Random Thoughts

Fox Comics Special
Fox Comics #24-27

Edited by David Vodicka.

The first twenty-three issues of Fox Comics were published in Australia, but they apparently wanted to get wider distribution by publishing through Fantagraphics. And that worked: Just see, I bought those issues.

I’ve been trying to find the Aussie-only issues over the years, and here’s the total result:

Yes, a grand total of three issues, but the editorial in the first Fantagraphics issue (which reprints stuff from the previous issues) helps explain why:

Yikes. If the first dozen issues had a print run of 200, the chances of me ever getting to read them seems pretty slim. The subsequent issues seem conceivable, though, even if they never seem to pop up on Ebay, in my experience. (Although searching for them there is pretty tricky, since there’s an American old published also called Fox Comics…)

Anyway, the editorial explains frankly about what the Australian comics scene was like in the 80s.

I re-read the three non-Fantagraphics issues I had, and it seemed like the magazine had taken a journey from being all funny all the time to try to also feature more ambitious and serious work. Lazarus Dobelsky and Ian Eddy’s work is in the former camp, but being funny isn’t all bad either, eh?

Dave Hodson’s oblique framing reminds me a lot of Rick Geary’s early work. The drawing styles are very different, but still there’s a similar eerie effect. It works very well.

But perhaps the most distinctive stylist here is Chloe Brookes-Kenworthy. In her strip in Fox Comics #13 she’s using traditional panel borders with gutters between the panels, but in her work in all the Fantagraphics issues, she drops the gutters, and later she also drops the panel borders themselves, just using obsessively different hatching in each panel to separate the panels.

Combined with sometimes ambiguous text (never dialogue) floating over the images, it gives it all a non-premediated feeling, like we’re connecting directly to her. It’s a very strange and pleasant reading experience.

And it’s not all Australians, either. Here’s an excerpt by New Zealanders Kupe and Dylan Horrocks, but there’s also a solid British contingent in all the issues (Eddie Campbell, Glenn Dakin, Ed Pinsent).

There’s only one continuing serial story here, and it’s The Tattooed Man by Dave Hodson and Greg Gates. It’s a fantasy, sort of, centred around a carnival. It’s not completed by the time the magazine is cancelled, but it looks very pretty.

Neale Blanden’s pieces are, perhaps, well-observed, but are they funny? Perhaps loathing of this kind has to be processed a bit more before being committed to the page to really work. I think.

By issue twenty-four, most of the pieces are of the “serious” kind, and the mix really works. Trevs Phoenix… that name seems familiar… Oh, he’s done a number of mainstream comics.

Another Chloe Brookes-Kenworthy page, now without panel borders. Nice, eh?

Chris Reynolds (of Mauretania fame) and Rian Hughes. Which reminds me: I really have to lay my hands on all the issues of Mauretania. It’s not only the wonderful Monitor series by Reynolds (mostly reprinted by now), but also pieces by Carol Swain that I don’t think have appeared anywhere else.

Ooh! There’s a solo comic. Gotta have! Oops. That cover looks really familiar… Yup, I’ve already got that somewhere here.

So many of the pieces in Fox Comics are about unhappy childhoods. You get the feeling that growing up as a wimpy boy in Australia may be even more harrowing than elsewhere…

Or perhaps they’re just more sensitive. (Panel by Tim Richie and Kupe.)

And, of course, there’s the Neale Blanden approach to the issue. Which I kinda like.

Dean Gorrisen’s childhood traumas are very tangible (and it’s an effective piece).

Meanwhile, Glenn Dakin is traumatised by Haley Campbell eating all his food. Also note that Fantagraphics decided to print this issue on what I assume to be tracing paper: You not only see clearly what’s on the other side of the page, but also get a good impression of the next four pages.

In issue twenty-seven the editor announces that Fox Comics is being cancelled, but that there will be one more issue. That didn’t happen, but it sounds like a fun topic.

And as a way to finish this article, here’s a Glenn Dakin Krazy Kat homage. It sometimes seems like half of alternative comics artists have been inspired by Herriman.

After this magazine was cancelled, all the featured Brits went on publishing elsewhere, but I have no idea what happened to most of the Australian artists. I’ve visited Australia a couple of times the past few years, and I’ve visited comics shops. And while there seems to be a number of people producing comics now, I can’t recall many of the Fox Comics contributors showing up in my comics haul from Canberra or Melbourne.

In particular, googling now I can’t find any further published works by Chloe Brookes-Kenworthy, which is disappointing.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

Christmas with Superswine by Gary Fields.

This is rather weird. It sounds like a special edition of a running series, but Superswine wasn’t published as its own series until three years later. But perhaps the point was just to publish something seasonal.

The indicia says that it was published in February, which sounds typical for Fantagraphics around this time. I don’t think any Critters Christmas issues, for instance, were published before March the following year.

The main story is a take-off on the Clement C. Moore Xmas thingie….

… and it’s… er… that’s a pretty representative gag. The rest of the issue is also Xmas themed:

And…

Gary Fields was the guy who did Enigma Funnies in the Threat magazine that was cancelled around this time.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

Flash Marks by Carel Moiseiwitsch.

This is a collection of short pieces that have previously appeared in various anthologies in the 80s. It is, unfortunately, the only major collection of her work, and it isn’t very major. I mean, it’s bigly excellent, as the vernacular goes, but it’s just 32 pages. Magazine size, though.

The stories are short and angry and to the point. The artwork isn’t quite like anything else: It’s a kind of neo-expressionism, I guess, and I think you could see parallels to artists like Caro and Sue Coe, but it seems to come from a different place.

It’s more Picasso than Gary Panter. Here’s she’s illustrating a CIA handbook for rebels, and it just packs such an emotional punch.

She seems to be using scratch-board for some of these drawings, but not all of them…

Here she draws Dennis P. Eichhorn getting a blow job, so I would guess this has been reprinted from a Real Stuff issue.

She hasn’t published much after this collection, I think, and was most recently spotted in 2009.

Somebody should publish a proper retrospective. There must be more of her work floating around than is here. I seem to remember stumbling onto more of her jwork than is featured here.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

The Tell-Tale Heart and Other Stories by Edgar Allen Poe.

From what fetid hell did this magazine arise?

It reprints three Edgar Allen Poe stories (that you’ve probably read before), illustrated in this fashion:

The borders are repeated throughout each story, so this magazine has three borders, one cover and twelve illustrations (by Daryl and Josef Hutchinson).

If this is a way to ask the public “will this do?”, I think the answer is “no”.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

Jim #1-4
Jim vol 2 #1-6
Jim Special: Frank’s Real Pa
Frank #1-4

By Jim Woodring.

Jim (the series, not the author) started off as a collection of material that Jim (the author, not the series) had published in the 1982-86 period. The first four issues are magazine sized… and very strange.

The dedication in the first issue is probably a joke, but it’s rather apt.

Har de har. Anyway, I was 17-ish when I read the first issue of Jim, and I clearly remember how exhilirating and inspiring it all was. You have these gorgeous, yet squicky pages:

But the bulk of the first two issues are pages and pages of stuff like this:

Stories that seem to be written semi-automatically with little regard for consistency, but funny and disturbing at the same time. I remember doing some writing in the same style at the time (fortunately all gone now), and here this stuff was being published in a real magazine.

There are also some more traditional-looking comics pages here, and they are more overtly dream based than the text pages.

And here’s the first of the Jimland Novelties. I assumed at the time that it was all a joke, but reading these pages now, I can see how all these could perhaps be real items. And in later letters pages, Woodring claims that they took a long time to produce when somebody ordered them, so perhaps they were?

The Big Red stories appear occasionally throughout the Jim issues, and are probably the most realistic anthropomorphic cats in comics.

The first two issues were published a few months apart, and then there was a one year pause before the third issue, and then almost a two year hiatus before the fourth and final issue.

The two final issues also drastically reduced the number of text pages: A couple in the third, and none in the fourth. Instead almost all the stories are now in this style, and deal almost exclusively with retelling dreams. At least that’s what I assume they are, because the way Jim’s (the character, not the magazine) thoughts shift emotionally between the third and the fourth panel is just like being inside one of my dreams.

There’s a three year pause between the final issue of the magazine-sized first Jim series and the standard comic book sized second Jim series. During that time, he’d published the acclaimed Frank in the River story and the Tantalizing Tales series (co-created with Mark Martin) at Tundra. But then he’s back at Fantagraphics for another go with Jim Volume 2.

All issues are on shiny paper and is a mixture of black and white and colour work. Above we see another dream sequence. I can relate.

Running text under the horrifying, horrifying manhog story above was apparently the major controversy of the day.

For the third issue, Mark Landman did what I assume to be computer 3D modelling of the Frank story… or perhaps just very computer-assisted colouring. It’s pleasantly weird.

Woodring had used variations of this shading technique for a while, but I think this story in the fourth issue is the first instance where it looks just the way it’s going to look from now on: Stark and almost inhuman. It gets more and more regular as time goes on, and you can still see that it’s drawn by a hand here, but it’s getting there.

In the sixth issue Woodring announces that Jim (the series, not the character) is being put on the back burner. No subsequent issues were released, but the aforementioned Frank series did a few months later.

I don’t know what he’s been persuaded to do, or by whom. Looking at his bibliography, there doesn’t seem to be any major work from this era? I may just be blanking here, and this work was published later, but I can’t find much (other than the Frank issues discussed below), until the Frank book The Lute String in 2005 and the amazing Weathercraft in 2010.

I must be missing something.

Anyway, the next thing to be published is Jim Special #1: Frank’s Real Pa. It was originally published in the Whole Earth Catalog, one panel per page. It was reformatted some before being collected to make the panels fit better.

I didn’t realise that “Frank’s Real Pa” would work as a pun until I thought about it real hard, and then it was “d’oh”. But apparently the pun wasn’t intended (no pun intended), but instead refers to this:

Are those two bristly looking guys Frank’s real and faux pas?

Yes! Because that’s just how Frank’s going to look when he gets old, and we all resemble our parents.

Mystery! Solved!

Anyway anyway, the Frank series lasted for four issues, and had pretty much the same format as the Jim II series. Only very Frank now.

This comic was later reprinted in a book that accompanied a Bill Frisell CD. Or the other way around. I saw Frisell in concert a few years back (well, I’ve seen him dozens of times) where he accompanied a number of silent films. At least one of them were animated Frank cartoons. Very nice, I seem to recall, and the place was absolutely packed.

By the end of the Frank run, the “novelty” section had grown less… novel. Well, all good things apparently have to end for some reason or other…

The major feature of the last two issues of Frank was a serialisation of a new, long story called Frank’s High Horse. I can’t find anything on the web about it being finished or collected, which is a shame, because it was (well, duh) very good.

Jim Woodring is still publishing, and everything he does is still wonderful.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.