keeping at a safe
distance from it. Burns’s graphic style, a
compoundÅa’ it then seemed to mu of riffs
lifted from Ai Fel&tein, R.H. Webb, and
H.G. Peter, confirmed this impression:
• I’Let the little bastard do something as
good as ‘Seeds of Jupiter! or Frankenstein
(Classic Comics version) or a vintage
Wonder vgman story before he bresunies
€0’ condescerid to his betters,” I snarled
vGnwafdly. Well, he has. The two feature-
length stories by Burns I have since read
‘C’The Voice of Walking Flesh” in •Raw 4
and “Robot Love” in the •January 1983
Heavy Metal) reveal him as an artist of great
.originålity and authentic, if mannered,
narrative and graphic power, and as the
firs! American comics artist since Kim
Deitch to use science fiction effectively as a
vehicle for social and political satire.

[…]

Like previous
issues, Raw 5 intersperses comics pieces
done in a wide variety of styles and formats
with full-page reproductions- of drawings,
paintings, prints, and (this time around) a
page of real ads laid out like a grid of comics
panels. The point is neither to show that
comics are up there with painting and
graphic art (or, as in previous issues, with
illustrated text pieces) nor to show that
visual and literary formsalready acknowl-
edged as serious art are down there with
comics, but to create an artistic continuum
which includes comics as ,one of the arts
and which promotes fresh, raw ways of
looking, reading, hearing, feeling. If works
of art can look at us—What do you repre-
can look at one another as
well, and the choice and arrangement Of
material in Raw 5 (subtitle: i’ The Giaphix
Magazine of •Abstract Depressionism”)
maximizes the amount of looking done by
all parties concerned. This editorial
strategy can be playful or menacing or both
at the same time. Even after repeated view.
ing, some Of the juxtapositions in Raw 5
still make me feel like a live target in
visual shooting gallery.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Flashmarks by Carel Moiseiwitsch (212x274mm)

I covered this comic in the Fantagraphics Floppies blog series, too, but I couldn’t do a “punk comics” series without Moiseiwitsch, now could I?

I see that I drew some comparisons between this work and Sue Coe in that blog post, and… I totally agree with myself. But it does seem to come from a parallel line of development, not quite intersecting the Raw crowd? I guess it’s … more akin to World War 3 Illustrated? Which reminds me — I should do a couple issues of that, too, to compare.

Anyway, this is totally amazeballs, and it’s insane that this is still the only collection of her work available. She’s appeared mostly in anthologies and stuff, but nobody has published a comprehensive retrospective.

She was interviewed in 2017:

In your bio at the end of your collection Flash Marks, you mention that punk rock was a gateway into other types of art for you.

Oh, yes. When I got to Vancouver, the general function of art seemed to be comforting, decorative, pretty, beautiful … basically consoling. Things that would fit in nice in your office or next to a sofa or whatever it was, you know? That was still the idea. There was a certain amount of class. Then suddenly there were these punk posters up and zines around. I thought, “Wow! This is it!” Just fantastic.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Big Ideas by Lynda Barry (216x139mm)

I’ve got the reprint edition (from HarperCollins) of this book, but I assume the contents are pretty much the same as the Real Comet Press edition?

Hm… “The Fun House”? I don’t have that book! Ebay shopping break!

*two minutes pass*

Yay! Got a copy. And I thought I’d read everything by Barry. That was a nice surprise…

Anyway, the strips in the first collection, Girls + Boys, were (almost all) two-pagers. (I.e., four square panels.) This collection is mostly three-pagers (six panels), with a smattering of four page and two page strips. Which makes me wonder how these were originally printed — the three-pagers were presumably printed in a 3×2 panel arrangement? And the four-pagers in a 4×2 arrangement vertically? Hm.

In any case — this collection is even funnier than the first one. And so informational! I didn’t know that that’s what those words appearing on my car meant!

“Later after that I’m gonna have me a premarital sex”. Such tough talk.

The artwork’s a delight here, too. Barry’s still trying out a lot of different styles, like this thing that looks like something Beto Hernandez would do a bit later.

And there’s some real surprises in here… Look at this strip. Just gorgeous. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her use this rendering technique before or since?

This is sort of in the same vein, but more graphic.

The book is mostly strips from 1982, but there’s some earlier ones, too, and they’re a lot denser. I mean, they’re also funny, but they’re harsher.

Oh! There’s that strip from the issue of Comics Journal — the first Ernie Pook Comeek strip I ever saw…

Funny, but not just funny.

It’s an amazing little book.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

We’re Depressed by Mark Beyer (327x330mm)

This is a physically pretty unique book — it’s square and has these very thick pages — like a children’s book, I guess.

It’s published by Water Row Books, who’ve done a bunch of high end publications.

Bruno Richard does a… unique… introduction to the book (which is a collection of Amy & Jordan strips printed in 1983 in the British music paper New Musical Express).

There’s one strip per page with these huge margins in the middle. It’s very odd, eh? But it kinda makes sense in this context: The printing quality is perfect, and this size makes the strips seem more… well… weighty.

Slightly unusual for Beyer, the narrative here makes sense, sort of. I mean, it ends pretty abruptly, but is a fun/depressing read.

And the artwork is just amazing.

And a nice colour image on the back.

The Comics Journal #144, page 11:

Mark Beyer Art Stolen
RAW contributor and Agony creator Mark Beyer
Often draws stories about people in the throes
of despair. Now, Beyer himself is worried about
the fate of his original art, much of which was
stolen sometime in early June.
Beyer has traveled the world in recent years,
and had entrusted his originals to a storage
locker at Budget Store & Lock Village in Allen-
town, PA. “The robbery took place sometime
between June I and 5,” Beyer told the Journal.
“There were several hundred Old drawings
stolen from the period of 1970 to 1975 (not old
comic strips). Also, an old hand-bound chil-
dren’s book I did from 1974 called A Green
Nose. Also, a big box of my original comic art,
including quite a few published and unpublished
stories, numerous illustrations, and drawings.”
In addition, there were “10 or 12 handmade
dolls, made by me, which were also stolen, in-
cluding an Amy doll, a Jordan doll, Tony Target
and Thomas House” among other characters.
Beyer said he was worried that some of the
art might be sold to collectors. “Basically, the
only person I ever sold comic art to was (New
York-based collector) Alfred Bergdoll. I know
he would never sell those pages. I sold two other
pages to a Chicago man several years ago, and
also two pages to the Library ofCongress. That’s
it. So, in other words. if things started turning
up at comic book conventions or anyplace else,
it would be very suspicious.”
People with information about the stolen art
can contact Beyer at P.O. Box 2304, Lehigh
valley, PA or call (215) 820-9017.
Here is a partial list Of the stolen material:
• Agony (all the book’s art except for the cover)
• The Mistake (8-page Amy and Jordan story)
• Danger in New York (3-page Amy and Jor-
dan story)
• An Afternoon at Fish City Airport (Amy
story)
• Amy Machine (3-page Amy story)
• I Like to Inugh (4-page Tony Target story)
• Amy Tilsdale Visits the Thomas House Rest
Home (3-page Amy and Thomas House story)
• Fine Arts Page (I-page story)
• Tony Target (First Tony story for Arcade)
• Radiator Relationships (I-page story from
I.Æmme Outa Here)
• Derelicts (2-page Amy and Jordan story)
• The Glass Thief (3-page story from RAW)
• Outside Out (6-page story from RAW)
• We’re Depressed (12-episode story from
Dead Stories)
• I Like Paris (2-page Tony Target story from
Metal Hurlant)
• I Fell for a Fish (Unfinished, unpublished
3-page story)

Wow. Has the artwork ever been recovered?

Here’s another report of the theft:

Artist Mark Beyer told police on Tuesday that thousands of dollars’ worth of artworks he has done and memorabilia he has collected over the past 20 years had been stolen from a storage unit he rents in Allentown.

He said the theft occurred sometime during the last few days.

But I can’t find anything more.

Well, that sucks.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.