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Above we see Marshall Rogers, among the ‘star’ superhero artists of the late ’70s/early ’80s, at his most transformed. This is from Cap’n Quick & A Foozle, his one and only longform project as a writer/artist, although Rogers actually took the credit of Director; this was, I suspect, partially in homage to the Warner Brothers cartoons that provided no small inspiration, but it also highlights Rogers’ understanding of himself at the head of a band of collaborators, including scenarist/colorist Chris Goldberg, and additional colorists René Reynolds & L.J. Chapin. As you might guess, there’s a lot of emphasis on color in this thing, ranging from odd, hazy translucent effects to washed-out blue & green over pencil shading, to – ah, see above. I don’t think Eclipse would publish anything quite so anxious and out-there again until Floyd Farland, Citizen of the Future.

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It is my distinct pleasure to mention that the above image hails from the millennial L’Association anthology Comix 2000, a copy of which I recently found sitting in the Adult section of a comics store I’d visited only two times prior. It was buried in porn. Always check the Adult section – there might be more than just Love and Rockets back issues!

Comix 2000, of course, is one of the mighty monuments and grand follies of ‘alternative’ comics in the last decade: 2000 pages of original work, accounting for 324 contributors from 29 nations, restricted from the use of dialogue or narrative text and honed in on the theme of “the 20th century.” Despite this — and yes, I know it was actually published toward the end of 1999 — I consider it to be the beginning of the ’00s in comics, that mad chaos epoch of diverse ambition, multiplied formats, and saturating foreign insight. It’s a huge, stolid hardcover brick of a comic, a solid red jacket design covering gossamer-thin pages, like a reference tome. Indeed, it was meant as a summing up – a book anyone, anywhere could theoretically open up and understand, and thereby grasp the mess of what happened in the world.

The trick is, you might need to just open it up somewhere and start reading, because going from front to back strikes me as attempting to read the encyclopedia as a novel. If we apply the traditional criterion of an anthology’s worth — superior contributions arranged to form a revelatory whole by way of keenly focused editorial vision — Comix 2000 registers as a baffling fog of tonal incoherence. I have no idea how an editorial vision is even supposed to stay focused over 2000 pages of contributions from people speaking over a dozen languages, even under the best of circumstances — although the book’s introduction, repeated in 10 languages, that ‘alternative’ visual styles blend and travel far more efficiently than the provincial populism of the Franco-Belgian tradition, commercial manga or superhero art, suggesting at least a purposeful cultivation of ‘individualism’ as a prevailing motif — and coordinator J.C. Menu ultimately opts to simply arrange the artists in alphabetical order. The stated theme, broad so as to become vaporous, moreover guarantees that everyone will do basically whatever the hell they feel like anyway. What’s your 20th century?

But god, the proportions! An alphabetical, non-comprehensive reference of contrasting perspectives on enormity! It had to be this big, true believers! And further – doesn’t it simulate what we’ve done for ten years now, comics qua comics? Ten years of growth? Of categorization, of manipulation? Framing? Considering the past, the Golden Age of Reprints? Downloads? The whole fucking internet? The availability of works, of works-on-works, of criticism? Navigation of a seemingly exploded terrain, sick with looping, lurching, overlapping perspectives? New freedoms? Could you even imagine a Comix 2000 in 1997, even leafing through your NON #1, you lucky kid, your Collection Ciboulette? Because if it hadn’t existed by now, it’d just be logic to suggest it. Or something like it – 2010 pages just sounds weird. Wasn’t that a Jamie Delano series?

Right now, I’m busy exploring suggested routes; as Bart Beaty remarked in Unpopular Culture, it’s “a book manuscript not so much to be read as to be toured.” I’ve just finished reading Sammy Harkham’s chat with project coordinator J.C. Menu from The Comics Journal #300, and I’ve gone and read all the selections named in there. Prior to that I picked out all of the manga artists, forming a mini-anthology in my head – the picture above was drawn by Muddy Wehalla (also spelled Wehara), a Garo contributor most prominently seen in English via the 1996 anthology Comics Underground Japan, which featured a two-part, all double-splash saga of salarymen in combat with monsters, bisected by odd, probably pun-laden gag strip breakdowns. His is as direct as contributions get, a hugely visceral saga of adorable babies crawling through seething nests of snapping, writhing serpents, one of them finally shrugging off his tears and learning to walk, only to happen upon precarious cliffs knotted with really BIG snakes.

Is… is it all an allegory for Japan emergence into the global community from the womb of isolationism? Is the fat baby eating snakes the shade of militarism? To be continued…?! It’s gonna take forever to see part two. Way longer than in MOME. By then, I might even be finished with the damned thing! Unless I’m somehow distracted: (more…)

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In an effort to maintain some continuity between these little(?) post introductions, I’ll note that the same Dark Fantasy Productions I mentioned last week had at one point planned to publish the work of Croatian-born Danijel Zezelj, who at that point had just recently arrived in the United States. Specifically, they were going to release an American edition of his 1995 book Rex, a crime comic about a hulking ex-cop smashing out of prison to exact revenge on the people that ruined his life. The material was finally released in a North American edition in 2008 by Optimum Wound Comics, which also posted it online; there’s some interesting mixed media stuff going on with some pages, and an extended coda that seeks to hoist the content entirely into some oddball poetry space.

Zezelj had developed a lot since then; the image above is from one of my favorite recent finds, the artist’s 2004 short comics collection Caballo, published in English by Petikat, the art workshop he co-founded. The image above is from Reflex – Marinara, one of five segments in the book named after an earlier project, 2003’s graphic novel and live performance piece Reflex. These shorts are wordless, typically exercising some interest in comics pacing, or perspective; as seen above, the readers perspective seems to zoom in incredibly close to Zezelj’s representational slashes of image, abstracting the scene until briefly backing away to reveal a different image, one apparently suggested by the preceding abstract image. This is the sequence, perhaps improvisatory, but keenly unified: scenes flickering in and out of solidity.

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remember, right to left

Well look at that! Incontrovertible truths, straight from Japan! Before we’re even past the break! Take my hand, sweet reader, as we journey deeper into… the dreams of manga!

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Neil Gaiman is an axiom. Or perhaps a kind of totem. He’s certainly been a comic book character, several times, even occasionally in stories to which he had no preexisting relationship.

Witness: Donna Mia, an intended four-issue miniseries created by one Trevlin Utz and produced with colorist/sometimes-inker Eric Olive for Dark Fantasy Productions, which appears to have been active in comics publishing from 1994 to 1997. Only two issues were actually released, spun off from the publisher’s Dark Fantasies house anthology, wherein the Donna Mia character — an escaped succubus apparently fused with a medieval Italian girl — made her funnybook debut. As you might imagine, only Neil Gaiman could possibly handle such a life’s story, so there he sat in the titular miniseries, covers by Michael Wm. Kaluta, variant red foil edition available with bonus centerfold, all shades and leather jacket and iconic and astonished at the super-secret sexy origin. You might call it a ‘bad girl’ comic.

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…and I’m a year older.

My birthday was last weekend, so I thought it’d be fun to page through some comics from around the blessed date; ’81 was an odd and busy time in comics, days where Creepy, Heavy Metal and RAW shared space in the form as the Direct Market grew. One magazine-styled creature of the new distribution was Eclipse, a b&w comics periodical from the publisher of the same name, not yet three years from its release of Sabre, the Don McGregor/Paul Gulacy comics album famously targeted at comic book specialty retailers. Above you see the star of the show, from the July 1981 issue #2: Marshall Rogers, then fresh off a McGregor-written album of his own, the staggeringly portentous Detectives, Inc.: A Remembrance of Threatening Green.

Ah, those precision headlights and draftsman’s rays – like François Schuiten and Tsutomu Nihei, Rogers was exposed to architectural composition before he became professional in comics, and his inevitable cityscapes are the stillest and coldest of the group. This panel is apparently intended to contrast with a lonely desert vista at the top of its page, but Rogers’ hills and plants are so sharp and precise you’d think you could cut your finger on the page, causing “the strip” to register as less a response to the wilds than an explosion of organic growth. Which could just mean a cancer, but what control!

Rogers was in every issue of Eclipse, mostly (as above) via the Steve Englehart serial Coyote, though to my mind the same team seemed far more relaxed and effective in Slab, a self-contained piece from issue #1 initially written as a Superman/Creeper story for DC Comics Presents and revamped by Rogers into something else entirely, chock-full of gleaming sci-fi structures and oddball character designs (the Creeper becomes a talking cartoon bird, for instance), then re-scripted atop by Englehart when appropriate, tongue presumably in cheek.

Still, this speaks to the makeup of Eclipse, a self-positioned mainstream-underground bridge running through comics retailers, mixing Marvel/DC veterans with Trina Robbins and Harvey Pekar and mystery prose/Dick Tracy writer Max Allan Collins, everything very sedate and straightforward, the occasional appearance by the likes of Kaz notwithstanding – you could have told me half this stuff was drawn in 1975 and I’d have believed you. That’s not exactly a criticism, but it maybe speaks to the ease with which publisher Eclipse felt its way into the delicate market, certainly without a lot of money. The magazine ended with issue #8 in 1983 to convert into a color comic book, Eclipse Monthly.

Meanwhile, no less a well-financed comics entity than Marvel was releasing issue #6 (June 1981) of Epic Illustrated, a big fat color magazine squarely positioned as a reaction to Heavy Metal. An establishment response, but god damn if those early issues in particular didn’t throw themselves into the work, oozing with paints, seared with airbrushes, and occasionally teetering on the brink of comprehensibility. Granted, much of this particular issue is taken up by Ken Steacy’s adaptation of Harlan Ellison’s Life Hutch, one of those arch separations of copious words and illustrative pictures I mentally associate with Byron Preiss (maybe I should be thinking Jim Steranko), but even that seems of a restless piece with a five-page Rick Veitch epic — intended as a  double-sided foldout and reprinted as such in his 2007 Shiny Beasts collection — concerning the psychic fusion of a starship and a dude with hoses in his eyes forming a gigantic nude humanoid space weapon that has cosmic sex with a feminine Earth protector/science goddess and boils the flesh off corpulent galactic warmakers.

That’s not the melted face above, mind you; Mike Saenz was still a few years off from the digital inquiries of Shatter and Iron Man: Crash when he and writer Roy Kinnard (who’d scripted him Creepy that year too) did Flash Sport, a typical ‘guy controlled by awful people in a deadly game’ scenario unique for its video game subtext: two bratty kids putting Our Man through violent paces for laughs. An appropriate context for the computer-inclined Saenz, triumphantly depicting a bad little boy’s getting shot open all over the page at the story’s close. And then there’s Kultz, a veritable double-down by Stephen R. Bissette & Steve Perry in which the rowdy trash film-loving teen consumers at a futuristic mega-mall fall prey to a terrible film that feeds their energies back to them until they tear each other to pieces at the surreptitious behest of the store management. You might not want to take it as an allegory for the Epic Illustrated situation, but maybe it works as a nightmare of corporate control of underground and foreign energies obliterating the young and enthusiastic – a real hazard.

Yet when I look at these rackmates of 1981, it’s the Marvel magazine that seems hungry and dated and reckless – inspiration and desperation in the face of competition, while the smaller magazine shows prudence and care, that old craftsman’s quiet. Of course, they shared contributors: P. Craig Russell, Jim Starlin. They both afforded their talents ownership of their original works. They were both very traditional in the face of RAW – but their differences are fascinations of the pliable era. And anyway, reading magazines from when I was born breaks up the monotony of googling my name and gazing into mirrors.

Oh right, new comics:

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From "Chi's Sweet Home"; art by Konami Kanata

Yes, kitty. Lots of manga indeed.
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Following up on last week, above we see artist Richard Corben working from a story by the late Harvey Pekar, as presented in 2006’s issue #2 of the first Vertigo iteration of American Splendor; a second series followed in 2008. Collectively, those eight issues were the last of Pekar’s work to see print in the comic book format — although they followed a prominent bookshelf-ready Vertigo release in 2005’s The Quitter, drawn by Dean Haspiel — and often had the feel of a valedictory effort, with a occasional propensity for teaming Pekar with hopefully simpatico ‘name’ artists, like Gilbert Hernandez or Darwyn Cooke.

Corben illustrates a five-page Halloween story which, in true Pekar fashion, ambles into a small domestic drama about searching for a lost pair of glasses the day after a party. The effect of this subject matter on the art is interesting; stripped of any overt supernatural or fantastical image potential, extra attention is drawn to how Corben’s stylized figures hang weightily in space, initially standing in claustrophobic rooms draped with midnight holiday shadows (see left), but then moving outdoors with Pekar’s narrative into white-heavy space, cold and aloof (perfect for hiding misplaced items) and quietly threatening, like sharp leaves and twigs surrounding grumpy vulture Harvey above, externalizing his eternal anxiety ($150!!) as nature itself threatening him with yet another poke. That’s just how Harvey’s world could seem in these comics, mundane to some but likewise potentially transformative for collaborators, in that we might suddenly see nothing but ably wrinkled humans scanning their model-like world, a vulture by a tree, wondering what to do, or maybe pondering which created which, man or world? Writer or artist?

Other artists, and worlds, of course, might resist. Witness Eddie Campbell, as crucial a practitioner of autobiographical comics as Pekar, but full of fancy and romance and fiction, sharply apart from the self-consciously unadorned vignettes and monologues and encounters of the comic book American Splendor. Above you’ll see the bottom half of the second and final page of a Pekar/Campbell collaboration, from the same issue as the Corben story. Harvey has bought some pierogies at the store, and become engaged in a chat with a bagger on trombonist Jiggs Whigham, whose father was a policeman. Our Man reminisces about the old Famous Funnies series Juke Box Comics, in which real popular musicians would get into adventures. Suddenly, the final ‘panel’ is protruding downward from the talking heads above, and Benny Goodman is racing around Pekar’s narrative in a wordless escapade, anticipating the (literally) extra-narrative, occasionally extra-mortal antics of Campbell’s 2008 The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard with Dan Best.

But make no mistake – this might look like crime fighting, but it’s as much a jailbreak. From Harvey Pekar.

Additional splendor of every construction and connotation follows:
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Nothing beats a good ol’ local comics convention, so my Sunday morning was fucking invincible. It was one of those longboxes-atop-longboxes things, held in a local campus gymnasium so remote on school property a cosplayer took it upon himself to direct eager patrons in. The basketball hoops were still hanging; it was hot. To your left is my prime find, probably not the kind of revelatory funnybook (re)discovery that might open your eyes, heart, etc., but still: Fantagor #1, first Last Gasp edition, 1971, $5.00.

It’s Richard Corben, of course; I’ve been in the mood since reading an appreciation by critic David Brothers (very much worth reading for a perspective premised largely on Corben’s recent, front-of-Previews comic book work) and then belatedly discovering that the artist has returned to comic book self-publishing via Odds and Ends, a 32-page b&w compilation of assorted items, paramount among them a 20-page sequel to 1994’s color Corben release From the Pit. We can certainly draw a line straight back to Fantagor, the artist’s original (initially self-published) showcase series, although writer Starr Armitage and artist Herb Arnold also appear, foreshadowing the anthology format in which Corben would plant himself for many years – the seductive quality of narrating a comics artist’s path across the development of the form ensures that the younger Corben is typically identified as an ‘underground’ cartoonist, which is accurate, but it’s also true that his Warren magazines debut came in 1970 (Creepy #36), the same year as his initial contributions to Last Gasp’s Skull Comics and Slow Death, and only two years after his earliest fanzine appearances in Voice of Comicdom. In this way Corben bridges the gap between the EC (or thereabouts) horror-influenced faction of the undergrounds and the arguably more direct continuation of the aesthetic via Warren, while indeed anticipating the shift of the Warren magazines toward a less traditional ‘horror’ focus as the ’70s continued.

Five bucks was a popular price at the basketball con (as I have renamed it); I also picked up that enormous Treasury edition of Jack Kirby’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Dave Sim’s Collected Letters 2, because you know entertainment’s right around the corner when the first two words in a book of correspondence are “Gary Groth.” I felt so great I almost did a victory layup. Although, actually, I ran cross country in high school; I don’t really know what a layup is. And I can’t even jump these days without my ankles shattering. My presence on the internet may be diminishing, but make no mistake: I’m rapidly expanding in other ways.

A note on new comics methodology: I’m writing all this on Sunday night, because it turns out I won’t have online access until Friday. As such, this week’s selections are based on Midtown Comics’ list of 7/14 releases to Midtown Comics locations, which may differ in certain ways from Diamond’s own list of releases (updated Mondays), although neither list is foolproof, or a guarantee that your shop ordered anything besides X-Force diorama statues. But anyway:

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This past Sunday was Independence Day in the U.S., which means UPS had Monday off, which means new comics don’t arrive until Thursday, so Diamond didn’t update their release list until yesterday – hence the ’24 hours later’ status of this post (again). It’d be cliché to insist I spent the extra time reflecting on American comics, so instead here’s Michael Jackson as drawn by Suehiro Maruo, from 1991’s The New Comics Anthology, edited by the late Bob Callahan. This was very possibly the artist’s first comics work to see print in English, predating Blast Books’ 1993 release of Mr. Arashi’s Amazing Freak Show or Maruo’s infamous Planet of the Jap contribution to Blast’s 1996 Comics Underground Japan anthology, and it stands in a unique context. If the 1980 debut of RAW marked the beginning of the ‘alternative comics’ era — and believe me, there’s alternate choices — then ’91 serves as its natural bookend, since that’s when the final, transformed, bookstore-distributed digest RAW appeared. That was also the year of Kitchen Sink’s first latter day Twisted Sisters anthology, a term used for marketing on the cover of The New Comics Anthology, which endeavored to designate ‘new’ comics as loosely categorized trends. Maruo found himself categorized with new ‘punk’ comics of Gary Panter inspiration, as opposed to the historically-informed ‘vaudeville’ of Chris Ware and Dan Clowes and Peter Bagge, although I think 20 years of ensuing exposure to the artist’s work have revealed him to be a wry traditionalist of his own, of a more direct lineage with early Garo artist (and Doing Time author) Kazuichi Hanawa, to say nothing of a prior century’s printmaking. Indeed, the comic above draws an amusing analogy between MJ’s Bad-era costuming and your typical Japanese boys’ school uniform as seen in many a Showa fetish Maruo epic; in the end he spins so fast his head explodes, which matches the rather goofy horror comic disposition of several Maruo shorts.

This, of course, is another function of criticism: providing a continuum of revised understanding of foreign works, filling in absent context and discussing historical positioning, often to challenge the received wisdom about an otherwise aloof, potentially language-barred artist, a constant hazard online today in the midst of enthusiasm for foreign language works. Maruo’s work was the only New Comic from Japan, and thereby suggested assumptions about the state of Japanese alternative comics from his idiosyncratic example, one that today stands out more for its unique aesthetic departures, much in the way that mainline manga used to be often sold in its heaviest, most detailed, violent sci-fi form, there perhaps to make it seem more in line with American expectations for popular comics.

For more in expectations and delay, here is your American Thursday:

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