Category: Adult/Erotica

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Treasury of Mini Comics volume 1


By many and various, edited by Michael Dowers (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-657-7

The act of stringing pictures and/or words together is something almost everybody has done at some stage of their lives. It’s a key step in the cognitive path of children and, for an increasing number of us, that compulsive, absorbing euphoria never goes away. Whilst many millions acquiesce to the crushing weight of a world which stifles the liberation of creation, turning makers into consumers, a privileged, determined few carry on: drawing, exploring, and in some cases, with technology’s help, producing and sharing.

Michael Dowers loves the concept of crafting and disseminating Mini Comics and his last book Newave!- The Underground Mini Comix of the 1980’s described and reproduced hundreds of examples: spotlighting with enticing, encouraging exuberance those driven artisans who came out of the “anything goes” 1960s and 1970s Underground Commix movement still craving a vehicle of personal expression.

These creators aren’t in it for the money and, in the era before computers, they found enough time to write, draw and compile artwork (small press people are notoriously generous, contributing work at the drop of a hat) before laboriously photocopying, cutting, folding, stapling and then distributing the miniscule marvellous results.

Just by way of definition: most mini comics were home-produced pamphlets using borrowed – or when necessary paid for – print processes. The most popular format was an 8½ x 11inch sheet, folded twice, and printed at local copy-shops (or clandestinely churned out on school/work repro systems like early Xerox, Photostat, Mimeo or Spirit Banda machines) on letter – or any other sized – paper.

Because they weren’t big, they were called “mini commix”. Inspired, no?

Now this superb sequel tome – another massive brick of fun (8500 monochrome pages, 178x127mm) – offers another trip through forty years of free-thinking, self-determined free expression and technological developments. Many of the key figures in the creation and steady proliferation of this uniquely eloquent people’s medium are included here, not only through examples of their groundbreaking work, but also through statements, interviews and fond reminiscences.

Nobody who wanted to and had access to any kind of reproductive technology ever resisted making their own comics, and content comes from all over the North American continent, covering everything from superhero spoofs, monster-mashes, autobiography, recreational drug, religious, spiritual and philosophical diatribes and polemics, surreal experimental design and just plain fun stories, chatter and gags: all as sexually explicit, violent, political or personally intimate as their creators wanted them to be…

It all starts with Michael Dowers, himself the force behind not only this compilation but also Brownfieldpress and Starhead Comix, whose Introduction leads into ‘The Story of Quoz in Leonard Rifas’s Own Words’ after which the breakthrough Quoz #1 (1969) is reprinted in its quirky absurdist entirety.

Justin Green lays claim to having created the winning format of mini comics in his reprinted blog ‘Statement…’ before his groundbreaking Spare Comic? and inspirational Underground Cartooning Course (both from 1972) show us all how it should still be done…

Gary Arlington is highlighted firstly through an interview he gave to Comics Journal (#264) reporter Patrick Rosenkranz and his uplifting Awake! mini from 1972, followed by the delightfully morose adventure of Johnny Hangdog in Useless (1980) by Jim Siergey, and Larry Rippee’s comically macabre Skeletoons #18 from 1979.

Dowers’ interview of Richard Krauss (midnightfiction.com) is followed by the latter’s first self-publication Bar Fly Theater from 1979 and Bug Infested Comics: a 2008 collaboration with Bob Vojtko, after which Dickhead #1 by Clark Dissmeyer & Par Holman (1982) elaborates on the tricky life of a blue-collar talking penis…

Tales from the Inside was inmate Macedonio M. Garcia’s description of a convict’s existence, tellingly realised here in issues #1 and 3 from 1981 and 1982 (assisted by a script from inmate Melander), after which minor legend Matt Feazell of Not Available Comics describes his prolific career and re-presents The Amazing Cynicalman and Board of Superheroes #1 (1981 & 1994).

Another major player who crossed over into mainstream funnybooks was Matt Howarth whose beguiling The League of Mikes from 1983 took the lid off the collectors’ mentality and still rings true today, Steven L. Willis’ Brave New Nazis of the Inland Empire (1985) savages fascists with excoriating mirth, whilst Nukemare by Donald Russell Roach (1983) combines Cold War paranoia with glittery science fiction hope.

‘The Story of Outside In’ details an extensive collaborative effort which spanned 1983-2003 as a succession of editors and publishers shepherded an ambitious idea and made a little history.

As described in ‘Outside In Introduction‘ by Rick Bradford, Steve Willis conceived and produced issues #1-14 of a invitational mini which sought to print self-portraits by the movement’s many artisans (further described herein with a canny, funny strip of the book’s early days by Willis) before Dowers, Edd Vick & Hall Hargit and Bruce Chrislip recount their own tenures at the top.

A complete Outside In contributor list covering #1-50 follows, plus Hargitt’s primer Outside In-formation, before Brad W. Johnson’s Wurst Funnies (1986) returns us to strip sampling with a selection of sausage-inspired cartoon capers.

Dowers then interviews Tim Corrigan of C&T Graphics, after which Serious Comics #14 and 15 (1985) highlights the nigh legendary Mightyguy (a long-running minor success of the mid-1980s “Black & White Explosion”) and, from the same year, David Miller’s No More Bottled Milk! explores less commonplace comicbook themes…

Break out mini comics star Colin Upton reveals all to Dowers before his Self-Indulgent Comics #10 and 2008 Diabetes Funnies leads into Acid Man Society (1989) by Robert Pasternak, whilst Glenn & David Lee Ingersoll’s The Davey Thunder Jack Lightning Show: The Ugly Dog of Heaven is followed by Roberta Gregory’s Devolution.

A John Porcellino Interview is augmented by a selection of his short works spanning 1983-1993, comprising ‘I Wrote My Own Pink Slip!!’, ‘Smells Like Teen Bullshit’, ‘In der Nacht die welt dreht sich das Oberste zuunterst’ and ‘Night Time’, after which a heartfelt commemoration of the life, works and contribution of Dylan Williams (1970-2011) is delivered by Tom Spurgeon.

This tribute to mini comics’ “great synthesizer”, a major publishing force and founder of Puppy Toss and Sparkplug Comics, is followed by his own stunning Horse #1 and an assortment of other strips.

Eric Reynolds contributes Broken Picture Tube Theatre  (1994), featuring ‘The Brady Lush’, ‘Barry Williams is Johnny Bravo‘ and other TV-triggered spoofs, whilst the bawdy Zelda Zonk’s Hyper Revue Folies Album (1993) comes courtesy of Quimby World Head Quarters and Molly Kiely, and is followed by the shockingly sordid Asphalt Aneurism #21 by Blair Wilson from 1994.

The mammary madness of Jim Blanchard’s Teat Warp #1 from the same year is counterpoised by 1995’s Moldy Fig (and other Sufi stories) by C. Cilla, whilst Jim Woodring & David Lasky’s sublime Jesus Delivers offers some sage advice to the overly zealous spiritual seekers to end this section.

Dowers’ Marc Bell Interview is followed by the beguiling sci-fi fable Arbeitees – Einer Industrium Dokument den Marc Bell ut Rupert Bottenberg (1996) and the documentary Yeast #6 by Ronald J.M. Regé Jr., before a Leela Corman Interview segues into her mordant 1997 Valentine and Karl Wills’ paean to childhood perversity Jessica of the Schoolyard in “Jessica’s Good Deed”.

Further of the period’s exemplars include Onsmith’s The Rouge Knuckle Gang, Cowboys Getting Racked by Travis Millard, the dark yet anthropomorphically lovely Kids These Days by M. Campos, Nate Beaty’s Mixtape (2006), I’m the Devil by Peter Thompson from 2007 and Fiona Smyth’s The Wilding from 2008…

The Carrie McNinch Interview by Dowers is backed up by her graphic journal You Don’t Get There From Here (#11, spanning December 15th 2008-March 23rd 2009) after which the Funchicken.com duo Mark Todd & Esther Pearl Watson are both interviewed,  prior to his Bad Ass booklet and her Bike Repair Kit which portray the infinite variety of American person-hood. Then after fantastical Rudy, Vasilios Billy Mavreas’s Year in a Cone explores the graphic outer limits of imagination whilst No Exit by Andy Singer offers a humorous glimpse at Yankee obsessions such as sport, pets and the justice system…

#Noah van Scriver’s autobiographical Complaints (2010) descibes his own painfully restricted life and Sadist Science Teacher (Kelly Froh, 2010) continues in a similar journalistic vein, whilst the anonymous members of gimmeshelterpress reveal the build up of Bad Energy (2010), before Max Clotfelter’s Hole Show #1 and Marc Palm’s Hole Show #2 opt for a science fictional setting for their round-robin exercise in graphic collaboration to end the immense collected display of narrative virtuosity.

However this massive monochrome collection still holds a few more delights and, after the list of Artist Website Addresses, a full colour section reprints David Heatley’s Yesterday comic strip diary (from 5/11 to 6/10 2003), Night Terrors by Laura Wady, Fiona Smyth’s The Parkdale Gyre and a selection of equally enhanced full-hued covers by Krauss, Vojtko, Beaty & Rippee for Bug Infested Comics, Mixtape and Skeletoons.

The pioneering craftsmen who simultaneous started a self-printing movement and – now – tradition led inexorably to today’s thriving Alternative/Small Press publishing industry as well as the current internet comics phenomenon, and thus this book has incredible appeal on an historical basis.

However, that’s really not the point: the real draw of this compilation is that creativity is addictive, good work never pales or grows stale and the great stories and art here will make you keen to have a go too.

I’ve done it myself, for fun – even once or twice for actual profit – and it’s an incredible buzz (I should note that I am still married to a wife not only tolerant but far more skilled and speedy in the actual “photocopy, cut, fold, staple” bit of the process and willing, if not keen, to join in just so she might occasionally be with the compulsive dingbat she married…)

The sheer boundless enthusiasm and feelgood reward of making comics celebrated in this astoundingly vast, incredibly heavy and yet still pocket-sized hardback is a pure galvanic joy that will enchant and impel every fan of the art-form: as long as they’re big enough to hold a pencil, old enough to vote, and strong enough to lift this book.
Treasury of Mini Comics volume 1 © 2013 Michael Dowers and Fantagraphics Books. All contents © 2013 their respective creators or authors. All rights reserved.

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Sinemania!


By Sophie Cossette with Phil Liberbaum & Ryan Lalande (ECW Press)
ISBN: 978-1-77041-112-8

Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: Because you’re you… 8/10

Filmmaking was the pre-eminent art form of the 20th century, capable of marrying the aesthetic strictures of humanity’s unfailing urge to create with the common herd’s insatiable desire to be distracted with stories. Cinema always aspired to educate, elucidate and entertain, but so often merely pandered, titillated and, if moralists and cultural blamestormers are to be believed, corrupted.

It’s apparently still going strong in the post-literate, increasingly online 21st century…

Practically all people everywhere love “The Movies” and controversial Canadian adults-only cartoonist Sophie Cossette (Mendacity, scripted by Tamara Faith Berger), her husband Phil Liberbaum and their close friend Ryan Lalande are amongst the most avid and erudite of aficionados.

Being proper grown-ups, however, they can readily accept that only a certain kind of person could envision, steer, wrangle and accomplish such an immense collaborative concoction and – like most of us – revel in the rewarding, gossipy indulgence that comes from debating, deconstructing, deriding and just plain mocking such auteurs’ inescapable sexual foibles and indisputably embarrassing kinky quirks.

Thus, Sinemania! – a bawdily baroque collection of graphic skits, sketches, articles, reviews, recommendations, games, featurettes and interpretations of behaviours favoured by Tinseltown’s most infamous denizens past and present, delivered in outrageously addictive cartoon narratives very much in the iconoclastic vein of Kenneth Anger’s notorious Hollywood Babylon.

Of course, famously fair and scrupulously polite, the Canuck contingent don’t stint in turning their all-seeing eyes on the worst excesses of British, European and their own Dominion’s savants as well.

Moreover, the project – financially supported by the prestigious Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Book Fund – is adamant that “this book is a work of satire. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons – living or dead, (celebrity or extra, clothed or naked) – business establishments, events or locales is either satirical or entirely coincidental.”

So there.

Subtitled ‘A satirical exposé of the lives of the most outlandish movie directors! Welles, Hitchcock, Taratino, and more!’ the cartoon calumnies commence, after Opening Shots and Introductory Thoughts from the team, with a 2-part biography of ‘Mondo Tarantino’ before taking a few well-aimed shots at ‘Alfred Hitchcock – The Hitch Who Lusted Too Much’.

A series of comparative reviews separating each entry begins with Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street (1954) analysed by Lalande and his 1953 Noir epic The Big Heat similarly examined by Liberbaum, after which ‘William Castle – the King of Gimmicks!’ tells of B-Movie excesses in excoriating fashion.

The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967) and Rosemary’s Baby (1968) undergo the Ryan & Phil treatment before Roman Polanski gets a metaphorical thrashing in ‘Polanski! In the Corner! Now!’, and judgement of Tod Browning’s The Unknown (1927, by Ryan) and Freaks (1932, Phil) segues into ‘Diary of a Surrealist Madman’ with the shocking low-down on Luis Buñuel…

R & P assess David Lynch’s Elephant Man (1980) and Blue Velvet (1986) as Sophie plays ‘Tim Burton’s Dice Game’ whilst ‘Orson Welles – It’s All True!’ examines a stellar fall in what could so easily have been his own words.

Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and Baby Doll (1956) precede the imaginary testimony of ‘Otto Preminger – The Man with the Iron Fist’ after which Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956) and A Clockwork Orange get a solid thumbs up from the panel.

The antics of ‘Ken Russell – The Mad Hatter of British Cinema!’ are followed by Fargo (1996) and The Big Lebowski (1998) courtesy of The Coen Brothers via Phil & Ryan, and then there’s a sense of genuine outrage in Cossette’s dissection of ‘Russ Meyer – and the Immortal Mrs. Tease!’

Brian De Palma is represented by and lauded for Carrie (1976) and Carlito’s Way (1993), after which ‘Love at First Bark’ weighs the relative demerits of two directors dominated by the women in their lives in ‘Joseph von Sternberg vs. Guy Ritchie’ before Paul Thomas Anderson answers to Ryan & Phil for Boogie Nights (1997) and Magnolia (1999)…

‘Sam Peckinpah vs. Rainer Werner Fassbinder – Duel of the Hellraisers!’ is another comparison (sour) taste test, including ‘The Prolific Rainer Werner Fassbinder Kraut Paper Doll’ complete with fetish outfits for you to cut out and enjoy, followed by reviews of Robert Wise’s Born to Kill (1947) and I Want to Live! (1956) and Cossette’s astounding, mindboggling ‘Pier Paolo Pasolini – The Jeremiad of a Modern Martyr’ totally steals the show in a blistering graphic panorama.

Phil & Ryan then dissect Federico Fellini’s The White Sheik (1952) and La Strada (1954) before a glimpse at a scrapbook divulges ‘Fritz Lang: The Secret Behind the Door’ and Joseph H. Lewis’ Gun Crazy (1950) and The Big Combo (1955) lead to stylishly open warfare in ‘Woody Allen and Spike Lee – Woody Spikes Things Up at Cannes!’

The magnificent Billy Wilder fares well under Ryan & Phil’s scrutiny of Sunset Blvd. (1950) and Ace in the Hole (1951) whereas the reputation of Erich von Stroheim takes a bit of a bashing in Sophie’s ‘La Grande Delusion of Count von Stroheim’ and ‘Kenneth Anger’s Snakes and Ladders Game’ reveals even more of Hollywood’s seamier side.

The debased behaviour of Werner Herzog in ‘The Wild, Wild Adventures of a Shoe Eater!’ is balanced by reviews of Paul Verhoeven’s Turkish Delight (1973) and Showgirls (1995) before the industry somewhat eats itself in ‘Timothy Carey – And the Razzie Goes To…’

After Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker (1964) and Dog Day Afternoon (1975), the unflinching artist takes a glimpse closer to home through the works of Bruce McDonald and others in ‘Blame Canada!’

No cinematic catalogue of shame could be complete without ‘Dennis Hopper: A Man Under the Influence’ and his impossible life and dreams wrap up the main feature here after one last Ryan & Phil fest, examining Lindsay Anderson’s unique contributions in This Sporting Life (1963) and If…(1968), but please wait: there’s more…

This grotesquely compelling trawl through tacky times and turgidly lowered tone still holds a few Short Stories to titillate and thrill, beginning with witty eulogies to John Waters and Buster Keaton in ‘Tacky Trashy’ and ‘Shattered Silent Dreams’ before offering up a ‘Requiem for a Real Femme Fatale’ in the form of troubled, doomed-from-the-get-go Barbara Payton.

A trenchant comparison of ‘Slashers vs. Blockbusters’ segues neatly into a nightmare trip with Paul Schrader in ‘Confessions of a Taxi Driver’ and the curtain finally falls with an examination of Donald Cammell’s infamous psycho-sexual “Swinging Sixties” drama in ‘The Performance that Achieved Madness!’

Savage satire, scandalous extrapolation and scurrilous cartoon reportage from people who certainly love their movies – if not the shallow, flawed, nasty and just barmy army of self-appointed geniuses who shot them – make this a book not everyone can enjoy, but for those adults who are sincerely seduced by Silver Screen gems and love their comics, this might well be the most enjoyable book of the year.

© 2013 Sophie Cossette. All rights reserved.
For further movie madness and even more sordid pictorial portraits check out http://sophiecossette.blogspot.ca/

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The Strange Tale of Panorama Island


By Edogawa Rompo, adapted and illustrated by Suehiro Maruo, translated by Ryan Sands & Kyoko Nitta (Last Gasp)
ISBN: 978-0-86719-777-8

Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: Beautiful, seductive and intoxicating… 10/10

Edogawa Rompo is hailed as the Godfather of Japanese detective fiction – his output as author and critic defining the crime thriller from 1923 to his death in 1965. Born Tarō Hirai, he worked under a nom-de-plume based on his own great inspiration, Edgar Allen Poe, penning such well-loved classics as The Two-Sen Copper Coin, The Stalker in the Attic, The Black Lizard and The Monster with 20 Faces as well as many tales of his signature hero detective Kogoro Akechi, notional leader of the stalwart young band Shōnen tantei dan (the Boy Detective’s Gang).

He did much to popularise the concept of the rationalist observer and deductive mystery-solver. In 1946 he sponsored the detective magazine Hōseki (Jewels) and a year later founded the Detective Author’s Club, which survives today as the Mystery Writers of Japan association.

Although his latter years were taken up with promoting the genre, producing criticism, translation of western fiction and penning crime books for younger audiences, much of his earlier output (Rampo wrote twenty novels and lots of short stories) were dark, sinister concoctions based on the trappings and themes of ero guro nansensu (“eroticism, grotesquerie, and the nonsensical”) playing into the then-contemporary Japanese concept of hentai seiyoku or “abnormal sexuality”.

From that time comes this particular adaptation, originally serialised in Enterbrain’s monthly magazine Comic Beam from July 2007-January 2008.

Panorama-tō Kidan or The Strange Tale of Paradise Island was a vignette released in 1926, adapted here with astounding flair and finesses by uncompromising illustrator and adult manga master Suehiro Maruo.

A frequent contributor to the infamous Japanese underground magazine Garo, Maruo is the crafter of such memorable and influential sagas as Ribon no Kishi (Knight of the Ribbon), Rose Coloured Monster, Mr. Arashi’s Amazing Freak Show, The Laughing Vampire, Ultra-Gash Inferno, How to Rake Leaves and many others.

This is a lovely book. A perfect physical artefact of the themes involved, this weighty oversized (262x187mm) monochrome hardback has glossy full-colour inserts, creator biographies and just feels like something extra special, whilst it compellingly chronicles an intriguingly baroque tale of greed, lust, deception and duplicity which begins when starving would-be author Hitomi Hirosuke reads of the death of the Taisho Emperor.

The shock of losing the revered ruler (December 26th 1926) echoed through the entire nation and forces the failing writer to brutally reassess his life.

He finds himself wanting…

At another fruitless meeting with his editor Ugestu, Hitomi learns that an old friend, Genzaburo Komoda, has passed away. At college the boys were implausibly inseparable: the poor but ambitious kid and the heir to one of the greatest industrial fortunes in Japan. Perhaps it was because they looked and sounded exactly alike: doppelgangers nobody could tell apart…

The presumed cause of death was the asthma which had plagued the wealthy scion all his life and Hitomi, fuelled by self-loathing and inspired by Poe’s tale “The Premature Burial”, hatches a crazy scheme…

Faking his own suicide the writer leaves his effects to Ugestu before travelling to Kishu and immediately beginning his insane plot. Starving himself the entire time, Hitomi locates his pal’s grave, disposes of the already mouldering body and dons the garments and jewellery of Komoda. He even smashes out a front tooth and replaces it with the false one from the corpse…

His ghastly tasks accomplished, the starving charlatan simply collapses in a road where he can be found…

The news spreads like wildfire and soon all Komoda’s closest business associates have visited the miraculous survivor of catalepsy. The intimate knowledge Hitomi possesses combined with the “shock and confusion” of his miraculous escape is enough to fool even aged family retainer Tsunoda, and the fates are with him in that the widow Chiyoko has gone to Osaka to get over her loss. Of course she will rush back as soon as she hears the news…

However with gifts and good wishes flooding in, even Chiyoko is seemingly fooled and the fraudster begins to settle in his new skin. Just to be safe, however, he keeps the wife at a respectful and platonic distance. Comfortably entrenched, he begins to move around the Komoda fortune.

Hitomi the starving writer’s great unfinished work was The Tale of RA, a speculative fantasy in which a young man inherits a vast fortune and uses it to create an incredible, futuristic pleasure place of licentious delight. Now the impostor starts to make that sybaritic dream a reality, repurposing the family wealth into buying an island, relocating its inhabitants and building something never before conceived by mind of man…

Fobbing off all questions with the lie that he is constructing an amusement park that will be his eternal legacy, he populates the marvel of Arcadian engineering, landscaping, and optical science with a circus of wanton performers, living statues of erotic excess and a manufactured mythological bestiary.

He even claims that the colossal expenditure will kick-start the local economic malaise, but for every obstacle overcome another seems to occur. Moreover he cannot shift the uneasy feeling that Chiyoko suspects the truth about him…

Eventually however the great dream of plutocratic grandeur, lotus-eating luxury and hedonistic sexual excess is all but finished and “Komoda” escorts his wife on a grand tour of the wondrous celebration of debauched perversity that is his personal empire of the senses.

Once ensconced there he ends his worries of Chiyoka exposing him, but all too soon his PanoramaIsland receives an unwanted visitor.

Kogoro Akechi has come at the behest of the wife’s family and he has a few questions about, of all things, a book.

It seems that an editor, bereaved by the loss of one of his protégés, posthumously published that tragic young man’s magnum opus to celebrate his wasted life: a story entitled The Tale of RA…

This dark compelling morality play is realised in a truly breathtaking display of artistic virtuosity by Maruo, who combines clinical detail of intoxicating decadence with vast graphic vistas in a torrent of utterly enchanting images, whilst never allowing the visuals to overwhelm the underlying narrative and rise and fall of a boldly wicked protagonist…

Stark, stunning, classically clever and utterly adult The Strange Tale of Paradise Island is one of the best-looking, most absorbing crime thrillers I’ve seen this century, and no mystery loving connoisseur of comics, cinema or prose should miss it.

© 2008, 2013 HIRAI Rutaro, MARUO Suehiro. All rights reserved. English translation © 2013 Last Gasp.
This book is printed in ‘read-from-back-to-front’ manga format.

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Little Fluffy Gigolo Pelu volume 2


By Junko Mizuno (jaPress/Last Gasp)
ISBN: 978-0-86719-743-3

If you’re over a certain age or have eclectic tastes in art and music you might feel a pang of nostalgia at the work in this second intriguing, coyly adult collection, featuring Manga sensation Junko Mizuno’s most subversively compelling creation.

Since her emergence in 1995, the author has become renowned – perhaps infamous – for mixing childlike innocence with grim, gory action and unwholesome or stridently clashing, wildly inappropriate content in a sub-genre now dubbed Gothic or Noir kawaii (where kawaii describes cutely drawn protagonists and subjects).

Moreover the skewed sensibilities of her work in such Manga as Cinderalla, Hansel & Gretel, Princess Mermaid, Pure Trance and Momongo no Isshō (the Life of Momongo) has exploded out of the comics ghetto to be embraced by a larger audience with art exhibitions (Heart Throbs and Tender Succubus), art-books (Hell Babies, Collector File and Flare) and high-end designer toys for adults which include plush animals, vinyl figures, stationery, postcards, stickers, original art T-shirts and even a line of condoms and erotic paraphernalia.

Her shojo (“stories for girls”) derived style also borrows heavily from the iconic imagery of the 1960s and early 1970s, particularly the Graphic Psychedelia which grew out of Pop Art, with huge eyed, large-headed poppet girls, drawn to look young or, more accurately, actively, innocently, illicitly under-aged: living in simplified environments where detail is reduced to bare minima.

Her stories are always sharply at odds with her drawing style, like cartoons for toddlers involving unpleasant visits to the gynaecologist or being consumed by cannibals, and much of her material incorporates splashy full colour despite the overwhelming preponderance of black and white material in Japan.

Once Upon a Time on a cute pink planet invisible to human eyes lived a race of beautiful naked young women and one very lovely, placidly carnivorous purple Space Hippo.

Of course, there was also Pelu: a fluffy excitable ball of fuzz who incessantly questioned the idyllic existence. From the Hippo Pelu learned of Earth where there are two sexes, and of his own origins, and immediately the little puffball determined to visit the planet of humans and father a baby so he won’t be alone any more…

The journey led to a number of salutary adventures for the naive ET, whose venerable progression from wide-eyed Innocent to sexual enlightenment did not provide contentment or that longed-for child.

On Earth the fluffy naif closely observed a host of human interactions whilst always politely asking if anyone would like to be made pregnant – but love, hate, jealousy, pride, ambition, self-loathing and even murder were all hard to grasp until Pelu befriended hobo alcoholic Su-San who became a valued comrade and teacher…

This second monochrome tome continues the elucidatory explorations and peripatetic pursuits of the lonely heart “lad”, beginning with ‘Bubble Princess Transformation’ wherein the amorphous alien becomes enamoured of a beautiful sex-worker in the final stages of gender reassignment and presides over a rare happy-ever-after rather than the regulation “happy ending” after which the 2-part ‘I Married a Puppet Master’ delves into even stranger territory.

Good wife Murako spends her idle moments knitting glove puppet friends, but is increasingly worried that husband Mamoru‘s job is affecting his health. She is utterly unaware one of her creations has befriended the oddly similar new neighbour Pelu…

However, when Mamoru is callously transformed into a living doll by his bosses at Big Pharmaceutical, Murako is shocked into stunned inactivity… but not knitwear nightmare Koro who recruits Pelu to help obtain a brutal revenge…

Back on the streets again Su-San and Pelu are then approached by a sexy hostess for one of those unique television competition game-shows in ‘Surprise! Japan’s New Record’ but, after the little visitor’s stunning victory leaves them flush for a change, things get very odd…

Another 2-parter, ‘The Secret of the Flower Garden’ finds the spherical sex-pot approached by lovely Tsubomi with a rather unlikely proposition. Soon Pelu is regularly servicing her, her mother and grandmother, in a secret villa beneath a soda factory, just helping a family of hereditary nymphomaniacs, blithely unaware that understanding man of the house Kiyoshi is a bit of an amateur film-maker…

Eventually, still without progeny, Pelu is discarded for a fresher, less exhausted replacement and returns to best buddy Su-San, just in time to fall in love again…

‘Sigh of the Kappa Girl’ is a bittersweet tale of unrequited love as poor Kappa-ko is ditched by boyfriend and prospective husband Makoto. His family want their boy to marry someone else – anyone else actually – as they have an old-fashioned prejudice against Kappas.

You can see their point of view: although she is sweet and sad and gentle, most of the magical water demons are mischievous, cunning flesh-eaters, living in the city’s tainted rivers and watercourses. Seeking solace with Pelu, the betrayed girl steals his heart away but soon leaves him for another…

The saga takes another strange turn in ‘The Niece from Outer Space’ when a young princess from the pink planet comes to visit her far-voyaging uncle. Melu is even more innocent than Pelu but too soon adapts to Earth’s ways – especially after gorging on human food makes her body grow up faster than her mind. Soon she’s hanging out with the wrong crowd (homicidal quintuplets and their abusive, exploitative father) and Pelu is too late to prevent a miraculous tragedy…

This extraordinary collection concludes in poignant heartbreak as Pelu and Su-San become ill on the streets and the little stranger loses his best friend forever to the ‘Homeless Paradise’. The only glimmer of light in the sobering tale for Pelu is meeting Su-San’s estranged daughter Noriko Saotome and learning something of his forever-gone companion’s sorry past…

Little Fluffy Gigolo Pelu continues the potentially shocking saga of an incorrigible innocent abroad, with seductive fantasy underpinned by a subtle sinister subtext and an overt narrative informed by the naivety of “Swinging Sixties” sexuality.

Everything, especially the legion of pretty  girls, is drawn in the style of early Playboy icons, in the brand of  cartoon stylisations that featured in movie title sequences like What’s New, Pussycat? or Yellow Submarine. Anybody British who remembers the children’s animation Crystal Tipps and Alistair, or the hippo from Rainbow, will feel a frisson of nostalgia – which is of course the point. The art is an irresistible velvet trap designed to reduce readers to a receptive state in which the author can make telling points about contemporary culture.
By co-opting children’s entertainment Mizuno addresses fundamental aspects of human existence in a form designed to shock, subvert, upset and most importantly provoke. So, if some thought on the readers’ part extends beyond our visceral gut-reaction to nude innocent girls and the idealistic purity that used to be associated with such imagery, then she’s done her job…

This is a supremely edgy fantasy with a lot to say about society and relationships – similar to but utterly different from Robert Heinlein’s groundbreaking social satire Stranger in a Strange Land, and will one day I’m sure, have just as much impact.

© 2004, 2013 Junko Mizuno. All Rights Reserved.

See also www.MIZUNO-JUNKO.com

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The Children of Palomar


By Gilbert Hernandez (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 976-1-60699-625-6

In the 1980s a qualitative revolution forever destroyed the clichéd, segregated, stereotypical ways genres of comic strips were produced and marketed. Most effective in blasting the comfy funnybook pigeonholes were three young guys from Oxnard, California: Jaime, Mario and Gilberto Hernandez.

Love and Rockets was an anthology magazine (and previously a self-published comic in 1981) that broke all the rules, featuring intriguing, adventuresome larks and captivating, experimental narratives which pretty much defied classification, all cloaked in the ephemera of LA’s Hispanic and punk music scene.

Stories generally focussed on the slick, sci-fi-seasoned larks of young gadabouts Maggie, Hopey and their extended eccentric circle of friends or the heart-warming, terrifying, gut-wrenching soap-opera travails of rural Central American outpost Palomar.

The Hernandez Boys, gifted synthesists all, enthralled and enchanted with incredible stories that sampled a thousand influences conceptual and actual – everything from comics, cartoon shows, masked wrestlers, trashy movies and American Hispanic pop culture to German Expressionism. There was also a perpetual backdrop displaying the holy trinity of youth: Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll – for which please hear mostly alternative music and punk rock.

The result was dynamite. Mario only officially contributed on rare occasions but his galvanising energy informed everything. The slick and enticing visual forays by Jaime explored friendship and modern love whilst destroying stereotypes of feminine attraction through his fetching coterie of Gals Gone Wild, whilst Gilberto mostly crafted a hyper-real microcosm in his Latinate landscape: a playground of wit, toil, passion and raw humanity in a poor village with a vibrant, funny and fantastically quotidian cast created for his extended epic Heartbreak Soup.

Everything from life, death, adultery, magic, monsters, murder and especially gossip could happen in Palomar’s metafictional environs, as the artist mined his own post-punk influences in a deceptively effective primitivist art style which perfectly blended a personalised mythology of comics, music, intoxicants, strong women, gangs, sex and family. The denizens of Palomar still inform and shape Beto’s work, both directly and as imaginative spurs for spin-off stories.

Winning critical acclaim but little financial success, the brothers temporarily put aside their favourite toys to work on side projects and special series before creatively reuniting a few years back to produce annual collections of new material in their particularly peculiar shared or, rather, intermittently adjacent pen-and-ink universes.

In 2006, more than a decade after the canonical Heartbreak Soup stories, Beto popped back to his leafy arcadia via a three-magazine run entitled New Tales of Old Palomar, producing a too-brief selection of elucidating tales drenched in revelation and imagination which revealed a few answers to questions we never knew we had…

In the opening act of ‘The Children of Palomar’ the denizens of the little town are going about their daily business with a little less than usual calm since a couple of abandoned wild kids have been stealing food from everyone, everywhere. The naked little nippers are incredibly fleet-footed and not even Sheriff Chelo can catch them.

Her immediate problems are solved once sporty soccer-playing Pipo decides to prove who is truly the fastest runner in town, but unfortunately, once feral foundlings Tonantzin and Diana Villaseñor have been taken in, the village has to civilise and find homes for them…

The men meanwhile have devised a scheme to make Palomar a little export money. They mean well but when the mayor and his pals decide to blow up a boulder just as the stray kids take off, it takes all Pipo’s acceleration to prevent a horrific tragedy…

Another time little boys were on the other side of “The Crack” hazing young Gato before letting him join their black shirt gang. When they got bored and left, Pintor tried to help the traumatised candidate get home but the log across the giant gorge had vanished.

Stuck and terrified they were then abducted by strangers in space suits who experimented on them. The strangers spoke a strange language but another Palomar boy named Manuel was there and he said that soon they would be made to forget everything…

The villagers meanwhile had noticed them gone and Sheriff Chelo led a search party to the gap, but when their makeshift bridge sundered, only she managed to get across. By the time she found the kids their captors were arguing and the violence only escalated when she intervened…

The entire outpost then vanished in an explosion but at least she got the boys back…

Of course, Chelo had no idea that one of the ghostly White Strangers was still alive and intensely interested…

Palomar is surrounded by huge, ancient statues and the people all know they live in a world of magic. When babosa-selling Tonantzin began seeing a ghostly chuckling “Blooter Baby”, a wise woman explained that they only appeared to girls and women who would be childless, before telling her how to get rid of it.

Instead, she and the spectre reach an accommodation and the girl learns she is not alone before gaining a mission for life…

Our picaresque peregrinations conclude some time later when diminutive Carmen thinks she feels an Earth tremor no one else noticed. She considers asking the peculiar white scientists doing their weird bird research at the edge of town but doesn’t know their language.

Everybody goes about their day until the strangers kidnap Chelo and the horrified sheriff recognises one of the “aliens” from across the gorge all those years ago. Although formidable, she succumbs to superior force and wakes up maimed but back in bed in Palomar.

Not normally an unforgiving woman, Chelo goes looking for her tormentors as soon as she’s able… and finds them…

There’s fiction, there’s Meta-fiction and then there’s Gilbert Hernandez. In addition to Love and Rockets‘ captivating tales of Palomar he has produced numerous controversial and groundbreaking volumes such as Sloth, Grip, Birdland, Girl Crazy and Julio’s Day: all distinguished by his bold, instinctive, compellingly simplified artwork and a mature, sensitive adoption of the literary techniques of Magical Realist writers like Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel García Márquez.

These techniques he has sublimely amplified and, visually at least, made utterly his own. This beguiling return to his landmark, signature series has been long overdue for a deluxe edition such as this splendid hardback, and such is the quality of the accessible writing and intoxicating art that first-timers will have no trouble slipping south of the border to join the veterans and devotees in a marvellous Latin mystery and adventure…
© 2013 Gilbert Hernandez. This edition © 2013 Fantagraphics Books, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Walrus (Brandon Graham’s All Bum Album – from Tusk ‘Till Dawn)


By Brandon Graham (PictureBox)
ISBN: 978-0-9851595-9-7

Autumn is officially here, with its fire-storms, droughts and sunburns, so it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the Holiday Season is inescapably close. After all, the Christmas films have been playing on Sky Movies since early March…

Seriously though, if you’re prudent, it is time to start looking at gifts for your loved ones or family, and here’s one of the prettiest and most intriguing comics art-books I’ve seen in many a year…

Brandon Graham was born in Oregon in 1976, an inveterate graffiti artist who seamlessly turned his graphic gifts and narrative flair to comicbook storytelling, beginning with Ameri-manga publisher Antarctic Press (October Yen) in 1996, dividing his time with Alternative or Independent Publisher projects and gracing the mainstream with work for Image, NMB, IDW and Vertigo.

He is a founder member of artistic collective MeatHaus, and if you like comedy, science fiction, erotica, manga and Moebius, you might want to seek out collections such as King City, 24Seven, Escalator, Multiple Warheads, Perverts of the Unknown and others – as well as this book…

Walrus is a monochrome and colour compendium of “Drawings and Sketchbook Comics from 2009-2011”, featuring  artworks, working roughs, calligraphy, rendered thoughts and idle musings, finished pieces and found imagery that serve to introduce viewers into a beguiling world of fantastic futurity and mesmerising wonderment – and there are weird critters and hot chicks…

A roughly comicbook-sized paperback (112 pages, 240x173mm) with a beautiful gatefold cover, this marvellous compendium comprises snippets of reportage, designs, roughs and layouts from finished stories.

There are moments of tenderness and intimacy, peeks into the creative process, bizarre moments of communal reality, caricatures, gags, spoofs of and tributes to comics and movies (such as Fantastic Four #9, Dirty Pair, Conan and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly), a commemoration of Moebius (The Long Goodbye), deliciously funny and whimsical gags, complete stories such as ‘Far North’, ‘Work Weak’ and ‘Today in the Life’ plus a preponderance of pages dedicated to evocative, seductive post-modern glamour art.

Punky, funky, enduring, enchanting and sublimely entertaining, this is another perfect example of the kind of book that makes the reader hungry to get out and draw stories now! Now!! NOW!!!

…As well as being just plain wonderful to see.

All art-forms need such creators and Walrus might well be the book to get you – or your kids – off the couch and into a studio.
© 2013 Brandon Graham. All rights reserved.

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Helter Skelter Fashion Unfriendly


By Kyoko Okazaki (Vertical)
ISBN: 978-1-93565-483-4

Following her debut in 1983, producing erotic material for the men’s markets, Kyoko Okazaki established a reputation for challenging, controversial, contemporary manga tales before gradually shifting her focus to produce stories specifically for and about women (such as Pink, Happy House and River’s Edge), focusing with unflinching intensity on their social issues and the overwhelming pressures of popular culture in modern Japan. You can find out more about this pioneering creator here.

From 1994-1995, and following her immensely successful strip Tōkyō Girls Bravo in mainstream fashion magazine CUTIE, Okazaki created a biting expose of the industry – and its casualties – in Shodensha’s Feel Young anthology.

Heruta Sukeruta took the author’s concerns, inclinations and observations into realms tinged with dark speculation, but the episodes never seemed too far-fetched or distant from what we all believed models and managers and clients actually experienced…

Liliko is the undisputed top model in Japan. The Lily’s face and body are everywhere, selling products and lifestyle to men, women and especially young girls. She is an unchanging paragon of look and style and has been so for absolutely ages.

In fact, nobody seems to know quite how long – except ruthless model agency president Mama Tada – and only Liliko’s long-suffering gofer/manager Hada and make-up artist Kin Sawanabe have any inkling of the real person under the gloss and glitz and glamour…

Despite her star status Lily is incredibly unhappy: bored, paranoid, burned out and increasingly obsessed with her inevitable usurpation by some fresh young “Next Year’s Model”…

Knowing her days are numbered, the fragile yet hard-as-nails supermodel is frantically chasing singing and acting gigs, capitalising on her celebrity. Sadly, lacking any discernible talent, she’s only getting ahead by sleeping with all the money-men involved…

When not drugged up, stressed out or screaming, she finds some measure of contentment in the arms of Takao, handsome, spoiled heir to the Nanbu department store fortune (and the man she plans to marry) or in degrading and debauching the obsessively devoted Hada.

Liliko’s biggest problem is an incredible secret that could shake the nation. All her beauty and success come from a series of cosmetic procedures, carried out by a renegade plastic surgeon at an exclusive clinic that caters to the most powerful and influential people in the world.

Long ago a desperate girl with a sordid past met Mama and agreed to a complete, full-body series of operations. Now only her bones and some meat is her – all that glittering skin and surface is a fabrication, maintained by constant use of addictive drugs supplied by the dowdy doctor in charge to fight implacable tissue rejection.

Sadly, after years of use even these experimental remedies aren’t as efficient as before and Liliko’s look is breaking down and fragmenting…

She is by no means the only client of the clinic, and following a spate of suspicious deaths and the trail of illegal aborted foetal organ traffickers, police prosecutor Asada has begun to put the pieces together. However even he is not completely immune to the Lily’s allure…

In the face of increasing breakdown, Mama brings Kin up to date and makes him part of the conspiracy, whilst arranging with “The Doctor” to perform still more operations on her fragile star…

Liliko’s damaged psyche endures even greater shocks when her fat and dumpy little sister turns up. Having impossibly tracked down her sublime sibling, little Chikako is sent away with stars in her eyes, a dream in her heart and newfound determination to be beautiful too, whatever the cost…

Chemically deranged, paranoid and alternatively wildly uncontrollable and practically catatonic, Lily goes off the deep end when Takao admits that he’s marrying an heiress for dynastic reasons but will still, of course, have sex with her in secret…

Having already seduced Hada and her boyfriend in a moment of malicious boredom, Liliko induces them to take revenge for her bruised pride and events quickly spiral into an inescapable crescendo of catastrophe that extends far beyond the intangible world of image and illusion into the very bedrock of Japanese society…

Harsh, raw, brutal and relentlessly revelatory, the author’s forensic examination of the power of sex, temptations of fame and commoditisation of beauty is a multi-layered, shockingly effective – if occasionally surreal – tale that should alarm every parent who reads it. It is also a superb adult melodrama, tense political thriller and effective crime mystery to delight all broad-minded fans of comics entertainment looking to expand their horizons beyond capes, and ghost and ray-guns…

Vertical are dedicated to bringing the best of Japan’s adult comics to English-speaking audiences and Helter Skelter is part of a line books targeting women readers with challenging material that breaks out of the genre ghettos usually attributed to manga. Helter Skelter Fashion Unfriendly certainly qualifies. The cautionary tale was collected into a Japanese tankōbon edition in 2003, winning a number of awards including the 2004 Osamu Tezuka Culture Prize, and was subsequently adapted into a film shown in Cannes.

Grim, existential and explicit, this is not a book for kids or the squeamish, but it is a dark marvel of graphic narrative and one well deserving of your attention.

© 2003 Kyoko Okazaki. All rights reserved.
This book is printed in ‘read-from-back-to-front’ manga format.

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The Complete Crumb Comics volume 5: Happy Hippy Comix – New Edition


By R. Crumb & various (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-0-930193-92-8

This book contains really clever and outrageously dirty pictures, rude words, non-condemnatory drug references and allusions, apparent racism, definite sexism, godless questioning of authority and brilliantly illustrated, highly moving personal accounts and opinions.

If you – or those legally responsible for you – have a problem with that, please skip this review and don’t buy the book.

Really. I’m not kidding…

Robert Crumb is a unique creative force in comics and cartooning, with as many detractors as devotees. His uncompromising, excoriating, neurotic introspections, his pictorial rants and invectives, unceasingly picked away at societal scabs and peeked behind forbidden curtains for his own benefit, but he has always happily shared his unwholesome discoveries with anybody who takes the time to look…

In 1987 Fantagraphics Books began the nigh-impossible task of collating, collecting and publishing the chronological totality of the artist’s vast output and those critically important volumes are now being reissued.

The son of a career soldier, Robert Dennis Crumb was born in Philadelphia in 1943 into a functionally broken family. He was one of five kids who all found different ways to escape their parents’ highly volatile problems, and comic strips were paramount among them.

As had his older brother Charles, Robert immersed himself in the comics and cartoons of the day; not just reading but creating his own. Harvey Kurtzman, Carl Barks and John Stanley were particularly influential, but also comic strip masters such as E.C. Segar, Gene Ahern, Rube Goldberg, Bud (Mutt and Jeff) Fisher, Billy (Barney Google), De Beck, George (Sad Sack) Baker and Sidney (The Gumps) Smith, as well as illustrators like C.E. Brock and the wildly imaginative and surreal 1930’s Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies animated shorts.

Defensive, introspective and always compulsively driven, young Robert pursued art and self-control through religion with equal desperation. His early spiritual repression and flagrant, hubristic celibacy warred with his body’s growing needs…

From this point onwards, the varied and exponentially impressive breadth of Crumb’s output becomes increasingly riddled with his often hard-to-embrace themes and declamatory, potentially offensive visual vocabulary as his strips grope towards the creator’s long-sought personal artistic apotheosis, and this third volume covers material created and published between 1960-1966 as the self-tormented artist began to find a popular following in a strangely changing world.

Escaping his stormy early life, he married young and began working in-house at the American Greeting Cards Company. He discovered like minds in the growing counterculture movement and discovered LSD. By 1967 Crumb had moved to California and became an early star of Underground Commix. As such he found plenty of willing hippie chicks to assuage his fevered mind and hormonal body whilst reinventing the very nature of cartooning with such creations as Mr. Natural, Fritz the Cat, Devil Girl and a host of others. It is from this period that the engrossing, amazing and still shocking strips in this book stem…

He worked on in what was essentially a creative utopia throughout the early 1970’s but the alternative lifestyle of the Underground was already dying. Soon it would disappear: dissipated, disillusioned, dropped back “in” or demised. A few truly dedicated publishers and artists stayed the course, publishing on a far more businesslike footing as Crumb carried on creating, splitting his time between personal material and commercial art projects whilst incessantly probing deeper into his turbulent inner world.

This particular collection covers the period when the insular, isolated Crumb first began to make a name for himself with a flood of gags, posters, commercial art jobs, short strips and longer material popping up seemingly everywhere. All are faithfully reproduced in this compilation – which makes for a rather dry listing here, I’m afraid – but (trust me) the pictorial output is both engrossing and legendary.

Actually, don’t trust me: buy the book and see for yourselves…

After a photo and cartoon-stuffed (from 1968 sketchbooks) Introduction from the old scallywag himself, praising the effects of mind-altering chemicals and recalling the first heady days of Counter-Culture celebrity, the wave of visual excess and literary freewheeling begins with ‘The Old Pooperoo Pauses to Ponder’: a baroque procession of his fun-loving characters rounded off with a micro strip at the bottom, revealing Eggs Ackley’s opinion that ‘This Kid’s a Scream!’, after which Mr. Natural, Angelfood McSpade and all the rest are reassured that ‘You’re Gonna Get There Anyway’ (all from East Village Other December 1-16, 1967).

Next ‘Mr. Natural, the Man from Affiganistan’ shares more timeless wisdom with resident curious “Straight” Flakey Foont (EVO December 15-30 1968), after which a rush of shorts from EVO January 12-17 begins.

‘Sky-Hi Comics’, ‘Then on the Other Hand…’ are followed by ‘Nuttin’ but Nuttin’, ‘Here She Comes! It’s Hippy!’ and ‘Junior High & his Sidekick Judy Holiday’ from the January 19-25 edition whilst ‘Those Cute Little Bearzy Wearzies/George Gwaltny’ (EVO January 26-February 1 1968) precedes Natural’s inevitable return to act as guru to ‘Schuman the Human’ from EVO February 9-15th.

The Wise one continues in revelatory style when ‘Mr. Natural Meets God’ (supplemented by) ‘Gail Snail and The Walkie Talkies’ from EVO February 16-22, whilst the next weekly issue described how ‘Mr. Natural Gets the Bum’s Rush’, and Schuman declared ‘Let’s Be Honest’ before Crumb confronted the period’s racism head on with customary shocking frankness in ‘Mr. Natural Repents’, ‘Hey, Mom!’ and attendant strip ‘Let’s Have Nigger Hearts For Lunch’ (EVO March 1-7 1968).

Zap #2 June 1968, then provided wry ‘Hamburger Hi-Jinx’ with Cheezis K. Reist and shockingly introduced iconic Bête Noir ‘Angelfood McSpade’ before closing with a warning to avoid cheap imitations from ‘Mr. Natural’.

Bijou #1, from Summer 1968, then supplies a wealth of intriguing, astonishing fare leading with ‘Neato Keano Time!’ before ‘The Big Little Boy’ and ‘Bo Bo Bolinski, He’s a Clown!’ went through their paces. Following that ‘Mr. Spiff’ makes a call and ‘Here They Are! Puppets of your favourite cartoon characters!’ provides paper-dolls of Angelfood and Mr. Natural. The harsh, ironic hilarity all ends with a laidback Bijou Funnies Ad…

The inescapably controversial Ms. McSpade and friends then cropped up in ‘All Asshole Comics’ (Chicago Seed, July 1968), after which covers for ‘Nope #6’ and ‘Nope #7’ (both 1968) are followed here by ‘The Zap Show’ – a captivating art jam with Rick Griffin, Victor Moscoso & S. Clay Wilson.

A ‘Fritz the Cat title page’ then acts as prologue to an outrageous tale of student terrorism and teen licentiousness in ‘Fritz the No-Good’ (taken from Cavalier, September/October 1968), after which you’ll need to rotate the book to be shocked by the interiors of digest-sized Snatch #1 (October 1968): rude and raunchy spoofs such as ‘The Adventures of Andy Hard-on’, ‘Krude Cut-Ups’ and ‘The Fight’ plus assorted gags like ‘Jailbait of the Month’, ‘Hi, Swingers’ and much more…

A rather lovely ‘Janis Joplin: original cover for Cheap Thrills‘ (1968) is followed by

‘The Phonus Balonus Blues’ and ‘Where the Action Isn’t’ (EVO September 27 1968) as well as the cover of that issue – ‘Can the Mind Know it?’

From the October 11 issue of East Village Other comes a barrage of strips: ‘Sleezy Snot Comics’, ‘Mr. Natural’, ‘Booger Buddies’ and more plus an ‘Ad for Head Comix’ whilst the October 18th edition provided both ‘Angelfood McSpade’ and ‘Cum Comix’, and October 25th a ‘Mr. Natural, disguised as a vacuum cleaner salesman, talks to the Housewives of America’ cover.

‘Edgar and Maryjane Crump’ and ‘Crime in the Streets’ both originated in EVO November 1) after which an ‘alternate cover for Zap #3′ segues into the infamous ‘Dirty Dog’ strip from Zap #3 (December 1968).

That underground classic also premiered ‘Mr. Goodbar “Off his Rocker”’, an astounding

‘Atomic Comics Jam’ with S. Clay Wilson, Gilbert Shelton, Victor Moscoso & Rick Griffin, grotesque shorts ‘Let’s Eat’ and ‘Mr. Natural’, ‘Hairy’ and ‘Street Corner Daze.’

Another digest-sized landscape section next reproduces the XXX-rated contents of ‘Snatch #2′ (January 1969) including ‘Look Out Girls!! The Grabbies are Coming’, ‘Down on the Farm’, ‘The Family that Lays Together Stays Together’ and far more before an ‘ad for San Francisco Comic Book Company’ from Bogeyman #2, 1969, leads seamlessly into ‘Don’t Gag On It… Goof On It!’ (Gothic Blimp Works, Ltd. #1, March 1969).

The April 1969 ‘cover for Creem #2′ precedes a stunning spoof of Romance comics with ‘The Bleeding Heart Syndrome’ (Tales from the Ozone #1, 1969) before ‘Shoo Shoo Baby’ and ‘The Pricksters’ (GBW #2, 1969) suspends the black and white barrage to briefly usher in a spectacular ‘Color Section’…

The polychromatic madness begins with ‘Head Comix covers’ (front and back and 1968), keeping up the pressure with the ‘Zap Comix #2 covers’ from December, as well as a ‘Fritz the Cat cover’, the ‘Cheap Thrills’ record cover for Big Brother and the Holding Company and the December 1968 ‘Snatch #1 covers’.

The ribald rainbows end with ‘Snatch #2 covers’ (January 1969) before ‘Flower Children on Broadway’ from Bijou #2 (1969) return us to monochrome merriment, ‘Nutsboy’ (Bogeyman #2, 1969) presages today’s teen obsession with “Slasher-flicks” and ‘Mr. Know-It-All and his pal Diz in What the Fuck’ (with S. Clay Wilson from GBW #3, 1969) continues the dark and bloody mood.

This landmark compilation concludes with Crumb’s contributions to Motor City #1 (April 1969) starting with ultra-independent femme fatal ‘Lenore Goldberg and her Girl Commandos’, after which cool dude ‘The Inimitable Boingy Baxter’ turns Detroit on its head, and mini-mystic Savannah Foomo explores reality with ordinary folk and ‘The Desperate Character’ in ‘Deep Meaning Comics’ and ‘More Deep Meaning Gommigs’, leaving good old Eggs Ackley to wrap thing up in macabre style with ‘Eyeball Kicks’…

If Crumb had been able to suppress his creative questing, he could easily have settled for a lucrative career in any one of a number of graphic disciplines from illustrator to animator to jobbing comic book hack, but as this pivotal collection readily proves, the artist was haunted by the dream of something else – he just didn’t yet know what that was…

Crumb’s subtle mastery of his art-form and obsessive need to reveal his most hidden depths and every perceived defect – in himself and the world around him – has always resulted in an unquenchable fire of challenging comedy and riotous rumination, and this chronicle begins to show his growing awareness of where to look.

This superb series charting the perplexing pen-and-ink pilgrim’s progress is the perfect vehicle to introduce any (over 18) newcomers to the world of grown up comics. And if you need a way in yourself, seek out this book and the other sixteen as soon as conceivably possible…
© 1967, 1968, 1969, 1989, 2004, 2013 Robert Crumb. All contributory art material and content © the respective creators/copyright holders. All rights reserved.

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Bread & Wine – an Erotic Tale of New York


By Samuel R. Delaney & Mia Wolff (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-632-4

The demands of drama dictate that true love never runs smooth but that’s not the case in real life. The trade off is that those actual romances which stand the test of time and tedium are painfully devoid of the remarkable circumstance and miraculous “gosh-wow” moments of fiction.

But this book proves That Ain’t Necessarily So…

In 1999 independent publisher Juno released a small graphic novel memoir, written by Samuel R. Delaney and illustrated by Mia Wolff, which recounted how a celebrated gay black literary giant, college professor and social theoretician with a mantelpiece crowded of awards and a teenaged daughter in tow, met and romanced one of society’s most outcast and forgotten souls.

At the time of publication they had been a couple for some years and they are together still, more than 25 years later. Julia Roberts and Richard Gere won’t be in this movie and not a single dragon had to die…

Following an Introduction from Alan Moore, this welcome and long-overdue new edition reveals how “Chip” Delaney took a walk on New York’s Upper West Side, bought a book from homeless Dennis and struck up a conversation with the kind of person most people refuse to acknowledge the very existence of…

In seamless seductive understated style the words and pictures detail how gradually, gently, unsurprisingly they became first friends and then lovers.

In the manner of all lasting romances, this is the history of two full equals who accidentally find each other, not some flimsy rags-to-riches Cinderella tale of predestination and magical remedies. The brilliance and position of one is perfectly complimented by the warmth, intelligence and quiet integrity of the other, and although far from smooth – or rose scented – their path to contentment was both tension-fraught and heart-warming.

Oh, and there’s sex: lots of sex, so if you’re the kind of person liable to be upset by pictures of joyous, loving fornication between two people separated by age, wealth, social position and race who happily possess and constantly employ the same type of naughty bits on each other, then go away and read something else.

In fact, just go away.

And that’s all the help you get from me. This lyrical, beguiling tale is embellished throughout with interwoven extracts from the poem Bread and Wine by German lyric poet Friedrich Hölderlin and illustrated in a mesmerising organic monochrome variety of styles by artist and Delaney family friend Mia Wolff, and you really need to have it unfold for you without my kibitzing…

This is one of the sweetest, most uplifting comics love stories ever written: rich with sentiment, steeped in literary punch and beautiful to behold. Moreover this lavish hardback also includes a celebratory commentary by Chip, Dennis and Mia and other protagonists in the Afterword, plus a sketch-packed earnest and informative interview with the creative participants.

Strong, assertive, uncompromising and proudly unapologetic, this is love we should all aspire to and Bread & Wine is a graphic novel every adult should see.
Introduction © 2013 Alan Moore. Contents © 2013 Samuel R. Delaney & Mia Wolff. This edition © 2013 Fantagraphics Books. 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.