Random Thoughts

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.

Meat Cake #0-17 by Dame Darcy.

I’m going to try to write this blog article without using the word “quirky”.

Oops!

I remember getting these comics about once a year throughout the 90s, and every time I was all “yay!”. It’s an utterly original comic book, filled with strange adventures and loopy, obsessive artwork.

There are also these text pieces written without a lettering guide. This is from issue zero, which is a Fantagraphics reprinting of the first, self-published version of Meat Cake. (Originally from 1991, reprinted in 1996.)

Darcy often writes longer texts in this rather exhausting manner. Trying to read these things is… trying, but I really enjoy the way that almost every single ink stain that’s printed in these comics come from Darcy’s pen. This is the indicia page. The only things that are not handmade by her is the Fantagraphics logo (the 80s version) on some covers, and pictures of Dame Darcy that are featured on many of the back covers.

Darcy’s artwork is so lovely. It’s very Victorian and luxurious. It reminds me slightly of Richard Sala, but probably more because he’s also referencing Victorian artwork than as a direct influence.

While I was always happy to find a new Meat Cake issue in my hands, it was always guaranteed to put me to sleep. Not because it’s boring. I think it’s because the logic and rhythm of her stories are quite similar to how my brain works when falling asleep. I mean, look at the monologue in this panel. Look at it.

The only other comic book that reliably puts me to sleep is the beloved Krazy Kat, and it’s for similar reasons.

So I wondered whether re-reading these comics would put me to sleep again, and… they did. A couple of times.

Darcy doesn’t include too many panoramas like this, but when she does, they’re luxurious. This was later available as a print.

The letter pages are filled with oddball letters, as you’d expect, but there’s also wise guys like this.

Love those frames around every single panel.

Yes, that woman has a tablet coming out of her throat, gushing blood. Her name is Strega Pez, and that’s the only way she can talk: By ejecting giant inscripted Pez tablets out of her neck.

She’s talking to her friend Richard Dirt here. Other notable characters are Effluvia, Hindrance, Perfidia, Friend the Girl and Wax Wolf.

Dame Darcy has the best character names.

While quite a few of her pieces are funny, most of them are not straight-up jokes, but there’s a few, like this very pretty one.

Helena Harvilicz makes an appearance, like she did in that Pat Moriarty story.

Darcy has ads for a bewildering number of items and services that she does, like a palm reading service, dolls, lots of singles and videos, and so on. She also had a rock band, and is an actress, and had a long-running show on cable access in New York.

She invented Kickstarter a couple of decades too early.

I don’t know whether any of these films were ever completed…

Alan Moore wrote a story for issue nine. I have no idea how that happened, but it’s quite instructive to contrast the result with one of her own stories. While Moore seems to follow her general mode, it’s clear how much more distanced and cold Moore is compared to Darcy. Moore is funny, but it’s an easy, dismissive absurdity, instead of one that contributes to a world-view. Darcy has a selfish shellfish, but it works in the context. A “simple-minded button prospector” can’t really go anywhere interesting.

Eek! For two horrible issues, Fantagraphics includes a house ad, and it’s incredibly jarring. So digital in this stream of organic.

We’re now up to 2001 (and issue 11), and Darcy includes a growing number of people she collaborates with. All of them are on the scripting side, except this story, which is drawn by “Tomasso and Nicolao” (no first names given). It’s also pretty jarring.

Darcy reacts to 9/11..

We’re now up to 2004, and issues are published on less than a yearly basis. The indicia stubbornly claims that it’s published “thrice yearly”, as it has from the start, and it’s never been true, I think.

Darcy’s artwork changes a bit during the last few years. While she’s previously been very consistent, she seems to be trying out other, less detailed art styles.

Fantagraphics switches over to thicker, white, luxurious paper for the last four issues.

Darcy simplifies the frames around some of the panels quite radically.

Is that where the band The xx took their name from? Probably!

Fantagraphics released a hardback collection of all this stuff under the name Meat Cake Bible earlier this year. The collective comics world response seemed to be “whaa? it cannot be!”, because the assumption seems to be that this work was so special that surely nobody outside comics-world would be able to get it.

It’s been reviewed all over the place, and everybody seems very positive about it. Sean T. Collins included it on his list of the best graphic novels of all time. (It’s a great list; all the books included are good.)

Which I think is like “duh”, because it’s a unique, amazing body of work, and anybody who buys it can also feel a bit of frisson at being quirky enough to “get it”.

Aargh! I used the forbidden word!

I also found this interview quite interesting.

Dame Darcy has a web site where you can keep up with all her projects.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

Tales Designed to Thrizzle #1-8 by Michael Kupperman.

I’m a bit exhausted. Laughing so hard your eyes are streaming for two or three hours takes a toll.

Kupperman used to work under the pen name “P. Revess”, and published pieces in various anthologies throughout the 90s, I think. His method hasn’t really changed much: He starts with an absurd premise (above we see an ad for pubic hair stencils) and then sees it through seriously.

Or adds further lunacy until we reach the end. That Picasso page up there is quite typical: We have a historical person plopped into a very strange situation, and then things spiral out of control.

It’s difficult to say just what Kupperman’s art technique is here. It looks like he’s tracing pictures or drawings (like Picasso’s head), but he’s certainly drawing the obsessive hatching himself.

I could just go on including page after page, because it’s all so wonderful that I just about burst while re-reading these comics tonight, but I’m not going to do that. I’ll just note that Kupperman is amazing at doing something like the above, and then returning to it later, and that unexpected return makes it all cumulatively insanely funny.

In addition to the “story” pieces (that vary in length between a page and a handful of pages), we also have a lot of these parody ad pages, and they’re also pitch perfect.

While Kupperman mostly does the “trace the figures and hatch the background” style, there’s quite a few departures from that style, like this woodcut-inspired look.

Kupperman isn’t very prolific. The issues of Tales Designed to Thrizzle were published on an almost-yearly schedule. During that time, Kupperman also worked on Mark Twain’s Autobiography, though.

Mark Twain and Albert Einstein, detectives, are perhaps the characters he uses most in this series, while his 90s characters Snake’n’Bacon (who are also detectives) and Mannister, the barrister who can turn into a bannister, make relatively few appearances.

Text pieces like the above appear frequently. Hm. I don’t think any of the water (that I was drinking (I was feeling dehydrated after laughing so much)) that spouted out of my nose landed on the page…

Anyway, by this point (issue five), Kupperman starts featuring these apparently non-redrawn pieces. It looks quite a lot like it might be panels from old comics that Kupperman has added new text to.

In issue six, Kupperman moved to full colour, and the artwork changes radically. The figures seem like they’ve been taken from old comics and shuffled around in the computer, and then colours are added. I really liked the old trace-and-hatch look, so I was a bit disappointed.

There’s a couple of fumettis in here, too.

The pieces that aren’t snipped from other comics are drawn in a very basic manner. It’s still very funny, but perhaps it means that he’s tired of, or doesn’t have time to draw comics any more?

Anyway, that’s it. 250 pages of absurdly funny absurdities. The series has been released as a two-volume collection from Fantagraphics.

The Twain autobiography (which is also very funny) was released in 2010. After that, Kupperman doesn’t seem to have published any comics work, but he created something called “Pirate Nightmare Vice Explosion: Inherited Remnants of an Amateur Dadaist’s Library”, which seems to be a book of magazine clippings.

And I can’t find a single review of it. Odd. I didn’t know it existed, but I’ve bought a copy now.

He’s got t-shirts here (and I’ve got the literature one, just look):

Not me, podner.

But I can’t seem to find any indication that he’s working on new stuff.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

Minimum Wage #1-10, Monkey Jank by Bob Fingerman.

Fantagraphics had published an introductory Minimal Wage graphic novel before starting this series, which is perhaps an unusual publishing strategy.

Fingerman had also published a number of porn comics through Eros before this series.

Minimum Wage is about a guy who’s a comic book artist, living in New York, struggling with the normal young people stuff. In tone, it’s very much like the HBO drama/comedies that started over a decade later (think Louis CK and all the rest of them): It’s endless kvetching about nothing, and nobody talks like actual human beings. (The “irregardless” stuff up there is a pet peeve of Fingerman’s.)

Fingerman has a line that doesn’t vary a lot in thickness, and in the beginning you get a quite a lot of these panels that seem to have a uniform level of greyness to them. My eyes sort of skid around a lot.

Some of the dialogue is physically painful to read. I mean that literally, actually.  The 90s computer lettering doesn’t help any.  It’s so incongruous with something that mechanical next to Fingerman’s organic lines.

Hm… that hair looks vaguely Chester Brownish…

I guess what I’m getting at here is that I just don’t like Minimum Wage a lot, and I’m trying to not be such an asshole about it. But this drawing pretty much sums up everything I find janky about Fingerman’s artwork. Where to start… OK, basically, they all look like deformed gnomes. Their limbs are stick-like, but they wear clothes that somehow cover these sticks and make them look like almost normal human beings. Their heads, hands and feet are freakishly big.

OK, I’ll just stop there with the dissection. I have such a disconnect from his artwork that it stops me from enjoying whatever good points there may be in his work.

That’s not to say that he’s not an original artist. I’ve never seen anybody use this technique to this extent before: Having people wear black clothes and then draw in the lines of the clothes using, er, white ink? Is that a thing? It’s a peculiar effect. I mean, in nature people don’t have black outlines, but we accept that convention, so why not white lines on black clothes?

There’s a lot of inside baseball stuff in issue four, where our heroes visit a convention to look at the mouth-breathing comics fans (and sell some comics). And meet up with various people who are given funny pseudonyms and we’re supposed to mirthfully guess who Fingerman is caricaturing. That’s Barry Blair, I guess? I’ve never read any of his stuff.

Every issue of Minimum Wage includes at least a couple of pages of other artists doing their versions of the characters from the book. It’s fun. Here’s Ted McKeever.

Paul Chadwick decodes the convention story.

Yeah, it’s impossible to live in New York and be a liberal. Nobody does that.

Did I mention that the characters talk a lot?

The series has an “issue of the week” kinda feel to them. One of the episodes is about abortion, this one is about gay bashing (sort of; that’s a man and a woman being thrown a bottle at), and so on.

By issue nine, Fingerman reduces the number of pages of the main feature (due to Minimum Wage not selling a lot and having to take commercial jobs), and adds backup stories by other artists. First out is Pat McEown.

In issue ten we have a hilarious bit by Dean Haspiel. Somebody should seriously get their act together and collect all his bits and pieces from all over the place.

And in issue ten Fingerman announces that he’s going to stop announcing Minimum Wage until it’s pencilled, and no more issues were published after that.

Which leaves us with Monkey Jank. It’s a post-apocalyptic humour series originally published by Penthouse Comix. Fingerman says in the notes that while putting the issue together, he decided to dump most of the pieces that had originally been published, and created some new ones instead.

Fingerman has continued to publish through a wide variety of publishers. He re-started Minimum Wage (via Image) last year (I think). I’ve read it, and it’s quite different in tone from the original series.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.