Category: Adult/Erotica

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Kramers Ergot volume 8


By various, edited by Sammy Harkham (PictureBox)
ISBN: 978-0-98458-927-2

Since the 1980s when “Underground” creators and cartoonists of adult and mature English-language comics first began to find mainstream and popular acceptance by re-branding themselves as alternative or Avant Garde, there have periodically emerged groundbreaking anthologies which served to disseminate the best of the best in challenging sequential art. Following on the groundbreaking heels of Raw and its descendants, Kramers Ergot launched as a 48-page mini-comic in 2000 and grew into a vari-format, anything goes visual and intellectual banquet before suspending publication with #7 in 2008 with a hugely proportioned (536x414mm) 96-page deluxe hardback starring sixty of the art form’s most beguiling pantheon of stars.

Now founding father Sammy Harkham returns with another stunning array of top-notch new creations and a smattering of sublime vintage material in a gloriously accessible 240-page clothbound B-format hardback that once more brandishes the sharpest of cutting edges at fans of the medium at its most uncompromising…

The magic begins with the abstract and glittering Overture by Robert Beatty, after which Washington Punk musician Ian F. Svenonius (Nation of Ulysses, Weird War and Chain and The Gang) contributes a fascination and informative essay on the shape of American arts with Notes on Camp part 2.

Alternative star and social commentator ‘Jimbo’ returns in a trek across tomorrow’s wastelands in a sharp monochrome yarn from Gary Panter after which C.F. explores isolation and human relationships in the placidly eerie ‘Warm Genetic House-Test Pattern’ whilst Kevin Huizenga redraws an old Charlton Comics fantasy tale (“The Half Men” by Bill Molno & Sal Trapani and possibly scripted by the prolific Joe Gill) in the quirkily disturbing ‘Mysteries of Unexplained Worlds’…

Leon Sadler produces the first of two contributions in the colourfully pensive ‘Friendship Comic’ whilst the muted hues and jolly style of Gabrielle Bell’s ‘Cody’ successfully belies the tale’s violent underpinnings and Frank Santoro & Dash Shaw shock and stun with their chilling ‘Childhood Predators’.

‘Ain’t it So?’ is a smart cartoon by Tim Hensley and ‘Get Your Ass to Mars’ is a set of stunning art photo pieces from Takeshi Murata, whilst ‘Mining Colony X7170’ is a typically dark and savage sci fi shocker from anti-art iconoclast Johnny Ryan before

Leon Sadler returns with the expansive and picaresque ‘Goblins Orbit the Earth (I’m Here! It’s Me!)’.

Chris Cilla takes a different look at love in ‘Secret Tourist’ and ‘Barbarian Bitch’ by Anya Davidson joyously screws with all the traditions of the hoary old genre and Ben Jones plays cunning mind-games and perpetrates dire puns in his shaggy doggish and charmingly primitivist ‘The Ultimate Character 2002’ after which Editor Sammy Harkham picks up his own pens to describe the silent horror and driving melodrama of ‘A Husband and a Wife’.

‘Epilogue’ is another visual voyage from painter Robert Beatty and this tome concludes with a long lost delight.

The last contribution is a true joy for me reprinting as it does a selection from what I believe to be one of the most delicious and clever British strips ever created. ‘Oh, Wicked Wanda (Select Excerpts)’ reprints in sublime full glossy colour Ron Embleton & Frederick Mullalley’s brilliant socio-sexual satire which ran in Penthouse magazine between 1973-1980.

Journalist, editor (of left-wing magazine Tribune), columnist, novelist and political writer Mullally was hired to script the exotic, erotic adventures of Wanda Von Kreesus, the richest woman in the world, Candyfloss, her insatiable jailbait paramour and an outrageous coterie of faithful employees including an all-girl army, a mad scientist and a brutal looking thug with the soul of a poet. To illustrate he secured the talents of oil painter and comic strip veteran Ron Embleton who had astounded comic readers with his lush and vibrant strip Wulf the Briton in Express Weekly and his illustrations in Look and Learn.

Oh, Wicked Wanda! was originally a prose serial illustrated by Bryan Forbes, beginning in 1969 before becoming, in 1973, the unbelievably lavish and torrid strip reprinted here, continuing until 1980 when it was replaced by Sweet Chastity, also painted by Embleton, and scripted by Penthouse proprietor Bob Guccione.

The bored and mischievous hellion is a sexually adventurous woman from a time when sexual politics and liberation were huge issues, and therefore prime targets for low comedy and high satire. Mullally peppered his scripts with topical references (many, sadly which would escape today’s casual reader, I’m sure) and the phenomenal Embleton would depict them with hyper-realistic accuracy. Harold Wilson, Edward Heath, Ted Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Fidel Castro, Lyndon Johnson, Spiro Agnew, Mao Tse-tung, John Wayne, Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse and even comic-strip greats like Pogo, Mutt and Jeff or Krazy Kat, all meandered through the glossy pages, a cross between a Greek Chorus and pictorial ad-libs.

Many celebrities were actively parodied, participants and classical and contemporary erotic allusions abounded; ranging from a little nymphette lounging about reading William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch to visual and verbal references to Shelley’s Leda and the Swan.

Here some of the earliest adventures are re-presented as Wanda destroys, debases, abducts and mounts (no, not necessarily that way) the obnoxiously rich and famous for her Museum of Misfits and Deviancy; consequently taking on the Mafia, the CIA and South American Nazi war criminal Martin Boorman. Her personal Mad Scientist Homer Sapiens also reveals his sordid connections to some of the 20th century’s nastiest personages…

Oh, Wicked Wanda! is still a funny, sexy read and inarguably one of the most beautiful British strips ever crafted. Hopefully this selection will lead to a new audience and a comprehensive reprinting …

As well as being a comics-lovers dream, Kramers Ergot is a book-lovers delight with excellent design and a reassuringly high-class print values. This package is something no lover of the medium can afford to miss.

All material © 2011 respective authors and owners. All rights reserved.

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The Bodyssey


By Richard Corben & Simon Revelstroke (Catalan Communications/Fantagor Press)
ISBNs: Signed/numbered Limited Edition 0-8741 603-2-4, softcover 978-0-8741 603-2-1
1993 Fantagor edition 978-0-96238-418-9

Richard Corben is one of America’s greatest proponents of graphic narrative: an animator, illustrator, publisher and cartoonist, springing from the tumultuous wave of independent counterculture commix of the 1960s and 1970s to become a major force in comics storytelling with his own unmistakable style and vision. He is renowned for his mastery of airbrush and captivatingly excessive anatomical stylisation and infamous for delightfully wicked, darkly comedic horror and beguiling eroticism in his fantasy and science fiction tales.

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. This particular hilarious adult saga developed in response to a stunning 8-plate art portfolio ‘Scenes from the Magic Planet’ from 1979. After serialisation in Heavy Metal #97-102 in 1985, the complete scandalous graphic novel epic was first released in December 1986 and re-published by the artist’s own Fantagor Press company in 1993.

The necromancer Hunghoul has run off (flown actually in a fantastic cloud machine) with Pilgor the Barbarian’s faithless wife Smegmella and the obliviously cuckolded hero is hunting them through the skies but their inevitable death duel doesn’t go well and the hero is dumped into the oceans far below.

Washed ashore in a strange country the massively-thewed champion becomes an object of imminent affection for an undulating Pudenda Beast until rescued by a reptile man named Ytgna – a scurrilous creature with plans of his own which sorely need a mighty muscled dupe and puissant fighter…

The wily lizard enlists the lovelorn hero in his own a quest to locate and liberate the amply pulchritudinous Ammora, and soon their search brings them to the fleshpot quarter of cesspit city Foulmouth where Pilgor catches the eye and steamier regions of androgynous Succulus Agripper, the Brothel Queen of the degenerate metropolis. Being a healthy upstanding chap Pilgor violently refuses the unwholesome unwelcome advances, effecting a spectacular escape and making another implacable, powerful and unforgiving enemy…

Eventually Ytgna and Pilgor locate their quarry – or so they think – but she proves to be far more than they bargained for and the searchers find themselves unwelcome guests of the formidable Amazons of Tumeschia and about to lose their he-man standings until a giant comatose goddess awakes and an extremely phallic giant titan invades. And that’s when the still most-piqued Agripper and his army turn up…

Meanwhile at Castle Bilious the first bloom of love is fading for Hunghoul and Smegmella so the wizard is happy to turn his attention back to Pilgor – who is still keen on exercising bloody vengeance upon them.

With the Amazons and Agripper hard on his heels and the nasty necromancer waiting for him the witless warrior is heading inexorably for a spectacular, eye-popping climax…

I’ve only got the signed and numbered limited edition so the remaining pages might not be in either of the softcover editions, but if you can, ensure you find a copy which ends the saucy fantasy extravaganza with the original portfolio plates from 1979.

In magnificent textured monochrome grey-tones and washes ‘Pilgor Discusses Politics with his Friends’, ‘Hunghoul’s Guards’, ‘Ytgna and his Faithful Ammora’, ‘Machola Seeks a Remembrance’, ‘Uncle Hunghoul Collects a Titbit’, ‘Pilgor Works his Work’, ‘Pilgor drops in at Dinnertime’ and ‘Pilgor’s and Ammora’s Happy Ending’ cap off the wry and whimsically debauched fantasy in a wave of sheer artistic excellence.

Like the cross between the World’s smuttiest Conan story and “Carry On, Barbarian!” this tale perfectly epitomises Corben’s unique visual style, love of the dark and scathingly sharp sense of humour. Combine that with humanity’s apparently insatiable hunger for sex, nudity, monsters and magic and this book becomes another utterly unmissable indulgence…
© 1986, 1993 Richard Corben. All rights reserved.

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The Complete Crumb Comics volume 3: Starring Fritz the Cat


By Robert Crumb (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-0-93019-375-1

Robert Crumb is a unique creative force in the world of cartooning with as many detractors as devotees. His uncompromising, excoriating, neurotic introspections, 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 many of those engrossing compendia are now being reissued.

With the material in this third volume the isolated and secretive artist began to break into the wider world as his first great creation escaped from Crumb’s self-published minicomics and into regular paying venues…

Once again, if intemperate language, putative blasphemy, cartoon nudity, fetishism and comedic fornication are liable to upset you or those legally responsible for you, stop reading this review right here and don’t buy the book.

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’ shattering problems and comics were always paramount amongst them.

As had his older brother Charles, Robert immersed himself in the strips and cartoons of the day; not simply reading but feverishly creating his own. Harvey Kurtzman, Carl Barks and John Stanley were particularly influential, but also newspaper artists like 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 and introspective, young Robert pursued art and slavish self-control through religion with equal desperation. His early spiritual repression and flagrant, hubristic celibacy constantly warred with his body’s growing needs…

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. In 1967 Crumb relocated 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, Devil Girl and the star of this particular show, the utterly amoral, unpredictable, almost human Fritz the Cat…

The rest is history…

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.

The mercurial pictorial parade is preceded by another fascinating reminiscence from life-long friend Marty Pahls describing ‘The First Girl That Came Along’…

Crumb’s early artistic style was utterly transformed by the introduction of Rapidograph mapping pens and ‘Fritz the Cat, Ace Salesman’ (August 1964) has a raw, mesmerising scratchy linearity that belies the subversive sexual undercurrent of the piece, after which the feline philanderer went hard-core in ‘Fritz Comes on Strong’ (published in satire magazine Help! #22, January 1965). From the same issue ‘Harlem: a Sketchbook Report’ displayed the artist’s gift for visual reportage.

Fritz appeared in the silent and extremely trenchant bobbysoxer strip ‘Fred, the Teen-age Girl Pigeon’ (Help! #24, May 1965), whilst ‘Fritz Bugs Out’ (Cavalier, October 1964-February 1965) found the cat misbehaving in a Bohemian college setting before setting out on an extended hippie-style vision-quest whilst three dumb-show episodes of ‘The Silly Pigeons’ (November 1964-March 1965) perfectly display the creator’s hardwired slapstick roots.

‘Bulgaria: a Sketchbook Report’ (Help! #25, July 1965) saw the artist turn his probing pens on a Cold-War alien culture after which ‘Fritz the Cat, Special Agent for the CIA’ (March-May 1965) perfectly parodied the political scene and the planet’s fascination with suave super-spies. Next up are three more, increasingly surreal, snippets from ‘The Silly Pigeons’ (Spring 1965) and a swift swipe at the modern working woman in ‘Roberta’ (Spring 1965). Working in the production department of a vast greetings card company gave the insular Crumb access to new toys and new inspiration and he would return repeatedly to the white-collar world to for inspiration and pictorial spleen-venting…

‘Fritz the Cat, Magician’ (Summer 1965, and published in Promethean Enterprises #3, 1971) is a sweetly seductive puff-piece whilst the exigencies of earning a little extra cash clearly influenced the speculative pieces ‘Guitar Models of the Future’ (Yell #3, September 1965), Topps Promotional Booklet ‘The Road to Success’ (Fall 1965), ‘Illustrations for Nostalgia Enterprises’ (Fall 1965), ‘The Heap Years of the Auto’ (intended for Nostalgia Illustrated, Fall 1965) and ‘The Small Small Businessman’ (again intended for Nostalgia Illustrated, Fall 1965): all showing Crumb’s versatility, passion for the past and imagination.

‘Punchlines for Color Cards’ features the interior messages for the artworks amongst the large Colour Section which opens here with a spectacular succession of sketches designated ‘Letter to Marty Pahls’ (covering April 4th, June 3rd, October 30th 1960, May 28th and November 5th 1961), after which two ‘Cards to Mike Britt’ (December 1963-January 1964) are followed by the wonderful covers for ‘Fritz Bugs Out’ (February 1965), ‘Agent of the CIA’ (March 1965) and ‘Roberta’ (Spring 1965).

Swiftly following are the aforementioned ‘Selected Topps Monster Greetings Cards’ (Fall 1965) and general ‘Cards for American Greetings’ (1964-1966) which close the rainbow section. Back in black and white another ‘Card to Mike Britt’ precedes the ‘Cover for Fug #1’ (Fall 1965) and the untitled group sex-romp ‘Fritz the Cat’ intended for that debut Fug, before a copious collection of ‘Greetings Cards for American Greetings’ (1964-1966) and the ‘Cover for Gooseberry’ #2 (Fall 1965) complete this meander through the Master’s formative years.

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 been 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 these books and the other fifteen as soon as conceivably possible…
Introduction © 1988 Marty Pahls. Greetings cards © 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1988 American Greetings Corporation. Monster Greetings trading cards © 1965 Topps Bubble Gum, Inc. All other contents © 1964, 1965, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1974, 1988 Robert Crumb. All rights reserved.

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Heavy Metal Presents New Tales of the Arabian Nights


By Richard Corben & Jan Strnad (Heavy Metal Books/Simon & Schuster)
ISBN: 930-36844-4

Richard Corben is one of America’s greatest proponents of graphic narrative: an animator, illustrator, publisher and cartoonist, springing from the tumultuous wave of independent counterculture commix of the 1960s and 1970s to become a major force in comic storytelling with his own unmistakable style and vision. He is equally renowned for his mastery of airbrush, captivatingly excessive anatomical stylisation and delightfully wicked, darkly comedic horror, fantasy and science fiction tales.

Until relatively recently Corben steered clear of the Fights ‘n’ Tights comicbook mainstream. He didn’t sell out – American publishing simply caught up, finally growing mature enough to accommodate him, due in no small part to his broad and pervasive influence…

Born in Anderson, Missouri in 1940, he graduated with a Fine Arts degree in 1965 and found work as an animator. At that time, the neutered comicbooks of the Comics-Code Authority era were just starting to lose disaffected, malcontent older fans to the hippy-trippy, freewheeling, anything-goes publications of independent-minded creators across the continent who were increasingly making the kind of material Preachers and Mummy and her lawyers wouldn’t approve of…

Creativity honed by the resplendent and explicitly mature 1950s EC Comics, Carl Barks’ perfectly crafted Duck tales and other classy early strips, a plethora of young artists like Corben responded with a variety of small-press publications – including Grim Wit, Slow Death, Skull, Fever Dreams and his own Fantagor – which featured shocking, rebellious, sexed-up, raw, brutal, psychedelically-inspired cartoons and strips blending the new wave of artists’ unconventional lifestyles with their earliest childhood influences… honestly crafting the kind of stories they would like to read.

Corben inevitably graduated to more professional – and paying – venues. As his style and skills developed he worked for Warren Publishing in Eerie, Creepy, Vampirella, Comix International and outrageous adult science fiction anthology 1984/1994. He famously coloured some strips for the revival of Will Eisner’s the Spirit.

Soon after he was producing stunning graphic escapades for a number of companies, making animated movies, painting film posters and producing record covers such as the multi-million-selling Meatloaf album Bat Out of Hell. He never stopped creating comics but preferred personal independent projects with collaborators such as Bruce Jones, Jan Strnad and Harlan Ellison – who provided an effusive introduction here.

In 1975 Corben approached French fantasy phenomenon M̩tal Hurlant and became a fixture of its American iteration Heavy Metal Рfrom which this stunning saga was collected.

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. This particular tome gathers a particularly impressive fantasy serial from the early days of Heavy Metal (specifically from June 1978 to August 1979) which cunningly reveals the final voyage and fate of a legendary hero…

This superb, criminally out-of-print but still readily available fable opens with a history of the charismatic storyteller Shahrazad and how she charmed her murderously strict husband, then goes on to concentrate on the tale she kept from him; and only shared with her wayward sister Dunyazad… ‘Sinbad in the Land of the Jinn’.

‘The Last Voyage of Sinbad’ begins when merchant Badr al-Bakkar recognises a Sufi sage as the legendary seaman and begs to know what turned such a worldly warrior into a penitent priest. As the broken old wanderer speaks of his secret Eighth Voyage a saga of tragedy and wonder unfolds…

Sinbad was a bored and restless husband who broke many of the Prophet’s Holy Injunctions and, whilst drunk one night, encountered a Jinn who attacked him, claiming the sot had killed his wife.

In retaliation the supernatural horror demanded the life of Sinbad’s beloved spouse Zulaykha, but could not find her…

The woman had vanished from the face of the Earth and the terrified adventurer resolved to find her and save her from the vengeance of the merciless Ifrit.

He is aided in his quest by the enigmatic Akissa, who claims to be the selfsame demon wife Sinbad supposedly murdered. She wishes to be divorced from her brutal trickster husband and offers to guide Sinbad and his crew to the magical realm of Zu’l Janahayn, the Jinni King of Kings who can grant any wish should he please. All they must do is find his floating citadel of Ketra…

And thus begins a quest of shocking terror, stupendous action, wanton debauchery and stunning duplicity, which resulted in the near-breaking of our hero, magical horrors and valiant perseverance…

The artist’s infamous signature-stylisation includes abundant nudity, excessive, balletic violence and astoundingly proportioned male and female physiques and these are all prominently displayed in this cunning and beguiling continuation of the fabulous legend of an immortal hero, which still finds room for a brilliantly contemporary twist…

Richard Corben is a unique visual stylist blessed with a love of the dark and graced with a scathingly sharp sense of humour. Combine that with our apparently insatiable hunger for monsters and mystery and this book becomes the ideal treat to while away the witching hour…
© 1978, 1979 Richard Corben and Jan Strnad. Introduction © 1979 Harlan Ellison. All rights reserved.

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Requiem Vampire Knight Tome 5: The City of Pirates and Blood Bath


By Pat Mills & Ledroit (Panini Books UK)
ISBN: 978-1-84653-496-6

As is so often the case Europe is the last and most beneficial arena for the arts and untrammelled creativity, and none more so than comics and sequential narrative. Mercifully the Continent cherishes the best of the world’s past as well as nurturing the fresh and new, without too much concern for historical bugbears of political correctness, transient social impropriety and contemporary censoriousness – which is why so many established English language strip creators produce their best work there.

Perhaps it’s simply that they revere not revile the popular arts as much as all those hoity-toity classical ones….

Requiem Vampire Knight is an impressive example of self-publishing done right, and happily with commensurate rewards. For years writer Pat Mills wanted to break into the European market and in 2000 he did so by setting up Nickel Editions with publisher Jacques Collin (whose Zenda Editions produced some of the nicest looking albums of the 1980s) and artist Olivier Ledroit who illustrated the first four books of the incredibly popular Chroniques de la Lune Noire (Black Moon Chronicles) for Zenda before the series transferred to Dargaud. Mills and Ledroit were already old comrades having previously worked on the impressive Sha.

Mills is well known to readers of this blog (see for example Marshal Law: Fear and Loathing and his incontestable masterpiece Charley’s War) but perhaps Ledroit is not so familiar. After studying Applied Arts he began his career as an illustrator for games magazines and broke into Bandes Dessinee (that’s comics to us Anglaise) in 1989 with the aforementioned Black Moon Chronicles, written by François Marcela Froideval.

Specialising in fantasy art Ledroit drew Thomas Mosdi’s Xoco (1994) before teaming with Pat Mills on the acerbic, futurist thriller Sha, set in an ultra-religious fascistic USA (1996-1999 and thematically in the real world any minute now).

His lush painterly style was adapted to fairytales in 2003 with L’Univers Féerique d’Olivier Ledroit, and he is credited as one of the founding fathers of the darkly baroque fantasy sub-genre BD Gothique.

From a financially shaky start Requiem Vampire Knight quickly proved that quality will always find an audience and Nickel swiftly expanded whilst continuing the excessively adult adventures of deceased warrior Heinrich Augsburg. The saga is released as annual albums in France and has been serialized in Germany as Requiem Der Vampirritter and in America’s Heavy Metal (beginning in Volume 27 #1, March 2003).

Two years ago Panini UK brought this evocative series to Britain in superb oversized, A4 format, double-editions presenting two albums per volume and the fifth compendium is here just in time to assault the Christmas market. The City of Pirates and Blood Bath continues the hell-bent saga of a conflicted Nazi doomed to unlive his life as a vampire warrior in a macabre inverse world of evil, which began in Requiem Vampire Knight Tome 1: Resurrection and Danse Macabre.

Augsburg was a German officer killed on the Eastern Front in 1944. As he died all he could think of was his guilt over a doomed affair with the Jewess Rebecca whom he chose not to save when the Gestapo came for her…

Resurrection is a brooding, blood-drenched world of eternal strife and warfare: a grim, fantastic, necromantic mirror of Earth with the seas and land-masses reversed, where time runs backwards and denizens grow younger day by day – if they’re not “expired” first by any of a billion-and-one friends, allies, total strangers or archest enemies.

The charnel realm is populated by all the worst sinners of Earth reincarnated as monsters of myth in a damned domain where the dead mortals are reborn in ranks and hierarchies determined by their sins on Earth. Their only purpose is to expiate or exacerbate the sins of their former lives…

Heinrich (now called Requiem) is a Vampire: one of the top predators in this bloody post-existence reality, pinnacle of Hell’s pyramid of puissance and a full knight at the court of Dracula.

Requiem and his blood-draining kin are trapped in a spiral of bloodletting, debauchery and intrigue and his position is far from secure. Not only has he earned the enmity of the treacherous faction of elite Nosferatu led by Lady Claudia Demona, Lord Mortis and Baron Samedi, but it appears that he may be a returned soul…

Long before Augsberg died on a frozen battlefield, killed by a Russian he was trying to rape, the Templar Heinrich Barbarossa had committed such atrocities in the name of Christianity that he was guaranteed a place in Dracula’s inner circle when he inevitably reached Resurrection.

However the remade Barbarossa/Vampire Knight Thurim committed such an unpardonable crime that he and it were excised from the court and Resurrection itself.

But in this volume, Requiem, plagued by memories of a doomed affair with a proscribed Jewess named Rebecca, is in the midst of a cataclysmic all-out war involving every ghastly inhabitant of the blazing inferno they’re pent within…

Amidst the factions of Vampires, Gods, arcane Archaeologists, Lamias, Werewolves, Ghouls and so many others, Rebecca too has reconstituted in Resurrection. Her only chance of eternal rest is to expire the one responsible for her being there…

I’d strongly advise picking up the previous chronicles before this one if back-story means much too you, since Mills & Ledroit don’t waste any time or space on catching up, but storm straight into the unfolding epic with a staggering climax to the all-encompassing war between the unruly desperadoes of Aerophagia, The City of Pirates and Dark Harbour, capital and stronghold of the Vampire Court of Draconia.

Along the breakneck way we discover that the second most important man in post-War America was the earthly identity and hideous soul reconstituted as the deadly Buccaneer Queen Lady Mitra, who has been trading with the living world of Earth for holy weaponry capable of destroying Nosferatu, whilst the conflicted and irresolute warrior Requiem makes an unlikely conquest who will again divert him from his quest for Rebecca.

Also drawing attention is the samurai vampire Dragon, bound to the pirate cause by his ancient – and therefore baby-like – sensei Tengu, but whose own unholy dream is to find and expire the man who caused the atomic death of Hiroshima…

As the conflict escalates to a bloody, burning climax all of Resurrection is embroiled in the constant carnage and even the most exalted monsters begin to falter and finally “die”…

With everything in uproar Dracula begins his final moves in the bloody game as Requiem, torn between desire, duty and despair faces off against his martial and spiritual counterpart Dragon…

Blood Bath combines the incredible end of the war with Mills’ signature blackly mordant bad-taste humour, as a peerless duel between the Vampire Knights devolves into murderous slapstick as demon-infant Tengu battles his own master (Requiem’s teacher and sponsor Cryptos – an even younger baby-thing) whilst a euphoric Lady Mitra invades the Vampire sanctum intent of sealing her victory in the ichor of undead elite Lady Zarkov and Queen Bathory.

Tragically for her, Mitra succeeds and learns a horrifying ultimate truth…

Meanwhile, in a far corner of the realm the race of dragons who once were England’s greatest champions are moving against their once-ally Draconia…

Unrelentingly hard and heavy, this spectacularly decadent, opulent, Machiavellian dalliance with the wildest dreams – and grim, black wit – of a new De Sade, this book ends on yet another cliffhanger as the Vampire Lord prepares to make his endgame move, but that a blood-drenched spectacle for a later day…

For any fan of Mills’ work there nothing truly new here to be shocked by, but the liberating license to explore his favourite themes guided only by his own conscience and creative integrity has resulted in a complex, intensely compelling epic of revenge and regret on the most uncompromising of worlds where there is literally no justice and no good deed ever goes unpunished.

Blending cosmic warfare with sardonic deadpan humour, wrapped in the ludicrously OTT trappings of sadomasochistic fetishism, this is a truly epic saga of Gothic hopelessness perfect for the post-punk, post-revisionary, lavishly anti-reductionist fantasy fan.

But it’s probably best if you don’t show your gran or the vicar and certainly not your – or anybody else’s – kids. They’ve probably got their own copies anyway…

Ledroit’s illustration is utterly astonishing. In places delightfully reminiscent of Druillet’s startlingly visual and deceptively vast panel-scapes from such lost masterpieces as Yragael: Urm as well the paradoxically nihilistic energy of such decadent Michael Moorcock civilisations as Granbretan or Melniboné, he has created a truly unique scenario with his vibrant palette. Never has the horrific outer darkness been so colourfully captured and the sheer scope of the numerous ambulatory nightmares and eye-popping battles is utterly mind-boggling.

A darkly grim and mordantly cynical secularist dream, this is a fabulously realized adult fantasy of blood and thunder both beguiling and addictive.

Dark, dark magic!

© 2009, 2010, 2011 Nickel/Mills/Ledroit.  All rights Reserved.

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The Complete Crumb Comics volumes 1 and 2


By Robert Crumb and Charles Crumb (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBNs: 0-930196-43-1(hb)   & 978-0-930193-62-8

Robert Crumb is a unique creative force in the world of cartooning with as many detractors as devotees. His uncompromising, excoriating, neurotic introspections, 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 many of those engrossing compendia are now being reissued.

These earliest volumes have been constantly described as the least commercial and, as far as I know, remain out of print, but contrary as ever, I’m reviewing them anyway…

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’ shattering problems and comics were always paramount amongst them.

As had his older brother Charles, Robert immersed himself in the strips and cartoons of the day; not simply reading but feverishly creating his own. Harvey Kurtzman, Carl Barks and John Stanley were particularly influential, but also newspaper artists like 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 and introspective, young Robert pursued art and slavish self-control through religion with equal desperation. His early spiritual repression and flagrant, hubristic celibacy constantly warred with his body’s growing needs…

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. In 1967 Crumb relocated 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. The rest is history…

Those tortured formative years provide the meat of the first volume The Early Years of Bitter Struggle which, after ‘Right Up to the Edge’ – a comprehensive background history and introduction from lifelong confidante Marty Pahls – begins revealing the troubled master-in-waiting’s amazingly proficient childhood strips from the self-published Foo #1-3 (a mini-comic project passionately produced by Robert and his older brother Charles from September to November 1958).

Rendered in pencils, pens and whatever else was handy; inextricably wedded to the aforementioned funnybooks, strips and animated shorts cited above, the mirthful merry-go-round opens with ‘Report From the Brussels World’s Fair!’ and ‘My Encounter With Dracula!’: frantic and frenetic pastiches of the artists’ adored Mad material, with Robert already using a graphic avatar of himself for narrative purposes.

Closely following are the satirical ‘Clod of the Month Award’, ‘Khrushchev Visits U.S.!!’ and ‘Noah’s Ark’.

From 1959 comes ‘Treasure Island Days’: a rambling gag-encrusted shaggy dog Russian Roulette experiment created by the lads each concocting a page and challenging the other to respond and continue the unending epic, after which ‘Cat Life’ followed family pet Fred’s fanciful antics from September 1959 to February 1960 before morphing, or perhaps “anthropomorphing” into an early incarnation of Fritz the Cat in ‘Robin Hood’…

That laconic stream of cartoon-consciousness resolved into the raucous and increasingly edgy saga ‘Animal Town’ followed here by a very impressive pin-up ‘Fuzzy and Brombo’, before the central full-colour section provides a selection of spoof covers.

Four ‘R. Crumb Almanac’ images – all actually parts of letters to Pahls – are complemented by three beautiful ‘Arcade’ covers, swiftly followed by a return to narrative monochrome and ‘A Christmas Tale’ which saw Crumb’s confused and frustrated sexuality begin to assert itself in his still deceptively mild-mannered work.

A progression of eleven single-page strips produced between December 1960 and May 1961 precedes three separate returns to an increasingly mature and wanton ‘Animal Town’ – all slowly developing the beast who would become Crumb’s first star until Fritz bows out in favour of ‘Mabel’ – a prototypical big and irresistible woman of the type Crumb would legendarily have trouble with – and this initial volume concludes with another authorial starring role in the Jules Feiffer (see Explainers) inspired ‘A Sad Comic Strip’ from March 1962.

 

The second volume Some More Early Years of Bitter Struggle continues the odyssey after ‘The Best Location in the Nation…’ – another Pahls reminiscence – describes the swiftly maturing and deeply unsatisfied Crumb’s jump from unhappy home to the unsatisfying world of work.

‘Little Billy Bean’ (April 1962) returns to the hapless, loveless nebbish of A Sad Comic Strip whilst ‘Fun with Jim and Mabel’ revisits Crumb’s bulky, morally-challenged amazon after which the focus shifts to her diminutive and feeble companion ‘Jim’. Next, an almost fully-realised ‘Fritz the Cat’ finally gets it on in a triptych of saucy soft-core escapades from R. Crumb’s self-generated Arcade mini-comic project.

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.

His most intimate and disturbing idiosyncrasies regarding sex, women, ethnicity, personal worth and self-expression all start to surface here…

Therefore, if intemperate language, putative blasphemy, cartoon nudity, fetishism and comedic fornication are liable to upset you or those legally responsible for you, stop reading this review right here and don’t buy the book.

Working in the production department of a vast greetings card company gave the insular Crumb access to new toys and new inspiration as seen in the collection of ‘Roberta Smith, Office Girl’ gag strips from American Greetings Corporation Late News Bulletins (November 1963-April 1964), followed here by another Fritz exploit enigmatically entitled ‘R. Crumb Comics and Stories’ which includes just a soupcon of raunchy cartoon incest, so keep the smelling salts handy…

A selection of beautiful sketchbook pages comes next and then a full-colour soiree of faux covers: letters to Pahls and Mike Britt disguised as ‘Farb’ and ‘Note’ front images as well as a brace of Arcade covers and the portentously evocative front for R. Crumb’s Comics and Stories #1 from April 1964.

The rest of this pivotal collection is given over to thirty more pages culled from the artist’s sketchbooks; a vast and varied compilation that ably displays the artist’s incredible virtuosity and proves that 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.

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 been an unquenchable fire of challenging comedy and riotous rumination, and these two tomes are the secret to understanding the creative causes, if not the artistic affectations of this unique craftsman and auteur.

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 these books and the other fifteen as soon as conceivably possible…

Report From the Brussels World’s Fair!, My Encounter With Dracula!, Clod of the Month Award, Khrushchev Visits U.S.!! & Noah’s Ark © 1980 Robert and Charles Crumb. Other art and stories © 1969, 1974, 1978, 1987, 1988 Robert Crumb. All rights reserved.

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The Pin-up Art of Humorama


By various, edited by Alex Chun & designed by Jacob Covey (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-56097-959-3

You’ve all done it; laughed at something you know you shouldn’t have and for us utterly reconstructed modern men – and, let’s face it, women too – sometimes a sexually, racially or otherwise politically incorrect joke or scene in an old movie or TV clip. You know it’s wrong, you know it’s wicked but dammit! – funny just is…

Once upon a time when we were all trapped in our cruel and unthinking hidebound world of stereotypes and pre-judgements, there was a thriving market for staggeringly coy smutty books, naughty cartoon joke periodicals and girly magazines for men.

Women read other things and we never enquired. It’s the only sensible example of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” that I can think of…

After volumes of Pin-ups from specific comics stars (Dan DeCarlo, Bill Wenzell, Jack Cole, Bill Ward) this anthology celebration gathers the Rest of the Best from the prolific Humorama pulp-digest division. They provided saucy gags and male-oriented mirth from 1938 to the mid 1980s – when hardcore porn ended all the tamer men’s mag markets – ubiquitous little throwaway digests with titles such as Gaze, Jest, Stare, Joker, Zip, Breezy, Cartoon Comedy Parade and Romp, packed with photos of saucy vixens like Tina Louise, Sophia Loren, Betty Page, Irish (Sheena of the Jungle) McCalla, Julie (Catwoman) Newmar and her cheesecake ilk – and oodles of deliciously daring cartoons.

The company was part of the Goodman publishing empire which included Atlas/Marvel Comics and reached its pulchritudinous peak during the 1950s when Editor Abe Goodman was the biggest buyer of cartoons on Earth.

Once the sexual revolution began, however, the oddly innocent, clandestine “men only” craft atmosphere was lost to increasing in-your-face frankness and a steady decline into vulgar X-rated smut as good old-fashioned raciness and stolen illicit glimpses became the meat of TV and cinema.

After an illustrated foreword by Howard Chaykin and a comprehensive history from Editor Alex Chun the parade of risqu̩ gags Рpopulated by the kind of girls that made Mad Men such a hit and Marilyn Monroe immortal Рworks its wiles, stretches its intellects and stuns its willing prey in a glorious panoply of old-fashioned fun and frolics. These racy renditions are superbly rendered in colour, monochrome and all points in between Рink and wash, cont̩-crayon, pen and even photo-montages, and this tome even finds space to squeeze in a few amazing house ads.

From amongst the memorable proponents you’ve already heard of are gags by Ward, Wenzell, Jefferson MacHamer, Dan DeCarlo, Vic Martin, Kurt Schaffenberger (AKA Schaff), Louis Priscilla, Niso “Kremos” Ramponi, Bill Hoest, George Crenshaw, Michael Berry, Stan Goldberg, Jim Mooney, Dave Berg and Basil Wolverton, but there are so many others by unsung pencil-pushers equally deserving of your attention.

This charmingly innocent compendium of Lush Ladies, Willing Wantons, Savvy Sirens, Naive Nymphs (always stunningly beautiful women) collects more than 200 or so rude cartoons from a time when boys thought girls didn’t actually like sex – when in fact they just didn’t like us or the way we did it.

Technically, this isn’t a graphic novel or trade collection, it’s a picture book – but an absolutely stunning one, collecting some of the best and most guiltily funny illustrations ever produced: a beguiling remembrance of a different time and the sexual mores of an entirely alien generation which nevertheless presents an enticing, intoxicating treat for art lovers and, I’m afraid to admit, many hearty laughs. This is work which is still utterly addictive and the book is an honest-to-gosh treasure beyond compare.

© 2011 Fantagraphics Books. Foreword © 2011 Howard Chaykin. Introduction © 2011 Alex Chun. All rights reserved.

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Commies From Mars the Red Planet: the Collected Works


By Tim Boxell, Hunt Emerson, Peter Kuper & various (Last Gasp)
ISBN: 978-0-86719-343-5

When political debate in America was less strident and a little more reasoned (let’s call it 1972) a bunch of filthy anarchist pinko hippy satirists recruited by the traitorously seditionist Tim Boxell began contributing raw, rude and utterly hilarious skits, sketches and spoofs on the social and cultural scene to a sporadically published underground comics anthology called Commies From Mars.

Taking their lead from the turbulent but well-informed political climate and deeply influenced by both EC horror and science fiction publications of the 1950s and the classic 1962 Wally Wood Mars Attacks trading cards, contributing artists took cartoon pot-shots at God, Mother and Country in brilliant pastiches ranging from graphic ultra-violence and outrageous interplanetary, inter-species sex-shockers to surreal adventure and outright polemical diatribes. The overriding premise if you’re still not following me was: Communism is Evil; Martians want to conquer us and steal our women. Ergo Martians must be Commies…

Or maybe the cartoonists were just being “clever”…

Six issues were published between 1972 and 1987 and at the end of 1986 Last Gasp publisher Ron Turner released a black and white compilation of (most of) the first four to commemorate the imminent release of #5. That supremely subversive tome is still available if you look hard and surely the time is long overdue for an updated, revised and complete edition…

Following a Foreword from Jerry (Grateful Dead) Garcia, ‘A Warning From the Editor’, ‘Excerpts From the Journal of Billy “Rage” Riley’ and the cover to issue #1, the graphic assault begins with ‘In our midst… Commies From Mars!’ which sets the scene and the scenario with a gritty story of rural resistance from Boxell, after which John Pound’s cover for #2 and more ‘Excerpts From the Journal of Billy “Rage” Riley’ precede a stunning Boxell fantasy-fest ‘Snak?’, a wry and grimly grotesque conversation with Martian Comrade Colonel Bemovitch in ‘The Treaty!’ courtesy of (Comrade) Rich Larson, and Hunt Emerson relates the astounding extra-terrestrial ‘Adventures of Alan Rabbit’.

Greg Irons revealed ‘Gregor’s 115th Wet Dream’ and Capitalism, Interplanetary Communism and nasty fast food collided at Boxell’s ‘Commies From Mars Café’ before #2 closed with the charmingly dark ‘Man on the Moon’ by Shawn Kerri.

Pound’s arresting cover for #3 and another “Rage” Riley page are followed by an untitled Checkered Demon/Commies From Mars team-up by S. Clay Wilson and a superb Kerri anthropomorphic exploit ‘Life on the New Martian Earth’, before Boxell waxes cataclysmically philosophical in ‘Washed Up’.

Ripp (Larry Rippee) plugged ‘Tourism on the Red Planet’ and a young Peter Kuper revealed a recurring nightmare in ‘Shiver and Twitch’ whilst Irons contributed a socially inclusive argument for welcoming the invaders in an impressive double-page spread. Boxell’s ‘Stoned Wolf’ went on a ‘Crash Diet’ after which Ian (Jim Schumeister) James & Jon Rich got shockingly dramatic with ‘Prayers from a Closet’ and Revilo drew up a fabulous integration questionnaire in ‘A Comic’.

Following the usual cover and “Rage” piece for #4 Shawn Kerri explains ‘The Communist Way’, Tom Cheney describes ‘Life on the Planet Floyd’ and Larson explicitly defines ‘Making Loveski’.

Chad Draper outlines ‘Mixed Marriage’ and Revilo expands the romantic theme in harrowing detail with another ‘A Comic’, after which Kuper also gets in on the unnatural act with ‘True Martian Romance’. Larson & Boxell contribute a brace of ‘False Views’ after which ‘Bye Bye Baby’ explains a few new facts of life.

Melinda Gebbie & Adam Cornford promote the social graces in ‘Hall Monitors from Mars’ and Kenneth Huey explores the political effects of the military industrial complex in ‘Dictation: Tales from the Apocalypse’, after which Mr. Rippee returns with ‘A Marriage Made in Heaven’ and Boxell punches the action button in the X-rated ‘Under His Hat?’

Hunt Emerson details romance in a Martian Socialist State with ‘The Date’ and Spain Rodrigues provides a graphic tribute to Godfather of the series Wally Wood, after which Boxell & Grisly went all-out weird and nasty with ‘The Swap’ to close the story portion of this outrageous entertainment.

Absolutely packed with pin-ups, supplementary art and prose pages, a selection of astoundingly intriguing house ads and with an extensive biographies dossier on the Underground greats and cartooning luminaries who contributed to this Big Red Scare, this delicious tome is still a marvellous example of un-Realpolitik as only cartoonists could conceive it.

Next time you feel the need to stretch your boundaries in a mature manner, why not try this never-more-contemporary tome. Just think “Fundie” or “Repug” and you’ll see what I mean…
©1985 Tim Boxell and contributing artists. All rights reserved.

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The Complete Crumb Comics volume 13: the Season of the Snoid


By Robert Crumb and others (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-56097-296-9

Like crisps, chocolate and bad puns; once you get the taste of Robert Crumb on your palate, it’s almost impossible to shift the craving for more. Here’s another re-released edition from the superb and multi-award winning Complete Crumb Comics series that will tickle the bad-taste-buds of discerning comics cognoscenti and is bound to make a whole new generation of fans among the cool kids who will take my usual disclaimer in the full spirit which it is intended.

This book contains really clever and outrageously dirty pictures, rude words, non-condemnatory drug references and allusions, 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. That will certainly teach us…

Robert Crumb is a unique creative force in the world of 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 mesmeric 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 strip artists 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 and introspective, 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…

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. In 1967 Crumb relocated 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.

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.

After an introduction from his brother Maxon Crumb, this re-issued 13th tome opens with ‘Treasure Island Days’ an autobiographical junket of the young Crumb boys from Lemme Outa Here in 1978, produced in collaboration with brother Charles, after which come the nigh-legendary pieces produced for CoEvolution Quarterly #23-26 in 1979-1980, still powerfully impressive after all these years.

The gently biting ‘A Short History of America’, the subversively salacious ‘Bearzie Wearzies’ as well as the stunning black, white and yellow covers to #24, the wildly manic ‘Bop It Out’ (with a canny cameo from the amazing “No-Shit Sherlock”) and the gloriously dry and acerbic fable ‘Adventures of Onionhead’, is followed by the first of a clutch of fabulous American Splendor collaborations with uniquely Ordinary Hero Harvey Pekar in ‘Excerpt’ (from Cleveland Magazine 1980). ‘Me and My Sweetie’ (Portfolio of Underground Art) and the superbly expressionistic cover to Tele Times (vol. 2 #21) end the initial black and white section of the book.

The middle section is full colour and comprises covers and album art; beginning with Bizarre Sex, #8, American Splendor #24 and Snoid Comics, before presenting the rarer (for comics readers at least) material: Blind Boy Fuller: Truckin’ My Blues Away, Banana in Your Fruit Basket, Cheap Suit Serenaders (Crumb’s own Swing nostalgia band), Cheap Suit Party Record, Memphis Jug Band, Yazoo’s History of Jazz, Wild Family Orchestra, a selection of record labels designed by Crumb and Eddie Lange: Jazz Guitar Virtuoso. In addition to these magical concoctions there are also four superb pages of Heroes of the Blues Trading Cards and an Early Jazz Greats poster ad.

The comics section resumes with Crumb’s crudest, most abrasive, confrontational and possibly most cathartic creation: an arrogant, abusive, sex-crazed little homunculus called Mr. Snoid.

Unpleasant and usually unwelcome, Snoid was utterly self-obsessed; a rampaging animate artistic impulse which nevertheless managed to sway or bully those around him into complying with whatever gratuitous flight of the Id he might contemplate or require instant gratification for…

Always his own harshest critic and ever-searching for artistic perfection, it was still hard for even his biggest fans to look at Crumb-the-creator in the same way after the Snoid hit town.

The character debuted in 1980 in – what else – Snoid Comics , grabbing the spotlight from panel one of ‘This Cartooning is Tricky Business’ before declaring his unpleasant manifesto and attitude on everything from art to women in ‘The Snoid Goes Bohemian.’ The most unsavoury origin in comics followed in ‘How Snoids are Born’ after which ‘One Foot to Heaven’ finds the little stinker looking for a little action and ‘Mr. Snoid Among His Fellow Humans’ gives a final insight into his obscenely unique philosophy of life.

As liberating, challenging and guiltily, wrongly funny as Snoid was, his creation – or perhaps escape – certainly reinvigorated Crumb creative juices, both as auteur and artistic collaborator.

‘Freddy Visits for the Weekend’ and the two strips that comprise ‘Vox Populi’ (drawn for Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor #5) resonate with new vehemence and understated tension, whilst the illustrations for Michael Bloomfield’s ‘Me and Big Joe’ from High Times #64 sparkle with affection and warmth.

‘Hospital Fun’ #1-2, scripted by Pekar, first appeared in Village Voice #25, after which Crumb’s next breakthrough series began in Zap #10, 1982, as the introspective, retrospective autobiographical ‘My Troubles With Women’ shockingly and hilariously opened more doors into Crumb’s troubled soul for us all to peer uncomfortably at…

This incautiously appealing edition ends with a selection of covers, ads and illustrations by Crumb from the ecologically proactive (we would now call it “Green”) Californian magazine Winds of Change (volume 2, #1-9 from 1980-1981) and includes articles by wife Aline Kominsky-Crumb and five of their collaborative strips ‘Everyday Funnies’ before this 13th chronicle closes with a typically effective (unpublished) book cover for ‘King of the Freaks’.

None of these collections is free of potentially offensive material and Crumb’s work is riddled with his often hard-to-embrace obsessive self-exploratory concerns. As always his work gouges out the creator’s most intimate and disturbing idiosyncrasies about women, sex, racial stereotypes, unchecked social change and a million other daily beefs and niggles. But there’s no disparagement intended or harm meant – except perhaps to himself – and his staggering honesty, incisive inquisitiveness and neurotic, intimate over-sharing is always leavened with a devastatingly ironic wit and rendered in imagery too powerful to ignore. Be warned but please don’t misunderstand what you’re looking at…

Crumb’s sublime cartooning has brought cachet and serious critical thought to our once ghettoised art form and, love or loathe him, no one can diminish his contribution to the broad world of graphic narrative. These superb books are the perfect introduction to any (definitively over 18) newcomers unaware of grown up comics… so if you are intrigued snatch up this book and all the others as soon as conceivably possible…

All material from American Splendor © 1980, 1998 Harvey Pekar & R.Crumb. All other material © 1976, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1998, 2011 R. Crumb. All rights reserved.

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The Complete Crumb Comics volume 15: Featuring Mode O’Day and Her Pals


By Robert Crumb and others (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-56097-413-0

Robert Crumb is a unique creative force in the world of comics and cartooning with as many foes as fans, but his idiosyncratic, unflinching, uncompromising, controversial and always bewitching work is impossible to ignore.

Therefore if intemperate language, putative blasphemy, artfully grotesque cartoon nudity, fetishism and comedic fornication are liable to upset you, stop reading this review and don’t buy the book. Stop reading now, check out an old, archived review instead or just come back tomorrow…

In 1987 Fantagraphics began the almost impossible task of collating, collecting and publishing the chronological totality of the artist’s output.

Son of a career soldier, Robert Dennis Crumb was born in Philadelphia in 1943 to a large and troubled family. After a tempestuous early life, he began working as an in-house art-drone at the American Greeting Cards Company and trading card giant Topps Publishing, married early and briefly before “dropping out” and joining the Counterculture movement, where he changed the nature of cartooning with such creations as Mr. Natural, Fritz the Cat, Devil Girl and a host of others.

Within a decade the explosively reactive underground movement was gone; dissipated, disillusioned, dropped back “in” or dead, with only a few notable independent and truly dedicated publishers staying the course. Always his own harshest critic and ever-searching for artistic perfection, in 1981 Crumb convinced Ron Turner of Last Gasp to publish a new anthology of underground/alternative/cutting edge commix in a new anthology.

Weirdo – with Crumb as editor and major contributor until 1983 when he handed over the editor’s role to his “discovery” Peter Bagge (who provides a fascinating introduction and overview for the tome under review here) – was, for many of us, the last bastion of a real gone world.

With the onus of deadlines and responsibility of magazine production removed Crumb resumed his quixotic search for artistic satisfaction…

Recently re-released, this 15th softcover volume (originally published in 2001) collects Crumb’s comic strips from Weirdo #9-15, assorted gags, private commissions, freelance illustration work, album covers and other pictorial ephemera plus strips from American Splendor and Zap Comix, covering the hedonistic, greed-soaked early 1980s which were such a painful anathema to someone of the Artist’s socialist/liberal leanings.

After Bagge’s aforementioned text recollections the graphic magic begins with the Crumb contributions in Weirdo #9 (Winter 1983-1984), a stunning and meticulous frontispiece, ‘Arline ‘n’ Bob and that Thing in the Back Bedroom’ – an autobiographical account of the “joys” of parenthood crafted in collaboration with second wife Aline Kominsky-Crumb plus the first snide and sardonic appearance of Reagan-era, appalling and avaricious anti-icon ‘Mode O’Day and Her Pals’ in a barbed observation of fame-hungry wannabes and the pathetic, empty gullibility of the nouveau-riche.

More of Mode (dabbling with the chic of being a benefactor and coffee-magnate of the so-troubled Nicaraguans) and nothing else appeared in Weirdo #10 in Summer 1984 whilst #11 featured a stark and salutary updating of an old favourite in ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’ and a magical selection of single panel cartoons declaring ‘Love’s Like That!’

Mode stalked and blagged her way into the good graces of an ugly plutocrat with her usual lack of success or happiness in #12, but Weirdo #13 (Summer 1985) was given over to Crumb’s stunning ‘Psychopathia Sexualis’ wherein the case histories of a number of “deviants” were brought to incredible grimy, sordid, evocative life as Crumb sampled the truly bizarre nature of humanity described by giant of psychology Richard Freiherr von Krafft–Ebing.

Issue #14 featured the far lighter and whimsically bombastic anti-pop (or is it simply anti-maximum decibels?) inquiry ‘Where Has It Gone, All the Beautiful Music of Our Grandparents?’ and the marvellously introspective yet light ‘Life Certainly Is Existential!’, whilst #15 opened with the surreal domesticity of ‘Comics from Other Planets Dept’, slipped comfortably into two pages of splendid ‘Gags’ and closed with a captivating ad parody.

The covers of Weirdo #9-15 (including a heartfelt ‘Parting Shot‘ at Ayn Rand), lead off the expansive central, full-colour section, which continues with record and book covers for The Klezmorim’s Streets of Gold, The Otis Brothers, Charles Bukowski’s Bring Me Your Love and There’s No Business Like Show Business, novel covers Texas Crude and The Monkey Wrench Gang; a Louis Bluie poster plus incidental illustrations and sticker art.

Back in black and white there’s a page of miscellaneous ads and illustrations from 1983, after which ‘Hypothetical Quandry’ (written by Harvey Pekar for his magnificent American Splendor on-going graphic autobiography: issue #9, if you’re keeping count) appears, showcasing Crumb’s far bolder and more liberated big-black-brush art style.

Crumb’s long creative association with author Charles Bukowski produced phenomenal results, and here, after a portrait of the writer and promotional art, follows a sequence of illustrations from Bring Me Your Love and There’s No Business Like Show Business, as well as Ken Weaver’s Texas Crude. More miscellaneous illustration art for Pepper & Stern Rare Books, The Magazine, Co-Education Quarterly and seven pages of vignettes and cameos from The Monkey Wrench Gang round out this section.

‘Constipated Chaos Consortium’ is a mind-bending jam-collaboration with fellow underground luminaries Spain Rodriguez, Bosirus Eerie, Victor Moscoso, S. Clay Wilson and Robert Williams and the first of three contributions to Zap #11 from 1985: the other two being ‘Jesus People USA’ (a hypothetical interview between a fundamentalist Christian reporter and ‘R. Crumb, Underground Pornographer and All-Around Lost Soul’) and the powerful and engaging biography of lost Blues legend (Charley) ‘Patton’.

This sublime – and key – transitional tome in the development of one of the art form’s greatest living proponents concludes with another section of miscellaneous illustrations including collaborations with wife and daughter Aline and Sophie and a poster with Dan O’Neill, Victor Moscoso and Bob Crabb.

As always this varied and impressive selection of Crumb’s craft is riddled with his often hard-to-embrace themes and emblematic declamatory and potentially offensive visual vocabulary: as always the work touches on the creator’s most intimate and disturbing idiosyncrasies regarding sex and women, both in the unsettling Abstract and the painful, side-splitting, lustful, painful and loving Concrete and, as always, the reader’s response can only be Love or Loathe…

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 been a unquenchable wellspring of challenging comedy and riotous rumination. This superb series charting the perplexing pen-and-ink pilgrim’s progress is the perfect vehicle to introduce any (definitively over 18) newcomers of your acquaintance to the world of grown up comics. And if you need a way in yourself, snatch up this book and the other sixteen as soon as conceivably possible…

All material © 2011 R. Crumb and its respective owners or co-owners. All other material © 1978, 1979, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, 2001, 2011 R. Crumb. All rights reserved.