Random Thoughts

Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy #1-8 edited by Joe Sacco.

Sacco announced in the last issue of the Honk! magazine that it’d be changing its name to Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy, but it did more than that. The page count dropped from 48 to 32, the interviews disappeared and the text features mostly disappeared, and a new roster of regular artists were brought aboard.

So Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy (I’ve put the name into a register so that I don’t have to type it all the time, thereby saving an estimated 32% of the time it will take to write this blog article) is a quite different magazine than Honk! was.

For one, Sacco has an editorial, I mean manifesto, in every magazine, with a clear political direction. Or possibly not. But the most important change is the tone:

It’s mostly very silly stuff. And I love silly stuff, so it’s right up my alley. (Gill girl by Matthew Finch.)

*snicker* That’s Organ Trail by Craig Bartlett. And that’s another thing: Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy has a handful of artists that appear in most of the issues, so it has an ensemble feel… Perhaps Sacco was going after a Mad Magazine kind of thing? JR Williams, Michael Dougan, William Clark, Jim Siergey and Jerzy Szostek have a couple of pages every month.

That’s a nice thing, because most of those people are pretty funny, but it means that there is less room for surprising wild appearances.

And it’s a very XY list of contributors.

Oh, yeah: Politics. This is during the twilight years of the Reagan administration, so things are pretty dour.

At least somebody tries to do something! (From a piece by Joe Sacco.)

But it’s mostly pretty absurd.

And then Beto Hernandez drops by for a page. (Jaime does a cover later in the series…)

The letters page (for the first few issues) are dominated by people who hate the “Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy” name, and the other half just think it’s… not very good. That changes in later issues, as I assume the people who were expecting more Honk! gave up…

Not everything is hilarious, though. I think “US Fightin’ Worms” is a good idea, but the artwork is pretty basic.

I love Matthew Finch’s somewhat “deranged photocopier” look…

And speaking of the photocopier, there’s an early Tom Tomorrow piece that takes up half the space in number five, and is the longest piece to run in Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy. It’s called “The World of Tomorrow”, which is the name Tomorrow would use for his syndicated strip four years later (I think that’s the timeline). He would still use the xerox, but there would be less cut-outs from ads…

Oh, yeah, every issue comes with a spiffy motto.

And, no, not all the jokes are winners.

But you have to love things like this. Yes, what happens afterwards is what you’d expect.

The pope comes to visit Mark Landman’s cat.

Hey! Krystine Kryttre! She also did the great cover to the final issue…

Yes, the final issue, because:

Ouch. That has to be pretty discouraging, but at least he didn’t just throw in the towel. The final issue is as good as any, and has a few surprises, like this early piece by Evan Dorkin, done in a style quite unlike what he’d get known for later:

He’s the world famous creator of Milk & Cheese, Dairy Products Gone Bad, of course.

And Craig Maynard drops by to whine about how horrible it is to work in retail. Yes, it’s so horrible to have customers that aren’t aware of where everything is.

But it’s over! Final issue! It was a quite successful run, I think. As an anthology it had cohesion and a vision (of sorts). Anthologies fail when they turn into a jumble of one-thing-after-another, and Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy avoided that.

On the back cover Fantagraphics announces Joe Sacco’s solo anthology which would soon follow. I remember it being very good, but I guess that a re-read later in this blog series will tell.

Of course, these days Sacco is a world-famous cartoonist journalist.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

Frederick & Eloise: A Love Story by Brian Biggs.

Here’s another pretty odd one, both in format (slightly wider than high) and content.

There’s two panels per page and not too many words, so it’s a very quick read.

The plot, as it is, doesn’t really go the way you think it’s going, which is nice… I guess what I’m saying is that it reminds me slightly of Ben Katchor’s work, and that’s fine by me.

Geez. What a meaningless article.

Biggs did a few other short comics works, but his main line of work seems to be doing children’s books, which doesn’t really come as much of a surprise after reading this book.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

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.