Random Thoughts

Howard Cruse’s Barefootz The Comix Book Stories (1986) #1 by Howard Cruse

Cruse had published a three issue Barefootz series at Kitchen Sink in the 70s, but had also used the character in the short-lived Marvel “underground” magazine Comix Book. This book reprints these strips.

I really like Cruse’s comics — they’ve got a lighthearted mania thing going on. It’s very hippyish, but has a classic sense of plot and timing.

And, of course, the artwork is so… cute? Yeah.

“Mamasoyboy vumulukrishkrosh” sounds like a good mantra to use.

It’s amusing and nonsensical.

It is totally of its time — and that perhaps explains why it’s never been comprehensively reprinted. I think it’s totally charming, but perhaps some people would find the recurring gag of the super-sexed-up woman chasing the asexual Barefootz tiring.

The early Barefootz was reprinted in 1990 by Fantagraphics, but all this stuff has been out of print for decades now. It’s a shame. Many of the other prominent underground cartoonists have gotten comprehensive collections in the past few years, so it’s about time somebody did the same for Cruse.

Somebody writes in Amazing Heroes #97, page 74:

These vignetteS from a decade
past put to shame most of the afore-
mentioned humorous comics of
today.
By 1975, we were well into the so-
called “Me Decade,” but not yet
enveloped in the fundamentalist frip-
pery of the Carter/Reagan years.
The activism of the ’60s had not yet
been buried; Woodstock was still a
vivid experience rather than a faded
memory.
Some of that ’60s Spirit was cap-
tured in Cruse’s cartoons. While this
will certainly make it more relevant
to older readers, the book has an in-
nate charm that should also appeal
to those who think The Chicago
Seven is the offensive *line of the
Bears football team.

[…]

While we are still not witnessing
side-splitting comedy here, Bare-
footz succeeds in being a genuinely
funny book. I think this is largely
because Howard Cruse knows how
to write—not just how to write
humor, but how to write period. He
first creates actual stories, or at least
fully developed situations. Since he
has a story, he doesn’t have to simply
string weak one-liners together, but
he can let his dialogue flow naturally
from the particular situation. The
resultant humor is much more
warm, charming, witty and funny
than that found in many other com-
ics. Another advantage is that much
of Cruse’s humor comes from be-
lievable characters (which descrip-
tion even fits his cockroaches),
rather than from contrived pastiches
that are really little different than the
superhero/fantasy/horror comics
they ape.
Cruse is also a very fine cartoonist
whose work is equally adaptable to
either a color or black-and-white
format. I can’t firmly place my
finger on his possible influences,
though I do feel he owes more to
newspaper and magazine cartoonists
than to any comic book penciller (of
either the undergound or main-
stream variety). He has an appeal-
ing style that carries the same
warmth and gentle humor that
characterizes his writing.
Barefoot: is one of the best things
to come from Renegade Press in
recent memory. If reading other
“funny” comics has left you with
doubts about your own sense of
humor, this book should certainly
restore your faith in yourself. Check
it out.
The stories here may be a decade
old, but they prove that true humor
is timeless.

This blog post is part of the Renegades and Aardvarks series.

Amusing Stories (1986) #1 by Scott Shaw and Don Dougherty

This was solicited as a continuing series, but only a single issue was published.

Half the issue is Dougherty’s Blast — I did a quick Google, and this seems to be the only appearance of these characters. It’s a zany space action comedy thing, and it’s quite accomplished. That is, the jokes are, yes, amusing, and the plot rumbles along in a nice way.

Dougherty’s artwork is classic “big nose” — and sometimes he drops into this rendering. Pretty cool.

The second half of the issue is by Scott Shaw!, and is apparently the only appearance of this character, too?

There used to be a law saying that you had to feature a Shaw! story if you were doing a funny anthology in the early 80s, so I’ve read a bunch of his work without really … paying attention.

Like Blast, this Urban Gorilla thing is drawn in a pretty standard way, but the jokes are more hoary.

So a second issue was definitely planned?

And is featured on the Renegade Press “coming up” page.

RJS writes in Amazing Heroes Preview Special #4, page 10:

Announced in the last Preview Special
as a Blackthorne book, publisher/editor
Deni Loubert assures us that Amusing
Stories will, in fact, be coming out
under the Renegade banner. ‘*Doh
[Dougherty) and Scott [Shawl ape
proached me first with the project,”
Loubert informed us, “butt during
negotiations, the Renegade, offices
moved and I lost their number. Later on,
I heard it announced as a Blackthorne
product and was able to contact them
again. I’ve since reestablished negoti-
ations and have been told by Scott and
Don that I can announce it as a Rene-
gade book.”

Heh. Drama!

Renegade ad copy in Amazing Heroes #113, page 60:

“Urban Gorilla”
created by Scott Shaw!
Urban Gorilla, like most superheroes, has a
secret identity: by day he lives in the city zoo in the
guise of Goril!a, But at night, he dons his
three-piece suit and roams the City in search of
justice for ail city animals. He’s .
Urban Gorilla!
Shaw! has pointed cut that Urban Gcnfia serves
a twc-fc!d putpcse: he’s a gccd parody character
because, essentially, he’s the protector and
aggressive representative cf ali domestic animals
in the city and the second purpose is that he deals
with all the things in everyday ‘ife that dnve us
crazy. He has a very direct manner when dealing
with irritants like door-to-door salesmen, people
who talk during a movie, and real estate agents.
“When first sericusy put ‘Urban Gorilla*
together, he was intended as an animation package
with other characters I’d created.” Now “Urban
Gorilla” comes to your store, alcng with a whole
cast cf bizarre characters that will make you think
twice when you visit the zoo next time!

Ah, Shaw! designed the character for an animation pitch..

Russell Freund writes in The Comics Journal #116, page 67:

Meanwhile, over at the absolute
opposite end of the Spectrum of
Pretension, we find Amusing
Stories, some good funny stuff
from Scott Shaw! and Don
Dougherty. This isn’t the sort Of
book that cries for penetrating
critical analysis, and since I seldom
provide any, we’re evenly matched.
Let me just way that while I smile
at Shaw!’s nifty Hanna-Barbarian
cartooning, Dougherty’s Jay Ward-
like zaniness tickles me more. His
• ‘Blast” is a sort Of interplanetary
Dudley Do-right, locked in mortal
combat with the wicked Emperor
Raymond, self-proclaimed ruler Of
the universe and romance novelist.
It’d make a pretty neat animated
cartoon series, and that may be
what Dougherty ultimately has in
mind, but in the meantime, it
makes a pretty neat comic book.

Yup.

I was unable to find any discussion of the book on the intertubes, or any mention of why the second issue never happened. Presumably both creators were busy with animation work.

This blog post is part of the Renegades and Aardvarks series.

Maxwell Mouse Follies (1986) #1-6 by Joe Sinardi

We’re now in the Black and White boom period of the US comics market — patient zero, Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters #1, had been released and had shown that people desperate for the next Teenage Mutant etc Turtles would snap up any #1, as long as it’s black and white.

I’ve seen nothing to indicate that Deni Loubert had that in mind when expanding the Renegade line-up, though, but it explains how these oddball titles Renegade were publishing in 1986 (and the first half of 87) had sales sufficient to keep them going for a while.

And, indeed, this comic had been in the pipeline for a few years, but Loubert hadn’t been in a position to publish it before now.

So — we’re in funny animal territory here, and it’s immediately somewhat attractive? The anthropomorphic design here is strange, though, even for funny animals. The characters have the classic four fingered (and gloves) design, but the two main characters (Maxwell and Monica) seem oddly… nude. Maxwell wears a tie and shoes, and Monica wears a necklace and shoes, and it just seems really weird. I mean Donald Duck wears a jacket, at least.

As in Neil the Horse, we get a few musical numbers, attractively designed. (But no sheet music.)

When Monica dresses up, it looks even weirder.

And those are hefty tails for mice.

You don’t see quotations from Walt Whitman in funny animal books that often.

Anyway, this book is surprisingly well made. There’s a lot of amusing bits and references to other comics, and the stories are fun and… actually make sense. I read Strata earlier tonight, so perhaps that has tempered my expectations, but I really enjoyed reading these comics. They move along at a brisk pace.

And some of the jokes you could actually picture in a screwball comedy of the 30s.

You gotta have paper dolls.

I don’t really have much to say about this comic — it’s nice — so let’s look at some Renegade Press oddities. In the first year, they stubbornly put the Canadian price at the top, which perhaps made sense when Loubert was stationed in Canada… but not even then, because surely you want to have the lowest dollar amount at the top? And besides, the US is a much bigger market.

But! When Renegade increase the price across the board, they did put the US price at the top… but it kinda looks the same, eh? The top number remains $2.00.

Clever!

Back in Maxwell Mouse land, we get a two-part story about Monica going off to Europe to marry (or not) a couple of princes. It’s a solid story, and it’s got plenty of amusing gags to keep things puttering along.

There’s perhaps a surfeit of talking (mouse) heads, but we also get some amusing action scenes.

The sixth and final issue is a grab bag of stuff, so I guess sales were tanking or Sinardi was getting busy elsewhere. For instance, we get at 48 (!) question trivia contest…

… and a non-Maxwell story probably meant for an anthology somewhere.

This series has never been reprinted, and neither has the original first issue:

But you can get these comics cheaply.

Looks like Sinardi has plans to bring this series back somehow?

I was unable to find any articles about this series on the intertubes, but Dale Luciano writes in The Comics Journal #69, page 50:

Like a scene out of a ’30s movie, Maxwell
Mouse Follies begins with a luckless hbbo
ambling up to a nattily dressed sharpie
with a Harlowesque blonde draped all over
his arm. “Brother… could you spare a
dime??” comes the familiar refrain from the
hapless hobo. “Outta da way, riff-raff!”
barks the sharpie, belting the hobo a solid
‘ ‘BOFF!”‘ across the chin. “Ooh! You’re so
strong!!” coos the blonde to the sharpie, as
they stroll off down the avenue. ‘As the
forlorn hobo picks up his cap, writer-artist
Joe Sinardi has a luckless hobo-mouse
amble into the panel, followed by a sharpie
mouse and his date. Whereupon the entire
ritual episode is repeated verbatim, placing
the story in depression era New York as
experienced by mice.
It’s a good framing device for this affec-
tionate, clever parody of the conventions
of ’30s Hollywood musicals (as in “Broad-
way! Music! Drama! Romance!”).

[…]

From every indication, Sinardi has had a
good time writing and drawing Maxwell
Mouse Follies. He manages quite a few neat
travesties on standard cliches of the
genre—a wryly nonsensical caption at the
opening reads, “The Thirties… Hard
Times… Touch a star and touch the pave-
ment… In the end, it feels the same,” which
somehow manages to sound exactly like
’30s Hollywood doggerel-poetry—yet
Sinardi’s affection for the era and the
dramatic conventions are always apparent.
Basically, Sinardi reproduces the stock
situations of ’30s musicals and plays them
out in a fairly farcical way. Many of the
humorous results are silly, and gags and
situations don’t always pay off as they
should. Sinardi as writer hasn’t always
come up with enough funny lines to keep
the material aloft, but Maxwell Mouse
Follies has an antic, quirky spirit that keeps
you charmed and entertained. The weak-
ness of any single episode and a tendency
toward too much anthropomorphic cute-
ness are compensated for by the overall
appeal of Sinardi’s concept. I wish some of
the writing were better, but the book is still
good.

Russell Freund writes in The Comics Journal #110, page 59:

A couple of new Renegade funny books
also aim to beguile. Each misses its mark by
only a hair. Maxwell Mouse Follies, by Joe
Sinardi, advertises itself as offering “funny
animal comics in the classic tradition,” and
that’s fair enough, if we can expand the
classic tradition to include the liberal
sprinkling Of hells and dammits found here.
Sinardi’s art has plenty of charm, and he
has worked out a delightful mousie.sized
culture, so-existing With the human-scaled
Manhattan of the 1930s. What’re missing
here are the laughs. The second issue
revolves around a adorable little
orphan mousie named Bitsy who provides
about as much fun as a rotten molar. Max-
well Mouse Follies is busy and cute instead
of funny.

And here’s a page from an Amazing Heroes Swimsuit Special:

This blog post is part of the Renegades and Aardvarks series.

Strata (1986) #1-5 by Joe Judt, Ray Murtaugh, Jim Brozman and others

Renegade’s publishing profile is pretty odd, to say the least, but most of the series published by Loubert up till now had been by a single creator, or at most a writer/artist pair. This is the first that has a writer/penciller/inker line-up, I think?

Let’s read the first three pages together.

Well, that’s kinda stylish? It’s very stark: No cross-hatching or tone or anything, but a pleasing variation in line weights and black spotting.

It’s also a bit difficult to actually read — my eyes are skidding all around these pages without finding any purchase whatsoever.

And that’s even before we get to the other worlds, where the design of the world and the characters makes things even more difficult to grasp.

Like… what… what’s going on? If you sit down and concentrate and interpret each panel, character by character, it’s not impossible to make out what’s happening here, but it’s just migraine on paper.

I know nothing about the creators, but I’m going to go ahead and guess that the penciller (at least) is quite young, and has an idea about making chaotic, fun comics, but the chops just aren’t there. Instead of being over-the-top weird action, it’s just a bunch of noise.

That the story doesn’t make much sense (I think? it’s hard to tell) either doesn’t help.

And it turns out that we’re on… Discworld? I mean Strata.

That age-old question: “What does a graphic designer do?” The answer is “Not work at Renegade”.

… Oh! I didn’t get that it was a swastika! I just thought it was a very odd collection of panels oddly cropped.

So perhaps they had a graphic designer anyway.

In the first year or so, Deni Loubert had written introductions to all the comics. But by now she’s just running the same one in all the comics (per month). Makes sense.

I wondered whether there was going to be rapid artistic development on display here, but nope.

So risque.

Inker Brozman does the all the artwork on this amusing back-up story written by Jack Herman. It’s about Picasso being hired as a police sketch artist.

Yup.

In the third issue, somebody has finally tipped the artists about something called “tone”, and the pages suddenly become legible. But at the same time, they also lose the stark attractive qualities the artwork had.

Panel-popping sword work.

I guess if you’re charitable, you could say that the storytelling and the artwork reflects the state of the protagonist pretty well. He’s confused about the world he’s in, so the reader should be confused, too?

But…

And then… they didn’t really ignore the giant otters in the next issue?

“The ring!”? What? I guess my eyes had glazed over at this point that I even missed there being a ring in here?

Or is it a reference to Tolkien? I mean, just because this comic isn’t funny doesn’t mean that it wasn’t meant to be funny; perhaps I just missed it.

And then the series ends like this.

A perfect mess, I guess.

The series wasn’t picked up by a different comics company, so I guess it was just abandoned. It hasn’t been reprinted, either.

Somebody writes in Amazing Heroes #92, page 58:

Strata presents a competently writ-
ten fantasy adventure. Too little time
is spent developing the character of
Flambeau, and too much is devoted
to the slash and stab antics of the
otters. One Bould expect them to be
played as humorous foils to the
human, but there is nothing about
them which is in the slightest bit
amusing. They are simply two talk-
ing animals that don’t have a lick of
sense.
The plot involved—a man is mys-
teriously transported to another
world to which he must tty to adjust
or from which he must try to escape
—is at least as old as the early pulps
(and indeed has antecedents in an-
cient mythology). Still, it is one that
has not been milked completely dry,
and can still be presented effective-
ly. Scripter Joe Judt has done a reas-
onably good job in that department,
though certainly not delivering any-
thing particularly noteworthy or
memorable.
His yeoman-like efforts are com-‘
pletely undermined by the poor
visuals to be found in this issue. It
is a veritable cornucopia of rotten
fruit. The art looks like the work of
a man who learned to draw from
reading old Harvy comics while
dropping acid.
Penciller Ray Murtaugh’s panels
vseren’t laid out on the page so much
as spilled. Each page is a cluttered
jumble of images fighting for atten-
tion but succeeding only in obscur-
ing those around, above and beneath
them. The only uniformity they pre-
sent is in their unattractiveness. The
almost total lack of line work leaves
nothing but sparse black-and-white
illustrations that blend one into the
other.

Harsh! I have no idea what “almost total lack of line work” means. It’s nothing but line work. Oh, they mean cross-hatching? Sure.

Russell Freund writes in The Comics Journal #109, page 53:

Strata could become delightfully Car-
rotoid with only a slight push. It’s a serio•
comic space opera, less richly detåiled than
Nexus, but in that same zany vein. The art
is almost there. Ray Murtaugh’s engaging
pencils have a nearly Burdenesque loopi-
ness; I liked his wild biplanes and his
spaceships that look like, well, watermelons
being gang-banged (you have to see these
things to believe ’em), and his Commander
D’art could be Lady Luck’s Peecolo caught
in a time warp. I wish his hero didn’t 100k
so much like something out of Mike Ploog,
but that’s a quibble. This is good, fresh
work.
I would prescribe a dose of Burden for Joe
Judt, the’ writer, however. There’s a scene
where the lovely lady space ranger throws
herself at the hero and he demurs, saying,
“l don’t love you,” and goes into a song and
dance about having to feel “something
magical.” This bit just begs to be played as
an absurd, Burdenesque vaudeville duet for
skewed egos. Instead, Judt treats his char-
acterS as rational beings, albeit With a touch
of humor. Strata is fun, but it isn’t as inven-
tive as the best books in its field. A judicious
dose of brain dama#, evenly applied, would
help.

Heidi MacDonals writes in Amazing Heroes Preview Special #2, page 117:

Flambeau also finds that having
ones dreams come true isn’t all beer
and skitties. “He’s a very ethical and
morat guy.” says Judt, “and he’s sud-
denly tossed into a world where every-
thing he beiieves and thinks is no longer
true. Nothing is realty as it seems in this
world: nothing is as it seems in this
book. Even it you think you know what
it’s really about. that maynot be true
“There”lbe a iot of swashbuckling.
and a lot of bad jokes. I try to keep
ttyngs as insane as I possibly can!’

Well, that bit was achieved…

I’m unable to find anybody discussing Strata on the interwebs. Joe Judt doesn’t seem to have done anything in comics after this, but Murtaugh seems to be working in comics still, and so is Brozman.

This blog post is part of the Renegades and Aardvarks series.