Random Thoughts

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.

Shadowland #1-2, Stuff of Dreams #1-3 by Kim Deitch.
The Mishkin File, The Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Waldo World #1-3 by Kim and Simon Deitch.

Kim Deitch (sometimes in collaboration with his brother Simon) has spun this long interconnected tale for decades, spread out over a number of titles and collections.

One part of this mythos is summed up on this introductory page from Shadowland: There’s a group of small aliens that record what’s been happening on Earth, and are collecting these films and beaming them off into space, aided by a group of pygmies and old-time movie stars on an island in the Pacific.

That’s a lot to take in, but there’s a lot of action in these stories.

But primarily I’d say these stories are about remembering, imagining and making connections. Which is rather like happening onto yet another of these comics: You half-remember things from previous comics, and then you go “uhm… isn’t that the guy who… and is she the one who… oh, that’s how it all fits together!”

It sure can.

Deitch’s artwork is not quite like anything else (well, except perhaps his brother’s). It has a distinct 20s-30s animation quality to it, but it’s also very, very stiff. But pleasingly so! Looking at these drawings, I get the feeling that it wouldn’t take much to make it all go quite awry, but the end effect is very endearing.

The constant diagonal hatching technique he uses gives it all an obsessive quality that fits these tales where everything is interconnected.

The Deitches present most of these stories as being true; they’re doing research into cartooning history. Ted Mishkin is the central character here, and we see a recreation here of a mural he did while in an insane asylum.

And he was there because if the other major part of this mythos: Waldo. He’s alternatively being presented as a figment of Mishkin’s imagination, or (as we later learn), he’s really a demon that only slightly deranged people can see.

Mishkin makes Waldo into a cartoon character in the 20s, but after Disney becomes huge…

… Waldo (in the cartoons) is made more bland and boring. This gives Deitch a nice way to retell parts of US cartooning history, and how early, exciting cartoons had to give way for this new, more commercial type of cartooning.

We follow the Mishkins up until the early 90s, here being smarmed by a Disney representative.

The Deitches’s (is that the correct plural possessive form?) artwork isn’t just people standing around making obscure connections: It’s also phantasmagoric visions.

Or what about this page? Nice, huh? Huh?

Reading stuff like this, where everything has paranoid connections also makes me wonder about other non-stated connections. Is Ted Mishkin’s nephew (pictured above) supposed to look that much like Simon Deitch (pictured below)?

ARE THEY THE SAME PERSON!?!?1!

Between Waldo World and the last pamphlet series here (The Stuff of Dreams), Deitch published two longer Waldo-related serials in the Zero Zero anthology. There we made the connection between Waldo and the grey men on the island, and Kim Deitch himself was introduced as a character.

In The Stuff of Dreams, he takes it one step further. Not only is he investigating Waldo (and the rest) in the storyline…

… he also calls out to the readers to help him get to the bottom of certain things.

The next issue was published two years later, and we learn that he’s gotten a lot of Waldo-related stuff, but not what he was looking for.

Instead he starts investigating an old movie serial with a companion comic strip (pictured above and printed in sepia tone). The more he digs into this, the more compelling the various strange interconnections seem.

In the third issue, several people on the letters page note that the Alias the Cat strip looked very much like Deitch’s own artwork, and that he’s just an old faker. This leads him to visit Moll Barkeley, where he makes a discovery:

He’d been copying Moll Barkeley’s artwork when he was a child! It explains everything!

Deitch also finally meets Waldo…

… and the entire things has an elegiac quality to it that’s very touching indeed.

And it seems like a quite final end to the entire Mishkin/Waldo saga.

I had to dry a little tear there.

Anyway, amazing stuff, and I think all of it is available in various collections. Some might be out of print now, though, but Ebay should be helpful.

The only thing Deitch has published after this last series is a book called The Amazing, Enlightening and Absolutely True Adventures of Katherine Whaley, which I assume may not be quite completely true. I’ve got the book, but it’s in that stack over there of unread comics…

There are comic book parts in it, but it’s mostly like this: Illustrated novel stylee.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.