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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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I find it extremely difficult to avoid coming off like Harry Naybors whenever I try to discuss things like comics terminology, but fortunately not everything about jargon is necessarily so deadly. It’s likely common knowledge to everyone else, but the origin of the term “fumetti” was new to me when I recently read it in a footnote from Tim Lucas‘s excellent-so-far biography of Mario Bava:

The word fumetti means “smokes” and it was coined for this medium of storytelling [comics told through photographs] because the Italians likened the word balloons used to convey dialogue to puffs of smoke.

Maybe I’m a sucker, but to me, that’s just a beautiful metaphor. In fact, it’s beautiful enough to make me want to become a fan of fumetti (as irrational as that chain of logic may be). Does anyone know of any photo-funnies that really work? I mean, that are worth reading more than once? In the meantime, I’ve got some old issues of National Lampoon and Weirdo to look through.