Random Thoughts

Bad News #3 edited by Paul Karasik.

The Bad News anthology series was conceived as a class exercise for the students at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York. This first issue was edited by Art Spiegelman (I think; I haven’t been able to locate a copy or find any reliable info on it. The two subsequent issues don’t seem like class exercises at all, though, and features a roster of super-star (or soon to be super-star) New York art comics people.

The second issue (which I have here… somewhere) is on newsprint and is vaguely tabloid-like in format (i.e., quite Raw-like, but on cheaper paper). And that’s kinda exactly what the vibe is like, too: It’s like Raw, but it’s less precious.

And you also get all the contributors to Raw. Above we have a panel from a very pretty page by Jerry Moriarty…

A wistful four page piece by Ben Katchor which is notable for being more formally experimental than he usually is. The above page is read from the outside in instead of row by row. The other three pages are more straightforward. I can’t remember seeing this piece reprinted anywhere else, but it’s really nice.

R. Sikoryak retelling anecdotes about John Cage in the style of various cartoonists. Which is his normal mode, and this is a particularly nice example.

Let’s see… when this was originally published I was 18, I think? I remember obsessing about this Mark Newgarden strip (“What We Like”), and I kinda adapted it as a demo for the Amiga. My friends were puzzled. But it’s just so… weird.

Richard McGuire (later to become famous for the “Here” piece in Raw) does an unusually non-experimental straight-forward story about his, er, grandfather. I think. “Pop.” I love how it centers around a bad joke, but manages to utilise that awkwardness to give an emotional punch.

This is a terrific anthology. Not a single piece here is bad, and some are really outstanding.

And unusually for Fantagraphics floppies, it’s not in any standard format. Fantagraphics don’t seem to be into weird formats for their saddle-stitched books: Virtually all of them are either standard American comic book size, or standard magazine size. (There are some exceptions, like Acme Novelty Library, but it’s like 97.3% standard.) This is unlike their peers like Alternative Comics or Drawn & Quarterly, who publish any which way.

But perhaps this magazine (it’s slightly shorter than normal, and has a cardboard cover) came fully formed from the editor, and the SVA crowd are really interested in formal matters, so perhaps this unusual (for Fantagraphics) decision was made elsewhere…

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

OK, drama over?  (Or at least a plan of sorts.) So back to the series of posts that can’t possibly interest more than approx. five people in the world: An overview of all Fantagraphics comic book comics ever published.

Neil & Buzz in Space and Time by George Alec Effinger & Henry Mayo.

In the mid to late 80s, Fantagraphics published a few science fiction comics (Keif Llama, Threat), but this one is the oddest one, because it’s so normal.

The other sf series are quite “indie”: More cartoony artwork, and more humorous. This is a straight up serious sci fi tale, with industry standard “realistic” artwork.

And mullets. Don’t forget mullets.

The story is: Neil & Buzz are astronauts who’re going to the farthest reach of the universe to examine whether weird stuff is going on there. It is:

Yes, there’s an amusement park, and the rest of the pages are them going through the various amusements while one of them considers whether this is real or whether they’re in hell. (Somehow it’s hell.) It’s boring as fuck.

Yes, that is a coincidence. It’s also a common problem with American lighter science fiction: When stymied by the sf-ness, they start throwing in lots of religious blather.

There’s one fun this near the end, though. (Spoilers!)

I like that.

Only one issue of this was published, so I guess everybody involved got really bored with it, or it didn’t sell at all. It’s not an adaptation of an existing Effinger work, but written specifically for this series, which is kinda interesting.

I don’t know much about the artist, Henry Mayo. I know he did the Dinosaur Rex series, a few covers and shorter stories in anthologies published by Fantagraphics around this time, but he seems to have stopped publishing after this book. Except possibly something in 2010.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.