FEATURES
REVIEWS EDITORIALS
THINGS TO COME
ARTICLE 10
>> Comment: Beyond The City Limits
>> Comment: Alternative Medicine
More...
I'm starting an internet campaign to save me from Fantagraphics. If just 10 of the people reading this- which is to say, all of you- were to send me a few hundred dollars a piece, I could afford all these terribly tempting deluxe $50 hardcover art books they're putting out. Alternately, you could just come to my house and taser me whenever I reach for my wallet with a faraway look in my eyes.
PICKS OF THE MONTH
WILL ELDER: MAD PLAYBOY OF ART, from Fantagraphics Books
Hardcover: JUL03 2213, pg. 318, $49.95
What can I say? He's the top, he's the Coliseum; he's the top, he's the Louvre museum. If he's not the best humour cartoonist of all time, he's at least in the top five. There's no style he can't ape, and nothing he won't do for a laugh. He's best known as Harvey Kurtzman's favorite collaborator, on the original MAD and afterward, but he shouldn't be seen as a subordinate - he was just as much a comic genius as Kurtzman himself. The zillions of gags he crammed into the background of every panel (all the while never obscuring the main action) can go on surprising even obsessives like myself years after we think we've ferreted them all out.
This 300-page hardcover includes commentary by Kurtzman and various MAD contributors, as well as by PLAYBOY publisher and cartoonist manqué Hugh Hefner, extravagant filmmaker and ex-Python Terry Gilliam, and world's most celebrated acid casualty Jerry Garcia, who presumably gave his thoughts via Ouija board. (This book must have been in the works a good long while.) Also sports an introduction by Dan Clowes.
B KRIGSTEIN: COMICS, edited by Greg Sadowski, from Fantagraphics Books
JUL03 2212, pg. 318, $49.95
Imagine if Will Eisner hadn't had a head for business. Imagine if he'd never been able to found his own studio and start writing his own stories, but instead had stayed trapped in work-for-hire. If he'd quit the medium in frustration and disgust in the mid-'50s, his work known and studied by savvier pros but otherwise unknown.
That gives you some idea of what Krigstein's career was like. Cartoonists as different as Art Spiegelman and Frank Miller have picked apart Krigstein's stories to suss out how they worked, but most comics readers haven't had the opportunity to see much of any of them, as up until now they'd never been collected. This book follows closely on Sadowski's widely and loudly acclaimed biography of Krigstein. It collects 36 of Krigstein's comics stories, including some for Atlas, DC and EC, all of them meticulously restored, Fantagraphics promises, and 15 of them entirely recoloured by Marie Severin. Oddly enough, these aren't the only deluxe art books devoted to contributors to the original MAD, this month. Also, there's:
AGAINST THE GRAIN: MAD ARTIST WALLACE WOOD, edited by Bhob Stewart, from Twomorrows Publishing
Softcover: JUL03 2521, pg. 365, $39.95
Hardcover: JUL03 2520, pg. 365, $59.95
Wood was one of comics' greatest casualties. He first came to prominence with EC, as the star of their landmark science fiction books, and he revealed an equal facility with knockabout humour in MAD. He never had so good a showcase after EC was forced out of the comics business. By the time editor Bhob Stewart joined his studio, in the late '60s, Wood was struggling to break free of the industry with his odd self-published proto-underground WITZEND. (Among other things, it contained the Tolkienesque saga 'The Wizard King', which he intended to be his life's great work. He never finished.) He had developed a burning hatred of editors and art directors, at one point writing a screed that concluded:
"...do not seek to be a creative writer or artist. Do not care about doing anything good. That will only put you at the mercy of those who will always hate you because you can do something that they can't."
He never did quite manage to take his own advice, try though he did at times. Like Kurtzman once observed, the work really used him up. So, increasingly, did alcohol, though he rarely missed a deadline. Supporting himself with commercial illustration got progressively more difficult, and he never did get any takers for his more personal work. By 1981, he'd been reduced to hacking out sub-Tijuana-bible pornography, he'd had several strokes, and his kidneys were failing so badly that he faced a lifetime on dialysis. He couldn't bear it any further, and so finally, with one of the many, many guns he'd collected, he took his own life.
This book by Stewart, "twenty years in the making," attempts to do some justice by Wood. It promises a wealth of rare and unpublished artwork, supplied in large part by Wood's own estate, and tributes to and remembrances of Wood by some of the great many pros who are in his debt.
THE BASIL WOLVERTON READER VOL 1, from Pure Imagination Publishing
Softcover: JUL03 2423, pg. 350, $25
Hardcover: JUL03 2424, pg. 350, $40
Another of the great humour cartoonists. His bandy-limbed characters got his style dubbed "the Spaghetti and Meatball school of design" by LIFE magazine, and the goofy little alliterative and punning signs that festooned his backgrounds were an obvious inspiration to Will Elder. His stuff is wildly physical and often genuinely weird (when Al Capp needed "the ugliest gal in the world" drawn for his strip LI'L ABNER, it was Wolverton he turned to). This book collects issues #1-5 of POWERHOUSE PEPPER, one of Wolterton's best-remembered strips. Pepper was a sort of JOE PALOOKA-type to the nth degree - a big, sweet-hearted lunk who doesn't know his own (totally ludicrous) strength.
DEAD MEMORY, by Marc-Antoine Mathieu
Hardcover: JUL03 0028, pg. 26, $14.95
I was afraid Dark Horse was out of the Eurocomics business after they split with Strip Arts Features (which has started soliciting in Previews directly - see below). It's heartening to see they'll still take a risk on the occasional highbrow Frenchman. How highbrow? When Bart Beaty started his "Eurocomics For Beginners" column in The Comics Journal, Mathieu was his inaugural subject. Beaty passionately argued that nobody has played with the medium more daringly than Mathieu, so all you metafiction fans will want to pounce on this.
B.P.R.D.: NIGHT TRAIN, by Geff Johns & Scott Kolins
JUL03 0021, pg. 22, $2.99
Yet another one-shot starring the HELLBOY second bananas. (Why don't they just call it a series? That's what it de facto is.)
ZERO GIRL: FULL CIRCLE, by Sam Kieth
JUL03 0238, pg. 96, $17.95
The original ZERO GIRL came highly recommended by people I respect, and so I, not having read any Kieth before, picked up the collection. With the best will in the world, I couldn't get into it. Most reviews of the book dwell on the zany and improbable characters, like the square-headed villains or the sow bug who's the reincarnation of Carl Jung. But for me, the least believable character was the supposedly normal one, namely Tim Foster, the young, hunky, incorruptible high school guidance counsellor who really cares. I can't look at him without mentally substituting Matthew Broderick's character from the movie version of ELECTION.
Strip away the gratuitous weirdness from the story, and at bottom it's about whether Foster and Amy Smootster, the 15-year-old misfit who's infatuated with him, could ever have a mature and lasting relationship together. Well, in real life, no, almost certainly not. But Kieth has rigged the game by idealising the characters so much. (Smootster may be mousy and may secrete strange substances from her feet when nervous, but she is Wise Beyond Her Years and never at a loss for something startling to say.) The villains have all the best arguments, but they're discredited just by virtue of being villains.
Kieth is a unique artist, certainly, and the way he alternates between rubbery physicality and cartoony linework is still startling - it's as if Simon Bisley and Bill Watterson were fighting for control over a single drawing hand. But based on the first ZERO GIRL, I suspect his work simply isn't for me.
Then again, ZERO GIRL: FULL CIRCLE picks up the story 15 years later, so it can't help but be deeply different from the original.
TOM STRONG BOOK TWO, by Alan Moore and various artists
JUL03 0241, pg. 97, $14.95
Alan Moore continues to try to make it hip to be square, with staunchly goofy Silver Age-style superhe- er, scienceheroics.
HICKEE VOL. 2 #1, edited by Graham Annable
JUL03 1924, pg. 240, $4.95
A humour anthology, mostly by cartoonists who make their livings in animation. Such things seem to work out well (see also MONKEYSUIT), and word on HICKEE has been strong.
ALAN MOORE'S YUGGOTH CULTURES #1 (of 3), by Alan Moore, Bryan Talbot & Juan Jose Ryp
Regular cover: JUL03 2020, pg. 260, $3.95
Wraparound cover: JUL03 2021, pg. 260, $3.95
The latest in Avatar's Alan Moore project, this one devoted to projects that never panned out. The big pieces here are NIGHTJAR, a series Moore proposed to British anthology WARRIOR, the first part of which has been finished by Bryan Talbot [HEART OF EMPIRE; THE TALE OF ONE BAD RAT]; and ZAMAN'S HILL, a story written for an aborted novel called YUGGOTH CULTURES, adapted by Ninth Art's Antony Johnston and drawn by Juan Jose Ryp.
I had begun to lose hope that we'd ever see CIVILIAN JUSTICE in Previews again, because Graig Weich hasn't got around to putting out a second issue. But I should have known that that would pose no obstacle to a born entrepreneur like Weich. Why bother creating a new comic when you can sell merchandise based on the old one?
The most inventive product here, far and away, is the CD. Yes, a CD. It's a dramatisation of CIVILIAN JUSTICE #1, complete with soundtrack, presumably for US superpatriots who can't read. (A not-insignificant demographic, I should think - Weich knows what he's doing.) It costs $14.99, which is pricey for what must be a short recording, but I'm tempted to buy it anyway, just to hear how actual human beings try to recite lines like "How dare you [the terrorist] deface [the Muslim] religion with your twisted sense of raucousness!"
Also, there are signed copies of the first issue (both covers), and a poster and a T-shirt featuring one of the covers. For these, "a portion of the profits will be donated to the over-looked victims of the WTC/9-11 Relief Funds". About time - those bastard relief funds have devastated too many innocent lives for too long. Bring it on, funds! BRING IT ON!
WINSOR MCCAY: COLLECTED EARLY WORKS, by Winsor McCay
JUL03 2113, pg. 291, $19.95
Boy, it's a banner month for legends of the medium, isn't it? This collects everything McCay, the first visual genius of the comic strip form, did before LITTLE NEMO IN SLUMBERLAND, such as his dream strip TALES OF THE RAREBIT FIEND.
LOUIS RIEL: A COMIC STRIP BIOGRAPHY, by Chester Brown
Hardcover: JUL03 2155, pg. 299, $24.95
Signed & numbered hardcover: JUL03 2156, pg. 299, $39.95
It's not quite fair to call this a return to form. There wasn't anything wrong with Brown's previous project, UNDERWATER, except that it was spectacularly ill served by dribbling out in serial form. Still, it was a relief when he abandoned that in midstream and started this, a biography of a man often called Canada's most controversial historical figure.
Louis Riel became the leader of the Métis, a tribe of half-breed Indians, during the late 1800s, and ended up leading an insurrection against the Canadian government. UNDERWATER was fairly abstract, but for RIEL, Brown adopted the solid, conservative storytelling of Harold Gray, creator of LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE, and it makes a surprisingly good fit. It helps him get some distance on the figure of Riel, who starts turning messianic halfway through the story.
In Brown's portrayal, Riel, despite his burdens and awful visions, is usually a figure of great and strange calm. Brown is on Riel's side, but he conscientiously provides copious footnotes, showing where he took dramatic license and providing historical background.
LEONARD & LARRY VOL. 4: HOW REAL MEN DO IT, by Tim Barela
JUL03 2173, pg. 300, $12.95
A new collection of one of the best-known gay comic strips, about which I know nothing, other than that it looks crisp and professional and has had a long run.
GRAPHIC CLASSICS VOL. 7: BRAM STOKER, by various
JUL03 2206, pg. 318, $9.95
Contains two excerpts from DRACULA, and six short stories that aren't DRACULA. (He wrote things that weren't DRACULA? News to me.)
THE COMPLETE CRUMB COMICS VOL. 17, by R Crumb
Softcover: JUL03 2209, pg. 318, $18.95
Hardcover: JUL03 2210, pg. 318, $39.95
Signed & numbered hardcover: JUL03 2211, pg. 318, $75
Attention! The solicitation says this is VOL. 16, but it is wrong. VOL. 16 came out last year.
This volume wraps up the '80s, collecting Crumb's three issues of HUP and the last of his strips for his anthology WEIRDO, and it represents some of his strongest and most focused work. Especially notable are "My Trouble With Women, Pt. 2," in which Crumb tries to find the roots of his fetishes and misogyny, and "A Short History of America", perhaps the most concise and striking expression of Crumb's revulsion at the urban landscape.
STUFF & NONSENSE, by AB Frost
JUL03 2214, pg. 319, $22.95
This is a new one on me, so I'll just quote from Fantagraphics' description:
"This is the first extensive reprinting of stories by the celebrated American illustrator A.B. Frost (1851-1928). Although recognized as one of America's greatest illustrators and painters, he was also a pioneer of the comic strip and a major influence of Winsor McCay (LITTLE NEMO), Fredrick Opper (HAPPY HOOLIGAN), and many other cartoonists."
"Stuff and Nonsense collects the three albums of sequential graphic stories (comics) he published in his lifetime. The book includes a variety of stories that highlight Frost's extraordinary skill at caricature and slapstick humor... [and] also contains over 60 illustrated limericks in the vein of the great Edward Lear, making the book uniquely suited to children as well as adults."
MABEL NORMAND & HER FUNNY FRIENDS
JUL03 2217, pg. 319, $4.95
Mabel Normand, a moment's research reveals, was hugely famous in the silent film era for being the only slapstick star who was easy on the eyes. Presumably these comic strips date from her heyday, but the solicitation doesn't say when they're from or who did them.
THE COMICS JOURNAL #256
JUL03 2216, pg. 319, $6.95
This issue's interviewees: R Sikoryak, probably the best visual mimic since Elder, and Aaron McGruder, creator of THE BOONDOCKS. Truth be known, McGruder isn't that great a cartoonist, but his strip is one of very few on the modern comics page with any guts at all.
COL-DEE, by Jordan Crane
JUL03 2304, pg. 336, $8
This originally came as part of volume #5 of Crane's anthology, NON, so I've had the chance to read it already, and it's really quite good. It's about childhood, and Crane gets the voices of the kids right, especially the way the main character worries about getting in trouble for getting free cola from a defective vending machine, while the truly important parts of the story take place outside his understanding. You can read some pages at LA Weekly.
DECEMBER 32ND, by Enki Bilal
Hardcover: JUL03 2306, pg. 336, $15.95
The sequel to THE DORMANT BEAST, by the biggest sci-fi cartoonist in Europe after Moebius. THE DORMANT BEAST involved, if I recall correctly, a cultish theocratic conspiracy that brainwashes people by means of mechanical flies, designed and controlled by a mad scientist with a prosthetic metal nose. Fun!
FAIRY TALES OF OSCAR WILDE, adapted by P Craig Russell
JUL03 2381, pg. 346, $7.95
First softcover edition. Wilde's children's stories are so exquisitely beautiful that it's almost a shame to adapt them at all, but it must be said that Russell does it superbly.
TO AFGHANISTAN AND BACK, by Ted Rall
JUL03 2388, pg. 346, $9.95
First, a confession: I've been following Ted Rall's work since 1988, when a short-lived editorial cartoon magazine called BULLSEYE did a feature on him, and I still haven't made up my mind about it. He's one of the very few practicing political cartoonists who actually does the job, which is not just to induce a chuckle but to challenge people's basic assumptions and make them see things from an unaccustomed angle.
But there's something pathological about the guy. Tim Kreider, a very funny cartoonist who admires Rall and shares his politics, was dead on in his Comics Journal #250 article when he acknowledged "Rall's knee-jerk cynicism, his apparent inability to believe that anyone is motivated by anything humane or decent". This trait has led him to do a few cartoons, like the infamous "Terror Widows" strip, that I'd call reprehensible.
But none of that matters here, because he got the story. Rall has had a long-standing interest in central Asia, and has toured what he likes to call the 'Stans before, which gave him a leg up on most of the other journalists who covered the war. Rall may be a doom-monger (he made sure to be the first to announce in print that the Afghan war had been lost, in a column included here), but events have largely vindicated him; what aid there's been to Afghanistan has barely made a dent, president Hamid Karzai doesn't control much more than the capital city, warlords are running rampant, and the Taliban is regrouping. All this is plain to anybody who cares to look, but America forgot about Afghanistan a long time ago.
This book collects many of Rall's Village Voice columns and editorial cartoons from during the war. The centerpiece of it is a new 50-page comics section about his trip, which won't make anybody forget Joe Sacco, a cartoonist Rall rather churlishly resents (Rall, who eschews caricature because he believes people all look and are essentially the same, probably wouldn't be anybody's first choice to capture a foreign locale), but it does the job.
Overall, Rall's knee-jerk cynicism, or, charitably put, his lack of sentimentality, serves him well here, as he's able to look at Afghanistan with a steady gaze and show just how cheap life still is in the country we liberated.
(PS: Of course, he reverses himself in the column of December 5th, arguing that in fact Afghan society is more cooperative and better integrated than ours. It's a weird note of noble savage-ism that jars violently, but nobody ever said provocateurs had to be consistent.)
HAPPY HALLOWEEN, LI'L SANTA, by Thierry Robin & Lewis Trondheim
JUL03 2383, pg. 346, $14.95
Sadly, it looks like NBM is ending both of their Trondheim titles, ODDBALLZ and DUNGEON, with issue #8. Perhaps they're switching to graphic album format. At least they aren't giving up on Trondheim entirely, as they're publishing another of his kids' books. Like the first LI'L SANTA, this is wordless, told entirely through sight gags.
And I see HOW LOATHSOME is ending, too, with issue #4 (JUL03 2385, pg. 346, $2.95). Damn - I was enjoying that.
BLUE MONDAY VOL. 3: INBETWEEN DAYS, by Chynna Clugston-Major
JUL03 2403, pg. 348, $9.95
BLUE MONDAY has garnered all sorts of raves, and so when I stumbled across VOL. 2: ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS for only a dollar, it seemed like a sure bet.
One of the things all those raves say about BLUE MONDAY is that it's the new, hipper ARCHIE. Well, don't let this get around, but as a sprat, I had a brief but intense phase of reading Archie comics. And I can tell you that the most important thing about them is their crystal-clear storytelling. It's very vanilla, granted, but it does the job. You can pick up any Archie comic and immediately grasp who the characters are, how they're related to each other, and what their defining quirks are. Stories are kept pared to the essentials, events follow logically one from the other and definitive conclusions are reached.
For example: in an Archie comic, if a joke depended on a character being the brother of one of the leads, the new reader would be told that at the time or beforehand, rather than seven pages later. (Clugston-Major has apparently been reprimanded about this sort of thing before, as there's a one-page strip in the back of ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS that rather snippily purports to introduce all the characters.)
More importantly, I feel certain that an Archie comic would not introduce a giant magical otter in the middle of an otherwise naturalistically-told story, particularly if said giant magical otter served no purpose, cluttered up the already-jumbled climax of the story, and, oh yeah, wasn't at all funny.
I won't go as far as to say I overpaid. I'll just file this series under Not For Me.
ONE PLUS ONE VOL. 1, by Neal Shaffer & Daniel Krall
JUL03 2406, pg. 349, $14.95
A nice little noir piece. In it, David, an agent of fate, has the task of keeping a young aspiring card shark on the crooked and narrow. The gimmick is that he does this with the aid of David, who sees people as they will look when they die. It would be an easy device to let slip into camp, but artist Daniel Krall nails it, as you can see in the opening sequence Oni has online. (Come to think of it, Krall's faces recall those on playing cards - I'll bet that's intentional.) Shaffer's writing is nicely muted - it's refreshing to see a modern noir that doesn't dive head first into self-parody, especially in comics.
COURTNEY CRUMRIN & THE COVEN OF MYSTICS, by Ted Naifeh
JUL03 2402, pg. 348, $11.95
New collection of the CRUMRIN series, about a crabby little girl with insufferable yuppie parents who has the good fortune to move in with her necromancer great uncle. It's attractive and very well spoken of, and I like what I've seen of it.
THE METAMORPHOSIS, by Franz Kafka, adapted by Peter Kuper
JUL03 2429, pg. 351, $16
Smart. Kuper, co-creator of WORLD WAR III ILLUSTRATED, has been adapting Kafka to comics for years. This is his first crack at "The Metamorphosis", and doing it for a major prose book publisher is sure to get him some well-deserved publicity. Even if you think you don't know Kuper's work, you've probably seen it - he does a lot of magazine and newspaper illustration, from TIME and THE NEW YORK TIMES to MAD (he took over SPY VS SPY). And anyway, his style is not the sort you soon forget. Expectations should be high for this.
THE TOWERS OF BOIS-MAURY VOL. 3: GERMAIN, by Hermann Huppen. Hardcover: JUL03 2444, pg. 352, $14.95
THE TOWERS OF BOIS-MAURY, the story of displaced lord Sir Aymar and his travels in feudal France, is one of the series that Strip Arts Features had been licensing through Dark Horse, and now are continuing on their own. I'm glad to see it, because this is top-rank work. Moebius calls Hermann "one of the finest and most daring artists in European comics," and you won't catch me arguing with Moebius.
His art reminds me of Frank Quitely's, actually, only without the bee-sting puffiness. There's nothing stilted in it, as is the danger with historical comics - it draws the reader into the period easily, even with the alien mores and the general squalor. (PRINCE VALIANT this ain't.) I look forward to SAF continuing the series.
THE BAREFOOT SERPENT, by Scott Morse
JUL03 2515, pg. 362, $14.95
And here I'm afraid I'm no help at all, Morse being on my short but seemingly permanent list of Major Creators To Get Around To Soon. THE BAREFOOT SERPENT is, says the solicitation, "the story of a small girl and her one-day friendship with a strange boy while on vacation with her family in Hawaii... bookended by full-color biographical excerpts from the life of Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa."
WORLD WAR III ILLUSTRATED: TAKING LIBERTIES, edited by Peter Kuper, Kevin Pyle & Susan Wilmarth
JUL03 2518, pg. 364, $5
The usual gang of malcontents (including Art Spiegelman, Tom Tomorrow, and Winston Smith) take a look at the lighter side of the Patriot Act. Oh, for fun!
BOOKS
NEW & USED BLAB!, edited by Monte Beauchamp, from Chronicle Books
JUL03 2730, pg. 395, $24.95
"BLAB! is the illustration and comics compendium that carries the proud tradition of unfettered graphic innovation into the future." High-falutin' rhetoric, to be sure, but they've earned the right to use it. "New & Used" is meant literally - half the book is a best-of, and the other half is entirely new. Cartoonists represented include Peter Kuper and Spain. Introduction by DEVO frontman Mark Mothersbaugh (entertainingly misspelled in PREVIEWS as Mark Mothersblaugh).
This article is Ideological Freeware. The author grants permission for its reproduction and redistribution by private individuals on condition that the author and source of the article are clearly shown, no charge is made, and the whole article is reproduced intact, including this notice.
All contents
©2001-5