Random Thoughts

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.

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.

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.

Bummer #1, Completely Bad Boys, Crap #1-7, Damnation! #1 by J. R. Williams.

I covered Bad Comics, oh, months ago (how much further to go!!!), and should probably have done these ones at the same time, but I forgot.

So you get two J. R. Williams posts.

I have the Cat-Head Comics edition of Bummer (which was later reprinted by Fantagraphics, which explains its presence in this article series). I haven’t seen the reprint edition, but I hope they kept this, the most unstaged of all unstaged artist portraits.

Bummer is mostly autobio stories, surprisingly enough.

The occasional parody think is thrown in, and, as usual with Williams, I have no knowledge of whatever he’s parodying. It’s that TV show about the talking horse, right? So he’s dead. That’s probably funnier for Americans, and Americans older than me.

The aforementioned Bad Comics reprinted a lot of the Bad Boys pieces, which makes the name “Completely Bad Boys” slightly confusing. But included are Williams’ attempt at a daily strip version of the little psychopaths, and while some of the strips have the old spark (like the second strip here), most aren’t very… bad. I mean, they are. That seashell joke? That’s some Garfield level shit.

Onto Crap, Williams’ attempt at a 90s slacker 20s series. It’s about five roomies (each with the requisite separate personality), and you’re set for hi-jinx to ensue.

You just need somebody to sit behind you to stab the laugh machine after every other panel, and you’re there.

I’m not the only one to make that connection! Darn, I though I was being so free-spirited and original and everything.

However, we were both a bit off. Instead of being a sitcom about twentysomethings, it quickly turns into a more Serious Issue Of The Week (For Twentysomethings) thing. Soon most of the standard sitcom jokes are out, and instead each issue is About An Issue, like this one about LGTBQA2 issues…

Sexual discrimination…

Bulimia…

And alcoholism. It’s not that Williams handles any of these issues with anything but sensitivity, but it’s not that funny. The disconnect between the art style (which would lead anybody to think they’re going to read weird and wild stories) and the storylines is not helping at all. I mean, it’s not as if that’s inherently a bad thing: upsetting the readers’ expectations can be a powerful tool. But it doesn’t work for me here.

There are more free-flowing backup stories in some of the issues, and they work better, I think. But are we supposed to laugh at the artist’s mouthpiece here for being so devoid of insight into himself, or are we supposed to share his disdain for the plebs?

Fantagraphics announces the cancellation in the seventh issue in their normal manner: By putting a “continued next issue” label in somewhere.

Finally, Damnation! collects various pieces from various places, and is… varied. Variously.

Williams apparently stopped doing comics, but continued to work in animation. He’s now a painter, according to Wikipedia and his blog.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

Suburban Voodoo Comics by Matthew Guest.

This is a 48 page one-shot (edited by Robert Boyd) with three stories that all seem like they might be autobiographical.

They’re tales of normal teenage life…

… and Christian damage.

The artwork is rather appealing, but I can’t help wonder whether something has gone wrong in the printing process. I get the feeling that there’s supposed to be many more of those small white lines that may suffer from ink gain.

If even the lettering has had that much ink fill-in, then perhaps that guy was supposed to have a face? I don’t know? It looks very, er, brutal the way it’s now, at least.

After Googling a bit, it doesn’t seem like Matthew Guest published any further comics, but he may be an art professor now, if that’s the same guy.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.