PX84: Raw #6: The Graphix Magazine That Overestimates The Taste Of The American Public

Raw #6: The Graphix Magazine That Overestimates The Taste Of The American Public edited by Françoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman (269x359mm)

This is it: This is the first issue of Raw I read, and I was 15, and I thought it was the most amazing thing ever in the history of ever.

Sure; I’d read good comics before — Varenne, Hernandez, Pratt, etc — but this was something completely different.

Just look at that cover. Look at it!

And just look at this opening spread: A gorgeous, but very mysterious painting (Komar and Melomid), and a very stylish contents page. (And a way to buy older issues and sign up for a subscription. And… no extra charge for sending to non-US addresses! *gasp*)

And then we’re off with a five page Mark Beyer story about Tony Target: I can’t imagine anything more perfect for a pretentious fifteen-year-old. It mixes angst and ridicule of that angst perfectly. “It’s disgusting… it reminds me of myself somehow.” And then Tony lies down to die, but people walk all over him, so he gives up on that idea.

I remember reading this book over and over again, feeling very smug and smart indeed.

And then a Joost Swarte thing! What! I remember being so thrilled at seeing somebody working in the Herge idiom, but doing something modern.

There’s only a single text page here (a story about somebody visiting New York, which I identified with immediately).

There’s no editorial voice in this issue — it all comes decontextualised to the reader. There’s no editor saying “with this issue, we’re doing X, Y and Zed”, but instead everything is just here for the reader to ponder.

I’d never seen Muñoz and/or Sampaya either, and they have the longest thing in this issue: A 20 page story about a deranged European director working in Mexico. Reading it now, I guess it’s really a story about Alejandro Jodorowsky? The artwork’s so thrilling.

I also remember being fascinated by these ads… Danceteria… “In search of a lower common denominator: Independent Publications”… It’s very New York. And it’s fun to see ads for Big Ideas by Lynda Barry and Mark Marek’s New Wave Comics now.

Jayr Pulga does a very unnerving little piece.

I guess this two-pager by Jerry Moriarty is really just a funny anecdote, but it conveys so much through gestures. It’s gorgeous and somehow meaningful.

Hey, more ads… what do we have here… Anarcoma from Catalan… Clothing Warehouse!? Printed Matter still exists…

Anyway, the preceding pages were all well and good: Fabulous artwork with an oppressive (and exhilarating) mood… but that didn’t prepare me for the Maus insert, which is just heart-wrenching.

Reading it now, I can’t help notice that Spiegelman has both his step-mother and his father complimenting him on his Prisoner on the Hell Planet strip, which seems… er… slightly gauche? If I remember correctly, it was stuff like this that put Harvey Pekar off Maus and made him, for a couple of decades, the only person who dared say anything negative about Maus.

This chapter covers many of the same things Spiegelman previously had done in his “Maus” short a decade earlier, and it contradicts that strip in various small ways…

Things get a bit lighter with an intricately told Ben Katchor four-pager. I mean, it’s not hard to decipher, but it’s a very interesting reading experience.

Oh, yeah, this isn’t the copy I had as a teenager — I’ve got that framed on the wall here. Instead I got a new copy for reading, and… This one is from the Fantagraphics collection!? Or Dale Crain’s collection. Tee hee. Didn’t buy it until two years later, though.

Charles Burns shows up and does an amusing riff on 50s Romance (and Horror) comics. Look at those lines. So sharp!

Caro takes the angst to 11.

Mark Newgarden also did one of these strips for Bad News #2 (which I got shortly after I got this book)… I guess it’s a skit, basically? I remember just being fascinated with it all, and I still am. There’s some good jokes in there.

And then Gary Panter does a few more pages of his Jimbo story. Reading this totally out of context, as I did at the time, it came off as a punch to the stomach. There’s so much here, and it speaks directly to everything in my brain.

Reading this now, I’m amazed at how intense this issue is. It’s one sucker punch after another: It’s an emotional journey… so we get one Krazy Kat page to chill off with after the … ordeal.

This is just the most perfect issue of an anthology ever. There’s not a single piece in here that’s not an artist working at the peak of his (I don’t think there’s any women in this issue?) form, and everything seems to be in dialogue with everything else.

So, OK, I’m biased: I’ve read this book many, many times, and it was An Event in my life, and it help seed my love of New York and becoming a pretentious wise-ass, but… It’s kinda good, eh?

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

PX88: Childhood is Hell

Childhood is Hell by Matt Groening (228x228mm)

I’m slightly fascinated by the relentless drive towards mainstream (i.e., bookstore) respectability for basically all the books I’m covering in this blog series. In the pre-mainstream era, there was a certain freedom with formats — mostly stapled things, and often oddball (too large/too small) formats.

This is a fun hybrid along the way: The three previous Life in Hell collections had been saddle-stitched, and this one is, too: Notice the staples. But it also has a spine, so that it’s easier to shelve. Is it the next volume that switches to a straight-up normal squarebound format? Watch this blog channel for updates! Subscribe and share and like!

Anyway, the previous volume was School in Hell, and Groening obviously had a lot to say about being a child, so we get this, which is, like, more. Having these two come after each other is a slightly odd choice — was I the only one that thought he had this volume already for years because he’d gotten it confused with School is Hell? He was? I mean, I was?

Darn!

TV is the best.

As usual when reading one of these books, I’m really into it, but I’m not exactly laughing out loud. And pages like this… I don’t know: I’m glad pages like this exist, but I’m not actually reading it, either.

Heh. A shout-out to Lynda Barry.

Oh, and Bart and Gary Panter’s Jimbo? Had The Simpsons started by now? Yes, indeed:

The shorts became a part of The Tracey Ullman Show on April 19, 1987.

This slightly earlier strip was the only one that had me laughing out loud.

Oh, that’s Gary Panter’s Rozz-Tox guy. So many references…

Me, too — there’s four variations on this strip in this book. The previous books only had a single one…

Adam-Troy Castro writes in Amazing Heroes #160, page 86:

One of Pat Benatar’s best songs is a
powerful rocker called “Hell Is For
Children.” Its resemblance to this
latest. collection by cartoonist Matt
Groening is not limited to title alone.
Both song and book deal with cruelty
to children. Both are the product of
artists ‘Åorking at the top of their form.
And both recognize that one of the
most tragic things about childhood
trauma is any child’s inability to fully
understand it.
But there the similarity ends, for
Groening goes farther than Benatar.
He reminds us, with acidically funny
writing and deliberately crude
artwork, that childhood is a painful
and bewildering time by definition,
and not just for those of us who grow
up in abusive homes.
Groening’s main character in this
collection is a one-eared, and there-
fore ridiculous-looking, anthropomor-
phic rabbit called Bongo. Bongo’s our
host for a series of strips on How To
Act Like A Child, with different
instructions for every age from one to
12. He shows us the silly things we
considered great humor at every stop
along the way. He shows us 16 kinds
of Moms, and also 16 kinds of Dads,
Brothers, and Sisters. He includes a
strip on “Your Pal The TV set.” All
of which are laugh-out loud funny.
There are also a number of single gag
strips, which are not nearly as funny.
The scenes of Bongo getting into
trouble at school or causing a mess
in the Kitchen read like second-rate
“Dennis The Menace” or 10th-rate
“Calvin and Hobbes.”
They don’t hold a candle to high
points like Groening’s exhaustive
Childhood Trauma Checklist, which
contains over 100 items ranging from
minutiae (cleaning your room, scrat-
chy new sweater, meeting another
child with your name), to unthinking
cruelty (being told “you’re just not
trying,” being called “lazy,” forced to
perform in front of parents’ friends)
to the dmvnright horrifying (locked in
closet, tortured, sexually molested).
The cumulative effect is very funny,
but it’s an uneasy kind of funny that
conjures up our own childhoods in
more detail than we may want to
remember them, and that’s more to
the point.
And then there’s “How To Deal
With Problem Parents,” which is not
funny at all, and is not meant to be.
It should be required reading for
everybody who’s thinking of having
children. And for everybody who’s
still dealing with emotional scars
inflicted during childhood. And—
most importantly—for kids. I myself
would have found it a great boost
when I was 10, and my parents were
only imperfect human beings who
made mistakes now and then. For
children living through genuine night-
mares, this little one-page comic strip
could be, quite literally, a lifesaver.
If you know any, please, please buy
them a copy of this book yesterday.
GRADE: MINT

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

PX81: Boys & Girls Grow Up #2-4

Boys & Girls Grow Up #2-4 edited by Tom Campagnoli and Amy Crehore (216x280mm)

I’m not quite sure where I happened onto these comics… I feel… I found them in a TAKE THEM AWAY WE HAVE TO GET RID OF THEM box at a comic book store. But those may be false memories.

These are somewhat adjacent to the subject matter of this blog series, but they were published in the early 80s, and my guess is that there’s some kind of connection to an art school? But I know absolutely nothing about these books except that they were published in Richmond, Virginia — I can’t recall seeing anybody ever mention these books.

So I thought it might be interesting to natter on about them a bit here, anyway.

The first issue I have here (i.e., #2) is chock full of shorter pieces… and somewhat uniquely, I’ve never heard of any of these people. I guess what happened in Richmond mostly stayed in Richmond?

We start off with a snide thing about New York, and namecheck all the hipsters (Debbie Harry, David Byrne, etc). City rivalry? (Les Smith.)

I guess I can see some influence from undergrounds, but this could basically also have been a thing from Drawn & Quarterly in the 90s. I mean, the artwork, not the writing. (Leslie Carlton.)

But it’s things like this that makes me guess that there’s an art school in Richmond and that most of the people here attend that school. I mean… Charlie Brown in a Can? That’s fun. (Kenny Spreeman and Ted Salins.)

And… I kinda like this spread. It’s so out there. (Anne Peet.)

And, of course, you have the more conceptual stuff. (“Ben Dover”. That’s mature.)

So… it’s a pretty enjoyable issue? It’s got all these things by people who seem very young, but possibly talented?

The second issue (i.e., #3) is equally full of short stuff, and this issue has a theme: “In the Atomic Age”.

Perhaps not surprisingly, it seems more assured — there’s things in here that kinda work quite well (Phil Trumbo.)

This rendering style, for instance, is oddly appealing. It’s impossible to know where to look because everything has the same weight, but for once, that makes it mysterious and inviting instead of off-putting. (The dialogue seems to go for being all transgressive and stuff. Kids these days! I mean those days! In the retro-future!) (Jo Hoots.)

And this has to be scratchboard, I guess? Very nice indeed. (Lori Edmiston.)

The third issue (i.e., #4) is slightly shorter (28 pages; the other two were 32 pages), and seems to veer off into two different directions. One half leans more into comics formalism… (Roger Carrington and Michael Clautice.)

… and the other is almost normal alt-comics. (Hunter Jackson.)

Scott McCloud writes in Amazing Heroes #93, page 66:

BOYS AND GIRLS GROW UP #5 by various.

Boys and Girls Grow’ Up is an anthol-
ogy comic featuring stories by about
a dozen artists. The strips are drawn
in a bewildering variety of styles and
don’t have much in common, but the
artists themselves do. All of them
either live or have liwd in Rich-
mond, Virginia. This “regional”
theme isn’t in Boys and
Girls, but it does signal an increas-
ing trend, especially for small press
where there are no national centers
of production, just several hundred
individual artists scattered across the
country. By making this aspect of
their contributors’ backgrounds a
relevant issue, editors Crehore and
Campagnoli are helping to re-estab-
1ish the seldom-discussed link be-
tween Wihat an artist draws and what
the artist is in “real life,” As for the
stories themselves, most fall some-
where between folk-art and New
Wave styles. A few are incredibly
messy and hard to read, but at least •
worth trying, especially Roger Car-
rington’s wildly demented “Slow-
junior’. ‘ Boys and Girls isn’t a great
technical achievement, but there’s
plenty of honest and thoughtful work
in it.

Apparently I made a good deal when I picked these up for almost no money? I’m such a canny investor.

Heh.

Aaah!

The first four issues of this underground comic created and edited by Amy Crehore and Tom Campagnoli. Inspired by Art Spiegelman’s *RAW* and *Arcade*, the pair set about recruiting fellow artist from the local Richmond, Virginia area along with technical assistance from Trent Nicholas, who has Inscribed the first issue. Contributors include Phil Trumbo, award-winning illustrator and animator who directed the opening of *Pee-Wee’s Playhouse*, and Hunter Jackson a.k.a. Techno Destructo a founding member of the performance rock band GWAR. The first issue was limited to 500 copies with subsequent issues limited to 1000-1500 copies each. Unfortunately just as the comic began to gain traction with nationwide distribution and positive reviews it ended when Crehore relocated to the West Coast.

It’s expensive because a guy from Gwar is in it! And it’s fun to see that there’s a connection to Gary Panter here, although slightly tenuous (via Pee-Wee Herman).

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.