Random Thoughts

Into the Vortex Redux

I’m not quite sure why I’m doing these (re-)reads of 80s comics. Surely I should have better things to do? Right? RIGHT?

But I guess it kinda just amuses me? And it’s comics from an era that’s mostly pre-Internet. It’s under-documented on dar intartubes, so it’s somewhat different from writing yet another blog about er The Mandalorian?

ANYWAY.

I started off claiming that Vortex was the best publisher in North America: Not because they’d published more great comics than anybody else, but because they’d 1) published great comics, and 2) hadn’t published anything that’s bad.

HA HA HA.

Well, that didn’t turn out to be true: The stuff I’d missed the first time around turned out to be pretty dire.

So I withdraw the claim.

Still, you have to hand it to publisher William P. Marks: He did publish some great comics. Did that happen because he’s got great taste, or was it sheer luck and proximity to some emerging talent that hadn’t been snapped up yet?

I think you can make the case for both interpretations. The biggest splash Vortex made initially was with Mister X, a comic conceived by Dean Motter — who worked next door to Marks’ successful design company.

But then Marks showed extremely good taste in hiring the Hernandez brothers to actually do the comics, and the results were pretty spectacular, I think. And then, of course, he neglected to pay them, which is probably what most people remember about Vortex Comics, if they remember anything.

(He did finally pay them everything he owed them a few years later, so it’s not really a straight-up tale of villainy.)

The most important book that Vortex published was, without a doubt, Chester Brown’s Yummy Fur: It was hugely influential, and totally brilliant. Brown lived in the same city, though, so that speaks of the “proximity” factor. But then Marks stood by the book through all the travails: It was a very controversial book, and the biggest distributor at the time refused to carry it. Marks even planned on setting up a separate shell company just to be able to continue publishing it, but that didn’t turn out to be necessary.

Other notably controversial comics were Black Kiss (very racy for its time) and Those Annoying Post Bros (very violent for its time). Vortex were not gun shy, and reading interviews with the creators, you get the impression that Marks never interfered with the books editorially in any way.

Even the final book Vortex published, Nocturnal Emissions, is really great.

But then there’s those NASCAR comics.

Oh, well. But I think the evidence points to Marks having really, really good taste in comics, and was a strong publisher who supported the books enthusiastically.

Anyway. It was fun (re-)reading these comics.

What next?

V2018: Hellmington

Vortex (2018)
by Justin Hewitt-Drakulic (as Jay Drakulic), Alex Lee Williams and others

Hellmington. Justin Hewitt-Drakulic. 2018. ⚁

[two minutes pass]

Well! Perhaps I should just get all the films Vortex has produced? Wolfcop was a barrel of laughs, and this starts off really well.

[twenty minutes pass]

Or… perhaps not? This is like a compilation of all low-budget scare-jump horror movies ever? I mean, it looks pretty good, but this is… it’s pretty risible.

[thirty minutes pass]

Oh god is this dreary. The lead does a really convincing job of playing a depressed cop… The cinematography OK; lots of angles and tight shots… But this is incredibly boring. There’s nothing here of interest: It’s just a collection of clichés, and I’ve kinda lost interest, which doesn’t help.

At the start of this I was thinking “well, even if this is kinda boring, perhaps it would be fun to get all the Vortex movies anyway? As a kind of survey of Canadian independent filmmaking?” This movie didn’t have to do a lot to sustain that impulse, but this is just brutal.

Brutally boring.

I like the music, though. The music earns the movie a ⚁ instead of a ⚀.

This blog post is part of the Into the Vortex series.

V2014: WolfCop

Vortex (2014)
by Lowell Dean and others

“What’s this then? A MOVIE?!?! BUT THIS IS A COMICS BLOG!”

Once again, dear reader, I can read your mind. But you see, after Vortex Comics stopped publishing comics, they… Well, I don’t quite know what they did at first, but they ended up as an independent movie producer called Vortex Words + Pictures:

Just read the about page:

As far as I can tell, the first movie they produced was in 2005? And it’s all cheap B movies, mostly horror and horror comedy stuff. Their most famous movie is this one, which is apparently about a cop who’s a werewolf?

Sure, I’m aboard for that.

Hm, no, that’s probably not correct: They also did Trailer Park Boys, which I’ve heard is actually pretty good? But I can’t watch cringe humour stuff, so I’ve just seen five minutes of one of the episodes…

Oh, Vortex just did the two live shows, not the TV series itself. OK, that makes more sense:

Let me first preface this review by stating that I am a big fan of the Trailer Park Boys TV show. I have all the seasons on DVD, as well as the blu-rays of their feature movies, as well as their direct-to-video movie. And as a fan, I must warn every and all TPD fans to avoid this “special” at all costs. Unless, of course, you’d like to have your memories of the classic show tainted by this garbage.
[…]
Honestly, I couldn’t even get through this travesty in one sitting. I’d be constantly wincing and invariably switch to a different movie or show just to cleanse my palate. In total, it took me 6 sessions to get through this 90-minute torture session, and I really had to force myself to power through.

Sounds fun!

And: No, I’m not going to watch all of the Vortex movies, just a couple. I’m … curious. Yellow.

OK, let’s roll… WolfCop!

Wolfcop. Lowell Dean. 2014. ⚄

Oh, my. The cop’s name is Lou Garou. OK, this is gonna be the best movie ever!

[five minutes pass]

It’s very modern. It’s got generic heavy rock music playing all the time, and never more than a couple of seconds between an edit. But it does seem kinda fresh? It’s already had a couple of gags I smiled at.

I was going to say that I liked the makeup on Lou (the cop), especially the eyeliner, which presages his werewolfness, but then:

His boss also wears eyeliner, so perhaps that just what the makeup artist does with all the actors?

[the end]

OK, my plan was to liveblog this movie while watching it, but I was so amused by it that I ended up just watching it instead.

It’s a fun movie! There’s so many things in here that are genuinely original… the plot is pretty clever, with reversals that are actually surprising.

They’re not trying to hide the Canadian origins, either. There’s a whole scene where the buddy is trying to convince the cop to take off his gitch for the camera, for instance.

And… well, I’ve never seen a werewolf transformation like that before: It starts with the guy peeing, and then we see the transformation from the penis up.

It’s funny!

It is!

But, OK, this is a low-budget movie… It’s very bloody… but it’s a lot of fun. I LOL-ed out loud several times. I liked all the actors. The editing was a bit too hyper-active for my tastes, and the music was too rocky, but for an unpretentious B movie, it’s excellent.

What did the critics and public think?

It’s mixed!

“Micturating.” OK, dear.

Funnily enough, non-critics seem to dislike it:

Reading between the lines, I think nerds were kinda grossed out:

I could do without seeing werewolf dick, though. The sex scene was bizarre but probably the closest thing to a successful gag in the movie. The premise of this movie was great but the execution was a fail.

Oh, yeah, the romantic scene was fabulous! Suddenly there were all these candles in the cell when they were fucking! The movie uneasily trod a line between being a slightly silly werewolf horror comedy movie, and being out-and-out Zucker/Abrahams total anything-goes, but I think they navigated those waters admirably.

That didn’t happen, but “Another Wolfcop” was released in 2017, and I’m definitely getting it.

There’s a “making of” on this bluray that’s almost as long as the movie itself. It turns out that Wolfcop won a reality show thing in Canada where the prize was getting (some) financing to do the movie. It’s got shots like these:

And:

Vortex is really getting back to their penis-mutilation roots!

“The weather turned on you like a bad bouncer at a bar.”

That’s a saying I haven’t heard before.

OH MY GOD!? THIS WAS SHOT IN SEVENTEEN DAYS?!

These people are geniuses.

This blog post is part of the Into the Vortex series.

V1991: Nocturnal Emissions

Nocturnal Emissions (1991) #1-4
by Fiona Smyth

Welcome back to the blog that covers all your NASCAR sports racing comics needs. Today we’re… we’re…

HANG ON! THESE AREN”T SPORTS COMICS!

Yes, Vortex had one last hurrah in the midst of all the NASCAR comics they suddenly started selling: Fiona Smyth’s Nocturnal Emissions, and if there’s anything less like a Herb Trimpe-drawn comic about cars, it’s this.

Vortex contains multitudes.

Seth provides the introduction, which makes you wonder: How did this book end up at Vortex instead of Drawn & Quarterly, where both Seth and Charles Brown I mean Chester Brown ended up at? And D&Q had already started publishing Julie Doucet by this time, I think, so it’s all quite strange? Anyway, let’s read the first three pages:

Man, that looks awesome. It’s so strong, visually, what with the expert black spotting and the squiggly lines and the attractive characters. It’s just kinda excessively gorgeous?

These aren’t comics I had to buy for this blog series; I bought them at the time, while being a student. (Except for the fourth issue, which took me years to find.)

It’s one of those comics that’s perfect as a pamphlet: It’s such a joy to stumble onto something as odd and compelling as this, and in book form it’s just not quite the same. (I mean, I’d buy it in book form, too, and I have; this series was collected and reprinted by Koyama the other year, and I bought that one too.)

Smyth encourages readers to send her their dreams.

And she illustrates a bunch of her own dreams. Here she is Burt Reynolds, drunk. We all know how that dream ends!

I hadn’t really planned on re-reading this series now since I’ve just read it in collected form, but there’s something irresistible about these comics.

But is that a true story or a dream?

In the third issue we get a longer story (well, part of a story) that seems like it’s older? It’s more scratchy… still very pretty, but very different.

OK, here even I think she’s gone too far: There’s absolutely nothing here for the eye to latch on to. It’s like a migraine on paper, and you have to make your eyes read the text by force. READ THOSE LETTERS< DAMMIT!!!1!

And here we have an ad for Dirty Plotte, which makes sense.

The fourth and final issue was possibly published in 1994, which is a couple years after the previous issue, and has to be the final thing Vortex Comics ever published. It has a different paper stock and no indicia, so I’m guessing they kinda… pushed it out there because they really wanted to, even if they were otherwise out of the comics business.

It’s a good issue graphically, but by this point there’s… four? continuing serials, all pretty surreal, and they all advance by … not very much, so it’s a frustrating read in some ways.

It’s still a pleasure to look at and it’s kinda funny.

And we get a letters page chock full of readers’ dreams. I’m not sure that’s a real dream, though. Some people!

And you could buy one of her dreadlocks if you had $300.

Those are some good-looking back covers.

So: There we are. I love how jam-packed these issues are: Smyth fills up almost every page; no house ads or anything. Now that pamphlet comics are a thing of the past (except for mainstream stuff), these are the sorts of things we don’t see in comics stores any more.

Oh, well.

J. Hagey writes in The Comics Journal #147, page 44:

Toronto artist Fiona Smyth takes great
pleasure in gently invading your dreams and
twisting them into subtle nightmares. In what
she writes, there are two texts. Text I is reac-
tive, moved by indignations, fears, unspoken re-
joinders, minor paranoias, defenses, scenes.
Text II is active, moved by pleasure. But as it
is written, corrected, accomodated to the fic-
tion of style, Text I becomes active too, where-
upon it loses its reactive skin, which subsists
only in patches (mere parenthesis).
The most important aspect a comic can have
is visual style; an immediate impact of its visuals
upon the senses can whet the reader’s mind —
not only as an onslaught to the eyes; the nose
and throat are besieged as well. Fiona Smyth
is just such a stylist.
One might suspect Smyth’s switch from her
bold painting technique to the black and white
of Nocturnal Emissions to be difficult, but she
makes the transition seem only a minor inconve-
nience. Throughout NE the artwork is charged,
firmly packed. It momentarily brings to mind
Julie Doucet’s work (but not in emulation; in-
stead, tangency). Smyth has taken that same
anarchistic, hard-polished gutter as Doucet, but
obviously careened off some fauve/surrealist
cliff. The little pictures are so dense they make
eyes bleed and senses numb. And I do not think
Smyth is sorry for what she has done.
The stories are aggressively anti-narrative in
both presentation and plot. A phenomenon
discussed at length by Roland Barthes seems to
apply. His idea of “drifting” in the text, and the
accompanying pleasure, aptly applies to Noc-
tumal Emissions. While you read along your
mind may take a tangent away from the text bas-
ed on something you’ve read. Contrary to the
usual fears that you are not “paying attention,”
Barthes claims great things can happen, liber-
ating things. The numerous distractions in each
frame of NE become the Story and the plot the
distraction. The flowing lines and the volumin-
ous abberations roam from thought to fantasy
in fabulous simplicity. If any comic illustrates
the beauty of Barthes’s “drifting” it is most cer-
tainly Smyth’s.

The first issue was presented at a gallery showing Smyth’s paintings:

Here’s a review of Somnambulence, the collected (and expanded) edition:

For those new to Smyth, it may take a few dozen pages to get with the flow of her absolutely singular vision, but once they do, I predict they’ll have a hard time putting the book down. Her thick line is extremely clean and intense, and the same is true of the visions she transcribes onto paper — the “intense” part, at any rate.

This blog post is part of the Into the Vortex series.

V1991: NASCAR Adventures

NASCAR Adventures (1991) #1-8
by a bunch of people

Welcome back to the sports blog! We’re all sports, all the time. Today we have NASCAR Adventures, the companion title to Legends of NASCAR, and the way to tell them apart is that one is called “NASCAR Adventures” and the other is called “Legends of NASCAR”.

I’m guessing Vortex had a time-limited option on doing NASCAR comics, so they did two monthly(ish) series? Anyway, let’s read the first three pages.

Yeah, it’s the same thing. And with the same artists as on the other series, too. Here’s Don Heck, drawing some very … er … jolly? … people.

He’s good at these dynamic montages, though.

Is he talking about DMT? And he has a problem with the DMT gnomes getting bigger? But only for a while? He wishes that the DMT gnomes were big all the time?

How odd!

Speaking of odd, Ken Holewczynski illustrates a second issue about the same guy — Richard Petty. And it’s rendered in the same oddly detached manner.

It’s such a slog to get through, though, even if the artwork is totally insane.

Michael Barsky is more traditional, but… er.. those are bad, bad cars. Actually, looking at them now on the screen, they have a kind of raw, oddball charm, as if they come from a weird 40s comic book? They’re almost kinda punk?

Since these comics don’t really have a plot, and they’re about actual people, the creators can’t really … do much, so you’d think an obvious out would be to put a lot of gags into the books, right? This is as close as you get.

Heh. You could buy a collected hologram set for just $75. Cheap!

Don Heck is back in the eight an final issue. Quite appealing, but unfortunately, the rest of the book isn’t as much fun.

This was published in December of 1992, and is (if I have my timeline straight, and I probably don’t) one of the last things Vortex Comics published. They reprinted Big Kiss one last time in the summer of 1993, and then it was over for good.

So… they naturally start of a classified ads section.