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Yeah, that’s right: I flip through foreign-language magazines looking for the comics. This is from a bookmark tucked away in a recent issue of Snob, a Russian-language lifestyle glossy which I’m told is common to newsstands in the NYC area, presumably given an especially liberal construction to “area” in that I’m three and a half hours away by train. As you can see, it’s an installment of John Deering’s Strange Brew, initially reading “It really tortured my soul to create this one…” Since I cannot read Russian, I don’t know if the same joke is being communicated presently, or if some advertising or Russian lifestyle-related jest has been covertly substituted, but I think all of us can agree, nonetheless, that making fun of gallery art and artists is as potentially universal a language as has yet been conceived.

Er, let’s get right to the release list:

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A few more 9-panel grids for you, coming out of Carol Swain’s 1996 long-form debut Invasion of the Mind Sappers. Swain tends to work mainly in short stories — many of them collected into last year’s fine Dark Horse hardcover Crossing the Empty Quarter and Other Stories — which means she sort of fades in and out of view in English-language comics. Still, assembling her various works, which would also include the 2004 solo book, Foodboy, and her 2009 collaboration with Bruce Paley, Giraffes in My Hair: A Rock ‘N’ Roll Life (and not her role as colorist on the notorious 1992 Peter Milligan/Brendan McCarthy project Skin), reveals an affinity for this simple, versatile layout.

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This scene comes courtesy of WildStorm-affiliated colorist Jonny Rench, who died this past weekend at the age of 28. I recalled him easily from the work pictured above, the 2007-08 miniseries The Programme, written by Peter Milligan and drawn by C.P. Smith. I can best describe Smith’s art as ‘heavy realism’ in the shadowed, deliberately posed manner of Jae Lee, whose own work typically divines much impact from its interaction with colors by José Villarrubia or June Chung; Rench colored Smith on the first five of twelve issues. In keeping with the broadly satirical nature of Milligan’s drug-kissed scenario — seeing literal Russian superpowers rise up to gift an uncertain terrorism-era America with the certainty of national competition — Rench blasts most all displays of superhuman force with garish, fuzzy, sickly colors. Otherwise, Smith’s photo-still figures are bathed in one or more hue.

It’s one of the more peculiar-looking longform series to see release from DC/Marvel in a while, enough so to wedge the visual team’s names in my memory. And it’s unfortunate my recall should be sparked again by such sad news, but there you go.

Onto the upcoming works:

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Writing about Neonomicon and Alan Moore’s infernal worlds of words the other day brought to mind an earlier, far more controversial adventure in horror comics: 1989’s notorious Taboo 2, edited by Stephen R. Bissette and dogged by all manner of production difficulties chiefly related to finding people willing to physically assemble the finished volume. Two printers, two copy shops, nine binders, a typesetting house and a color separation outfit all declined to handle the material, and then portions of the print run were seized by Canadian and UK customs. Looking at it today, the anthology mostly seems distinctly catholic in its approach to horror, blending art by S. Clay Wilson, Eddie Campbell, Richard Sala, Michael Zulli, Rick Grimes and Bernie Mireault, to say nothing of the auspicious debut of the new Alan Moore-written horror serial From Hell.

But the entry that’s stayed with me — and provides a fascinating link to Moore’s later horror work with Avatar — is Sweet Nothings, a 16-page story from writer Tim Lucas, best known as a writer-on-movies-on-home-video and eventual editor/publisher of Video Watchdog, and Belgrade-born artist Simonida Perica-Uth, making her comics debut. Lucas had begun work on Throat Sprockets, a Mike Hoffman-drawn comics serial in the prior Taboo, but eventually reworked it into a 1994 prose novel; its plot saw a man developing a fixation on women’s throats after viewing a strange fetish movie, a disease-of-image scenario not unlike the Lovecraft language whispered to one Agent Sax in Neonomicon prelude The Courtyard, opening his senses to the true nature of existence in a world of allusion.

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Neonomicon #2 (of 4) (Alan Moore & Jacen Burrows; Avatar, $3.99)

In the interests of promoting inter-website dialogue and peace throughout all free lands, what follows is a response of sorts to the recent, very fine writing-on-comics zine The Prism #1 (PDF download here), specifically its “annocommentations” — a considered set of page-by-page reactions — composed by Mindless Ones site contributors amypoodle, Zom and bobsy, in regards to the recent Alan Moore-scripted bookshelf-type comic The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century #1: 1910.

Three passages in particular seemed relevant to a more recent Alan Moore comic, this week’s Necronomicon #2. In fact, I found the three passages to coincide directly with three extremes active in the work. My duties as a comics critic and obsessive compulsive demand I detail each of them below, in order of growing expanse, as additionally informed by the trio of word-drugs prominent in The Courtyard, this present serial’s overture. To wit:

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Contrary to what you’re thinking, this is not from the new Palookaville, it’s an entirely random fumetti I happened to come across this week. Or, really it’s what North American publishers were calling ‘cinemanga’ until recently, in that it appears to have assembled from screengrabs of a 2006 action movie vehicle for Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan, Don: The Chase Begins Again. Publisher Bollywood Comics appears to prefer the term ‘movic’; I guess the producers of Don enjoyed the results regardless of what they’re called, since the comic was included as a pack-in with the dvd release of the film. I bought it just for the comic.

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No major insights here, just a little tribute to Spanish cartoonist Fernando Fernández, who passed away last month. A longtime artist for the Barcelona-based Selecciones Ilustradas agency, Fernández illustrated numerous romance and war comics for the British scene in the ’50s and ’60s, as did much of the SI crew, although he’s probably best remembered in North America for his odd contributions to Warren’s Vampirella magazine in the ’70s, “odd” because by that point Fernández was creating entire stories himself, then using SI as a means of licensing his work to assorted international magazines, whether whole or broken up as serials. Needless to say, he also turned in an obligatory Heavy Metal appearance when the time came, via his Zora and the Hibernauts album, pictured above as collected in 1984 by Catalan Communications. This is exactly what comics don’t look like anymore; I have pinpointed it through science.

And here is what comics do look like:

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For your pleasure, we now present the off-panel first-appearance-by-implication of beloved DC character Grant Morrison. Created by Don McGregor & Gene Colan in 1984, Morrison is notable for having never directly interfered in the action of his originating series, Nathaniel Dusk: Private Investigator, an out-of-continuity detective series (of added historical interest for being among the first division-of-labor comics series colored directly from an artist’s pencils). Morrison’s hands-off presence as a comics player was subsequently and radically reversed as chief among many DC character revisions proffered by the 1988 Animal Man series, in which “the Writer” Grant Morrison displays direct and seemingly unlimited control over storyline action, doubtlessly in support of the evolutionary theme present in the series at large, to say nothing of later related comics works.

While ostensibly killed by writer John Ostrander in a subsequent issue of Suicide Squad, Morrison has nonetheless endured as a pliable (if elusively identifiable) presence in DC or DC-owned comics, ranging from Planetary to Seven Soldiers. He shares a name with author and music video personality Grant Morrison, although it is unknown if McGregor and/or Colan were aware of this other Morrison — potentially through contacts established or submission present in the immediate wake of British writer Alan Moore’s arrival on the North American comics scene in the early ’80s — at the time of his creation.

This has been your Extremely Reliable Comics History for 9/21. Pricing information on upcoming releases follows:

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Amazing the things you can find at a comics show like SPX. I mean, I hadn’t expected Mark Millar’s comics magazine to be so well designed! Or distributed by Drawn and Quarterly! “I hope the little girl cuts someone,” I grinned to Tom Devlin, who looked slightly more than halfway toward the verge of tears, and maybe vomiting, which was understandable. I was pretty upset they’d moved the Miss Maryland Teen USA preliminaries to another weekend too, leaving the official SPX hotel neighbor slot to be filled by some sort of medical conference (which later became a wedding reception, perhaps spontaneously).

Much to my embarrassment, it was later explained to me that LINT is in fact the subtitle to ACME Novelty Library #20, while the Mark Millar comics magazine is titled CLiNT. This is so you might look at the title a certain way and mistakenly (hilariously) think the magazine is really titled CUNT. “But mom,” I said, “that’s an awful name for a magazine! And disrespectful to Rory Hayes! There really are no ideas left. Alan Moore was right.” I noticed then that she was softly weeping over the phone, as is her tendency. God, it’s not my fault the apple harvest festival isn’t until October!

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From "Balloon Vendor Comix"; art by Fred Schrier

Just a little end of summer traveling for your enjoyment; it was no doubt a pertinent theme for Schrier, whom I believe mailed in the issue’s final pages to Rip-Off Press from his work with the Peace Corps in Afghanistan circa 1971 or so.

Not much else to say, although hopefully I’ll have recovered some vocal function by this weekend’s Small Press eXpo, in which I and Tim will be participating in the Bill Kartalopoulos-moderated How We Judge comics critics panel with Johanna Draper Carlson, Gary Groth, Chris Mautner, Ken Parille and Caroline Small. That’s Saturday at 3:00; I’m told there will be a lot of added excitement this year with the addition of volunteers and/or Miss Maryland Teen USA hopefuls positioned under the floor to saw out holes around our seats if we aren’t sufficiently insightful. The rest of the weekend’s programming features Dan participating with Brian Ralph, Paul Lyons and Tom Devlin in discussing the Fort Thunder Legacy (again moderated by Bill K., Sat. 5:30) and Tim moderating a talk between Frank and Jim Rugg on “auteurial work that shows the influence of commercial comics” (Sun. 4:00), among other fine events. Come on down (up, over, through) and say hello.

As for new funnies:

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