Category: Mature Reading

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Peter Bagge’s Other Stuff


By Peter Bagge with R. Crumb, Alan Moore, Adrian Tomine, Dan Clowes, Johnny Ryan, Danny Hellman, Gilbert & Jaime Hernadez, Joanne Bagge & various (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-622-5

You probably know Peter Bagge as the fiery, wise-mouthed, superbly acerbic cartoonist responsible for incredibly addictive, sharply satirical strips about American life that featured in such wonderful magazines as Neat Stuff and Hate, his superbly strident Buddy Bradley stories or even his forays into the more-or-less comics mainstream with such works as DC’s Yeah!

But the graphic ridiculist also has a commercial impetus, whimsical nature, politically active side (as cartoonist and societal commentator for the Libertarian publication Reason) and a secret life outside comics.

Thus this glorious compendium of seldom-seen strips from a variety of publications has been compiled by Fantagraphics, in a (mostly) full-colour softcover collection stuffed with deliciously fluid drawings and razor-sharp polemic, broadly comedic or surreal observations and, as ever, sharply incisive, highly rational and deeply intimate questioning quandaries and observations.

Bagge’s oeuvre is skewering stupidity, spotlighting pomposity and generally exposing the day-to-day aggravations and institutionalized insanities of modern urban life and these strips, from such diverse sources as his own Hate Annuals, Hate Jamboree, Weirdo, El Rios, newspapers such as The Stranger and LA Times as well as publications like Magnet Magazine, Spin, Razor, Discover, Details, Toro, Vice and software company Adobe’s website from the 1980s to the present, offer a fascinating insight into his world, working as they do under the constraints of a client’s prerequisites…

They’re still all outrageously hilarious and powerfully effective though, even when filtered through the lens of cartoon collaborators such as the sparkling pantheon featured here…

Following an extensive, detail-packed explanatory Introduction, the madness begins to unfold in a section collecting all the adventures of classy, racily moderne young broad Lovey (first seen in Hate Annual #1, 2, 4 and 5 and The Stranger from 2000-2004) beginning with ‘Gender-Bending Hyjinx’ progressing to the gloriously distasteful ‘The Gaggle and the Gimp!’ before revealing ‘The Real André’ and indulging in ‘A Party to Forget’…

The music scene gets a wry shellacking in Rock ‘n’ Roll – covering material from 1995-2012 – which opens with a string of ‘Musical Urban Legends Presents’ single-pagers from Magnet including ‘Gnomes are Real’, ‘A Winning Formula’, ‘Dinner with Brian (Part One)’, ‘The Stuff of Genius’, ‘What Price Love?’, ‘Dinner with Brian (Wilson, that is) Part 2’, ‘Little Richard in “Ménage a Whah?!”’, ‘Kiss my Baby’ and ‘Start Spreadin’ the News’ whilst ‘Man with a Vision’ lampoons youthful ambition in a smart strip which originally debuted in Spin.

The chapter then closes with a trio of Beach Boys-themed bad vibrations as ‘Murry Wilson: Rock ‘n’ Roll Dad’ appals in ‘Turn Back the Hands of Time’ (co-created with Dana Gould), meets Charles Manson in ‘Helter Skelter, My Ass’ and treats his son ‘The Meal Ticket’ just as you always suspected he did…

The promised Collaborations cover the period 1996-2002 and mostly come from Hate, finding Bagge working in various roles such as scripter of ‘Me’ illustrated by Gilbert Hernandez, and illustrator of ‘Go Ask Alice’, written by Alice Cooper and appearing in Spin.

‘Shamrock Squid: Autobiographical Cartoonist!’ was drawn by Adrian Tomine, ‘The Hasty Smear of my Smile…’ exposing the sordid life of the Kool-Aid Man was written by Alan Moore & inked by Eric Reynolds, whilst ‘Life in these United States’ was rendered by Daniel Clowes and debuted in Weirdo.

Iconoclastic Johnny Ryan drew ‘Dildobert Joins the Al-Qaeda’, the autobiographical delight ‘What’s in a Name?‘ was illustrated by Danny Hellman, sordid strip spoof ‘Caffy’ was drawn by R. Crumb, ‘Shamrock Squid in Up the Irish!’ was inked by Eric Reynolds and the hilarious ‘The Action Suits Story’ was illustrated by Jaime Hernandez.

There are a number of strips throughout the volume gleefully dissing long-time inker and collaborator Jim Blanchard in such cruel and revelatory epics as ‘Backyard Funnies’ written & pencilled by Reynolds, ‘Don’t Knock It If You Haven’t Tried It’ (written & drawn by Pat Moriarty), ‘Bleachy Blanchard’ written & drawn by Kevin Scalzo, and ‘Harassed Citizen’ written & drawn by Rick Altergott. There’s also the scathing solo effort ‘That Darn Blanchard’ in the introduction pages too…

“True” Facts covers educational (sort of) features such as biographies of scientists from Discover Magazine in 2009. These highlight Robert Brown in ‘I’ll Second That Motion’, Wallace “Gloomy Gus” Carothers in ‘It’s a Wonderful Legacy’, reveal what ‘Mendeleyev Predicts!’, heralds Joseph Priestly as ‘Phlogiston’s Last Champion!’, details Major Walter Reed’s ghastly experiments in ‘Yellow Fever Fever!’ and celebrates ancient Moslem savant Taqi al-Din in ‘Oh, What a Spin I’m In!’

From 1998 ‘So Much Comedy, So Little Time’ (from Details) exposes the festival circuit whilst the autobiographical ‘East Coast, West Coast, Blah, Blah, Blah…’ came from Road Strips in 2005 and ‘Partying with the “Dickster”‘ revealed a truth about Vice President Cheney in a 2007 strip from the LA Times… as did radio expose ‘At the End of the Day…’

‘Stuff I Know about Belgium, by Some Dumb American’, which originated in El Rios in 2010, the savagely self-excoriating ‘What Was Wrong With Us?’ from 2002, the incisive ‘Game Day with the Quarterback’s Wife’ (Toro, 2004) and ‘The Expert’ (Vice, 2006) all explore humanity’s foible-besmirched mundanity, and this collection more or less concludes with a series originally shown as entertainment content on Adobe’s homepage in 2000 before being reprinted in Hate Annual #6.

Restored and re-coloured by Bagge’s most consistent collaborator – his wife Joanne –

The Shut-Ins follows the slow seduction and fall of computer illiterates Chet and Bunny in ‘Meet the Shut-Ins’, ‘Meet Santiago’, ‘Pretty Flowers’, ‘Make the World Go Away’, ‘The Great Indoors’, ‘Withdrawal Symptoms’, ‘Life Among the Earthlings’, ‘A Short-Lived Recovery’, ‘Our Babies’, ‘Irrigation Blues’, ‘The Funeral’, ‘No Good for the ‘Hood”, ‘The Meg Ryan Factor’, ‘Oh, What a Night!’, ‘Taking Stock’, ‘Slowly He Turned’, ‘Rich, Rich, Rich!’, ‘Dot Com Casualties’ and ‘Can I Interest You in Some Fairy Dust?’

Even after all that the cartoon craziness goes on as the designers squeeze in two more lost classics –‘Crazy Exes’ from Spanish GQ in 2000 and, on the back cover, ‘Good Ol’ Posterity’ from Artforum…

Challenging, hilarious, wonderfully shocking and always thought-provoking, Other Stuff in another superbly engaging and entertaining book from a brilliantly inspired social commentator and inquisitor; impassioned, deeply involved and never afraid to admit when he’s confused, angry or just plain wrong. This wonderful use of heart, smarts and ink is one more reason why cartooning is the most potent mode of expression we possess.
© 2013 Peter Bagge, except as noted on the strips themselves. All rights reserved.

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Mesmo Delivery


By Rafael Grampá with Marcus Penna, translated by Júlio Mairena (Dark Horse Books)
ISBN: 978-1-59582-465-3

In an industry and art form that has become so very dependent on vast interlocking storylines, an encyclopaedic knowledge of a million other yarns and the tacit consent to sign up for another million episodes before reaching any kind of narrative payoff, the occasional short, sharp, intensely stand-alone tale is as welcome and vital as a cold beer in the noon-day desert.

Just such a salutary singleton was Mesmo Delivery, first solo English-language release of singularly gifted writer/artist Rafael Grampá who originally devised the macabre and gritty thriller in his native Brazil in 2008.

Picked up and translated by Dark Horse two years later, this stark and spookily effective grindhouse/trucker movie amalgam offers dark chills, gritty black humour and eerie, compulsive mystery in equal, intoxicating amounts. And it all starts, unfolds and ends here. No muss, no fuss, no busload of tie-ins.

Aging, raddled Elvis impersonator Sangrecco is a very odd deliveryman working for a rather unique haulage business. For a start he can’t drive, which is why hulking, gentle cash-starved ex-boxer Rufo has been temporarily hired by the boss to operate the truck on a run through very bleak bad country.

Rufo doesn’t ask questions. He just drives the big container rig with its mysterious, unspecified cargo that he’s not allowed to see to God knows where, listening to the obnoxious, pompous Sangrecco mouth off about his many, unappreciated talents.

Things take a bad turn when they break at the isolated Standart Truck Stop. The Elvis freak is too lazy to even fetch his own beer, and when Rufo takes care of business and grudgingly tries to pay, a sleazy pack of locals trick him into an impromptu street fight on a cash-bet.

The ploy is a set-up and when Rufo proves unexpectedly tough the prize-fight gets too serious and results in a fatality – possibly two…

Street-fighting head tough Forceps then convinces his “townie” cronies and the other onlookers that they need to get rid of all the witnesses.

…Which is when old Sangrecco reveals what his speciality is…

Stark, brutal, rollercoaster-paced and rendered with savage, exhilarating bravura, this thundering, down-and-dirty fable grips like a vice and hits like a juggernaut, providing the kind of excitement every jaded thriller fan dreams of.

Also included in this slim, scary and mesmerising tome is an effusive Introduction from Brian Azzarello, pin-ups by Mike Allred, Eduardo Risso, Craig Thompson and Fábio Moon and a stunning 16-page sketch, design and commentary section ‘Making of Mesmo Delivery’.

Since Mesmo Delivery, Grampá has gone on to shine with his deliciously eccentric Furry Water as well as on such established titles as Hellblazer, American Vampire, Strange Tales and Uncanny X-Force amongst others, but this superbly visceral, raw storm of sheer visual dexterity and narrative guile is an ideal example of pared back, stripped down, pure comics creativity that no mature lover of the medium can afford to miss.

Mesmo Delivery ™ and © 2008, 2010 Rafael Grampá. All rights reserved.

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Jeremy Brood part 1: Relativity & Fantagor Presents Brood


By Richard Corben & Jan Strnad with additional designs by Stan Dresser (Fantagor Press/Longhorn Book Distribution)
ASIN: B0006F7UMU            ISBN: 978-0-96238-410-3

Richard Corben is one of America’s greatest proponents and pioneers of graphic narrative: a legendary animator, illustrator, publisher and cartoonist who surfed the tumultuous wave of independent counterculture commix of the 1960s and 1970s to become a major force in pictorial storytelling with his own unmistakable style and vision. Renowned for his mastery of airbrush and anatomical stylisation – producing works of captivatingly excessive overwhelming eroticism – and infamous for delightfully wicked, darkly comedic horror, fantasy and science fiction tales, Corben’s epic storytelling, violent, cathartically graphic and often blackly hilarious triumphs through the 1970s and 1980s were instrumental in making comics a mainstream medium and art form for mature readers.

Always garnering huge support and acclaim in Europe, he was regularly collected in luxurious albums even as he fell out of favour – and print – in his own country. Although most acclaimed for interpretations of classic horror literature, he is equally adept at capturing the alarming nuances of technological terror and cynical political intrigue in shocking science fiction tales such as the truncated epic spotlighted here.

In 1982 he began, with long-time collaborator Jan Strnad, a proposed series of European style square-bound albums starring a troubled star traveller, but it sadly fell victim to an economic downturn before it could find its feet. This taste of a tantalisingly uncompleted greater epic began in Jeremy Brood: Relativity and was brought to an abrupt finish in the magazine Fantagor Presents Brood (Fantagor #5, 1983). The tale has since been collected in a book in 1989 and subsequently re-released in 1998.

The original chronicle begins with a fascinating glimpse at the artist’s working process in his picture-packed ‘Illustrators Notes’ before the full Technicolor experience opens with spare-faring civil servant Brood and his horny but frustrated co-pilot Charlene receiving a sub-space transmission from Earth.

An agent on the planet Eden has sent a distress call and they are to divert there at top speed. Their civilisation is at a cultural crossroads and needs nudging in the right direction – or so planetary sociologist Bernard Finchley claims.

However due to the relativistic nature of near-light speeds, the message is three years old by the time it reaches them and their short trip to Eden will take two centuries in local time…

When they at last arrive, the promised paradise world is a hot, dry desert but, following protocol and armed with the latest tapes of the language, Brood dons a disguise and makes his way to the nearest city, leaving Char and the ship as back-up in case of trouble.

It finds him anyway and the Earthman is attacked by barbaric grotesques and has to get physical with the brutes…

In the intervening years Eden has fallen into religious fanaticism, and as Brood enters the devastated city he is found by an aged cleric who draws him towards a vast gathering. The worshippers are about to sacrifice another nubile virgin maid to Holobar – an increasingly rare occurrence as most girls wisely “disqualify” themselves at their very first opportunity – in the hope that the prophesied saviour will appear to deliver them from their oppressive all-conquering deity. As Jeremy watches in secure anonymous horror, his ancient guide Narrl hurls him into the middle of the ceremony and urges him to deflower the alien maiden or be torn apart by the mob…

Repressed WASP Brood used to have trouble getting sufficiently amorous even with his black girlfriend in the privacy of their spaceship – and she was actually the same species – so this horrific situation almost ends in disaster until the old wise man smashes the stone mask on a huge idol above the altar. Underneath, the monolith has Brood’s face…

Shocked, panicked and realising he’s been set up by a man dead for centuries, Brood at last accomplishes what he was dispatched for, encouraged in equal measure by the willing female under him and the screaming fanatics surrounding him.

Meanwhile miles distant, desert brigands mount a lethal assault on the grounded starship…

Safe for the present, Brood and his new bride Brynne are filled in by the devious alien Priest – who is also Narrl’s brother. The old connivers are the great grandsons of Finchley and a native girl, and their family has been working to build a counter-religion and messiah-cult based on Brood’s eventual arrival in the expectation that his Earth technology will allow them to overthrow the oppressive, draconian fundamentalist followers of Holobar …

Jeremy can’t think about his proposed role as rabble-rousing rebel: he’s lost radio contact with Char, and is forced to trek back to the ship. En route, however, Narrl tries to kill Brood, revealing himself to be a traitor seeking to destroy the saviour and crush the people’s hope of redemption forever. Eradiating his betrayer Brood pushes on, only to discover he is now the only Earthling on Eden…

Fantagor Presents Brood came out a year later: a special edition of Corben’s own occasional and self-published art magazine which ran a conclusion of sorts in full colour, supplemented by a black and white reprint and a new unconnected monochrome fantasy tale.

(In case you’re wondering the reprint was Razar the Unhero’ written in 1970 by Herb Arnold as “Starr Armitage”: a dark and sexily violent spoof with a deprecating edge, deliciously lampooning the Sword and Sorcery epics dominating paperback bookshelves of the day. The new tale was ‘Ogre II’, a tragic comic monster love story sequel to a yarn that ran in Warren Publishing’s 1984 #4.)

Jeremy Brood however starred in the rocket-paced all-action shocker ‘The Big Shriek!’ which picked up moments after Relativity ended…

As Jeremy buries what remains of Charlene, hordes of airborne dragon-riding Holobar zealots pass over his head heading towards the city and the (presumably) impregnated Edenite Madonna, determined to end the heretical resistance forever…

Soon the city is under shattering bombardment and all looks black until the infuriated Brood storms in, crashing his barely airworthy ship into the central square and briefly driving back in the attackers.

Retreating to the temple, Brood and Brynne prepare for their inevitable end, but the cunning far-seeing and ruthless Bernard Finchley and his devoted disciple Priest had arranged a last-ditch contingency plan, with no thought at the horrific cost their centuries-separated dupe Jeremy would be forced to pay…

Moody and trenchant, laced with sparkling irreverence and cynicism, this parable could and should have found time to fully flower but the times and trends were against it. However Corben and Strnad’s sublime acumen in depicting humanity’s primal drives and inescapable failings has never been better exemplified, and at least the 80 or so pages that were complete are still available in one single edition should you care to check out yet one more book no comics or fantasy fan should be without.
© 1982, 1983, 1989 Richard Corben and Jan Strnad. All rights reserved.

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The Collected Fat Freddy’s Cat volumes One and Two


By Gilbert Shelton with Dave Sheridan & Lieuen Adkins (Knockabout)
ISBN: 0-86166-055-2 & 0-86166-056-0   Omnibus 978-0-86166-161-9

The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers shambled out of the Underground Commix counter-culture wave in 1968; initially appearing in Berkeley Print Mint’s Feds ‘n’ Heads, and in Underground newspapers before creator Gilbert Shelton and a few like-minded friends founded their own San Francisco based Rip Off Press in 1969.

This effective collective continued to maximise the madness as the hilarious antics of the “Freaks” (contemporary term for lazy, dirty, drug-taking hippy folk) captured the imagination of the more open-minded portions of America and the world (not to mention their kids)…

In 1971 Rip Off published the first compilation: The Collected Adventures of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers – which has been in print all around the planet ever since – and soon assorted underground magazines and college newspapers were joined by the heady likes of Rip Off Comix, High Times, Playboy and numerous foreign periodicals in featuring the addictive adventures of Freewheelin’ Franklin, Phineas T. Freakears and Fat Freddy Freekowtski (and his quintessentially idealised cat): simpatico metaphorical siblings struggling day-to-day with their selected life style of sybaritic self-indulgence.

In the grand tradition of early newspaper “Funnies” sections, the original strips were often accompanied by “topper” or “footer” strips – separate mini adventures which accompanied the main story – designed to fill any odd spaces on the various syndicated pages.

Most of these micro strips supplementing the Freaks’ antics starred Fat Freddy’s Cat who rapidly became an offensively anarchic star in his own right. Eventually those 5 or 6 panel gags became complete single pages which bloomed during the 1970s into full-blown extended exploits of the canny, cynical feline reprobate in his own series of digest-sized comicbooks entitled, unsurprisingly, The Adventures of Fat Freddy’s CAT…

Much of the material consisted of untitled quickies and short sequences concocted by Shelton (with assistance from Dave Sheridan, Paul Mavrides and Lieuen Adkins) and eventually, inevitably, those little yarns were collected by UK Publisher Knockabout as a brace of oversized  297x212mm  black and white albums and, as here, two mass-market b-format paperbacks in the company’s Crack Editions imprint.

In 2009 the entire canon was finally collected in one arm-busting tome as The Fat Freddy’s CAT Omnibus.

These tales are wicked, degenerate, surreal, hilariously cynical, scatologically vulgar and relentlessly drenched in daft pre-stoner “Dude, Where’s my Litterbox…” drug culture idiom; sublimely smutty and brilliantly funny in any format but with their raw, anarchic, arch-hysteria perhaps best enjoyed in the fabulous jacket-pocket-concealable editions I’m highlighting today.

Book One opens with the hilariously whacky epic ‘Chariot of the Globs’ (written by Adkins with art by Shelton & Sheridan) revealing how the imperturbable, insouciant puss saved alien explorers from a hideous fate on our backward planet, followed by 38 short, sharp shockers covering every topic from mating to feeding, the joy of bathing cats to the things they’ll put in their cute little mouths, and the equally voluble creatures such as the Massed Cockroach Army under Freddy’s fridge…

Other pant-wetting topics covered include talking to humans, the war between felines and electrical appliances, how chickens think, kittens, travelling in Mexico, why you should never have uncaged moggies in your van and especially how cats inflict revenge…

The next extended saga is the devious and satirical 1973 spy-spoof ‘I Led Nine Lives!’ recounting the days when the fabulous feline worked undercover for the FBI. This is followed by 31 more mirthful manic gag strips about eating, excreting, clawing, dancing, grooming and meeting fellow felines. Shelton and Sheridan then disclose the horrors of ‘Animal Camp’ wherein the irrepressible feline was dumped by Fat Freddy in a Boarding Kennel run by Nazi war criminals where pets were converted into clothing and pet food or else used in arcane genetic experiments!

Naturally the brainy beast had to lead a rebellion… leading to the last 15 gag strips and ending with a big song and dance number in the Ballad of Fat Freddy’s Cat…

 

Volume Two begins with the lengthy and uproarious epic ‘The Sacred Sands of Pootweet… or the Mayor’s Meower’ from 1980, a splendidly raucous political satire based on the tale of Dick Whittington.

When a religious hard-liner overthrows the oil-rich nation and former US satellite of Pootweet, Fat Freddy attempts to scam religious dictator the Supreme Hoochy-Coochy by using the cat to clean up kingdom’s rodent problem. Only trouble is that the pious and poor Pootweet populace have no vermin problem (even after Freddy industriously attempts to import and manufacture one); only sacred, unblemished, un-desecrated shining serene sands which the cat – in dire need of a potty-break – heads straight for…

Then 39 more unforgettable side-splitting shorts investigate food, weather, diets for cats,  communication, feline entertainments, food, Christmas, mice, cat mimes and food, and ‘Fat Freddy’s CAT in the Burning of Hollywood’ from 1978 wherein the sublimely smug and sanguine survivor of a million hairy moments regales his ever-burgeoning brood of impressionable kittens with how he and his imbecilic human spectacularly flamed out in the movie biz: a truly salutary tale for all fans and readers…

This second tome then descend into catty chaos with 66 more solo strips covering and comprising talking cockroaches, drug-fuelled excess, toilet training (and imbibing), fighting, mating, outsmarting humans, outsmarting Freddy (not the same thing), begging, playing, healing and getting lost and being found – in fact all those things which make pet ownership such an untrammelled delight, and possibly explain the rise of recreational substance abuse since the 1970s….

Despite the hippy-dippy antecedents and stoner presentiments, Gilbert Shelton is always a consummate comedy professional. His ideas are enchantingly fresh yet timeless, the dialogue is permanently spot-on, and his pacing perfect. The stories, whether half-page quickies, short vignettes or full blown sagas, start strong and relentlessly build to spectacular – and often wildly outrageous, hallucinogenic yet story-appropriate – climaxes. Moreover, blessed by his superbly skewed view, these scurrilous, scandalous and supremely hilarious examples of the cartoonists’ skill are comics classics to be read and re-read ad infinitum.

Anarchically sardonic and splendidly ludicrous, the madcap slapstick and sly satire of Gilbert Shelton is always an irresistible, riotously innocent tonic for the blues and these tales should be a compulsory experience for any fan of the comics medium.
© 1987 Gilbert Shelton. All rights reserved.

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Dead Air


By M. Dalton Allred with Laura Allred (Slave Labor Books)
No ISBN, ASIN: B000GLP8JG

Major comicbook creative force M. Dalton (‘we call him “Mike”’) Allred’s many comicbook writer/artist triumphs include Madman, The Atomics, and Red Rocket 7 as well as notable collaborative runs on Marvel’s X-Force and X-Statix with Peter Milligan and Vertigo thriller iZombie with Chris Roberson, but unlike almost everyone else in the industry to reach an exalted status, most of his early work was – and remains – extremely readable…

After switching from a career in the media to funnybooks, he commenced his unique brand of tale-telling (aided as always by wife Laura) with a dreamily paranoid, visually symphonic suspense shocker very much in the mould of classic 1960s Rod Serling Twilight Zone mystery tales.

Originally designed as a black and white 4-issue miniseries, Dead Air was instead released by independent publisher Slave Labor as a complete Original Graphic Novel and reintroduced comics to the thrills of uncanny, inexplicable paranoiac peril through the channelled artistic sensibilities of modern design legend Patrick Nagel (upon whose remorselessly pared-down stylisations Allred based his own early drawing).

Following The End of the World, the poignant personal horror begins in ‘Shapes of Things’ as, in the small American town of Roseburg, Oregon, radio DJ Calvin Lennox stares at the blue glow coming from over the mountains and wonders…

One night all communication with the outside world was completely lost. All the TV channels blinked out to static and there was nothing but dead air on the radio. Soon Mayor Leroy Black had declared Martial Law and instigated a curfew: nobody out and nobody in, and order viciously imposed by the sheriff’s bully-boys.

Everybody knew it had to have been the long-deaded nuclear war, but Lennox didn’t care. His wife Sydney and their two boys Michael and Connor were miles away in Eugene when the disaster – whatever it actually was – had struck, and Calvin was going crazy trying to get to them.

Asking Black to let him leave only resulted in a savage beating, so Lennox carefully laid plans with lifelong pals Charlie Custen, Warren Goodrich and Kevin Zelch to escape from the captive population, all the while barely holding off the bubbling madness, desperation of loss and agony of not knowing…

Their moment came in ‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’ as the determined quartet made their break with the unexpected assistance of an unsuspected ally. The attempt led to a desperate car-chase and an exchange of gunfire which permanently scarred the frantic family man and badly wounded Warren, but soon they were all on their way, riding on an open empty highway that was somehow, subtly… wrong.

Warren was the one who spotted it.

Everything looked fine, with no sign of atomic – or any other physical – destruction, but the road no longer had any turn-offs or exits…

Freaked out, the fugitives continued on and began to notice that the scenery, landscape and mountains now seemed altered and oddly different. It was like they’d been transported to another world….

With reality reeling, they stop to assess their situation and, after some discussion, decide to push on and find Sydney and the kids. Switching to the motorbikes, they travel on – far, far further than the normal distance to Eugene.

The horror starts to hit home in ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’ when the interminable highway is interrupted by a beach and sea-shore miles from where it should be. Nonplussed, Calvin breaks into an empty lighthouse and sees his destination just over a ridge. Somehow Eugene was just there, but there was something not right about the city’s edges and outskirts…

Baffled and combative, the freaked out friends move on to find a familiar city filled with forgotten childhood treasures but utterly devoid of life. As they separate to explore, Calvin discovers he can now see through John’s eyes just as a glowing blue cloud begins to dissolve all the buildings…

Only Warren and Calvin escape the all-enveloping mist and the heartsick, bereft family man is filled with a terrifying partial understanding as he turns their vehicle back towards Roseburg for the incredible answers to all mysteries in ‘A Sort of Homecoming’. Even then only Calvin Lennox makes it, to finally confront the agent of all his woes and find the answers he’s been seeking…

Stylish, wry, moving, quirkily lyrical and inundated with iconic islands of popular culture, Dead Air is a beguiling puzzle picture and decidedly different love story which still packs a punch for fantasy fans and comics lovers to enjoy over and over again.
© 1989 M. Dalton Allred. All rights reserved.

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The Wild West Show


By Joe R. Lansdale, Lewis Shiner, Neal Barrett Jr., Sam Glanzman, Doug Potter & many and various. Edited by Richard Klaw (Mojo Press)
ISBN: 1-885418-04-3

Once upon a time, not that very long ago, nearly all of fiction was engorged with tales of Cowboys and Indians.

As always happens with such periodic popular phenomena – such as the Swinging Sixties’ Super-Spy Boom and the recent Vampire/Werewolf Boyfriend trend – there was a tremendous amount of momentary merit, lots of utter dross and a few spectacular gems.

Most importantly once such surges have petered out there’s also generally a small cadre of frustrated devotees who mourn its passing and, on growing up, resolve to do something to venerate or even revive their lost and faded favourite fad…

After World War II the American family entertainment market – for which read comics, radio and the burgeoning television industry – became comprehensively enamoured of the clear-cut, simplistic sensibilities and easy, escapist solutions offered by Tales of the Old West; already a firmly established favourite of paperback fiction, movie serials and feature films.

I’ve often pondered on how almost simultaneously a dark, bleak, nigh-nihilistic and oddly left-leaning Film Noir genre quietly blossomed alongside that wholesome revolution, seemingly for the cynical minority of entertainment intellectuals who somehow knew that the returned veterans still hadn’t found a Land Fit for Heroes… but that’s a thought for another time and different review.

Even though comic books had encompassed Western heroes from the very start – there were cowboy strips in the premier issues of both Action Comics and Marvel Comics – the post-war years saw a vast outpouring of anthology titles with new gun-toting heroes to replace the rapidly dwindling supply of costumed Mystery Men, and true to formula, most of these pioneers ranged from transiently mediocre to outright appalling.

With every comic-book publisher turning hopeful eyes westward, it was natural that most of the historical figures would quickly find a home and of course facts counted little, as indeed they never had with cowboy literature…

Despite minor re-flowerings in the early 1970s and mid-1990s, Cowboy comics have largely vanished from our funnybook pages: seemingly unable to command enough mainstream commercial support to survive the crushing competition of garish wonder-men and the furiously seductive future.

Europe and Britain also embraced the Sagebrush zeitgeist and produced some pretty impressive work, with France and Italy eventually making the genre their own by the end of the 1960s. They still make the best straight Western strips in the world.

Happily however an American revolution in comics retailing and print technologies at the end of the 20th century allowed fans to create and disseminate relatively inexpensive comicbooks of their own and, happier still, many of those fans are incredibly talented creators in other genres. A particularly impressive case in point is this captivating lost treasure from independent creator-led outfit Mojo Press, which published some amazing and groundbreaking horror, fantasy, Western and science fiction graphic novels and books between 1994 and their much-lamented demise in 1999.

Released in 1996, The Wild West Show was Mojo’s sixth release, a black and white anthology which celebrated the classical iconography of the genre whilst gleefully playing fast and loose with the content and running roughshod over the traditional mythology of the medium.

After the informative and educational ‘Two Fists, Four Colors and Six Guns’ – a history of Western comics by Scott A. Cupp – the wide-screen wonderment begins with Joe R. Lansdale’s beguiling short story ‘Trains Not Taken’ (adapted by Neal Barrett Jr. & John Garcia) as American Ambassador-to-Japan Bill Cody strikes up a casual conversation with businessman James Hickock on a Iron Horse trip to the Dakotas.

Among the many topics are the captivating single woman both find impossible to ignore, the Japanese/American union and recent massacre of a combined US Cavalry/Samurai force by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull,

The tragic loss of both Custer and Yoshii and other matters of great import pass the time, but the weary Hickock is too distracted to concentrate fully. His mind is filled with the troubles of his aging alcoholic wife and the disturbing dreams of another life: one where he was a buffalo hunting scout and deadly gunslinger. But those are just frustrating fancies of trains not taken. It’s all too late now – or is it…?

Lewis Shiner’s ‘Steam Engine Time’, illustrated by Doug Potter, is another glorious genre-bending snippet set in Austin, Texas in 1898, where an anonymous lad with a dream and a guitar tried to get the white folk interested in his new kind of music. Even though the far-more-welcoming Negroes in the Colored Quarter hadn’t heard of “The Blues” they accepted his unique squalling and bizarre pelvis-led dancing and understood his impatience. The kid wished that somehow he could get electricity into his guitar. Someday, maybe…

Veteran comics craftsman Sam Glanzman then turned in a silent masterpiece of action and bleak, black humour in ‘I Could Eat a Horse!’ after which Paul O. Miles and artists Newt Manwich & Michael Washburn adapted Donn Webb’s hilarious saga of a far from ordinary sidekick in ‘Cowboy Dharma’, whilst Norman Partridge & Marc Erickson revealed the West’s affinity for grotesque horror in the terrifying tale of The Head – but not much else – of murdering bandito Joaquin Murrieta in ‘For Neck or Nothin’…

Short and bittersweet, ‘Custer’s Last Love’ is a smart parable of the battle of the sexes from Steve Utley & Kevin Hendryx, and the whole shooting match ends on a lyrical high with the fact-based historical drama of settler Maggie Gosher whose ‘Letters from Arizona’ in 1889 are here transformed into a powerful and memorable strip by Joe Preston, John Lucas & Martin Thomas.

The Western tale has long been a part of world culture and perhaps that fact has relegated the genre in too many minds to the status of a passé fascination of a bygone generation. However these fresh looks at an overexposed idiom prove there’s still meat to found on those old bones, and cow-punching aficionados, fans of nostalgia-tainted comics and seekers of the wild and new alike can all be assured that there’s a selection of range-riding rollercoaster thrills and moody mysteries still lurking in those hills and on that horizon…

Black hats, white hats, alternate worlds, great pictures and macabre twists – what more could you possibly ask for?
The Wild West Show © 1996 Richard Klaw. All material contained herein © its respective creators. All rights reserved.

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The Umbrella Academy volume 2: Dallas


By Gerard Way & Gabriel Bá (Dark Horse)
ISBN: 978-1-59582-345-8

Superheroes have been around long enough now that they’ve been able to evolve into different sub-sets: straight Save-the-World continuity types as championed by DC and Marvel, obsessively “real” or realist iterations such as Marvelman, Crossfire or Kick-Ass, comedic spins like Justice League International or She-Hulk and some rare ducks that straddle a few barstools in between.

Addressing the same Edgy, Catastrophic Absurdism as Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol, the archly anti-didactic antics of The Umbrella Academy offered readers a subtly subversive take on the idiom which impressed the heck out of everybody and lured many disillusioned fans back to the pitifully tired and over-used genre when first released…

This second collected volume gathers the frenzied fantastical follow-up 6-issue miniseries as well as an offering a chance to see the 8-page online yarn from MySpace Dark Horse Presents #12.

Once upon a time a strange event occurred. All across Earth, 43 babies were unexpectedly born as the result of apparent immaculate conceptions – or perhaps some kind of inexplicable parthenogenesis.

The births even surprised the mothers, most of whom discarded, abandoned, sold or had adopted their unexpected, terrifying newborns.

Notorious scientist entrepreneur and closet extraterrestrial Sir Reginald Hargreeves, inventor of the Levitator, mobile umbrella communicator, Clever Crisp cereal, Televator and a process which enabled chimps to speak had a secret plan, and he knew the kids would all be special. He thus acquired seven of these miracle babies for an undisclosed purpose, subsequently rearing and training the children to become his private superhero team to enact it.

He was in no way a “good” parent…

The callously experimental family, after a spectacular early career eventually proved to be unmanageable and the Umbrella Academy – created and trained “to save the World” – sundered in grief and acrimony, but not before poor Ben, Number 6 AKA “The Horror”, pointlessly lost his brave young life and Number 5 “The Boy” took a short trip into the future and never came back…

The surviving members of the utterly dysfunctional superhero team parted but were reunited twenty years later when the news broke that Hargreeves – whose nom de guerre was The Monocle – had died…

In the interim, Number 1 son Luther became an off-earth defender and pioneer, so hideously damaged by a doomed journey to Mars that to save him, Hargeeves had grafted The Spaceboy‘s head onto the body of a colossal Martian Gorilla.

Poor, neglected Vanya, whose musical gifts Hargreeves deemed utterly useless, became a drop-out and wrote a scandalous tell-all book before becoming a voluntary exile amidst Earth’s lowest dregs. When Number 7 returned she was again rejected by her “family” and summarily seduced by a manic musician who unleashed her true potential and almost destroyed the world with her untapped power…

The Boy returned after sixty years of ranging through the time-stream and materialised in the body of the ten-year old he had been, However, his physical form was frozen and he stopped aging at that moment…

Favourite friend, technologist, housekeeper, actual lifelong care-giver and talking chimp Dr. Pogo had died in Vanya’s – or rather The White Violin‘s – apocalyptic attack which had left Allison (Number 3, The Rumor) with her throat severed, apparently forever deprived of her talent for warping reality with a word…

Diego (Number 2, The Kraken) remained the obsessive scary vigilante psychopath he’d always been but Klaus (Number 4, The Séance) was even weirder than before: a floating, shoeless space-case who talked to the dead and pulled the wings off the laws of physics…

Once upon a time, long ago and whilst still children, the UmbrellaAcademy saved WashingtonDC from an animated and extremely angry Lincoln Memorial. They’ve had an odd relationship with American Presidents ever since…

Now having saved the entire world from prophesied destruction, the dysfunctional quintet are at a loss and killing time in the rubble of their old home: Luther zones out watching TV, Klaus pampers himself, Diego keeps busy assaulting various underworld ne’er-do-wells, and maimed Allison offers rather radical treatment to amnesiac Vanya.

Only The Boy is really busy as he deals mercilessly with yet another attempt by chronal cops of the Temps Aeternalis to make him fulfil the mission they recruited and rebuilt him for.

In ‘The Jungle’ of the modern world nobody is a more apex predator than the time-locked tyke, but his former masters are adamant he should fulfil his purpose and send in their most dreaded expediters Hazel and Cha-Cha…

‘Boy Scouts’ sees The Kraken and Police Inspector Lupo closing in on the mystery assailant leaving dismembered bodies all over the city – and slowly becoming aware how little they really know about the fortuitously returned Number 5 – whilst billionaire John Perseus arrives back in town with a most mysterious crate which definitely bodes badly for all humanity….

It’s The Rumour who actually tracks down The Boy and gets to the truth even as the unstoppable Hazel and Cha-Cha make their first gory move…

‘Television or Are You There, God? It’s Me, Klaus’ sees The Séance desperately seeking assistance before succumbing to the time-tossed, sugar-crazed killer couple as the horrific story of The Boy comes out.

Temps Aeternalis spent a lot of time and effort upgrading the kid into the perfect assassin for difficult, history-altering missions and even after a relative eternity of brutal successes they still need him for the Big One.

Dallas 1963…

Klaus, meanwhile, has moved on and is chatting with the Big Guy in Heaven when Luther becomes Hazel and Cha-Cha’s next target in the campaign to get the rebellious Number 5 to do what he was re-made for. If the world is to survive Kennedy must die – but Number 5 just won’t play ball and reality is beginning to suffer…

A countdown to nuclear Armageddon starts ticking as ‘A Perfect Life’ finds the separated Hargreeves clan all zeroing in on yet another end of the world and taking extraordinary steps to stop it.

Rumour and the Boy for example, ally themselves with the Temps Aeternalis and agree to personally stop The Boy (the other one but it’s really him too, see) whereas Luther, Diego and the freshly resurrected Klaus opt for a straight time-jaunt to the kill-zone to lay in ambush.

Sadly they miss by years and have to wait a bit for their plan to come to fruition in ‘All the Animals in the Zoo’ before all the alternate Earth craziness is superbly made sensible and satisfactorily wrapped up in the deviously bravura climax of ‘The World is Big Enough Without You’…

Also included are an Introduction from Neil Gaiman, a brace of Afterwords by Way and Bá (‘Texas is the Reason’ and ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll’ respectively) and a short revelatory glimpse at the rebellious teen years of Vanya and Diego and their punk band The Prime 8s in the deeply moving ‘Anywhere but Here’ from MySpace Dark Horse Presents #12 (July 2007).

This volume concludes with more fascinating behind-the-scenes secrets of ‘Designing the Umbrella Academy’.

Whilst happily swiping, homaging, sampling and remixing the coolest elements from many and varied comics sources, The Umbrella Academy created a unique synthesis and achieved its own distinctive originality within the tired confines of the superhero genre. It’s a reading experience no jaded comics fan should miss.
Text and illustrations of the Umbrella Academy ™ © 2008, 2009 Gerard Way. All rights reserved.

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What’s He Like in Bed? – A Rough Guide to the Bedside Manners of the Human Male


By Marcel Feigel & Brian Heaton (Arrow Books)
ISBN: 978-0-09-944660-X

Warning: this book is rude and a bit nude, so if you’re of a sensitive nature and don’t think sex is funny it could all be a bit of a shock and potentially lead to the sundering of your dreams and life-long disillusionment.

As Winter Part III (This Time it’s Personal!!!) settles in around my oversized, sun-deprived ears, I again turn to an old cartoon book to inculcate a little warmth and cheer to my gloomy days. Here’s another little known collection of cartoons about British bedtime habits to tide us all over: at least if we have to submerge ourselves in duvets and cocoa we might as well have a giggle at the same time…

Of course it’s all really just one more excuse to bemoan the loss of those once-ubiquitous cheap ‘n’ cheerful cartoon-packed paperbacks which are now all-but-forgotten fossils of a once mighty industry; fast fading as the more palatable sounding Graphic Novels and Trade Collections carve a niche in our psyches and on our bookshelves.

What’s He Like in Bed? is a solid example of a lost art form: saucily-themed gag-books which were the last commercial gasp in a tradition of pictorial entertainments that began with Punch and evolved into a racy standby of British life for nearly a century before fading away to loiter around bargain bins, Jumble sales and junk shops…

This particular raucous, ribald and hilariously risqué treatise catalogues the ploys and peregrinations of that forgotten popular hero “The Guy Who Gets All the Girls” and thus contains lots of wickedly naked people making a mess, scandalising the neighbours, and generally letting the side down more than just a bit…

Masquerading as invaluable tips and hints, the assorted chapters fully expose the tactics and foibles of ‘The Truck Driver’, ‘The Customs Man’ and even ‘Country and Western’ fans before breaking for the first of a recurring exploration of inflatable friend aficionados, after which ‘The Translator’ and the ‘Stone Mason’ both fail to live up to the modern girl’s exorbitant and exaggerated expectations.

‘The Estate Agent’ soon gives way to ‘Inflatable Doll #1’ and ‘The Librarian’ to ‘Inflatable Doll #2’ before the urbane legends of ‘The Milkman’ and ‘The Footballer’ are finally tackled…

‘Inflatable Doll #3’ leads to a fully extended chapter on ‘The Macho Man’ (including especially some handy hints on ‘The Condom Moment’, ‘The Importance of Momentum’ and those all-important ‘Orgasm Restrain-Postponement Techniques’), before a brief interlude with ‘Inflatable Doll #4’ gives us all a moment to catch our breaths (big ones too)…

There’s an educational advantage to be had in dealing with ‘The Don’ (Oxbridge not Corleone) and the full SP on ‘The Jockey’, whilst ‘The Detective’ and ‘The Barrister’ reveal facets of human nature best left vague, whilst both ‘The Dentist’ and ‘The Airline Pilot’ act just as you’d suspect – even if ‘The Bishop’ doesn’t.

Also on show are the habits of ‘The Farmer’, ‘Inflatable Doll #5’, stage magician ‘The Great Popoff’, the secrets of ‘Corporate Life’ in the Post Room, for Middle Management and even under the Chairman but as always ‘The Actor’, ‘The Policeman’ and the truly disturbing sight of glamour icon Margaret Thatcher as ‘Inflatable Doll #6’ act as sure signs that those so-different times are gone forever.

Still with secrets to conceal are ‘The Taxi Driver’, ‘The Accountant’, ‘The Athlete’, ‘The Computer Man’, ‘Frenchmen’ in general, ‘The Vicar’, ‘The Disc Jockey’ and ‘The Photographer’, but eventually even modern men need a bit of a rest and the lecture concludes with ‘The Revenge of the Inflatable Doll’…

Dedicated to the certain premise that (other) people’s sexual exploits are simultaneously better than yours and still truly hilarious, this snappy little monochrome tome is a cut above much of the era’s rather tawdry treatment of the subject, superbly rendered and still marvellously entertaining even in these liberally licentious times – and for a change, this one is still readily available from a range of internet retailers…

British cartooning has been magnificently served over the centuries by masters of form, line, wash and most importantly smart ideas, repeatedly poking our funny bones, pricking our pomposities, stroking our happy places and feeding our fascinations, and this sort of thing used to be bread ‘n’ butter in our game. We’re all going to really miss them if they do disappear forever, so why not find a shy, alluring little bookshelf and start filling it with mucky material like this…
Heaton is a competent artist in the modern style and the gags range from contrived to fiendishly clever, all delivered with easy charm and utterly without text – never an easy job in cartooning. If you find this book or anything similar give it a try, as you really will miss them once they disappear forever.
© 1992 Brian Howard Heaton. All Rights Reserved.

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Julio’s Day


By Gilbert Hernandez (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-606-5

In the 1980s a qualitative revolution forever destroyed the clichéd, stereotypical ways different genres of comic strips were produced and marketed. Most prominent in destroying the comfy pigeonholes we’d built for ourselves were three guys from Oxnard, California; Jaime, Mario (occasionally) and Gilberto Hernandez.

Love and Rockets was an anthology magazine featuring slick, intriguing, sci-fi tinted hi-jinx of punky young things Maggie & Hopey – the outrageously beguiling las Locas – as well as heart-warming, terrifying, gut-wrenching soap-opera fantasies from the rural Central American paradise of Palomar.

Supreme synthesists, Los Bros Hernandez Boys enthralled and enchanted with incredible stories that sampled a thousand influences, conceptual and actual; everything from Comics, TV cartoons, masked wrestlers and the emergent exotica of American Hispanic pop culture to iconic German Expressionism. There was also a perpetual backdrop displaying the holy trinity of the young: Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll – for which please hear alternative music and punk rock.

The result was dynamite. Mario only officially contributed on rare occasions, but Jaime’s slick, enticing visual feasts explored friendship and modern love whilst destroying stereotypes of feminine attraction through his fetching coterie of Gals Gone Wild, whilst “Beto” exhaustively crafted a hyper-authentic rural landscape and playground of wit and passion created for his extended generational saga Heartbreak Soup: a quicksilver chimera of breadline Latin-American village life with a vibrant, funny and fantastically quotidian cast.

Everything from life, death, adultery, magic, serial killing and especially gossip could happen in Palomar’s meta-fictional environs, as the artist mined his own post-punk influences through a powerfully effective primitivist style which blended the stylised mythologies and iconographies of comics, music, recreational drugs, gangs, sex, forceful, capable, dominating women and the inescapable bonds of family using a narrative format which is at the graphic vanguard of Magical Realism.

There’s fiction, there’s Meta-fiction and then there’s Gilbert Hernandez. In addition to his astonishingly captivating Palomar tales he has authored stand-alone books such as Sloth, Grip, Birdland and Girl Crazy, all marked by his boldly compelling, disingenuous artwork and a mature, sensitive adoption of literary techniques by writers like Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel García Márquez: techniques which he has amplified and, visually at least, made his own.

He then went on to examine filmic and literary influences such as Roger Corman, John Cassavetes, Elmore Leonard and Jim Thompson as he broke new ground and reprocessed the cultural influences that shaped all us baby-boomers, with “adaptations” of the trashy B-Movies which featured as perennial plot “maguffins” in his stories and affected his cast of characters. Those became a little more actual in his “adaptations” of thrillers like Chance in Hell, The Troublemakers and Love from the Shadows…

Always winning critical acclaim but seldom financial reward, the brothers eventually went their own ways, but a few years ago creatively reunited to produce annual collections of new material in their particularly peculiar shared or, rather, adjacent pen-and-ink universes and this rapturously beguiling pictorial elegy began in Love and Rockets volume II, #1 but remained unfinished until completed in this stark evocative monochrome hardback.

Here Gilbert foregoes many of the signature elements he invented and the chaotically frenetic youth-fuelled backdrop he’s famous for to patiently detail the moving life-story of an ordinary man… and, of course, once you start looking you realise there’s really no such thing as ordinary…

It’s about families and friends, the secrets we must keep and how, even though the World changes, sometimes we just can’t…

I’d be doing you and the author a huge disservice by going into too much detail, but suffice to say that somewhere in Southern California a baby is born in 1900. From the start Julio is nourished and cherished by a loving family – all except his uncle Juan, whom only the infant’s older sister Sofia realised should be kept well away from all children at all costs…

Over 100 pages, until his passing in 2000, Julio grows up with friends Tommy and Araceli, dimly aware of yet barely affected by humanity’s great crises, although the fierce uncompromising nature of the times and the elements and environment shape the people of the village just as powerfully as any global war or Stock Market crash.

One tragic slip in a mere mudslide would come to affect the family for three tragic generations…

Moreover even in such placid outreaches, bullying, cruelty, bigotry and intolerance exist in abundance to mould young hearts and minds…

As he grows to maturity, Julio loses family, makes new friends and comes to realises he has a secret he cannot share with anyone: one that, despite the way the times change society before his eyes, he just cannot admit…

Dedicated to the proposition that big history happens somewhere else but its effects touch us all, this warm-hearted, deceptively heart-wrenching, challenging, and incontrovertibly groundbreaking epic is a grown-up comics fan’s dream come true and proves how far the medium has progressed.

From traditional world saving, anodyne fist-fights, fanciful fantasies and children’s escapism to the likes of Maus, One Bad Rat, Palestine, Persepolis, Pride of Baghdad Sailor Twain and so many more, comics have been continually evolving until they not only produce material equal to other art forms, but with Julio’s Day – the diamond point of the cutting edge of graphic narrative – at last arrive at masterpieces which can only be truly told as graphic narratives

…As you will surely see…

© 2013 Gilbert Hernandez. This edition © 2013 Fantagraphics Books, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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The Wasteland


By Dave Louapre & Dan Sweetman (Piranha Press/DC Comics)
No ISBN, ASIN: B000UE4MBE

During the anything-goes 1980s the field of comics publishing expanded exponentially with new companies offering a vast range of fresh titles and ideas. To combat the upstart expansion, Marvel and DC also instigated innovative material for those freshly growing markets with the latter colossus especially targeting readers for whom old-fashioned funnybooks were anathema …or at least a long-abandoned childhood flirtation.

DC pioneered new, more mature-oriented niche imprints such as Vertigo and Helix, but undoubtedly some of the most intriguing treats came out of their Piranha Press line, formed in 1989 and re-designated Paradox Press in 1993.

When DC founded this off-key, adult special projects imprint, both the resultant releases and reader’s reaction to them were passionately mixed.

It had long been a Holy Grail of the business to produce comics for people who don’t read comics and, despite the inherent logical flaw, that’s a pretty sound and sensible plan, but the delivery is always problematic.

Is the problem resistance to the medium? Then try radical art or narrative styles, unusual design or typography, and use talent from outside the medium to fill your books: you get some intriguing results, but risk still not reaching a new audience whilst alienating those readers already on board…

This superbly eclectic and overwhelmingly effective collection partially mitigated that risk by using new creators with an already established pedigree outside the comics industry and material which had found a fan-base elsewhere in publishing…

It’s also was one of the best and most wickedly addictive books Piranha produced…

Dave Louapre & Dan Sweetman had worked together since college, producing self-published illustrated stories which they sold direct to local bookstores. This led to a macabre and deliciously dark panel-gag series published in the L.A. Reader and movie magazine Fangoria and the creation of stunningly off-kilter, ironically post-modern and media-celebrated cartoon-fiction analect Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children, which winningly combined outré, edgy domesticity with the aesthetic sensibilities of Jean Paul Sartre, Ambrose Bierce, O. Henry, Charles Addams, Aubrey Beardsley and Gahan Wilson. It was not your average comicbook…

The Piranha Press experiment was always a tenuous dream in a cutthroat business, and though BSFUC was undoubtedly its greatest triumph – 41 delirious issues, some specials and a “Best Of” collection – the imprint was radically restructured in 1992 and Dave and Dan moved on and out to Hollywood.

Before they finally left, however, the company published also The Wasteland: a compilation – with some new material – of that aforementioned gag feature…

Produced as a single captioned panel, the strip offered the trademarked weird ideas and compelling, alluring prose rendered (sur)real via lovely, sketchy, scratchy, frantically evocative monochrome illustrations with the same skewed worldview, supplemented with a heaping helping of mordant Gary Larson wryness added to the mix.

There’s no point my trying to relate the contents of this superb, tragically out-of-print but mercifully still available tome: 128 pages of graphic imagery blending the cute with the grotesque, the mundane with the bizarre and the unexpected with the cheerily distasteful which you just have to see to believe.

All I can do here is tease you with a few atypically typical sample subject-lines such as ‘Men without Women meet Dogs without Snouts’, ‘The Little Cyclops Puppy Nobody Would Play With’, ‘Cheerleaders on Fire’, ‘Lover’s Hop, for the Less-than-Devastated’, ‘The Substitute Executioner’, ‘My Dinner with Medusa’, ‘Jump-Starting the Dog’, ‘We Got Along Swimmingly Once I Learned They Hated Me’, ‘A Day at the Nun Jousts’ ‘Rudolph the Red Light Reindeer’, ‘Zero-Gravity Autopsy’, ‘The Gas Chambermaid’ and ‘Rumble Monks’, and rest assured that some of you will now be unable to rest until you experience the sheer creative anarchy for yourselves…

Happy Easter, comic fans…
The Wastelands © 1989 Dave Louapre & Dan Sweetman. All Rights Reserved.