Random Thoughts

Anything Goes! edited by Gary Groth.

I just realised that the end was in sight for this blog series, so my enthusiasm returned. There may be some slight pauses before we get to the end, as I’m waiting for some issues to arrive to complete some runs…

Anyway! Anything Goes! is, perhaps, not formally a Fantagraphics series: It’s published by The Comics Journal as a benefit series to help pay the costs from the lawsuit brought on by Michael Fleisher.

Gary Groth explains in the editorial here.

I found that if I read this editorial using Comic Book Guy’s voice, it’s funnier.

The contributors to this series are mainly people who have regular series with Fantagraphics, which should perhaps not come as much of a surprise. But there is a handful of “name” artists (and writers) unaffiliated with Fantagraphics that pop up here with pieces done specially for this series: Frank Miller, Bill Sienkiewicz, Dave Sim, George Perez, Alan Moore…

Above we have a panel from a very violent four page, er, story by Gil Kane, that seems to point to Kane doing a new His Name Is… Savage! series soon. That didn’t happen.

Beto Hernandez illustrates a funny, apparently autobiographical story by Jan Strnad. Hernandez also contributed a solo piece later that talked more directly about the issues surrounding the series; one of only two strips to do so, I think.

It’s not all superstars, though. Here’s Mike Baron and Dave Garcia. I wonder what the editorial practices are when doing a benefit book. If somebody sends you something that’s… not good, then do you reject it? That seems kinda rude. This story isn’t that bad, but there are some real clunkers later in the series that are barely readable.

Sorry, I meant barely unreadable.

The only story that’s had much of an afterlife is this one: “In Pictopia” by Alan Moore, Donald Simpson, Pete Poplaski and Mike Kazaleh (*phew*). It the kind of elegiac fan service piece that Moore excels at, about (basically) how comics these days suck. Allegory alert!

It’s a pretty effective and affecting story.

Jaime Hernandez pops in with an amusing four page Locas story. Those were the days.

Jack Kirby and Joe Sinnott team up for the first time in years.

Dave Sim does a very text heavy three page vignette, and is the only other person (other than Beto Hernandez) to refer to the Fleisher case. (The case was about Harlan Ellison calling Fleisher “bugfuck” in an interview in the Comics Journal.)

Sim’s prose is as leaden as always. If I ever re-read Cerebus, I think I’ll just skip past all the non-comics pages.

The colours have to be mentioned. SM Graphics did the separations, and they’re as muddily psychedelic as always. (See the Dalgoda article for further, er, appreciation of their… singular vision.)

Has Daniel Clowes ever looked as Bernie Kriegsteinish as he does in the Lloyd Llewellyn short in issue four? Perhaps. But not a lot. I love the stiffness.

Hey! Whatever happened to Alec Stevens? He’s a very distinctive stylist… Hm… oh, he’s now totally christian and an instructor with the Kubert school, according to Wikipedia. That may explain why it’s been a while since I’ve seen any work from him…

By issue four, they started padding the issues with reprints and stuff. I know the point is to make money to pay the lawyers, but it still feels like a cheat.

Groth takes the Gracious Winner of the Year award. Just kidding! I would have been gloating like that, too, if something as stupid as the Fleisher lawsuit had ever happened to me (and I’d won).

Like I alluded to above, I have no idea how the editorial process for a book like this works. Here we have a couple of pages from a rather delightful Arn Saba/Trina Robbins collaboration, and Robbins is the only female artist that appears throughout these issues, which is beyond strange. (Nadine Messner-Loebs collaborates on the writing of a short Journey strip with William Messner-Loebs later in this series, and that’s it for women.)

A Robert Crumb strip from 1977 is reprinted in the fifth issue. We here see Crumb’s prescience: He correctly foresees The Walking Dead 35 years later.

The final issue is inexplicably in black-and-white. (An old Eddie Campbell piece above.) Which makes me curious: Did Fantagraphics, I mean The Comics Journal, make much money off of this series? Making any money from publishing alternative comics is a pretty chancy thing, after all.

But perhaps they did sell a shitload of these? Somehow? You can pick up pretty much all the issues for less than cover price now, which seems to indicate both that they’re commonly available, and… that people didn’t feel the need to hold on to them.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

The Natural Inquirer by R. L. Crabb.

Crabb is mainly known for his underground series Tales of the Jackalope. This book has a few pages of jackalope lore, but most of the pages concern other species like:

The is not a comic book per se, but is just a series of these drawings and descriptions.

Crabb is still active today.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

Uptight #1-5 by Jordan Crane.

This is one the very last floppies Fantagraphics has published, and it doesn’t look much like Fantagraphics comic book comics usually look. There’s no verbose indicia (“any similarities to etc”), no UPC code, it’s cheap, the cover stock is the same as the interior stock, and the first three issues are only 20 pages each. (Well, plus the 4 from the cover. Everything has to be divisible by 8, you know.)

All of this makes me wonder whether this series is really more distributed by Fantagraphics than really published by them. Jordan Crane used to self-publish his work… Let’s see… Hm, didn’t the URL used to be different? Anyway, I’ve bought quite a lot of things from him directly, and his own things have pretty much the same aesthetic as Uptight. Although he screen-prints a lot of stuff instead of having it printed on an offset.

Anyway! Uptight started in 2006 and the fifth issue was published in 2015, so that’s a pretty lethargic publishing schedule. The main serial here is Keeping Two, which I’ve read before in a different format… Oh, yeah, he self-published it in a smaller pamphlet form. But wasn’t that a while ago?

Confusingly enough, Keeping Two isn’t concluded in Uptight, but I think it was in the pamphlets? So confuse.

Anyway anyway! Keeping Two is about a guy sitting at home imagining what may be happening to his girlfriend who’s late, and stressing out completely. The shifts between reality, remembrance and fantasy are really well done: It’s almost always clear what’s going on, but it’s still unnerving how fluid this all is.

Crane switches between various art styles a lot. The Keeping Two one uses nose-less faces, for instance, while his other pieces don’t. There’s a prevailing feeling of unease and melancholy in all of the stories, though, even the funny ones.

This story, about a guy who imagines (perhaps) his girlfriend being unfaithful is very handsomely rendered, and again very differently from the other pieces. However, I did find the “guy obsessively pondering his girlfriend” repetition somewhat worrying: By returning to the same theme in the same issue, the reader may well start thinking more about Crane’s motivations than the characters’.

And then there’s this really goofy and funny story about these kids (and their cat) getting lost in the air conditioning system at their school, drawn in this open, bright style.

When I reached the back cover I thought “hah! Fantagraphics put some UPC stickers on there!” and then I started scratching at it with my nails. And it’s not a sticker! It’s a perfect trompe l’oeil of a sticker. You can tell that Crane is a designer.

And then we’re on to the fifth issue, which isn’t a thin floppy at all, but a hefty squarebound one. While all the previous issues were printed on thick, absorbent paper (in Canada), this one is printed on thin, shiny paper (in South Korea). The paper is so thin that there’s a lot of bleed-through, and the whole thing feels rather read. As a physical object, I mean.

Crane’s also using these more abstract sound effects more prominently here, possibly inspired by Japanese comics? Of course, there the sound effects in Japanese comics aren’t really abstract to people who know Japanese…

This is still from the Keeping Two serial, but this is from the bit where the protagonist is chilling out by reading a book, and this part is from the book he’s reading. I think.  So we have these shifts between reality and fantasy (or rather, depicting the emotional state graphically) in the story-in-the-story, too…

And then there’s a sci-fi thing in colour. More loss and despair, of course, but that’s what we like.

Hm… but what’s Crane up to these days? Hm… Wow. That’s a much expanded version of Keeping Two as a web comic? Huh.

Oh! Wikipedia claims that Keeping Two will be getting a collected release in 2017. Well, that makes sense. I’m looking forward to it, and it’ll be the third time I’m buying it.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

The Pogostick #1-2 by Al Columbia and Ethan Persoff.

We’ve seen both Al Columbia and Ethan Persoff before in this article series, and here they turn up with a collaboration. This book has an unusual format, being smaller than standard-size comics and printed “sideways”. Sort of.

Based on the indicia and guessing, this was probably written by Columbia and drawn by Persoff.

Well… “drawn”… I guess the artwork was created in a very computerey process. It looks like each element was created once and then moved around on the screen a lot.

The story is about a very unpleasant, possibly insane guy who works the night shift at a rivet design company. So it’s what you’d expect from both Columbia and Persoff, really.

The second issue is printed much lighter, ink-wise, than the first issue: It looks slightly bleached out. I would assume that this is a printing error, but you never know…

Persoff’s approach to the artwork isn’t very appealing, I think. Of course everything looks stiff and awkward, but that can work to your advantage. The main problem is that it’s just difficult to tell these people apart, or to read their intentions when they all look like that.

For instance, in this pivotal moment, I was wondering whether the guy to the right up there was the same as…

… either of these two guys here, but he isn’t. Flipping back and forth this way to clarify stuff like that doesn’t really help much with enjoying the book.

The first issue was 32 pages and the second was 24, and I have no idea whether any further issues were planned or not. I guess you could say that the plot, as it is, had reached a natural conclusion, or they could have continued in this vein indefinitely.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

Angry Youth Comix #1-14 by Johnny Ryan.

I guess Ryan works in the gross-out humour comics tradition exemplified by people like Sam Henderson, but he’s most similar to Ivan Brunetti in his most deranged moods. Or perhaps there’s a Mike Diana influence going on here, although I think Ryan probably doesn’t really mean it the same way Diana (or Brunetti) does.

So we have a lot of outrageous violence (and sex), and plotlines that usually aren’t very… developed.

Ryan works hard at trying to be as offensive as possible, but it’s the kind where you can just picture him tittering behind the drawing board, so it’s neither that shocking or that funny. In my opinion.

In the early issues Ryan has some stories that have semi-coherent plots (like this one where Loady must get a job, so he transforms Sinus’s pets into mutant hookers (yes, that’s a semi-coherent plot)). There’s almost a sitcom like pacing to these stories.

And then there’s the one-line gags, which mostly consists of some gross absurdity. I think the point may be to be really unfunny, and then that makes it funny? It’s OK.

The most frequent target for Ryan’s fake ire is other cartoonists: I think there’s like five or six pieces in this run about how awful serious comics are. Which is fair.

I can really get behind Ryan’s hatred of stand-up comics. Or perhaps it’s just Loady’s.

Next after other comics, the most frequently recurring subject is racism.

Well, race-based jokes.

Loady’s origin is revealed.

Those are good concentration camp jokes.

For some reason or other, I stopped buying Angry Youth Comix after issue three. I picked up #7-13 easily enough this autumn, but I was completely unable to find the rest at any price. Then I had a look at Comixology (boo hiss Amazon) and all the issues were there, so I cheated and got those instead.

It’s very easy to pick up copies of comics published in the 80s and 90s, but it’s very difficult to find newer alternative comics. I guess the print runs are tiny.  You snooze you lose.

But that’s a good disclaimer up there.

The Comixology issues seem to be complete: Even the letters pages are included.

Ryan gives his perspective on working on comics.

And the ever-popular holocaust skits. (That’s Hipster Hitler, or Hipler for short.)

I’m not sure Panter is right here: Just because somebody works at their artwork doesn’t necessarily mean that they aren’t just having nihilist fun. I think.

On the other hand, there’s this story done in a completely different, 70s underground style. I didn’t think it was by Ryan first, but I couldn’t find any other name attached to the piece, so perhaps it is?

Ryan loves poking fun at Seth and the rest of the Drawn & Quarterly gang.

But that’s a Charles Burns parody (of Black Hole fame). It’s well-observed.

I think this summary of Blankets (by Craig Thompson) is way too kind, myself.

Ah, the letters pages. Half of them are about how great and outrageous Ryan is, and one third is like this. It’s a good guess.

While I’m rather on the fence about whether these comics are “good”, I think that’s the best speech balloon ever.

I may also be more than a bit burnt out by this stupid blog series. Not too many to go now… Just a few more…

Anyway, by this point all the longer stories in the series seem like improvised goofs. “Plot” morph into “plot” aimlessly, and sometimes circle back, but mostly just weave and bob.

The tenth issue is 48 pages of gags like this. Very Sam Hendersonesque.

Noooo!!!

That’s a really weak defence. The old smug “How come you’re discussing offensive comic books when there are children dying in Darfur?” gambit. It’s a moronic line to take, and may give us an indication of Ryan’s level of thoughtfulness about the entire project.

Angry Youth Comix was cancelled after issue fourteen, but a collected hardback edition was published last year. Ryan has continued to publish, and his most well-known series of books is probably the Prison Pit books, which is more violence and less jokes, if I remember correctly. I’ve only read the first book.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.