Random Thoughts

Painting on acrylic by Mark Beyer.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies! Coloring Book by Lynda Barry (278x355mm)

I hope Steve liked the book.

Is that an official designation?

Anyway, I don’t think the “coloring book” thing is meant to be taken seriously, but this is a huge black-and-white book with drawings of naked ladies and Barry writing about her childhood and her relationship with naked ladies (in Playboy, for instance).

Good chant.

Some of these naked ladies are more abstract than others.

I think that’s basically accurate.

Barry packs a punch.

I wonder what the impetus for this book was — whether she had planned on drawing these 56 women as an exercise, and then morphed the artwork into these playing cards and added the text, or whether it was all planned this way from the start. Because the thing is — it really works. The apparent incongruity makes this a thrilling reading experience.

And Barry has coloured the ladies for us, and you can cut out the centrefold and make your own playing cards.

Barry is interviewed in The Comics Journal #132, page 67:

POWERS: And 1 read that —
BARRY: Kiss me! 1 dare ya’!
POWERS: — when the Naked Ladies exhibition open-
ed, there nus some sort of controversy..
BARRY: There was no controversy! I swear on a stack
— I will lay on Bibles buck naked and swear before God
that there was no controversy. But people expected there
to be, so people just made it up. You want to know how
little controversy there was? Naked Ladies got a positive
review in Ms. and Screw. I thought there would be a con-
troversy; I didn’t know who was going to get me, the real
conservative people Or the separatist lesbians. But nobody
said a word. I was sort of sad, myself. In interviews they
always say, “I’ve heard it was quite controversial.” The
only people who gave me trouble was the artist-run
bmkstore — the hip, artist-run bookstore in .%attle refused
to carry it because they said it was sexist.
POWERS: I think it Hus in a Boston Globe article that
that wus When you had your division With the fine arts
community.
BARRY: Yeah. One of the things I noticed whenever I
went to a bookstore was I was looking more and more
at graphics, photography, and comics, and less and less
at the fine arts section. In fact, when I looked at any kind
of books of new art, modern art, my contemporaries, I
had no idea of what they were do’ . I
like the
ernlxror’s new clothes. It still is: I don’
doing. I feel kind of bad about it. So I guess I just turned
into a cartoonist by accident. I was furious at the fine arts
community and at the artists who run that bookstore for
saying that the work was sexist. I mean, Jesus God! Read
it! They were the only people who gave me trouble —
the hippest people in the town.
POWERS: How did that project come about?
BARRY: I bought this deck of those nudie playing cards
for my little brother, and it said “52 different girls,” and
my brother looked at it and said, “Is it 52 different girls,
or is it five girls with 52 wigs?” There was something
about that statement that let me know that it could be five
girls with 52 wigs: the body types are always the same.
I thought it would be fun to do a deck of cards — because
I love naked women — with every type of body. It would
be fun to just draw it; that’s what I thought. I have this
buddy, Keister, one of the guys who got me printed; I
thought it would be fun to do for him. It was originally
a project to make one of my friends happy. It turned into
this thing — it turned into a show; it turned into some
paintings; it turned into this coloring book. And then I
wrote this narrative that went with it.
POWERS: Whs the narrative you speaking?
BARRY: No. It’s a character. It’s not autobiographical.
There are some things: the opening sequence about the
first time I ever saw a boner, that’s true. A lot Of it’s just
made up. Old fiction.
POWERS: The character Ann talks about how she likes
naked ladies…
BARRY: I think that if you talk to any girl, you’ll hear
that. It’s universal. Any kid does, because it’s the
mysterious and it’s the hidden. It’s actually hidden, like
hidden somewhere in the house. A girl I met yesterday
told me that her dad hid the “naked lady” books with
the cookbooks for some reason, thinking that the kids
would never look through the which of course
they beeline to immediately as soon as they found out.
In the narrative, Ann makes a distinction between when
she looks at it as a kid and when later on she’ll never look
at it. She can’t look at it with boys When she becomes
an adolescent; it’s embarrassing for her. So that’s what
that’s about.

R. Fiore writes in The Comics Journal #101, page 39:

Lyrida Barry prosecutes her side of the
sexual wars with a razor wit and a sly in-
telligence that can only be compared with
middle-period Rolling Stones, but with
reserves Of compassion and empathy that
they couldn’t dream of. Naked Ladies is
parc parody of the pornography of Barry’s
childhood (including the National Geo-
graphic), part examination of what the
pamphleteers used to call women’s body
image, and mostly a celebration Of in-
dividuality. The best part is the memoir
that runs under the pictures, in the manner
of some coloring books: Our Home Ec
teacher wou7d terrify us with information
like how the dentist could tell when you
were on your period, and by taking Our
bust measurements and writing ‘it down.
She told us she was exactly like we were
when she was our age and that made some
of us feel sort of like crying.”

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Panter Versus Beyer by Gary Panter and Mark Beyer (322x465mm)

I guess you could call this a portfolio? It’s got four folded sheets of paper in a slightly larger cover/folder.

Each sheet of paper is printed on both sides — usually with two separate images on the “outer” side…

… and one larger image on the “inner” side of the sheet.

Half of the sheets are by Mark Beyer…

… and half are by Gary Panter.

I thought that perhaps these were screenprinted, but fondling the pages more closely, it doesn’t really feel that way. So … just conventionally offset printed? It doesn’t really look like that way, either.

This says it’s silkscreen:

printed entirely in col. silkscreen in 100 numb. copies

But it’s a limited edition of 100 copies?

The thing is, I have no recollection of how I came to buy this er portfolio.

And even more confusing:

I seem to have a whole bunch of these images on the wall in my office — but they are not from this portfolio, obviously. I mean, they can’t be on the wall and the same time be here in this portfolio. But they also seem to be printed on a different kind of paper, and they have not been folded.

But they are in exactly the same size and configuration as the portfolio, so… CBO Editions published them as both a limited edition portfolio, and also (unfolded) as posters? And I bought them both?

I’m all confused.

Anyway, looks awesome.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Mark Marek’s New Wave Comics by Mark Marek (208x270mm)

Mark Marek explains how this book came to be published.

It’s striking how few of the books I’m covering in this blog series are published by… well… publishers. The alternative comic book market wasn’t huge at the time, but publishers like Fantagraphics did exist, and book publishers had departments for art books… but instead most of these books are self-published, or published by art schools, or, as here… by a design studio.

This is published by Manhattan Design, which (contrary to the official-sounding name) was a tiny studio… but they had designed the MTV logo, as well as a bunch of other things for MTV and various “hip” musicians, so they were presumably flush with money and could publish this book.

I’ve never seen a copy of this book for sale that wasn’t signed, so I’m guessing Marek signed the entire print run:

(And an aside here — I’m sure glad I bought so many of these books at the time (or just a few years after), because they’re really all kinda expensive now. I guess I’m not the only one that obsesses about these comics…)

We get not one introduction, but three — from R O Blechman, Gary Panter and Frank Olinsky (from Manhattan Design).

I’m not sure whether this book reprints strips that had run in National Lampoon? I’ve been googling, but apparently only the Hercules strip ran there?

Those of us who read National Lampoon and High Times in c. 1985 will remember coming across Marek’s “New Wave” (scratchy, demented) Hercules comic — “the strangest, bravest comic on earth” — there.

These comics seem to have been created from 1979-1983, but whether it’s a reprint or not is unclear. But these are mostly gag strip, and the first one is… kinda… hackneyed? The main schtick here has been done to death.

But then things pick up and we get more genuinely oddball humour.

I love the way Marek will have the text circle up the panel when the text gets too long. It’s what every child does when making comics.

In this strip, Marek says “no erasures, no mask-outs” (and then a gag follows), but I wonder whether that’s his general mode? Being spontaneous and not making corrections? Very method.

The book is organised into thematic sections, with a separate page introducing the topic featuring a much enlarged image from one of the following strips. These are to enlarged that you can see every wobble in Marek’s marks.

(Original image in the first panel on this page.)

The artwork has a ratty line, but it’s quite accomplished, really: Look at the drama in the second panel, and the swirling confusion and despair in the third. It’s great!

Huh. Did they have humiliating and painful quiz shows like that in 1981? I thought that was something that started happening a couple decades later. Perhaps Marek was prescient?

Anyway, it’s a fun read, and I remember liking it quite a lot as a teenager.

I was unable to find any contemporaneous reviews of this book. Or any review of it now on the web, for that matter.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Okupant X by Gary Panter (140x216mm)

This is a most curious book. It was published in 1979 by Diana’s Bimonthly Press, with a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts. It’s offset-printed (I think; very shiny ink) and stapled. I tried googling the publisher, and I’m finding things like:

And:

But nothing that says what the press actually was…

Anyway, the book is about Jimbo playing Occupant X in a play in Dal-Tokyo, and that’s the first of many references here to other works by Panter elsewhere. Dal-Tokyo was a strip Panter published in the LA Reader starting in 1983, so this is before that.

The Jimbo-on-stage/text-below thing gives this a children’s book vibe, sort of.

Panter experiments with different rendering techniques, and on this spread, he’s doing an almost super-hero inking job with Jimbo’s hair.

We touch upon Invasion of the Elvis Zombies, published in 1984.

And this was used as the cover of Raw #3, published in 1981:

If Okupant X had been published later, then you’d think of it being very referential, but instead it seems like Panter would cannibalise ideas from it over the next few years? Or perhaps Dal Tokoy/Elvis were things that he had already started working on, and just included here, too?

Dale Luciano interviews Panter in The Comics Journal #100, page 217:

LUCIANO: Tell me about Okupant X. 1
haven’t been able to locate a copy, but people
tell me it’s an important book.
PANTER: Yeah .
LUCIANO: Uhh, what is
PANTER: Okupant X is a book did in
. .uhhhhh… [Gets up, starts rummaging
around in search of a copy] Lemme see if I can
find a copy here.. .Oh yeah, I told you I
had a Xerox of that, and I do. [Thumbing
through the book) I can’t remember what
year. . ’79, ‘SO, something like that .
published on really good paper by an art
publisher in Rhode Island, from Diana’s Bi-
monthly Press.
LUCIANO: Gary, what it??
PANTER; It’s a 28-page book about this
guy, OkupantX. It’s kind ofa puppet play.
It’s just about this guy who goes for a walk
and happens onto this corporate property
where this giant monster attacks him.
LUCIANO: A giant monster, did you say?
PANTER: Yeah, a large germ. It was an
excuse to draw a ’50s monster with lots of
eyes and arms and stuff, and write some-
thing sort of Kabuki-like.
LUCIANO: That occurred to me, at least on
a subliminal level. At one point, looking at
“Jimbo,” I thought, “This is like Kabuki
Drama.’ .
PANTER: Yeah, it is Kabuki-influenced
in a way. I’ve really studied and looked at
Japan to see what their view of the West
was, to see another view of things.
LUCIANO: Tell me more about. working in
this child-like style.
PANTER: Well, it’s just following tradi-
tions. I don’t think of my stuff as looking
like children’s drawing, really. In some
ways, I’m just working to”fill in a gap. If I see
everyone doing slick, air-brush, beautiful,
really • ‘finessed” drawings, then try to do
something that’s not being done as much.
That’s where my work comes from. But
now, lotsof people are drawing ratty.
LUCIANO: (Laughs) Drawing ratty? That’s •
What call it?
PANTER: Yeah, ratty. That’s pretty
much what I call it. Ratty drawing.
LUCIANO: But you like ratty drawing, cor-
rect ?
PANTER: Oh yeah, it comes right out of
the human being. Ratty drawing is natural,
like the marks people make on crates when
they write the numbers on them to ship
them off, or like bathroom graffiti when it’s
just scrawled onto the walls. The line has
some kind of content. It’s got the emotion
of the person doing it. It’s a testament that
the person exists and that they made the
marks.

[…]

LUCIANO: You use the word “marks, i’
where hear most cartoonists or artists talk
about “lines. What’s the difference?
PANTER: (Long pause during which he con-
siders the question) I think lines are the kinds
of things an artist uses to construct an illu-
sion. A line is a tool for making or defining
an illusion. A mark is more ofa thing that
exists for and by itself. It’s more abstract as
a building block. I think the idea of
“marks” is •somehow closer to the natural.
Marks get away from the sophisticated
reality of an illusion of depth toward the
reality of something that’s closer to the
natural order of things. Yeah, marks have
the look of nature.

It was apparently also published in a different format:

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.