Random Thoughts

The Mystery of Woolverine Woo-Bait by Joe Coleman.

This is the third and final internet-acquired comic for this blog series (sorry!): Some books are just impossible to find. I can perhaps understand the scarcity of copies in this case. Joe Coleman is a pretty famous artist, and this is his only published comic book.

That is, it was originally published in 1982, and this is a reprinting (with a bonus back-up features).

It’s less psychedelic than I thought it would be. It has a kinda coherent storyline, but perhaps the story isn’t the most important thing going on here. For some reason or other, I was reminded a bit of Gravity’s Rainbow (especially the first 70 or so pages).

I KNOW.

The scan for this comic could have been better: The original artwork must have been so detailed, but much of it’s lost here. I think I’ll pick up a copy if I find one, but there’s no time in this blog series. It’s all over soon!

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

The Cereal Killings #1-8 by James Sturm.

This series passed my completely by when it was released in the 90s. I’ve read most of his later stuff, like Market Day and The Golem’s Mighty Swing, which are both very earnest, so I was curious what a book with such a punny name would read like…

Well, the artworks is rather basic in the first issues, but it becomes richer as the series progressed. (The eight issues were published over four years.)

But Sturm does some interesting formal things, like here in this two page spread that starts off in a bar, and then in the last panel of the first page, one of the characters goes thinks of an earlier time, and then we’re back to the bar in the last panel of the next page. It’s an interesting thing to do.

The first couple of issues have back-up features, like this very Jack Kirbyish nonsense above.

You can tell that Sturm is destined to go off into education: He does a Nancy (well, Sluggo) pastiche. I think it’s a formal requirement for all faculty.

Er, no, elephants don’t drink through their noses.

Anyway, I haven’t really mentioned the concept behind the series: It’s about mascots for Kelcogg’s cereals. You know. That tiger and that rabbit and all the rest. The mascots are dying, or being killed off. And something odd happened at the Kelcogg’s warehouse in the 50s, but what? Are these things connected?

So it’s a mystery.

Only the mascots are anthropomorphic. All the other characters are human, but nobody seems to comment on this much. And, all in all, them being funny animals doesn’t really play that much part if the mystery part of the plot.

More back-up goofing off. “R. Sienkoriewak”? Is that a mash-up of Bill Sienkiewicz and R. Sikoryak?

I guess somebody finally told Sturm than nostril drinking wasn’t a thing…

Anyway, I’ve been looking for the final issue for months, but it seems to have vanished from the face of the Earth. Each of the first six issues say “chapter “, but the seventh said “chapter seven & chapter eight”, so perhaps when the eight issue was published, everybody assumed they’d already read it? Googling, I can find several sites that list the eight issue as “issue nine”, so it’s all so so confusing.

Finally I gave up and relied on the kindness of strangers on the Internet and got a digital copy. And Sturm manages to tie up a few of the various plot strands quite nicely, although I don’t think… like… Well, NO SPOILERS.

But nicely done, anyway.

I don’t think this has been issued in a collected edition, and at this point I’d guess that that’s not very likely to happen.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

Yahoo #1-6, Spotlight on the Genius That Is Joe Sacco by Joe Sacco.

We last saw Sacco in this blog series in Centrifugal Bumple-Puppy (by emacs! When was that? This summer? Feels like several years ago…). Sacco was the editor of this quite successful humour anthology (well, artistically, not commercially, I guess), and he went straight into doing Yahoo.

So what’s that like?

It starts off as a classic single author humour anthology. The first story is drawn in a much more “flowy” and pretty style than Sacco would ever use again, and it’s a parody of autobio comics. (I think in the 80s, parodies of autobio comics outweighed autobio comics 10:1. I actually have the numbers to prove it!)

I’ve always enjoyed Sacco’s work: He’s funny and intelligent, and I think his artwork is expressive and sometimes beautiful. But I think I’ve read like dozens and dozens (OK, two) of people saying that they’re repulsed by his artwork, and they usually mention the way he draws lips. And it’s true, his lips (I mean the way he draws them, I don’t know what his own lips look like) are full and fleshy.

And there is something sorta grotesque about his faces and dizzying perspectives. And so much sweating! Most panels are pretty moist.

The panel above is from another recurring theme in Sacco’s work: The fascism underlying corporate culture.

And, of course, everybody likes making fun of artists.

During the first four issues, I think, there are no two stories that take the same storytelling approach, and the art styles shift wildly, too. This period (1987-91) was apparently a time of constant experimentation for Sacco.

There’s one honest-to-goodness autobio story in the first issue, too, but it is (as Sacco (full-and-rounder-lipped than usual) explains here) more of a way to complain about how one of his friends from college was a bit of a dick.

And then one funny childhood reminisce. Man, these issues are just packed. I took me all evening to re-read these comics…

The second issue is all one long story, and it’s about the time when Sacco accompanied a rock band on a European tour as their resident cartoonist biographer. Or something. And, yes, all the rock band tour clichés make their appearances (groupies, border guards, cramped vans), but the story, such as it is, is told in a quite oblique manner. Very little is explained and things sort of just… happen… as if in a daze. I’m not quite sure whether it’s completely successful, but it’s interesting, at least.

In issue three we’re back to slightly shorter stories again, and the first one is a somewhat allegorical piece about working in a library. I mean, he probably did, and all his worries about the library system are probably true, but I’m assuming that there aren’t literally slobbering hordes grasping for the latest “high demand” book.

The longest piece in the book consists of pages that look like this. You have this long running text on the left that seems to hint at perhaps being automatic writing, or perhaps Sacco’s inner monologue while snoozing on the couch. Anyway, I’m not quite sure what it’s about at all, really, but look at that art! Man! Now that’s obsessive rendering. All those tiny itsy bitsy lines on all those people and buildings.

The fourth issue (and we’re now up to 1991; Yahoo was published on an approximate yearly, er, schedule) is the first one that has Sacco talking to us in an editorial voice, and it’s also the first one that’s about what has been his subject for the rest of his career to date: War.

The first piece consists of quotations from officials in various wars about aerial warfare. It’s edjumacational, too: I didn’t know about the incendiary bombs the Americans used on Japanese cities in World War II. (That’s “fire bombs” for those that don’t speak militarese.)

And it’s obvious that Sacco has found something to write about that he’s passionate about. That’s the footnote page from the eight page piece on airpower.

The second, and longer piece, isn’t autobiography, but biography. Sacco tells the story about his mother who was a child in Malta during World War II, and what she experienced. You can see where his cartoon character got his lips from, but it’s also a quite affecting story.

Now, the first four issues were fine. But something definitely happened before issue five. You can see Sacco taking all his drawing and writing chops (both for humour and serious stuff) and finally getting everything to mesh perfectly. It’s such a dramatic step forwards: It reminds me of the difference in Daniel Clowes between the last issue of Lloyd Llewellyn and the first issue of Eightball.

The story (which fills the issue completely) is about the run-up to the first Gulf War, and it’s about Sacco’s break-up with his girlfriend at the same time. I know, that sounds like a writing workshop idea, but reading it, it’s completely engrossing. It’s infuriating (the war inevitably coming) and it’s heart-breaking (both Sacco’s personal depression and the Palestinians Sacco met while taking German classes (he’s living in Berlin at this point)).

This is Sacco’s first fully realised work, and points out the way for his super-stardom now.

So how do you follow-up something like that?

You illustrate a comic book written by a stripper.

The sixth issue of Yahoo was written by Susan Catherine, and it’s fine. A bit on the wordy side, but Catherine’s stories about dancing naked on stage throughout most of North America are interesting. But stripping seems to be such a go-to subject for alternative comics artists that it’s a bit “eh?”-ey. I think this is at least the fifth comic book in this blog series that features strippers prominently.

If only there had been more scenes like this.

So that’s the end of Yahoo, and Sacco went on to find his destiny (documentary comics about war zones) and fame and hopefully fortune. We’ll cover his next series, Palestine, when I finally get hold of a copy of issue 2 of that series, which should be (according to FedEx) this weekend.

Instead, we end this article with a look at Spotlight on the Genius That Is Joe Sacco, which is a compilation of early and mostly unpublished comics Sacco had done in the mid-80s.

Christof Ellinghaus writes an introduction that provides the rationale for this compilation, so there was apparently a buzz about Palestine this early (which is 1993).

All the comics in this volume are of the non-serious kind, and some of them are quite funny. Here’s how Isaac Newton invented calculus.

There’s more corporate culture stuff…

And a longer, quite Monty Pythonesque look at life in a medieval hamlet.

It’s all amusing, and I’m not sure whether this material has been reprinted since. Most (or all?) of Yahoo has, in the Notes From a Defeatist book from 2003. Since Yahoo, Sacco has done mostly journalism/war stuff, but he returned to teh fun last year with Bumf Vol. 1: I Buggered The Kaiser.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.