Random Thoughts

Doomsday Squad #1-7 by Joe Gill and John Byrne.

This series was supposed to be called “John Byrne Classics” and reprints the old Charlton Comics series Doomsday +1. Apparently Byrne protested and it ended up being called Doomsday Squad instead. He was also apparently supposed to supply the covers, but only did two, while most of the remaining issues were done by Gil Kane instead.

So… why would Fantagraphics publish something like this?

The editor doesn’t really explain, but the only reason to reprint a C-grade comic from a Z-grade defunct publisher is that Byrne was (at this point) hot shit, and the Charlton properties were for sale, probably at a cheap price. So here’s an opportunity to make some money, and at the same time, print back-up stories featuring characters from other Fantagraphics publications. It gives the artists in question a rare chance to work in colour, and each back-up also works as a five-to-seven page ad for the publication in question. Win win!

But what’s the main series about? It’s about seven issues.

Oh, and post-apocalyptic stuff. There’s only three people alive on Earth after WWIII, and they have adventures and stuff. They meet robots and alternate reality people and dinosaurs and thawed-out goths.

The colouring job is very, very Fantagraphics. As noted in the Dalgoda article, nobody has done colour separations quite like Fantagraphics did in the mid 80s. Which is something most people are quite OK with.

Here’s how that page above looked originally:

So the colourists drew a lot of stuff in that wasn’t originally there.

The first backup story is the aforementioned Dalgoda. And it ties in with the lead story: It’s about thawing up an old savage, and it points out that this isn’t really possible.

It’s fun to see the backup story criticise the main story. Subsequent backup stories would have none of this synergy…

The editor takes another go at explaining why this reprint exist. “Crude energy.”

Speaking of the colouring, some of these pages makes me wonder whether the original pages were just mostly blank. This looks awfully like the colourist has drawn in the figures in the windshield there.

Nope, they were there, but were rasterised. How odd.

Lloyd Llewellyn backup story by Daniel Clowes. Scary clown!

Yeah… I can see it now… Crude energy.

Whaa… How… So how could the original possibly look like that? Charlton certainly didn’t do painted colour holds.  That’d cost money.

Oh, the colourists just drew a new guy there based on the original image. I can see why the editor in the first issue said that the colourists went beyond the call of duty, but I’d say this is beyond the call of… sanity.

An Usagi Yojimbo backup story by Stan Sakai. “Ho! Mangy villagers!” That’s going to be my go-to greeting from now on.

I wonder whether the writer, Joe Gill, is trying to tell us something with the “gill-men’s eggs” line.

The fifth issue is particularly ironic. The editorial is all about how finally these comics are printed the way they should be…

… and half the pages are printed horribly off-register. The red is printed about two millimetres off of where it’s supposed to be.

Don’t you think?

Captain Jack backup by Mike Kazaleh. I want some octopi arms sticking out of my car windows, too!

You can’t say that it isn’t edumacational.

Why is war always hardest on the pets! WHYYYY!!1!

Oh, I think I failed to mention that Doomsday +1 is piffle. I’ve read worse, but it’s kinda boring. It throws all 70s sci-fi clichés it can think of into the series, but it doesn’t do anything interesting with them. It’s close to being a parody of a 70s sci-fi comic book, but it isn’t funny enough for that.

Byrne’s art (where you can see it through the colourists work) looks quite nice, especially some of the robots. It’s not as good as it was going to get a few years later.

The final backup story is a Keif Llama story by Matt Howarth, and as usual (with his colour work at the time), it looks rather spiffy. Is he drawing directly onto the separations? It’s an interesting technique…

I did not read this comic in the 80s, because 15 year old me assumed that it would be a bit boring. That guy was so right. But I bought the issues now, just for this blog article. The things I do for my readers! I mean reader!

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

Aesop’s Fables #1-3 adapted by Charles Santino.

This series has a slightly odd motivation for its existence:

So the project wasn’t started by somebody with a passion for fables, but just somebody looking around for something to adapt. You’d think that this would result in some pretty shoddy comics, but they’re quite amusing.

The majority of the stories in the first issue are two-pagers, which makes it inexplicable that they’re printed like this:

That’s a pretty jarring transition between Hilary Barta and Rick Geary. Both look great, but why not do each of them on separate spreads?

The longer stories fare better, like this one by Sheri Flenniken.

I find myself without much to say about this series, though. It lasted three issues, and the stories are mostly amusingly told, although I think they could have avoided the more well-known stories like The Boy Who Cried Wolf.

It’s fine, though.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

Critters Special #1 by Stan Sakai.

I should have covered this one in the Critters article, but I forgot.

Anyway, the series lasted only one issue, and featured Nilson Groundthumper (and Hermy), characters developed for the Critters series, I think.

Sakai would, of course, go on to do Usagi Yojimbo (which he’s still doing), but this is very early work. It’s from 1984, and it looks quite different from Sakai’s later work. The blacks are crispier, somehow, and slightly reminds me of Ty Templeton, if you squint a bit.

And, yes, it’s very amusing.

It also has these super detailed panoramas that Sakai doesn’t do any more.

Anyway, it’s a fine issue. I don’t think Sakai used these characters again much after this, which is a shame. But perhaps one floppy-eared samurai character is enough…

A 100 page collection was released by Dark Horse later, and the stories from this issues appeared there in colour versions.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

Alex #1-6 by Mark Kalesniko.

This is a quite unusual Fantagraphics floppy series: 1) It’s not a single-author anthology, but a proper story that 2) seems to be designed to last for six issues and 3) wasn’t cancelled before it was completed and 4) was published on a strict bi-monthly schedule (which may be a first (and last) for Fantagraphics) and 6) isn’t very good.

There are good things about it. Kalesniko draws beautiful ugly factories.

All the exteriors are great. They look organic and real and have personality. More personality than the characters. The protagonist is a funny animal, while all the other characters are human, and not all that convincingly rendered.

But the problem here isn’t the drawing, which varies between fine and great, but the histrionic storyline, which is about a alcoholic cartoonist (with a similar name to Kalesniko) who’s not very inspired (except by one new painting he’s made) and is alienating all his friends and drinking himself to death.

OK, perhaps that sounded kinda interesting, but the pages are filled with references we’re supposed to get (and if we don’t, are really boring).

But here’s the main problem here. We see the artist losing his brush…

And then the natural result: He flips completely out, trashes the apartment and then throws the brush from the balcony. And then goes to looks for it, which is the fun part. This is repeated with… uhm… three more objects? I forget. So it’s meant to be funny, and the repetitions are meant to provide structure (and further amusement), but after seeing him trash his apartment for the ninth time, it all starts feeling very silly.  And not good silly.

Kalesniko includes some of the reference material on the back pages, which probably means that there are autobiographical elements to the story, I would guess. Hm, yes, I just duckduckwent a bit, and his biographical details seem to be the same as the Alex character.

This is a pet peeve of mine: Over-emphasising. Why is “teacher” in bold oblique? “Talk”? Really, why is bold oblique used here at all? Sometimes when I’m extra cranky I feel that it would be better not to model prosody and emphasis at all when lettering, especially here where it’s an internal monologue. (In speech bubbles it’s really common to go bold oblique in comics, and that’s usually fine.) If he’s really THINKING that WAY all the TIME then the inside of his head has to BE REALLY annoying.

Besides, trying to dictate reading to that extent is a sure sign of KOOKERY.

(And I won’t mention this is an example of pretty early computer lettering (1994), because I”M NOT A nerd.)

Every other scene is like this.

One bit I liked here was the way he used the cats as harbingers of death (or something). They ghost the guy who’s next to die (or something).

With all the subtlety of a knife to the eye.

Kalesniko has continued to publish sporadically via Fantagraphics. His latest work was Freeway from 2011, I think.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

The Nimrod #1-7 by Lewis Trondheim.

This series is a collection of various of the more “indie” Trondheim works: Autobio, a McConey story, and several shorter pieces, so I can see why it looked like it might make sense to publish this stuff in English in pamphlet format. It’s like US indie comics, so publishing it floppily would be popular?

The autobio work usually has an internal monologue running through it where Trondheim thinks a lot about whether he’s an asshole or not. Or comes off like an asshole. It’s fun.

And since he draws comics, a significant part of the stories deals with, well, drawing comics. Here he recounts the changes the editors at Kodansha (I think) wants to have made to the Japanese version of “The Fly”. And I think this speaks volumes as to why mainstream Japanese comics are so dreadfully boring. Editorial micro-managing seems to be the order of the day there, and that seldom leads to anything resembling art.

OK, it’s a pretty simple joke, but I just absolutely adore (and laughed out loud) to the middle tier there.

In issue two, editor Kim Thompson (in his usual frank way) announces that The Nimrod is cancelled due to awful sales. So the “indie comic” publishing strategy failed for this material.

But then a third issue appears a year later. Thompson explains that he just had to publish it, even if it loses money because it was nominated for awards, and he just had to.

The two McConey albums (in colour, and hardback, I seem to recall) didn’t sell either, apparently. Thompson’s doesn’t whine about it or issue a call to arms, but seems pretty much resigned to publishing Trondheim at a loss. Which is admirable, although it would perhaps be preferable to find a different public to sell this stuff to…

But back to the work itself. The other major mode (other than the autobio) in this series are these pages. They all have pretty much the same arrangement: Square panels with very cartooney characters, and captions above the panels. Some of them are funny (like this one), but others drag a bit. I don’t feel that this form is particularly gripping, I guess…

After teasing the meaning of the title “The Nimrod” for a couple of issues, Thompson finally spills the beans in issue four. I didn’t guess that that was what it meant… or… non-meant…

The issue has a longer McConey story, which is the usual four-guys-bickering while nothing much happens. And it’s great. There’s something so completely real about the way they talk to each other, and while it doesn’t seem to have an overt artificial structure, it all comes together to form a whole anyway. Trondheim is just so good at this type of thing.

Here they meet a farmer. “Short pants.” Heh heh.

But, in my opinion, not this type of thing. These strips feel like he’s improvising some kind of philosophy while at the drafting table, and they’re frequently a bit on the hokey side. I find that it helps if I read the captions with a French accent.

One thing I don’t think I’ve mentioned in this FF series is the way Fantagraphics does internal ads. In the early days, there was usually a couple of pages pushing stuff that might be of general vague interest to the reader of the comic book, but for books like this, they’re targeted particularly well. We get all the solo Trondheim books, but also appearances in the Measles and Zero Zero anthologies, as well as issues of The Comics Journal that have interviews with Trondheim.

Oh, and a t-shirt.

I wonder how successful these ads are… They lend a certain air of slapdash cheapness to the comic books.

The final issue is published in 2003, 18 months after the penultimate issue. There’s no editorial in the issue, and it doesn’t mention that it’s going to be the last issue, but perhaps Thompson didn’t know. But perhaps this is the reason:

Apparently NBM found a way to sell Trondheim to an American audience that had eluded Fantagraphics, so Thompson just wished them luck and stopped losing money on The Nimrod.

NBMs Trondheim program seems to be quite successful. Or at least sustainable: They’ve published more than a dozen Trondheim albums and books, and they’re all pretty much great. Oh, I see that one of the series mentioned in the ad there is something called “Oddballz”, which looks like a pamphlet series. So NBM also experimented with that format before going all perfect bound? And I don’t seem to have that series, so I’ll have to fix that…

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.