Read Comments (6)

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.

(more…)

Read Comments (10)

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.

(more…)

Read Comments (4)

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:

(more…)

Read Comments (12)

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:

(more…)

Read Comments (14)

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!

(more…)

Read Comments (7)

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:

(more…)

Read Comments (16)

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.

(more…)

Read Comments (9)

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…)

Read Comments (13)

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.

(more…)

Read Comments (26)

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.

(more…)