FF2001: Fuzz & Pluck in Splitsville

Fuzz & Pluck in Splitsville #1-5 by Ted Stearn.

The physical format of this series is reminiscent of La Perdida, published a few years earlier: It’s slightly smaller than standard US comic book size, is thick (most issues are 48 pages) and has stiff covers.

We last saw our plucky pair in the Zero Zero anthology, and the action picks up pretty much directly from that, er, plotline.

The artwork is very different. Gone is the obsessive cross-hatching and condensed action, and instead backgrounds are mostly AWOL and there’s zip-a-tone instead. Especially in the first issue; the hatching and the background returns after a while…

The action is quite decompressed, and reading these five issues was very breezy. They were published over an eight year period, though, so creating them wasn’t as easy, I guess.

As with any Fuzz & Pluck story, perhaps it’s better not to try to recap anything. Things happen, and then more insane things happen, and then…

… you have half-insect half-fruits working as gladiators. It’s the kind of thing that happens. It’s fun.

Stearn explains who the book is for.

Pluck explains the plot.

This series was given an Ignatz nomination for best comic in 2003. Stearn hasn’t published much in comics since this series ended, but Fantagraphics released his The Moolah Tree in 2016.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

FF1991: Perramus: Escape from the Past

Perramus: Escape from the Past by Alberto Breccia and Juan Sasturain.

Hi! I had hoped to end this blog series about Fantagraphics last year, but having the scheduling slide is so very Fantagraphics, isn’t it?

Only three more posts to go, though.

Very early-90s Fantagraphics design courtesy of Dale Yarger.

Anyway, strangely enough, I did not buy this series at the time, so I had to buy them now. These comics were definitely the most expensive items I had to procure for this blog series. Which is both odd and perhaps not so odd: These probably had a minuscule print run, so they’re rare, but on the other hand, they’re translated reprints that are widely available in other languages…

They were originally serialised in Italy in 1983, but Breccia is Argentinian and the plot lines clearly reflect that and the post-Junta time they were produced in.

Fantagraphics helpfully provides these footnotes (seen above) that carry both translations of Spanish text on walls and in sound effects, and also explain who some people are.

Fantagraphics published Perramus in four forty page magazine sized issues, and there are two clear stories being told. The first half is about Perramus, an amnesiac escaping a dictatorship. Hi-jinx ensue. Sorry. It’s all very symbolic and strange, and occasionally gripping.

The artwork is rather lovely, isn’t it? Done with ink washes, perhaps? I’ve seen European editions of Breccia where they’ve printed the artwork with several different grey inks, which looks really good. Fantagraphics have opted for the cheaper rastering method, but it looks fine, too. It’s sometimes a bit more washed out than it should be, I think.

The first issue has a brief Breccia autobiography and timeline.

Breccia’s artwork tends towards abstraction.

And sometimes it teeters on the brink of incomprehensibility, but it doesn’t really ever tip over.

Hey! That’s a reference to The Eternaut, a 60s (I think) Argentinian serial that was reprinted by Fantagraphics in 2015 to great acclaim and attention. Breccia drew a reworked version of that work in the early 70s, which I haven’t seen.

The final issue is printed on newsprint, which I take to mean that Perramus sold even worse than projected. This reduces legibility even further, and also gives the story a kinda Warren 70s feel.

The cover promises “CLIMACTIC FINAL ISSUE”, and the latter part is true, but climactic? It’s very metaphorical, though.

Breccia died in 1993. He hasn’t been widely translated into English.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

More Fun With Google Geocharts

I’ve been using Google Geocharts to create nice world maps for my World of Films and Cocktail blogging project. It’s a pretty good service, but it doesn’t really have all the bells and whistles I need to customize the interactive version the way I want.

But today I’m hung over, and I got down to the nitty gritty undocumented interfaces. Behold!

But click over here to experience the much awesome.

Here’s the longer story for other people who are interested in doing something similar. Note that this is likely to stop working at any point since I’m using non-public features that just happen to work now with the version of Google Geocharts right now, on January 1st 2017.

So: I wanted to have stuff happen on a “hover” action, so that people don’t need to click to make things happen. Much more fun. But there is no “hover” callback in Google Geocharts. Instead I piggy-back on the tooltips and use them to root out the data I need to determine what country the user is hovering over.

First of all, make the tooltip be HTML instead of the default SVG text elements:

var options = { 
  ... 
  tooltip: { trigger: "focus", isHtml: true } 
};

Then hide the oh-so-ugly tooltip:

.google-visualization-tooltip { 
  visibility: hidden; 
}

Then do something like the following to have something happen when you hover over a country. Each country is a separate SVG path element, so:

$("path").each(function() { 
  $(this).hover(function() { 
   $(".google-visualization-tooltip")
     .find("span")
     .first()
     .each(function() { 
             var html = this.innerHTML; 
             if (html.length == 2) { 
               $.map(films, function(film) { 
                if (film[0] == html) 
                 displayFilm(film); 
               }); 
             } 
           });

Obviously this won’t work directly for you, but what I’m doing here is rooting out the data from the displayed tooltip (here it’s the two-character country code), and then using that to figure out what country I’m over. And from there you can just do whatever you want.

What I wanted was to display a random image from the film from the country under the cursor, so I used a weird cross-origin Google script service, which just reads the HTML from the blog post, finds all the images, and displays one of them at random.

Useful, huh? HUH??!?!

Oh, well.

Here’s the source code.

FF1996: Coventry

Coventry #1-3 by Bill Willingham.

Willingham is known these days for writing Fables, the Vertigo series re-appropriating fairy tale figures, but in the 90s he was doing things like Ironwood and Time Wankers for Eros Comix, the Fantagraphics imprint. I think I assumed at the time that Coventry was more of the same, but it turns out that it is not porn.

Willingham’s rendering is lush, as always.

It turns out this book is a precursor to Fables of sort: It’s about angels and werewolves and witches living in modern-day USA, and there’s a private investigator (or two) who’s trying to track down supernatural murderers, etc.

The artwork is very un-Fantagraphics: It’s based heavily on photo reference and is rendered in a manner that reminds me of other self-publishers around this time, like Terry Moore and Dave Sim: Facile brush work or something.

Willingham predicts the current Golden Age of Quality TV.

To a T.

Willingham explains that Coventry is the book that he’s going to do until he’s dead, and reading it, I do get a feeling that this one is a keeper. It’s well paced and plotted, with interesting characters and situations.

And my guess about photo reference turns out to be right: Each character is based on a specific person, and he’s collected around 300 photos from each of them.

There’s even a map of Coventry and a description of the various sections. Willingham really did seem like he was going to keep at this book, with its odd price point ($4, which was a lot in the 90s for a comic book), printed one nice white paper, with cardboard cover stock.

Sometimes it seems like Willingham can’t quite make the various photos he’s using match up all that well, which can be somewhat disturbing.

And so the third and final issue ends.

Willingham later wrote two novels set in the same universe, but the reasons for abandoning the comic book series aren’t clear. Low sales? Dissatisfaction with Fantagraphics? This is a really odd book for them to have been publishing. The only thing that comes close to this is Castle Waiting, and that was a decade later.

It’s a shame, because reading this was such a welcome change from the other Fantagraphics books I’ve been plowing lately: It’s a breezy, delicious romp.

And with that, we’re going to take a break for a few days.  I had hoped two wrap up this blog series before the holidays, but we still have four more posts to go before we sleep, and those comics are still in the mail due to lousy planning.

See you on, like, four or five days.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

FF1992: Trailer Trash

Trailer Trash #1-9 by Roy Tompkins.

If you were to rifle through Trailer Trash, you would probably assume that this was going to be a book of nihilist violent gross-out fun like, say, Angry Youth Comics.

The internal monologues from the viewpoint characters keeps on coming, which seems rather outdated these days, I guess: Every motivation every character have are spelled out.

The character design is incredibly strange.

These characters aren’t presented as looking freaky or anything. They just look this way, and nothing is said about it. Reminds me a bit of Crap, which was also published around this time. Perhaps something in the air.

And, of course, since this is a comic with hillbillies, you have conspiracy theories about Elvis.

So this is really what it seemed like? A wild and woozy nonsensical single author anthology as it looks like?

No. It’s a coherent, traditional story of Harvey (to the left up there) who is a rather shy, and rather dim, fellow who has a crush on a girl and hangs out with his slacker friends. It’s way, way more Hate than Schizo.

This disconnect between the bizarre way it looks and the traditional way it reads doesn’t work in Tompkins’ favour.

There are some bizarre shorter pieces in the first few issues that don’t have this problem, though, but they soon make way for all-Harvey issues of moping around and getting drunk and arguing with parents.

Harvey is basically a decent, moral kind of guy, but he’s so feckless that it’s rather hard to get any momentum built up, story wise.

There are other characters that have intersecting storylines with Harvey that are more propulsive, like that drug dealer who has a necrophiliac downstairs neighbor, so it’s not all like this, but the prevailing feeling is one of a 90s tv drama.

The artwork is obviously very much influenced by Charles Burns. Not layouts or character design, but his linework is a dead ringer.

And predictably enough for someone who obviously puts so much work into his shading, he finds time to, er, critique other, lazier comic book artists.

Several of the back covers feature these slightly porny collages.

Oh! I forgot to mention that the first six issues weren’t published by Fantagraphics, but by Tundra. And scrolling all the way to the beginning of this article is too much work. Obvs.

In 1993, Kevin Eastman, owner of the money hemorrhaging Tundra comics, paid Kitchen Sink to take over, and the first thing Kitchen did was ax all the titles that were losing money hand over fist. (Officially Kitchen bought Tundra, but I think that summary is accurate; it’s all based on rumours of what really transpired.)

Trailer Trash was one of the casualties, but Tompkins announces that he’d be looking for a new publisher.

Fantagraphics took over with the seventh issue, three years later. Tompkins’ art style has changed a bit, but not dramatically.

The story continues from where it left off, and the characters do their wordy as-you-know-Bobs to bring new readers up to speed.

The eight issue is odd in several ways: Eight interior pages are on newsprint, and the other sixteen are on white paper. I’m assuming a printing error.

But it’s also the only issue to have colour printing on the inside covers, and Tompkins uses it to throw shade on such commercial sell-outs as Hate and Eightball, also published by Fantagraphics.

The storyline of the issue also diverges from the usual slacker shenanigans, and instead tells the story of one of the kids, and it’s about drugs and sexual abuse. Much heavier than the earlier issues.

The final issue is a grab-bag of various odds and ends. For instance, there’s this three-page adaptation of an urban legend.

For the conclusion to the main storyline (which I suspect Tompkins had gotten really bored with by this point), Tompkins shifts to a simpler art style, complete with zip-a-tone and everything. To tie everything up, he (*spoilers*) just kills off two of the main characters.

Like I said: Bored.

Most of the pages are taken up with earlier works probably intended for anthologies. They are drawn in magazine size ratios.

The most interesting is perhaps the (seemingly) autobiographical one about one of his high-school friends who had a mother who was a hoarder.

And… that’s it. Not a very satisfactory ending to a series that was kinda interesting.

As far as I can tell, Tompkins has not published any further comic books after Trailer Trash was abandoned. He seems to be working in illustration these days.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.