Random Thoughts

The Adventures of Captain Jack #1-12
A*K*Q*J #1

By Mike Kazaleh.

Back in the 80s, Fantagraphics published a number of funny animal titles. This one is one of the funnier funny animal titles.

Kazaleh’s day job is as a storyboarder for animated films. It’s kinda obvious looking at some of the scenes, but it’s not all slapstick. Or much, even.

The first issue is pretty gag oriented:

Har de har. The first half was also apparently drawn with magazine size in mind — it’s too wide, so he had to put a filler down at the bottom. (And the reduced size makes the letters kinda hard to read. Lawn: Get off it.)

Slapstick! But starting with issue two, things veer off in a different, more soap opera like direction. And somebody’s thinking naughty thoughts:

What could this “it” he’s talking about be!?

*gasp* Issue 5:

I remember this from back then. Various comic shop owners had gotten arrested for selling comics with sexual content, and publishers were reacting to this by slapping “for mature readers” on anything that was likely to get anybody arrested. It was controversial: Some people felt this was akin to saying “hey, this is porn!”. So here’s the offending page:

Aww. But I guess this makes Captain Jack more furry than funny animal…

Anyway, by this point, Captain Jack isn’t much about funny space heists any more. Instead it love and heartbreak and friendship and stuff.

The artwork is as charming as ever, but the other thing I wanted to draw your attention to here is the paper the book is printed on. In the late 80s, Fantagraphics was experimenting with a variety of paper qualities, and for a while they settled on this thing.

It’s nice and white, but it’s so so so see-through. Not only does the image printed on the other side of the sheet peek through, but you can see the page after that page, too. It’s just madness. I remember feeling really put off by this penny pinching, even back then.

But there’s a reason:

Captain Jack is selling so poorly that they’re switching to an even cheaper paper. But I think the newsprint is nicer, anyway:

The paper isn’t white, but there’s no bleed through.

Oh! This isn’t Paper Quality News Weekly, is it? There’s a comic going on.

The last handful of Captain Jack issues is very down to Earth. (See! Joke! They’re on Earth, and it’s… Oh, forget it.)

It’s quite a way to go from having space jinx to sadly sitting in a laundromat. Perhaps the financial situation of the comic is being reflected in its contents…

And then it ends with no resolution to the storyline. Re-reading this again, I must say I feel a bit let down. I mean, it’s a nice reading experience. I like the characters, I enjoy the art, it’s amusing… But it’s a let down. So let’s meet Hyper Al on the final back cover:

Or final? One special a couple of years later:

Will we get the plot resolved? Huh? Huh?

No, it’s 40 pages of jokes from Oldee Thymees.

Kazaleh has published a number of one-offs since finishing Captain Jack, and is still working in animation last time I heard.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

The Adventures of Mr. Pyridine #1 by M. Singh

Fantagraphics published a large number of what you might perhaps call “aspirational series”. That is, they aspired to be series, but I think everybody involved could guess that there would most likely be no more than one issue.

Perhaps I should gather a few up in one larger post… Or not.

Anyway, this is a book with very little information available. The artist is identified only as M. Singh, and the stories are old school surrealist pieces. Some funny:

And some unnerving:

Googling a bit leads me to this: The full name is apparently Mahendra Singh and he’s still active.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

Particle Dreams #1-6
Keif Llama: Xenotech #1-6

By Matt Howarth.

Matt Howarth is best known for his The Annoying Post Bros series. The protagonists there run around different universes killing people and having fun. I never quite warmed up to that concept, although I’ve probably read most of the issues by now.

These comics, on the other hand, center mostly around a government agent, Keif Llama, who goes around various planets fixing problems with the locals. (Or rather, in most of the stories it turns out that the problem is An Evil Corporation, and she fixes the problem on behalf of the locals.)

But there’s a lot to enjoy here.

Howarth’s artwork can be uneven, but there’s something about the way he piles up all these textures next to each other that’s really attractive. Cross-hatching every which way… It’s pretty neat.

Back in the mid 80s, Fantagraphics was publishing quite a lot of genre books in addition to their more serious ones. A few years ago, somebody wrote an article about how this “ground level” kind of work had just disappeared: On the one hand, there was super-heroes, horror and porn (and porno super-hero horror), and on the other hand, you had serious literary stuff.

The fun, non-insulting genre stuff had gone away. But the past few years has seen a revival of sorts — mostly over at Saga Comics. I mean Image Comics, as they probably formally call themselves. (Prophet, Saga, Descender, Saga, Southern Cross, Saga, Saga.) But it’s all a bit more soap opera like and a bit more serious than this:

Fight scene! That’s the way to do it.

I’m quite taken with his way of (sometimes) just describing what the words would have been. And last but not least: All the aliens. The aliens are really great.

How can you not love these stampeding aliens?

And from the moebius strip strip, where everybody’s waiting in an infinite line:

However, the stories are problematic. More than a few of them end with a sense of “Huh? That’s the end? Did I miss something?” And most of them feature a genocide of some sort or another. After a while, it starts grating on you, just like it does in the more thoroughly violent Post Bros book.

After six magazine-sized issues, the title changed, and the format was reduced, and refocused entirely on Keif Llama. (The name is apparently a pun on “Keith Laumer”, who also wrote sci-fi short stories about bureaucrats who travels around various planets fixing problems.)

Howarth’s colouring technique is pretty special:

Instead of first colouring, and then separating the colours before printing, he consistently does the colouring directly on separate layers. This means that he’s really drawing each cover four times over, once in each colour. (I mean, he’s really drawing in black and white and imagining how it’ll all look when it’s printed in the four colour press.) It’s a pretty unique look.

Like I said earlier, the artwork is frustratingly uneven. Some pages are great, an on other pages he just drops the backgrounds:

And the plots… Oh, dear. Here’s a pretty bad one:

They go into a null field (used to shield the craft from radiation) to enjoy the darkness, and then it turns out that the button to open the door doesn’t work, because it’s a null field and nothing much can exit or enter the field. The engineers who built it didn’t think of that.

*sigh*

Anyway, the Keif Llama book lasted for six issues.

Matt Howarths is still publishing comics, but mostly self-publishing in digital form. I have not read any of the digital publications, but looking at the catalogue, I see several things that look attractive. And I’ve got a tablet to read them on, so I think I’ll give them a whirl.

[Edit: I just did, and it’s a kinda wonky interface.  These are DRM-free PDFs, which is good, but the one I bought is formatted as five-page PDFs inside a ZIP file.  And they can’t be concatenated, because they’re “encrypted”.  I can read them fine on the laptop, but I don’t want to be futzing around on the tablet with all these small files…  Disappointing.]

He does make enjoyable comics, even if they are a bit annoying at times.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

Sinner #1-5 by José Muñoz and Carlos Sampayo.

After the previous post which literally killed me, I (in a ghostly incarnation) decided to do a very small series today.

Sinner is one of the earliest attempts by Fantagraphics at bringing French-ey comics to the US. (The creators are Argentinian, but live in Europe and publishes in France and Italy.) These days, publishers seem to have found a format that’ll be successful enough: Huge whopping editions where they combine several original albums into a tome that’ll really hurt your toes if you were to drop it on your feet.

But this was 1987, and they were trying different format. For this one, they went with a magazine size, 32-page package in stiff covers.

They had great hopes:

That did not happen, but the five issues they managed to publish before deciding they couldn’t afford to lose that much money (I’m just guessing here) are pretty spiffy.

The first issue is the strangest one. I have not seen the original, and it’s a pretty late story in the Alack Sinner cycle (but it is the Origin Story, and perhaps they felt that American readers need that first to get sucked in), but it seems like it’s been blown up from whatever format it was originally published in?

There’s way too much white space in that box at the right, and the lettering is strangely big. I’m guessing it was originally published in a three tier format and then hacked up into a two tier format? Or perhaps it was published in a pocket book format and just enlarged?

Anyway, it’s odd. But gorgeous:

The super-hero artist Keith Giffen famously plagiarised Muñoz (or was very, very inspired by him) for a while. I think Giffen should have done more of that, because that was his best period. I mean, who can blame him for wanting to make pages like that?

Anyway, in issue two we jump back to the first Sinner story they made, and you can kinda see why they didn’t want to lead with that.

The art is more conventional, and it’s not immediately clear whether the tough guy talk is supposed to be convincing tough guy talk or a kinda parody on tough guy. That line up there makes you go “hm”…

It’s a pretty good detective story, any way. And there’s a back-up y Alberto Breccia that’s pretty horrific.

The art continues to evolve the next story, with one of the most imitated stylistic ticks being displayed more prominently:

Cool, huh? In the later Viet Blues story, it’s gotten really pretty:

And also very political. Very 70s:

The fourth issue was published 18 months after the third, and the fifth was preceded by yet another year-long pause. Here’s Kim Thompsons’s editorial from the last issue Fantagraphics published:

Still full of plans to publish the entire Sinner oevre, but after this issue issue was published, only the Billie Holiday book was released (in 1993), and then nothing else of theirs has seen the light of day in the US.

And the fifth issue is really amusing.

Muñoz and Sampaya turn up as characters, hanging around with Alack Sinner (who happens to have the same name as their fictional detective), and the go on to solve a murder case. Or, at least, hang around in the background, being made fun of, while Sinner does the detecting. Although they do guess who the murderer is before Sinner does.

So true. So metafictional!

And lots of fun, so it’s a shame that there just wasn’t a market for this in the US (or any other country with a language I can understand) back in the days.

But! The nice people at IDW will be publishing a collected edition starting this summer. And, as mentioned above, it’s one of those toe-hurting editions, clocking in a 392 album sized pages. And the cover design isn’t as horrible as that Corto Maltese one.

I know I’ll be buying a copy.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.