Random Thoughts

Evil Eye #1-12 by Richard Sala.

Sala is one of the more distinctive stylists in American comics. Like Charles Burns, he appeared on the scene in the early 80s, fully formed, with an art style like nobody else, and with a narrow range of subjects for his comics. Burns was mostly about growing up and sexual horror, while Sala has always been interested in monsters, conspiracies and 60s hipsters.

Evil Eye is, incredibly enough, Sala’s first solo comic book. I think, basically, all his previous comics were published in anthologies: Most prominently Raw and Blab!, and most recently the long Chuckling Whatsis serial in Zero Zero.

Evil Eye seems designed to be designed as a classic single author anthology, where Sala would put whatever he wanted to. In the end, though, the book was  dominated by one long serial, Reflections in a Glass Scorpion.

And it’s exactly what you’d expect: Monsters, mad scientists, conspiracies, young heroes and lots and lots and lots of gruesome murders.

All in good fun, of course.

While the Scorpion serial takes up around two thirds of each issue, and seems like an unusually well-planned-out and plotted story (for Sala), the backup feature is a series of short stories about Peculia and her friends and foes. It’s a rather vague setup, and these stories have an improvised feeling about them: Peculia will leave her home for a walk, and then things happen, and then she returns home.

Strangely enough, all the covers on Evil Eye depict scenes from Peculia, not from the main serial.

Sala’s artwork used to be quite a lot more intricate than it is in Evil Eye, but I would say that it essentially looks the same as it did in the 80s, and it’s still beautiful. Look at those items on the shelf. Peculia’s posture. The discreet butler. It’s all so perfect. Those weird angles makes up a convincing milieu even if everything is so strange.

Sometimes I think he’s just fucking with us, though; challenging us to accept ever-weirder cranial shapes.

While the figure work looks nothing like actual human beings, it’s just so endearing without going full “cartoon”. I read images like the one above as being naturalistic in context, and it’s just when you look at it separately you start to really think about how very, very odd the figures are.

His female characters look incongruously straighforwardly pretty. Sometimes there’s a slight jarring effect going between these glamorous women and the freaky monsters, but… it’s very slight.

My suspicions that the Glass Scorpion storyline had been plotted in advance seems to be confirmed here, when Sala says that issue six is the midpoint. And it’s probably the most tightly plotted story I’ve read from him: All the characters are connected, and clues are dropped that are picked up fifty pages later.

Perhaps everything is slightly too tightly wound, though, when the characters starts commenting on how everybody seems to happen to be in the same place at pivotal moments.

In issue 8, Evil Eye switches to better paper, stiff cover stocks and starts featuring these colour illustrations on the inside front and back covers. They’re not connected with any of the other contents, but they’re pretty spiffy.

The Glass Scorpion serial ends, and then Sala announces a next issue that never happened.

After this comic book ended, Sala has continued to create comics in pretty much the same vein, mostly with Fantagraphics but also First Second.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

Trucker Fags in Denial by Jim Blanchard and Jim Goad.

This is a collection of a monthly single page comic that was originally serialised in Exotic magazine. Jim Blanchard is perhaps still most famous as the inker for Peter Bagge’s Hate in the 90s, but he’s also released a number of solo collections.

This comic is a high concept story where, basically, all you need to know is in the title.

While the humour is meant to be offensive, it’s less dedicated to offence, than, say, Angry Youth Comics.

There’s quite a bit of sex here, and the storyline isn’t very well-developed, but it’s pretty amusing. The artwork is rather basic, though, with stiff figures and not very convincing faces. I like the line, though.

And there’s merchandise…

… a resource page…

… and an activity page. What more can you ask for?

I didn’t buy this comic at the time, so I had to buy it now. The price it demands now is pretty steep.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

Pressed Tongue #1-3, Weasel #1-7 by Dave Cooper.

In my mind, Dave Cooper was part of a movement towards “body horror” in 90s comics, as exemplified by Renée French, Al Columbia and (somewhat earlier) Jim Woodring. All these artists are technically proficient and create dark, “squishy” pages that straddle the line, uneasily, between horror and humour.

Cooper had published a number of series at various publishers (like A Big Someplace for Iconographix), and had appeared in all the comics anthologies of the time, but I think it was Pressed Tongue that made quite a lot of people start paying closer attention.

It’s drawn in this incredibly meticulous, expressive, ink soaked style.  While there isn’t much (or any?) explicit sex here, shipping it through Borderlinx caused the package to be stopped and pulped.  So Coopers sweaty art style is still unnerving for people in Ohio.

As in many of his stories, one of the protagonists is a comic book artist, and this one draws a comic book that quite resembles the one you’re reading.

The book seems to start off with something resembling a normal 20s slacker plot (think Crap or Hate), but veers off into different lands only a few pages in. The central story is about that pus encrusted guy up there that discovers that if he smears the shit from the 20-somethings’ baby on his skin, then the faeces clears up his sores.

Yes.

Most of the characters are drawn pretty much realistically, but this guy has a nose that keeps growing throughout the series into satanic proportions.

Both in Pressed Tongue and Weasel, there isn’t a single drop of ink on the pages that hasn’t been hand drawn by Cooper.

Look at this letters page. Just look at it.

In issue three, Cooper announces that the series is coming to an end. And not for the usual reason for an alternative comic book series (i.e., low sales), but because the story is finished. Which took me by surprise, since it kinda seemed to be structured as a longer story…

… but then Cooper wraps everything up in an ingenious way by introducing more overt metafictional elements like this fanatical Dave Cooper fan.

And, yes, the ending makes complete sense. In a kind of Lynchian sense, but by the final page of this issue (which is on the back cover), we have a very satisfying, and slightly unnerving, finish to the story.

I was extremely surprised.

After this, Cooper serialised the Crumple story in Zero Zero and released a few stand-alone books. Suckle? Something like that, but of these mid-90s works, I think Pressed Tongue is the strongest. And the rest aren’t bad, either.

Cooper returned with a new series of floppies in 1999, this time called Weasel, and in a very handsome, smaller, almost-square format. Physically, these are quite attractive objects, exquisitely designed. And instead of doing a single story, Weasel was designed as a classic single-author anthology, where Cooper could just dump all of his projects.

However, the main serial, “Ripple, a predilection for Tina” was to take up the vast majority of the pages. Cooper’s drawing style has changed dramatically from the Pressed Tongue years. Instead of the relentlessly overworked panels, we here get this sketchy, scratchy line that I really like. I love the way he’ll fuzz up almost all the lines with those zig-zags.

And this time, there’s no overt horror or fantasy elements, but a pretty straight-forward story of sexual obsession.

The protagonist is a cartoonist, of course, and the framing story is about him drawing the story that we’re reading.

There are shorter backup features in each issue, though. The most puzzling one is this encyclopaedia in this apparently made-up language. It goes on for pages and pages. I suspect a lot of pot smoking is involved.

There’s also this serial drawn in this more cartoony style that seems pretty much improvised. Horrible things happen.

Pat McEown contributes this spiffy piece that has a lot of concurrent stories going on at the same time. The rows on the pages are both rows of panels and floors in a house, and some of the stories are told left to right, and some are right to left, and sometimes they change floors. It’s fun.

There’s quite a bit of sex in Weasel, and most of it’s not very pretty. Very moist.

Pat McEown explains why he won’t be appearing in any further Weasel issues.

Cooper’s characters are incredibly expressive. Have a look at that dissatisfied coffee drinker up there, and that glowing nerd. Perfect.

And look at that angry, jealous nerd here.

Weasel won the “best new series” Harvey award that year, which is understandable.

Mike Mignola draws an apparently non-narrative piece where the script is the same as used in that imaginary encyclopaedia. Very odd.

Then Cooper announces that he’s ending Weasel in its current incarnation, and again he manages to finish his storylines.

So many alternative series just stop instead of having an ending, so I really appreciate Cooper sticking to his guns.

I would not normally think that Cooper’s work would lend itself to franchising, but if you were to make a toy from his characters, it’s probably a better choice, commercially, to go with Eddy Table instead of that pus-filled nose guy from Pressed Tongue.

The final two issues of Weasel are squarebound books collecting paintings and drawings “of mostly pillowy girls”, as the covers say. And that’s what they are: No comics inside.

Just pages and pages of stuff like this.

With a fold-out centerpiece that’s, I think, the best thing in these books.

I don’t think Cooper has created any comics after Weasel was finished. At least I’m unable to find any trace of that on the web. Instead he seems to be a full-time painter and illustrator. He’s such a good storyteller, so that’s a disappointment to me, at least.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.