Random Thoughts

Holy Cross #1-3 written by Malachy Coney.

Well, this is an odd series. It’s written by Malachy Coney and drawn by three different people; it’s set in Belfast during the troubles; every issue is of a different size; and it’s three separate but somewhat interconnected stories.

Let’s take a look.

The first issue, shorter and wider than a standard US comic book, is drawn by Davey Francis in a quite cartoonish style somewhat at odd with what’s going on. If you can’t tell, there’s two soldiers going for a smoke and a piss in an alley, and then there’s an empty panel. Or it’s supposed to be, but the issue was printed on one-ply toilet paper, so you’re looking mostly at whatever’s on the previous or next page as much as on the current page. Bleed-through-o-rama.

(The empty panel was supposed to signify that a bomb went off.)

The dialogue sometimes seems like a stream on non sequiteurs, or otherwise foreshadowing that doesn’t really make any sense.

Yes, that’s how you draw a scene in a dark room.

Note dialogue cropped from rejected Irish greeting cards. Or, when they’ve been collected, Irish movies about… well, anything.

Oh, the story? Somebody is running around raping old women and a vigilante mob forms. Hilarity doesn’t ensue. And the big reveal at the end reveals exactly the one you thought was going to be the rapist since the first time he appeared.

Next!

It’s a short, standard-size comic book, and the artist is Chris Hogg, and it’s rather appealing. It’s got a lively line and convincing characters. The plot, however, is about a boy who has saved all his tears in a big ol’ jug and is taking the aforementioned jug of tears to the river (while his aunt wants to send him away to priest school). Did I mention the jug of tears?

SO ALLEGORY!

The lovable drunks from the first issue make a guest appearance.

It’s really hokey (let me solve the allegory for you: Gay boys shouldn’t become priests), but it’s saved by the artwork. Not too bad.

Next!

It’s a 48 page standard comic book size, drawn by Paul J. Holden. It’s very… hm… changeable. It veers between a more cartooney style and a more standard-US-alternative-action-style frequently…

See? It kinda works. It’s fine.

The story this time is about a boy (see above) who’s being beat up a lot by his father (see above) while his mother (squint above) doesn’t do much to protect him (the boy, that is (SO MUCH TRAUMA FROM THIS SCENE)). Meanwhile the boy’s even wimpier friend (see below) tries to get him to get help, but burns up in the comic’s climax to teach the boy (the one above) a lesson about life or something, because the wimpiest boys (see below) always have to die. And then the boy (see above) Mans Up.

Oh.

SPOILERS!

Our hapless drunken duo makes a reappearance… Much continuity… And here’s the final page.

That’s very Irish.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

In the Days of the Ace Rock ‘n’ Roll Club by Eddie Campbell.

I totally forgot about this one when I did the blog article on the other Fantagraphics Eddie Campbell comics… but since this one is from before the “Alec” period, and I called that article “Alic(ish)”, let’s just say I had this planned all along.

Yeah.

This is a collection of bits Campbell did in 1978-79, originally self-published as photocopied mini-comics. The environment should be familiar to readers of his later Alec comics, though: It’s about Campbell and his friends hanging out at the bar and having adventures.

But first a prologue about Campbell not being able to read modern super-hero comics any more, here exemplified by The X-Men.

So Campbell decides to send off these old comics to Fantagraphics and have them republished.

And they’re easily distinguishable as Campbell comics. You’ve got the witty repartee, the slightly oblique way things happen, the zip-a-tone, the teddy boys… But the artwork, while clear, expressive and amusing, isn’t as good as it was going to get later.

But it’s still plenty good, and the jokes are funny and the stories are good.

One particularly fun part of this book is just how out there he got with his zip-a-tone usage. Just how many different ones did he use here…

… and here? It’s very nice indeed.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

Black Hole #1-12 by Charles Burns.

This book is Charles Burns magnum opus on being a teenager, doing drugs and having sex. And, of course, having horrible mutating diseases.

He’d been doing work in this area pretty much from the beginning, but only scratching the surface. So to speak. He finally went all out here, and it’s even more astounding than I remember it being.

For one, it’s the attention to detail and the incredible consistency over the 11 year period it took to make this 12 issue series. All the issues have the same look and feel: A thick cardboard cover, glossy coated white interior paper, and all the issues open like this (with different content each time, of course):

Cover.

Endpapers, almost always showing a section of ground from the forest.

The indicia two-spread, with the indicia to the bottom left under a “before” image of one of the characters (or somebody who might be a character in the book?), and a something that reads like a quote from a character in the book to the right. From the character pictured?

Then the opening spread, with a symbol that may or may not somehow sum up the chapter you’re about to read. And then, of course, it starts.

This ritual introduction to each chapter really sets the tone, I think. It’s almost like a visual chant that bring our brains into the mood for what we’re about to read, and you know what’s coming is going to be intense.

And it is.

That’s page three and page four of the first chapter, and I admire how up-front Burns is about what this book is going to be about. These are the themes he’s going to explore: Here they are.

The shiny, white paper allows for extra-juicy black blacks, which is so important here. Every shadow is a nightmare.

And then at the end of the issue! Letters page:

WHAAA?

It’s the only mis-step in the entire series. After getting the reader trembling with horror and excitement, dropping us into this two-pager feels really weird, and not in a good way. Thankfully Burns dropped it after the second issue.

Oh, I forgot to mention: The first four issues were published by Kitchen Sink, but they went bankrupt, I think, so the last eight issues were published by Fantagraphics, the subject of this blog series…

Anyway, Burns’ almost-inhuman artwork stays incredibly consistent over the eleven years it was make. There isn’t all that much overt experimentation, but I particularly liked this interesting way of showing the scene from both sides…

… as well as the doubling of the scene later. There’s a lot of recurring imagery, pointing to almost-fathomable meaning…

Anyway! While re-reading this, I found myself so engrossed that I don’t really have a whole lot to say about this book. After issue two I have no notes whatsoever: I just sat on the couch devouring the book without any thought for witty bon mots.

So, er… It’s great? It’s really great? And I cried at the end?

But now I’m curious as to what the collected edition is like. It was such a perfect reading experience, issue by issue. The book is divided into clear chapters, and most issues have just one of these chapters. (Sometimes there’s two chapters in one issue.) So it feels quite made-for-serialisation, and would probably have looked and felt quite different if it had been created straight for the big hardback. (Which must be a bit less than 400 pages, I would think?)

Oh, they dropped the quotations. Hm… That kinda changes how it all ends… Interesting… Hey, that’s a pretty good review. Read that one instead.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

Honk #1-5 edited by Tom Mason and then Joe Sacco.

Hey! Comics aren’t just about serious stuff any more!

Honk! was Fantagraphics’ first humour magazine. It’s a mixture of comics, interviews and features: It sometimes reads a bit like a version of The Comics Journal that somebody has stuck a lot of comics pages in.

Quite a few of the pieces deal with comics formalisms, like this one by Marc Hempel. I was surprised to see him pop up in these issues (quite a few times and always with this shtick) because I don’t remember him as a humorist. And they aren’t really that successful…

Another unexpected thing (well, I just had forgotten) is how many of the more familiar British people pop up. Here we have Eddie Campbell, but there’s also Phil Elliott, Glenn Dakin, John Bagnall… Oh, is that it? I guess it’s mostly Elliott and Campbell, who appear separately and together.

The amazing Chester Brown does a totally absurd and amazing two-page story.

Bob Boze Bell with his first in a series of text/parody pieces that are somewhat hit and miss…

A 1983 Daniel Clowes story written by Mort Todd. Which reminds me: Is that a real person? I have always, somehow, assumed that that was a pen name used by somebody on the New York art/comedy scene (most likely Clowes himself), and I have no idea why. Perhaps my crack team of fact checkers can get on it?

*enough time passes for the team to type in “mort todd” in a search engine*

No! He’s a person! The editor of Cracked, even. Well, a pseudonym, but still…

As I alluded to earlier, there’s a couple of interviews in each issue, which gives Honk! a magazine feel. The time it takes to read these dominates the reading experience slightly… but they’re good interviews. This one is by Mark Waid? Is that the comics writer?

Oh! And a feature on the wonderful Mark Marek. I had forgotten that I wanted to see whether he had ever published anything other than the New Wave Comix book he did, which I inexplicably bought from somewhere when I was like 14…

Yes! I must have them all! Now! Yipes! Hercules amongst the North Americans was way expensive! Somebody should republish! Business idea!

There are also reviews here. This one of The Adventures of Roberta by Munro Ferguson is so negative that it makes me want it.

I love this panel to bits. (By Eddie Campbell and Phil Elliott.)

Alan Moore regales us with tales of his childhood in a four page piece. And then!

A wild Bill Watterson interview appears!

This is published in January 1987, so Watterson had only been doing Calvin & Hobbes for a year and a half. He seems to have put a lot of thought into the project and has amusing anecdotes about taking it around to various syndicates. (One of them suggested inserting a more merchandisable robot character they had, and Watterson refused and went to a different syndicate.)

And on the question of whether he sees himself doing Calvin & Hobbes forever:

And in the end, he stopped the strip in 1995, so he had a pretty amazing grip on all this from the start.

Mark Waid interviews Drew Friedman. I’m excerpting this bit just because of the remark about the Comics Buyer’s Guide guy. Critics! Hiss!

Issue tree has an interview with a pre-Simpsons Matt Groening, so it’s all about the wonderful Life in Hell strip. He amusingly enough says later on that he hopes that Life in Hell will earn him enough money for him to work on various undisclosed side projects. Instead Life in Hell became the side project, but that’s life.

It’s a good interview by Kim Thompson.

Groening with one of the ducks that live in his backyard.

With issue four, Honk! got a new editor, Joe Sacco (who would later go on to become the famous war journalist cartoonist).

I found it somewhat interesting that he put out a call for new contributors, and I think Honk! changed in character a bit from his first issue. Slightly less staid. And stuff like this from John Callahan:

I found David Boswell (of Reid Fleming fame) pretty amusing.

And the interview is in “feature” style (answers to questions intervowen in between the journalist’s writing) instead of the preferred Comics Journal style (question/answer transcript). Sacco would revert to the “transcript” style in all subsequent interviews, though.

In the fifth issue, Sacco announces that the magazine will change its name to Centrifugal Bumble-puppy (from Brave New World by Aldous Huxley) because, er, he didn’t like it, I think… That’s a pretty brave new magazine title.

More John Callahan.

The main interview in the final issue is with Bill Griffith. Zippy had recently gone from a weekly strip to a nationally syndicated daily strip, and Griffith explains the audience difference.

One other interesting bit here (for me, at least) is that it sounds like a Zippy movie, produced by Michael Nesmith, was a done deal? Diane Noomin and Griffith were just going to polish the script a bit, but otherwise it was definitely going to happen? Research team! Research! Stat!

Nope.

Well, on that sad note… another sad note: The reproduction on many of these pieces is atrocious. Especially the stuff reprinted (like this Campbell/Elliott thing that originally ran in the Sounds magazie) approaches illegibility more often than you’d prefer.

But all in all, I’d say the magazine is a great success. I mean, as a reader. It’s a fun, well-balanced, fulfilling reading experience. It’s perhaps a better read as it was originally published than in one evening as I did just now.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.