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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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