Random Thoughts

Pop Life #1-5 by Ho Che Anderson and Wilfred Santiago.

I’m running out of Fantagraphics pamphlets to write articles about here. (Was that a sigh of relief I heard?) But that’s not because I’ve done them all. No, it’s just that I’m stalled since I’m waiting for a bunch of comics to arrive in the mail to complete various series.

But since I’ve got about a month of articles backlogged, you probably won’t experience any service interruptions. I guess you’ll find out tomorrow. (Was that a sigh of relief I heard withdrawn?)

Anyway, our object of appraisal today is Pop Life, a short-lived luxurious series of the late 90s. (It’s hard to stop writing “luxurious” after re-reading Meat Cake.)

What’s that about Anne Rubenstein, I wonder? Hm…. Rubenstein had reviewed King, but that seems like a quite positive review. Oh, here we are: “Ho Che Anderson’s drawing is so beautiful and good […] if […] he could stop writing those incoherent, dopey stories.” I guess that explains that mystery.

Anyway!

Anderson had earlier published a number of series through Fantagraphics, including I Want To Be Your Dog, King and Black Dogs. I’m not sure whether Santiago had done anything before this, but his name seems familiar. Hm… Oh, he worked at mainstream superhero companies.

His artwork doesn’t really seem all that super-heroish, though.

About half of each issue is taken up by a serialisation of a story written by Anderson and drawn by Santiago. It’s about these people, who are in a band, and all have broken legs. Those legs are never explained, and that’s quite typical of Anderson’s oblique storytelling.

And it’s a storytelling trick that works. He just plops us into an interesting milieu and then goes from there without much exposition. These are pretty dense pieces.

The other half of each issue are taken up by shorter Anderson-drawn pieces, as well as the serialisation of a longer story, which is apparently a continuation of a storyline from I Want To Be Your Dog. Which I can’t remember; I should perhaps have re-read it before reading this.

As would become a theme in the text pages in this series: This series doesn’t pay much for anybody, and seems to be on the verge of cancellation from the first issue.

Anderson used to be quite influenced by Howard Chaykin, but by this time he seems to have shed that style completely.

The title of that letters page (the only one in the series) is accurate: They’re all rather harsh.

Anderson’s longer piece in issue three uses a quite unusual technique: Just various shades of blue. It’s pretty, but perhaps a bit difficult to follow sometimes?

Oh. The blue strip wasn’t supposed to look like that.

Some of Anderson’s artwork is incredibly stylish.

And then Anderson announces that Pop Life has finally been cancelled. The last issue is 24 pages (as opposed to all the other ones which were 32), and seems to collect bits and pieces meant for later in the series. Like this one (drawn by Santiago) about breasts.

It’s a very mammary series all around.

Anderson rounds out the issue with some fumetti.

I think both Anderson and Santiago have since retreated into illustration work, but they both recently published new work at Fantagraphics: Scream Queen by Anderson and 21 by Santiago.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

Top Notch Comics #1 by Ethan Persoff.

I remember this comic being somehow controversial, but I can’t quite remember why.

There are some very Chris Ware-esque things about it. It has an unusual size, it’s printed in duo-tone, and it uses blurred backgrounds.

There are things to cut out and assemble.

There’s a fake ad. But I don’t think Ware would have been talking about “Limp Dick Liquor”.

And some of the artwork reminds me more of Al Colombia than Ware.

Anyway, it’s a pretty slight story, and I’m left wondering whether it’s a parody or a sincere attempt at telling a story. It ends with “to be continued”, and it wasn’t so I guess it didn’t stun the world.

Here’s one fun thing about it:

It has a die cut page in the middle. One of the children breaks a window, and when you flip the page over…

… the hole lands on the character from the preceding page. Clever, eh? Eh?

I think this is the only time I’ve seen Fantagraphics allowing somebody to do something like that in one of the floppies, which might mean that they were pretty taken with the book.

Let’s see if I can find out why I had a feeling was controversial. I thought it was OK.

Oh, dear. The first review there is vicious.

Bart Beaty reviews Top Notch for The Comics Journal and says that it’s probably the worst thing Fantagraphics has published, and that his faith in Fantagraphics has been all shook up.

And then he gets nasty.

A couple of years later, Persoff and Al Colombia teamed up to create a series called The Pogostick, which I haven’t read yet.

Here’s Ethan Persoff’s web site.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

Blood Orange #1-4, Bête Noire: The International Comic Art Quarterly #1 edited by Chris Polkki.

Since Bête Noire is termed an “international” quarterly, and Blood Orange isn’t, and they have the same format and editor, I assumed that Blood Orange would be an all-American feast.

But, nope, the Orange has got plenty of foreigners, too.

Anyway, this pair of anthologies were launched a year before Mome got started, and were axed at that point, so… er… perhaps Fantagraphics didn’t want to be publishing two “competing” anthologies?

Anyway anyway, since I’ve read Zero Zero quite recently, it’s tempting to compare these anthologies to that one. Zero Zero had a strict (ahem) no experimentation, no autobio, no erect penises policy going. Blood Orange seems to be diametrically the opposite: We have experimentation (Gary Baseman here)…

Autobio (David Collier here, who appeared in Zero Zero a lot, and therefore ruins my “diametric” thing in the second example, even)…

And erect penises. But not shown here, because this is a family oriented blog. Instead Allison Cole. And while narrative, as most of the pieces in Blood Orange are, it’s a bit on the vague side, even if what’s depicted is clear enough.

It’s hard to summarise the aesthetic of Blood Orange. While there’s a great variety of styles and approaches, it’s all perhaps a bit melancholy? Not lachrymose, but a bit thoughtful and quiet.

And then you have Marc Bell, who I thought was making a comment on the format of Blood Orange itself (it’s an almost square publication), but instead it’s an excerpt from something that looks like a newspaper strip? Or something? And he’s explaining how he’s gone from a 4×4 grid to a squat rectangle. But they’re printed one above the other in Blood Orange, so it’s square again! So meta!!!

Cole Johnson from issue two.

No page numbers are printed in any of these issues, and very few of them have names printed alongside the pieces themselves, so I found myself flipping back and forth between the contents page a lot. That was fine in the first issue, but in the second issue the list is arranged thusly. Gah. Triangulating who’s making what becomes a chore.

Blood Orange feels like a solid, cohesive anthology. There’s a great mix of shorter and longer pieces, experimental and narrative, but it doesn’t feel like a jumble of anything goes, either. Quite a few of the artists are associated with various Rhode Island things, like Paper Rad stuff (Ben Jones above).

But there’s also Caroline Sury from France…

And Jeffrey Brown, who’s from Chicago, I guess.

The list of contributors continues to get more and more useless. Here they are arranged in absolutely no order, so I have no idea who did this rather intriguing 16 page piece:

Every page is a “panel”, but there are, like, 20 different stories going on. You have to follow each little creature for 16 pages and see what happens to that fellow, and then flip back to the beginning, pick out another being, and repeat. It’s fun. Nothing Earth-shattering happens in any of the “storylines”, but nice.

Perhaps I can say who it is by eliminating the ones it can’t be… It’s not Tobias Bak or Brian Ralph… Or Ted May… Or Nicholas Mahler… So, Rebecca Dart or Lark Pien?

Is this why the editor makes the list of contributors so useless? To have reader participation? If so: Meh.

Bête Noire has twice as many pages as Blood Orange, and the first (and last) few are in colour. Morgan Navarro here, I think.

And that’s definitely the marvellous Yuichi Yokoyama. It’s a short piece, but it’s a blast of energy. I should re-read all his books more often.

Bête Noire is a nice mix of famous artists and people I’ve never seen before, like Suzu Amakane above. Bête Noire has less of a unified tone than Blood Orange had, but it feels like a treasure trove of throwaway gems. The newsprint the bulk of the issue is printed on enhances that feeling.

Caroline Sury is the only artist that appears in both anthologies, I think, and her Bête Noire story is a direct continuation of the story in Blood Orange.

The country that has the most contributing cartoonists is Switzerland, which is a country that’s almost completely unknown to me. Comics-wise, that is. Here’s MS Bastian very New York-ish freakout.

Kevin Scalzo bids us adieu, but there’s no next time.

I know absolutely nothing about the editor, and Blood Orange was never reviewed in The Comics Journal. I can’t remember seeing anybody mention these anthologies before, and I bought Bête Noire just now for this blog series.

Let’s do some research. The first hit on Google is this, which doesn’t help much. (And not putting a date on the page is even less helpful.)

Oh, this page explains that Bête Noire was a rebranding of Blood Orange, not a sister title, as I had assumed. That makes more sense.

Nothing else pops up. Oh, well. Very nice anthologies, but Mome would soon swoop in, and that was a big success, and featured a lot of the same artists.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

Meat Cake #0-17 by Dame Darcy.

I’m going to try to write this blog article without using the word “quirky”.

Oops!

I remember getting these comics about once a year throughout the 90s, and every time I was all “yay!”. It’s an utterly original comic book, filled with strange adventures and loopy, obsessive artwork.

There are also these text pieces written without a lettering guide. This is from issue zero, which is a Fantagraphics reprinting of the first, self-published version of Meat Cake. (Originally from 1991, reprinted in 1996.)

Darcy often writes longer texts in this rather exhausting manner. Trying to read these things is… trying, but I really enjoy the way that almost every single ink stain that’s printed in these comics come from Darcy’s pen. This is the indicia page. The only things that are not handmade by her is the Fantagraphics logo (the 80s version) on some covers, and pictures of Dame Darcy that are featured on many of the back covers.

Darcy’s artwork is so lovely. It’s very Victorian and luxurious. It reminds me slightly of Richard Sala, but probably more because he’s also referencing Victorian artwork than as a direct influence.

While I was always happy to find a new Meat Cake issue in my hands, it was always guaranteed to put me to sleep. Not because it’s boring. I think it’s because the logic and rhythm of her stories are quite similar to how my brain works when falling asleep. I mean, look at the monologue in this panel. Look at it.

The only other comic book that reliably puts me to sleep is the beloved Krazy Kat, and it’s for similar reasons.

So I wondered whether re-reading these comics would put me to sleep again, and… they did. A couple of times.

Darcy doesn’t include too many panoramas like this, but when she does, they’re luxurious. This was later available as a print.

The letter pages are filled with oddball letters, as you’d expect, but there’s also wise guys like this.

Love those frames around every single panel.

Yes, that woman has a tablet coming out of her throat, gushing blood. Her name is Strega Pez, and that’s the only way she can talk: By ejecting giant inscripted Pez tablets out of her neck.

She’s talking to her friend Richard Dirt here. Other notable characters are Effluvia, Hindrance, Perfidia, Friend the Girl and Wax Wolf.

Dame Darcy has the best character names.

While quite a few of her pieces are funny, most of them are not straight-up jokes, but there’s a few, like this very pretty one.

Helena Harvilicz makes an appearance, like she did in that Pat Moriarty story.

Darcy has ads for a bewildering number of items and services that she does, like a palm reading service, dolls, lots of singles and videos, and so on. She also had a rock band, and is an actress, and had a long-running show on cable access in New York.

She invented Kickstarter a couple of decades too early.

I don’t know whether any of these films were ever completed…

Alan Moore wrote a story for issue nine. I have no idea how that happened, but it’s quite instructive to contrast the result with one of her own stories. While Moore seems to follow her general mode, it’s clear how much more distanced and cold Moore is compared to Darcy. Moore is funny, but it’s an easy, dismissive absurdity, instead of one that contributes to a world-view. Darcy has a selfish shellfish, but it works in the context. A “simple-minded button prospector” can’t really go anywhere interesting.

Eek! For two horrible issues, Fantagraphics includes a house ad, and it’s incredibly jarring. So digital in this stream of organic.

We’re now up to 2001 (and issue 11), and Darcy includes a growing number of people she collaborates with. All of them are on the scripting side, except this story, which is drawn by “Tomasso and Nicolao” (no first names given). It’s also pretty jarring.

Darcy reacts to 9/11..

We’re now up to 2004, and issues are published on less than a yearly basis. The indicia stubbornly claims that it’s published “thrice yearly”, as it has from the start, and it’s never been true, I think.

Darcy’s artwork changes a bit during the last few years. While she’s previously been very consistent, she seems to be trying out other, less detailed art styles.

Fantagraphics switches over to thicker, white, luxurious paper for the last four issues.

Darcy simplifies the frames around some of the panels quite radically.

Is that where the band The xx took their name from? Probably!

Fantagraphics released a hardback collection of all this stuff under the name Meat Cake Bible earlier this year. The collective comics world response seemed to be “whaa? it cannot be!”, because the assumption seems to be that this work was so special that surely nobody outside comics-world would be able to get it.

It’s been reviewed all over the place, and everybody seems very positive about it. Sean T. Collins included it on his list of the best graphic novels of all time. (It’s a great list; all the books included are good.)

Which I think is like “duh”, because it’s a unique, amazing body of work, and anybody who buys it can also feel a bit of frisson at being quirky enough to “get it”.

Aargh! I used the forbidden word!

I also found this interview quite interesting.

Dame Darcy has a web site where you can keep up with all her projects.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.