WFC Hungary: Egymásra nézve

It’s an interesting little film. It must have been difficult to make this in the early 80s.

I love the actors. The story is… uhm… Well, you won’t be surprised by how it ends. NORMALITY RESTORED in the usual way in these films.

Another Way. Károly Makk. 1982. Hungary.

  • 1 part white wine
  • 1 part Cognac

Pour into a white wine glass.

Well, that was horrible.

This post is part of the World of Films and Cocktails series. Explore the map.

FF1991: I Before E

I Before E #1-2 by Sam Kieth.

These two issues reprint a lot of Sam Kieth’s early work; Kieth had become a hot artist over the past few years. I like how “Fantagraphics” isn’t mentioned at all on the covers. Perhaps keeping that fact a secret would entice Sandman fans to buy them?

The most puzzling thing about these (56-44 page; newsprint; stiff covers) issues is how The Maxx is referenced on the covers as if that’s the big Kieth thing. But these were released in 1991? Didn’t The Maxx start in 1993? SO PUZZLE.

First we get a quite funny introduction by William Messner-Loebs explaining how Kieth got published for the first time. I found the idea that Kieth based his art style on Messner-Loebs’ odd; I thought it was more Wrightson and Suydam, and didn’t really see much of a Messner-Loebs vibe…

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Oh. That’s totally Wolverine MacAlistaire. With a pinch of Rand Holmes.

But the rest of the comics here are more Wrightson than Messner-Loebs.

Included are some early and somewhat rough pieces, but it’s mostly like the one above: Pretty great. The stories are slight, though.

Kim Thompson introduces the second issue. Kieth does sound very self-critical.

The bulk of the second issue is reprints from Critters. Which is OK, but I read them just the other… month…

And a checklist for the Kieth completist.

I didn’t buy this at the time, and getting them now was slightly difficult. I mean, they’re for sale all over the place, but mostly as “slabbed” high-grade issues that you can’t really read. And very expensive. But I found these non-slabbed issues somewhere for… er… a price. Which I guess means that the material here might not have been reprinted anywhere else? Otherwise it would have been cheaper?

I’m just guessing, though, because I’m too lazy to do research tonight.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

FF1991: Guttersnipe D

Avenue D, Guttersnipe Comics #1-2 by Glenn Head.

I guess you could call Glenn Head a third generation underground comix artist. His comics seem to belong to that lineage even if he started working in the 80s.

Avenue D collects various bits and pieces into a 48 page magazine sized single author anthology. About half the pieces are autobiographical (although Head uses the name “Chester” for himself), and we’re treated with a number of anecdotes and stories from his drunken, druggier days. Here he meets Muhammad Ali randomly on the streets, a scene that Head also included in his recent (and very well-received) Chicago book.

There’s a lot of stories about drinking too much. It starts to feel somewhat boastful after a while, but they’re interesting.

The other half of the stories are violent anthropomorphic tales of depravity. Here we see somebody doing something that Borderlinx certainly wouldn’t approve of!

There’s a certain element of going over the same stories again and again, like when Head moved into a place above a topless bar in Brooklyn. Here we have the scene from Avenue D…

… and here it’s from Guttersnipe, his short-lived series from the mid-90s. It’s a really good story though, so the temptation to tell it twice is understandable.

Guttersnipe is wilder graphically than Avenue D was. I think perhaps a great deal of Kim Deitch has crept into his layouts? Lots of chaos on almost every page.

Head really likes characterising himself as a slightly dangerous guy, but he also deflates himself a lot, so it’s not too eyeball-roll-inducing.

As mentioned earlier, Head published his first larger book recently, and it was well received. I thought it was fine, myself, but I found the reception slightly puzzling. “A Titillating, Brutal Comics Memoir” warbled Vulture, as if they hadn’t read any underground comics before… In the book, Head depicts himself going to Chicago and almost (almost) sleeping on the street one night before somebody took him in.

It’s just not all that brutal.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

FF1989: Stinz

Stinz #1-4 by Donna Barr.

Stinz had been running in the Dreamery anthology by Eclipse Comics for a while, but the Fantagraphics title is his first solo comic.

Stinz is a half-horse living in an alternate reality Austria in the early 1900s. Rather high concept, eh?

But it’s fun. Barr has a lively drawing style and a way to make virtually any scene, no matter how trivial, into so much drama. Here’s Stinz getting on a train.

These people are surely all speaking German, which makes the, er, translations in the speech bubbles all the more bewildering. First of all, it’s all “thou canst” all the time, which I guess you could think of as a way to signify that they’re talking oldee tymee German… or country bumpkin German… but then there’s the frequent inter-sprinkling of real German words, always asterisked with a translation elsewhere in the panel.

I know some German, so reading this stuff without looking up the translations is no problem, but this must be a rather annoying affectation for most people. Language play is fun and all, but if you start thinking about it, these speech balloons make no sense. But perhaps they add to the general sense of approaching chaos…

And the thing about So Much Drama? So Much Drama. These kinds of scenes erupt all the time. But it’s fun. Barr draws these scenes of controlled chaos well.

The lower parts of Stinz aren’t clothed, which leads to, er, fun, but it’s not a very bawdy comic book.

Oh, yeah, I forgot to say what this series was about: Stinz gets enrolled into the military, and we follow him through training. And it’s structured in the classical way you’ve read in dozens of young adult books: Grouchy teacher (I mean sergeant), kindly headmaster (I mean Captain), student who struggles then makes good (I mean private).

It’s fun.

And then Kim Thompson announces that it’s over due to low sales (under the break-even point).

Barr went on to publish the Stinz saga through a bewildering number of titles from several smaller publishers. I’ve got most of them, and I seem to recall that Stinz gets a slightly more sombre tone as Stinz gets older. (There’s a war coming and it’s not one of those fun wars.)

But I haven’t seen anything from Barr lately… What’s she up to these days?

If I’m reading this correctly, she hasn’t published any new comics in nearly a decade, but she has most of her books available on Kindle and on print-on-demand.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

FF1992: Not Love & Rockets

Ten Years of Love and Rockets, Tales from Shock City #1, Blubber #1-3 by Beto Hernandez with Mario Hernandez and Jaime Hernandez.

These are comics that I should have covered in the Love and Rockets blog post, perhaps. At least the first one. Probably not the last one.

It’s a bit of a mish-mash, but anyway.

Ten Years of Love and Rockets reprints a few shorter stories, and there’s a character index and stuff, but the real attraction is two new one-page pieces, as well as two articles on their artistic processes.

Jaime illustrates some common reader question and comments for a very cute page.

Jaime comments on his process: On this page that he hasn’t drawn the refrigerator the character in the first panel is opening because he skips to the bits he’s most interested in, so he’s pencilled the second panel (with Daniela) in full. You see the problem here? The reproduction of the pages-in-process is absolutely horrendous, so it’s often difficult to see what the brothers are talking about.

Other than that, these essays are absolutely fascinating. I don’t know whether they’ve been reprinted anywhere else.

For instance, we learn just how much planning Beto does for his characters, but there’s a lot of minutiae on panel borders and perspective and dimensions that just tickles the process nerd in me.

Tales from Shock City reprints the backup strips from the Mister X comics, published in the mid-80s by Vortex, along with one new piece, and one piece that may have been started at the time, but finished in 2001.

They’re pretty fun stories, written by Mario and drawn by Beto Hernandez. Very stylish, as befits a Mister X backup story.

I don’t recall whether these stories were in black-and-white or in full colour originally, and I’m too lazy to root them out from that cupboard over there. I wonder just what colours were used when printing it here, though: It looks like it may have been printed in black, red and brown? But is that a thing? Or are the browns really just reds with grey dots? Does red and grey result in brown?

Finally, and most importantly, we have Blubber, Beto Hernandez’ new comic book comic series. It’s completely insane. It’s so off its kilter that it may never be kiltered again. It is bat-shit crazy, and it’s kinda brilliant.

There’s a lot of very large (and some very small) penises on most of the pages, and since I don’t want this blog to get extremely X-rated, I’ve not included a lot of examples.

The first issue is a lot of this kind of stuff; very much like a stream-of-consciousness imaginary nature documentary. With a lot of penetration any which way, here for once without a penis in sight.

But haven’t we seen that creature somewhere else? Wasn’t it sucking the brains out of people in a different Beto storyline a few years back? Hm…

The second issue has more humans, but they behave pretty much like the creatures in the first issue does.

You are!

In an interview he explains the impulse for doing Blubber: “I just didn’t see a lot of comic books like that around”. And I think that’s true. There’s a lot of body horror going around in comics now (and some of it pretty gross), but this mixture of dementia and humour is pretty rare these days.

Blubber was apparently originally planned as a one-off, but there’s three issues so far, so let’s hope he keeps it up. So to speak.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.