Random Thoughts

Steve Ditko’s Strange Avenging Tales #1 by Steve Ditko.

After leaving Marvel in the early 70s, Ditko has been publishing a stream of Ayn Rand-inspired comics at any publisher that would let him do whatever he wanted without any interference.

Strange Avenging Tales was apparently an attempt at doing one of these comics at Fantagraphics, but for (reasons unknown to me), only one issue was published.

Let’s have a gander.

Most of the stuff I’ve seen from his post-Marvel period has been line drawings only, with little shading. For the lead piece in this comic book, he’s apparently using washes to paint in some greys? Looks pretty nice.

The other stories are in his usual style: Very clean black and white.

The stories are, like most everything I’ve read from him the past few decades, simple short stories where somebody does something wrong, and then horrible retribution arrives setting things straight. Here a litterer is junked.

A one page philosophical treaty.

There is something quite attractive about Ditko’s artwork. A blend of experimentation and old school drawing.

I wonder why Groth put this page in. Ditko is known to be pretty prickly, right? So why put a page of not very respectful quotes about Ditko into his own magazine? Groth is even quoted saying “didactically repetitive Randian tracts [laughs]”, which is probably not something that any artist would want their publisher to say about them.

A second issue is announced, so they were probably going for a quarterly schedule. No such comic was ever published, apparently.

Ditko is still active to this day, and there’s probably a project being kickstartered as I type… Yup. A rolling kickstart campaign has been going for a few years now. I haven’t participated in any of them, because even if I like the artwork, I just find the stories to be repetitiously didactic.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

Empty Skull Comics by Gerald Jablonski.

Mm, yes…

Jim Woodring provides an introduction and offers the idea that Jablonski is possibly insane.

The first half of this collection doesn’t seem particularly crazy. The humour is off-kilter, but the silliness is within normal parameters, I would say.

This sort of humour is just my thing. You know: A cow that’s so dumb that she’s suddenly on the roof of the house? Brilliant!

Glamorous farm life? Nice fish breakfast for the horse? Yes! Bring it on!

Totally stupid word play? J’adore.

So I wasn’t quite getting whatever Woodring was… getting at.

Then, halfway through, things got weirder. But still kinda normal underground acid visions.

But then it started.

Page after page of this. Every page the same format and with the same structure:

First the father barges into the boy’s bedroom to complain about the noise (which is music from a band called Poopy).

Then, after a while, the boy explains to the father that his teacher is an ant.

Then it ends with us being told that the world will end and we’ll all die.

In between these three “plot points”, there a seemingly endless stream of puns, non sequitur, cross-talk and general yammer, but the delivery is so straight-forward that it doesn’t really work as a stand-up routine.

The rhythm is rather hypnotic, though. After a while, I started looking forward to getting to the part where the son tells the father about his ant teacher.

Such a weird effect. I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen anything like it.

Jablonski’s speech balloon tails also go awry from time to time, and you have to visually untangle them to tell who’s saying what.

A very peculiar reading experience, and quite enjoyable.

Jablonski is still publishing comics today, and it looks like they’ve gotten even stranger now.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

Nurture the Devil #1-3 by Jeff Johnson.

There seemed to be a micro-movement towards body horror going on at Fantagraphics in the mid-90s. Renée French, Dave Cooper and Jeff Johnson all did violent, visceral, sexually charged comics around this time, with squishy, ink-soaked artwork.

Nice introduction, but I really wanted to highlight a typical Fantagraphics indicia page. Sure, there’s a lot of them that are less personalised than this, but a sizeable portion of them don’t mention anything beyond whatever the artist themselves want to have on the page. Not even an editor is mentioned.

Contrast with a indicia page taken at random from Image:

Knowing that Jeff Boison is the director of publishing planning sure enhanced my reading experience. I only buy comics now that have had their publishing planned by Jeff Boison! I will accept no other publishing planning inside these walls! Jeff Boison! Jeff Boison! Jeff Boison!

ANYWAY! Back to Nurture the Devil.

One thing I wonder about the artwork is what size it’s been drawn at. There’s a lot of lines, but they seem to taper off before they get really fine. The lines are kinda blunt, really. Are these pages perhaps drawn just a bit up from published size, instead of more normal, larger sizes?

And I think I can perhaps see a bit of a Richard Sala influence going on here?

There’s a lot of patterns and meanings to be decoded on just about every page. This boy (turning into a girl) is in a crucifix position, and he’s divided by the panels. Johnson later said that the comic was “mostly driven by unresolved transgender issues”.

Fellow purveyor of squishy comics, Dave Cooper, shows up on the letters page.

About half the pages of the Nurture the Devil series are taken by a serialisation of a narrative called The Garden, which is about… uhm… stuff… The rest are pretty random, like this one, which is about… uhm… stuff…

There’s one autobio piece about Johnson graduating from university, and people trying to interpret his paintings.

What Johnson’s trying to say here is that he peed himself while drunk and he’s now taking a shower. I think he’s quite funny when he tries to be, but he doesn’t try all that often.

The third and final issue shifts the art style a bit. You get this obsessive swarm of tiny lines swirling though every panel. It’s rather beautiful. I wonder whether that might mean that he was working at a larger scale for this issue?

After Nurture the Devil finished (or was cancelled), Johnson went on to contribute to a large number of anthologies, and self-published quite a bit. He underwent gender assignment therapy in the late 90s, and she died earlier this year.

I think a retrospective collection of her work would be a nice thing to have.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.