Random Thoughts

Death & Candy #1-4 by Max Andersson.

Max Andersson is a Swedish cartoonist who make nightmarish stream of consciousness comics.

Andersson’s style takes me back to early 80s New York newave comics: Macabre and funny stuff in a blender. Here’s Car Boy, one of Andersson’s more recognisable characters.

The print quality of the first issue is variable. Some of the pages look washed out, while others are fine.

I think most of the material for Death & Candy was new, but this one is a reprint from a French magazine. Andersson is a contributor to anthologies all over the world, which might help explain the less-than-annual schedule Death & Candy was published at.

Andersson’s mixture of grotesque and sweet is endearing, but the main attraction is perhaps his gorgeous artwork with those juicy inks…

The stories mostly don’t really go anywhere, but when you’re having this much fun, who not stay put? This feels like a very dream-inspired apartment…

The title of the comic book is Death & Candy, who are two characters that Andersson had used earlier. Hm… I just read a bunch of their adventures, but where? Hm… Oh, yeah, I was in Sweden the other month and got one of his collections. Anyway, the only appearance of these characters in this series are for four pages in issue three, which is slightly perverse. But it’s a good title, anyway.

The last couple of issues are dominated by a collaboration with Lars Sjunnesson, “Bosnian Flat Dog”, which is even more stream-of-consciousness than Andersson’s solo work. Here they explain that they’ve forgotten what the narrative was all about.

The artwork is messier in the collaboration than in the solo stuff, too, but it’s rather funny.

Andersson is still publishing stuff today, and I’ll have to get that book, I think.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

Spicecapades edited by Queen Itchie.

By 1999, I would have thought that Spice Mania had subsided? So it was probably too late publish this to cash in, but perhaps that wasn’t the point, anyway…

So what’s up here? If not a cash grab, is it an honest appreciation or ironic appropriation?

“No thanks to all you comic book snobs”, and then “with nothing to read but Ziggy books”. If that’s not comic book snobbery, I don’t know what is.

There are several essays here, and most of them have some kind of variation of those paragraphs: People who like comic books suck (which is generally true, I think), and… and… somehow that makes the Spice Girls important. Somehow.

This is apparently a drawing of the editor, who may or may not be called Jenny Nixon? It’s all so confusing.

Beto Hernandez does a page…

Why so defensive? If you like the Spice Girls, why spend all this time moaning about people who don’t? (Moaning by Peter Landau.)

Sarcasm by Kaz.

The best piece in the book is by Peter Bagge. His love for pop music in general and the Spice Girls in particular is unabashed and uncomplicated.

A center fold poster by Danny Hellman.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

Poot #1-4 by Walt Holcombe.

The last three issues of this series are in a format that’s a bit smaller than standard-size US comics, while this first one is very small indeed.

Around this time, there seemed to be a lot of comics in vaguely this style: Slick, cartoony, anthropomorphic and wistful tales of love and friendship (i.e., Goodbye Chunky Rice and… er… you know). This one is more than a bit weird:

Here we see the snail character doing self-harm by rubbing against a salt lick.

The main story (about a bug and a water nymph?) is apparently somewhat autobiographical.

The final issue concludes with this page by Penny van Horn, which is an interesting thing to do.

Anyway, while it’s all very nice and wistful, I must admit to being rather confused most of the time on a page-to-page basis about just what exactly is happening. On the left-hand page we see the snail (in his car) colliding, and then pressing a button that apparently fires an ejector seat. (We can tell by the “EJECT!” sound effect.)

So he flies off into the night… and then we get a shot of the car that then explodes? And a tire goes off to the left? OK?

And then we see a big animal with two lovebirds on its tail. We get the sound effect “LAND!” Is the snail landing on the animal? No… doesn’t seem like it? So what’s landing? The bug is whistling? Why? Then the nymph approaches… and the bug pays somebody who has a hat in their hand…

OOOH! Right. That’s a flying squirrel? Who flies around as a service? Right. So the snail has nothing to do with this after all.

I found that every seven pages was like this, where it was not immediately obvious what’s going on; you have to decipher the action a lot.

And so it’s over.

Holcombe hasn’t published a lot of comics. His brief King of Persia graphic novel won the Eisner award in 1997, and ten years later his Things Just Get Away From You book was published.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

Rollercoaster #1-2 by Rich Tomasso.

Tomasso had previously published the Clover Honey graphic novel at Fantagraphics (and the Cannibal Romance series at Eros), but Rollercoaster seems like an attempt at creating one of those single author anthologies that Fantagraphics published so many of.

The major story in the first issue is about a girl who hasn’t slept in four days, and is delivering pizza on her year off from school. Tomasso really captures that sense of being overly tired, where you’re slightly out of it, and very irritable. The result is a tense, taut little story.

His artwork is pretty stiff, but I think it’s quite pleasing to look at. It reminds me a bit of European stylists like Joost Swarte, from certain angles…

And speaking of angles, I wonder whether some of these images were computer assisted? That looks quite a bit like a 3D model.

There’s a couple of backup features, too. I particularly like this one, drawn in a very different style: Harold Gray via Chester Brown.

The second issue is different. Instead of a magazine, it’s a square little thing, somewhat bigger than a CD booklet.

It’s wordless, and is mostly a series of visual associations.

Well, I’m not a critic, and I don’t agree.

Tomasso has gone on to create a number of comics, mostly in noir adjacent genres. His current series are at Image Comics. I’m currently enjoying his She Wolf series.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.