Random Thoughts

Steven Presents Dumpy, Steven Comix #2: Steven at Sea by Doug Allen.

Steven is a long-running weekly strip that’s mostly featured in alternative magazines and newspapers.

While these two comics have titles that seem to hint at more focussed tales, they turn out to just reprint a bunch of Steven strips. Eight issues had previously been published by Kitchen Sink, I think, and they went bankrupt around this time, which might explain why it moved to Fantagraphics.

I guess the obvious comparison to make is to Bill Griffith’s Zippy, so I won’t do that.

Allen’s art is satisfyingly cartoony.

And the stories don’t really go anywhere, but not getting anywhere is half the fun, isn’t it?

I’ve spent five minutes Googling whatever happened to Steven after this, but I’m coming up short.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

Pop Life #1-5 by Ho Che Anderson and Wilfred Santiago.

I’m running out of Fantagraphics pamphlets to write articles about here. (Was that a sigh of relief I heard?) But that’s not because I’ve done them all. No, it’s just that I’m stalled since I’m waiting for a bunch of comics to arrive in the mail to complete various series.

But since I’ve got about a month of articles backlogged, you probably won’t experience any service interruptions. I guess you’ll find out tomorrow. (Was that a sigh of relief I heard withdrawn?)

Anyway, our object of appraisal today is Pop Life, a short-lived luxurious series of the late 90s. (It’s hard to stop writing “luxurious” after re-reading Meat Cake.)

What’s that about Anne Rubenstein, I wonder? Hm…. Rubenstein had reviewed King, but that seems like a quite positive review. Oh, here we are: “Ho Che Anderson’s drawing is so beautiful and good […] if […] he could stop writing those incoherent, dopey stories.” I guess that explains that mystery.

Anyway!

Anderson had earlier published a number of series through Fantagraphics, including I Want To Be Your Dog, King and Black Dogs. I’m not sure whether Santiago had done anything before this, but his name seems familiar. Hm… Oh, he worked at mainstream superhero companies.

His artwork doesn’t really seem all that super-heroish, though.

About half of each issue is taken up by a serialisation of a story written by Anderson and drawn by Santiago. It’s about these people, who are in a band, and all have broken legs. Those legs are never explained, and that’s quite typical of Anderson’s oblique storytelling.

And it’s a storytelling trick that works. He just plops us into an interesting milieu and then goes from there without much exposition. These are pretty dense pieces.

The other half of each issue are taken up by shorter Anderson-drawn pieces, as well as the serialisation of a longer story, which is apparently a continuation of a storyline from I Want To Be Your Dog. Which I can’t remember; I should perhaps have re-read it before reading this.

As would become a theme in the text pages in this series: This series doesn’t pay much for anybody, and seems to be on the verge of cancellation from the first issue.

Anderson used to be quite influenced by Howard Chaykin, but by this time he seems to have shed that style completely.

The title of that letters page (the only one in the series) is accurate: They’re all rather harsh.

Anderson’s longer piece in issue three uses a quite unusual technique: Just various shades of blue. It’s pretty, but perhaps a bit difficult to follow sometimes?

Oh. The blue strip wasn’t supposed to look like that.

Some of Anderson’s artwork is incredibly stylish.

And then Anderson announces that Pop Life has finally been cancelled. The last issue is 24 pages (as opposed to all the other ones which were 32), and seems to collect bits and pieces meant for later in the series. Like this one (drawn by Santiago) about breasts.

It’s a very mammary series all around.

Anderson rounds out the issue with some fumetti.

I think both Anderson and Santiago have since retreated into illustration work, but they both recently published new work at Fantagraphics: Scream Queen by Anderson and 21 by Santiago.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

Top Notch Comics #1 by Ethan Persoff.

I remember this comic being somehow controversial, but I can’t quite remember why.

There are some very Chris Ware-esque things about it. It has an unusual size, it’s printed in duo-tone, and it uses blurred backgrounds.

There are things to cut out and assemble.

There’s a fake ad. But I don’t think Ware would have been talking about “Limp Dick Liquor”.

And some of the artwork reminds me more of Al Colombia than Ware.

Anyway, it’s a pretty slight story, and I’m left wondering whether it’s a parody or a sincere attempt at telling a story. It ends with “to be continued”, and it wasn’t so I guess it didn’t stun the world.

Here’s one fun thing about it:

It has a die cut page in the middle. One of the children breaks a window, and when you flip the page over…

… the hole lands on the character from the preceding page. Clever, eh? Eh?

I think this is the only time I’ve seen Fantagraphics allowing somebody to do something like that in one of the floppies, which might mean that they were pretty taken with the book.

Let’s see if I can find out why I had a feeling was controversial. I thought it was OK.

Oh, dear. The first review there is vicious.

Bart Beaty reviews Top Notch for The Comics Journal and says that it’s probably the worst thing Fantagraphics has published, and that his faith in Fantagraphics has been all shook up.

And then he gets nasty.

A couple of years later, Persoff and Al Colombia teamed up to create a series called The Pogostick, which I haven’t read yet.

Here’s Ethan Persoff’s web site.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

Blood Orange #1-4, Bête Noire: The International Comic Art Quarterly #1 edited by Chris Polkki.

Since Bête Noire is termed an “international” quarterly, and Blood Orange isn’t, and they have the same format and editor, I assumed that Blood Orange would be an all-American feast.

But, nope, the Orange has got plenty of foreigners, too.

Anyway, this pair of anthologies were launched a year before Mome got started, and were axed at that point, so… er… perhaps Fantagraphics didn’t want to be publishing two “competing” anthologies?

Anyway anyway, since I’ve read Zero Zero quite recently, it’s tempting to compare these anthologies to that one. Zero Zero had a strict (ahem) no experimentation, no autobio, no erect penises policy going. Blood Orange seems to be diametrically the opposite: We have experimentation (Gary Baseman here)…

Autobio (David Collier here, who appeared in Zero Zero a lot, and therefore ruins my “diametric” thing in the second example, even)…

And erect penises. But not shown here, because this is a family oriented blog. Instead Allison Cole. And while narrative, as most of the pieces in Blood Orange are, it’s a bit on the vague side, even if what’s depicted is clear enough.

It’s hard to summarise the aesthetic of Blood Orange. While there’s a great variety of styles and approaches, it’s all perhaps a bit melancholy? Not lachrymose, but a bit thoughtful and quiet.

And then you have Marc Bell, who I thought was making a comment on the format of Blood Orange itself (it’s an almost square publication), but instead it’s an excerpt from something that looks like a newspaper strip? Or something? And he’s explaining how he’s gone from a 4×4 grid to a squat rectangle. But they’re printed one above the other in Blood Orange, so it’s square again! So meta!!!

Cole Johnson from issue two.

No page numbers are printed in any of these issues, and very few of them have names printed alongside the pieces themselves, so I found myself flipping back and forth between the contents page a lot. That was fine in the first issue, but in the second issue the list is arranged thusly. Gah. Triangulating who’s making what becomes a chore.

Blood Orange feels like a solid, cohesive anthology. There’s a great mix of shorter and longer pieces, experimental and narrative, but it doesn’t feel like a jumble of anything goes, either. Quite a few of the artists are associated with various Rhode Island things, like Paper Rad stuff (Ben Jones above).

But there’s also Caroline Sury from France…

And Jeffrey Brown, who’s from Chicago, I guess.

The list of contributors continues to get more and more useless. Here they are arranged in absolutely no order, so I have no idea who did this rather intriguing 16 page piece:

Every page is a “panel”, but there are, like, 20 different stories going on. You have to follow each little creature for 16 pages and see what happens to that fellow, and then flip back to the beginning, pick out another being, and repeat. It’s fun. Nothing Earth-shattering happens in any of the “storylines”, but nice.

Perhaps I can say who it is by eliminating the ones it can’t be… It’s not Tobias Bak or Brian Ralph… Or Ted May… Or Nicholas Mahler… So, Rebecca Dart or Lark Pien?

Is this why the editor makes the list of contributors so useless? To have reader participation? If so: Meh.

Bête Noire has twice as many pages as Blood Orange, and the first (and last) few are in colour. Morgan Navarro here, I think.

And that’s definitely the marvellous Yuichi Yokoyama. It’s a short piece, but it’s a blast of energy. I should re-read all his books more often.

Bête Noire is a nice mix of famous artists and people I’ve never seen before, like Suzu Amakane above. Bête Noire has less of a unified tone than Blood Orange had, but it feels like a treasure trove of throwaway gems. The newsprint the bulk of the issue is printed on enhances that feeling.

Caroline Sury is the only artist that appears in both anthologies, I think, and her Bête Noire story is a direct continuation of the story in Blood Orange.

The country that has the most contributing cartoonists is Switzerland, which is a country that’s almost completely unknown to me. Comics-wise, that is. Here’s MS Bastian very New York-ish freakout.

Kevin Scalzo bids us adieu, but there’s no next time.

I know absolutely nothing about the editor, and Blood Orange was never reviewed in The Comics Journal. I can’t remember seeing anybody mention these anthologies before, and I bought Bête Noire just now for this blog series.

Let’s do some research. The first hit on Google is this, which doesn’t help much. (And not putting a date on the page is even less helpful.)

Oh, this page explains that Bête Noire was a rebranding of Blood Orange, not a sister title, as I had assumed. That makes more sense.

Nothing else pops up. Oh, well. Very nice anthologies, but Mome would soon swoop in, and that was a big success, and featured a lot of the same artists.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.