Category: Mature Reading

Posted on

Maria M. Book One


By Gilbert Hernandez (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-719-2

In addition to being part of the graphic/literary revolution of Love and Rockets (where his astonishingly addictive tales of rural Palomar first garnered overwhelming critical acclaim), Gilbert Hernandez has produced stand-alone books such as Sloth, Birdland, Grip and Girl Crazy, all marked by his bold, compellingly simplified artwork and inspired adaptation of literary techniques used by Magical Realist writers such as Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel García Márquez: techniques which he has amplified and, visually at least, made his own.

Hernandez also frequently acknowledges such outré mainstream influences as filmmakers Roger Corman and John Cassavetes, and crime writers Elmore Leonard and Jim Thompson as he entered new territories and reforms the cultural influences which shaped all us baby-boomers.

In Luba we glimpsed the troubled life of the lead character’s half-sister Rosalba “Fritzi” Martinez: a brilliant, troubled woman, speech-impaired psychotherapist, sex-worker, belly-dancer and “B-movie” starlet of such faux screen gems as We Love Alone, Seven Bullets to Hell, Chest Fever, Blood is the Drug and Lie Down in the Dark.

Although Fritzi only had a bit part in it, Hernandez “adapted” one of those trashy movies into a graphic novel (Chance in Hell, 2007) and repeated the story-within-a-story- within-a-story gimmick in 2009 with The Troublemakers – a frantic, hell-bent pulp fiction crime thriller which was part of the screen queen’s canon – and did it again in 2011 with Love From the Shadows.

Now he’s turned up the tension and doubled down on the plundering of his own mythologies. Maria M delves even deeper into the labyrinthine coils and onion-skin layers of meta-reality as the filmic biography of Fritzi’s long-absconded grandmother becomes a revelatory expose of the turbulent life of a beautiful, competent immigrant fugitive; carving out her own slice of the American Dream after escaping the rustic drudgery of Palomar.

Deftly mimicking a compelling-but-trashy post-Noir gangster thriller and sordid Fifties B-Picture melodrama, this first volume of Maria M sees a lovely Amazonian Latin beauty hit Everytown, USA in 1957, promptly befriended and taken in by couple of sympathetic working girls…

It’s all a huge mistake. Maria is actually the girlfriend of a mobster who has expedited her passage into the country. Unfortunately, by the time the mix-up is sorted and she finds his place, the poor guy is staring down the barrel of a rival’s gun.

Witness to murder and with no other place to go, the pneumatic stranger heads back to Trixie and Pam and begins her career in the men’s entertainment industry: “hostessing”, photo-shoots and – inevitably for someone with her looks – stag films…

Every attempt to go legit is frustrated by lustful men wanting her, and inevitably she settles for her new life. She still sees people from the Old Country, but they’re usually gangsters, hoodlums or worse…

She makes some friends along the way: other girls in the shady world of men’s movies, film critic Clyde and even bought cop Valdez, but her life only really turns around when she catches the eye of gang boss Luis Cienfuegos. The older man is so smitten with his sex kitten that he marries her…

His sons – both older than Maria – are dutiful and pay her every respect, but whereas taciturn, brutal Gorgo is clearly fascinated with his new stepmother, slick, businesslike, modern Herman makes no effort to conceal his distaste.

It’s a time of great turmoil for the Latino gangs in the USA. Tenuous alliances and collaborations are commonplace, but the assorted leaders have very different views on the rise of Communism in their homelands: beliefs which will inevitably lead to disagreements and bloodshed. And of course everybody plans on eventually being the only game in town…

Maria keeps herself insulated from her husband’s business, but does develop a passionate affinity for guns. It’s just as well. Over the next few years Luis barely survives numerous assassination attempts.

…And always silent, staring Gorgo waits in the background, watching her as his father’s employees, allies and enemies circle, drawn to her voluptuous beauty like moths to a flame…

In such a murky, dangerous world it’s impossible for Maria to keep completely apart from her husband’s affairs and when she is abducted by supposed allies Gorgo allows his true feelings to show in a savagely horrific manner, after which she divorces her man for the best possible motives…

Dark, evocative and astoundingly compelling, this perfect pastiche of a beloved genre and fabled time-period is a stunning graphic rollercoaster ride of sex, violence, greed, obsession and outlaw antiheroes: a mesmerising read jam-packed with Hernandez’s coolly understated narrative suspense, intoxicating illustration, brutally raw tension and sly elements of filmic surrealism which carry the reader through to the low-key cliffhanger ending in classic style.

And please, don’t get too het up over the convolutions and continuity provenances that resulted in this book. If you need to see the “True Story” of Maria, just check out the story ‘Poison River’ in the Heartbreak Soup collection Beyond Palomar, but otherwise why not just revel in a grim and gripping, saga of love and hope and inescapable doom…

Every adult lover of top-notch drama should snap up Maria M immediately to revel in the sheer brilliance of a master storyteller at the peak of his prowess, and open-minded comics fans should be advised to step beyond the costumes and chains of continuity to take a heady shot of pure imagination at work.
© 2013 Gilbert Hernandez. This edition © 2013 Fantagraphics Books, Inc. All rights reserved.

Posted on

Black is the Color


By Julia Gfrörer (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-717-8

There’s never been a better time to find dark and imaginative horror comics tales and the genre has seldom been better represented than with this eerie yet elegiac historical fantasy from Julia Gfrörer.

The relative newcomer hails from Portland, Oregon – having been born in 1982 and raised in historic Concord, New Hampshire. She studied Painting and Printmaking at Seattle’s CornishCollege of the Arts and first began turning heads a few years ago with her thoughtfully terrifying comicbooks Flesh and Bone and Too Dark to See as well as appearances in Thickness, Arthur Magazine, Black Eye, Study Group Magazine and Best American Comics.

The author brings a gift for sensitive emotional scrutiny and quirkily macabre understatement to this slim monochrome tome detailing the last days of a marooned mariner and the strange creature who temporarily adopts him…

It begins in the middle of the ocean as sailors Xavier and Warren are approached by the Captain’s Mate. The voyage is going badly. Storms have battered the frail wooden vessel and provisions are low.

As they were the last to join the ship’s company, the crew expects the pair to calmly get into the dinghy and drift away, giving the rest some slim chance of survival…

Xavier is already quite ill and Warren enquires why they can’t just be shot, but nobody wants a murder on their already benighted souls…

Cast adrift and enduring harsh exposure, the pair float aimlessly. Hardship and privation soon ends Xavier, but as angry, resentful Warren languishes in the boat awaiting his own death, he thinks he hears singing in the night and is soon conversing with a woman who seems to know impossible things – such as how and what his far away wife and child are doing…

More than half convinced he’s gone mad he continues his strange delirious conversations with her, all the while certain that his life is slowly ebbing away…

She won’t save Warren but the sea siren is quite content to stay with him as he expires, sharing intimate memories. And far away across the waves, his former shipmates sail helplessly into another storm as mermaids gather to watch…

Bleak, beautiful and lyrically elegant, this oddly mesmerising, gently scary, utterly visual yarn tellingly explores pride and loneliness but is cunningly underpinned by wry, anachronous humour and a cleverly memorable conclusion which will delight fans of mystery and imagination and lovers of beguiling illustration.
© 2013 Julia Gfrörer. This edition © 2013 Fantagraphics Books, Inc. All rights reserved.

Posted on

Gold Pollen and Other Stories


By Seiichi Hayashi edited & translated by Ryan Holmberg (Picturebox)
ISBN: 978-1-939799-07-4

When talking about Japanese comics most fans are generally thinking of the mainstream mass-entertainment form which began with Osamu Tezuka in the years following the end of World War II, and which within a generation had grown into a multi-genre print phenomenon adored and compulsively consumed by the greater part of Japan’s population.

However where there’s a mainstream there are always fringes, and the all-pervasive success of commercial manga naturally threw up experimental and alternative publications: the sort of forums and arenas where the most interesting and challenging works of every art form usually first begin…

A companion to the “Ten-Cent Manga” collections, this superlative hardback begins a series celebrating “Masters of Alternative Manga”, with resident Editor, historian and translator Ryan Holmberg offering comprehensive background and fascinating insights into one of the most respected envelope-pushers in the business and presenting a tantalising selection of shorter pieces by a compelling master of evocative sequential narrative.

Avant-garde illustrator, poster artist, filmmaker and poet Seiichi Hayashi was born in 1945 and became a star of Japan’s counterculture movement in the Swinging Sixties. He also created a number of comic strips for alternative periodical Garo during the turbulent late 1960s and early 1970s and four of them grace this captivating collection. His most well known work is probably the wildly experimental romance Red Colored Elegy.

The artist’s flawed and tragic relationship with his mother informed many of his stories and reprinted his insightful personal memoir ‘Azami Light: Childhood Remembrances (1972)’ as well as Holmberg’s contextualizing essay ‘Momoko and Manga: Seiichi Hayashi’s Maternal Roots’.

Each is copiously illustrated with photos, illustrations, covers and formative artworks, providing documentary and commentary to augment the striking strips which make up the largest portion of this volume.

Created at a time of rising Right Wing Nationalism and with Western popular influences such as comicbooks, TV shows and pop music seemingly inundating the nation’s kids, the tales reprinted here also display a broad flavour of cross-cultural contact and pollination, albeit with a ferocious undercurrent of intellectual criticism…

The powerful, deeply moving stories begin with the full, flat-colour ‘Dwelling in Flowers’ (1972): a sly, lyrically wistful examination of fragmenting relationships, followed by the charmingly sinister monochrome ‘Red Dragonfly’ from 1968: an apparently rustic and nostalgic fable of a child’s experience playing at war and observing his mother’s clandestine liaisons…

‘Yamanba Lullaby’ (also 1968) features many anomalous and anachronistic pop culture intruders as it allegorically ponders American influences whilst relating some explosive exploits of legendary heroic “Golden Boy” super-baby Kintarō, his horrific supernatural mater and a host of quirky opponents (giant robots, mad scientists, DC comics superheroes) – all rendered in stark black and white with gory red splashed on as appropriate…

This intriguingly appealing primer ends with the sadly unfinished ‘Golden Pollen’ from 1971. Printed in indigo and red, this is another allegorical foray investigating Nationalism and again co-opts traditional Japanese legends and Buddhist tales: updating the raucous saga of heroic newborn Hinomaru (also the name of the WWII Rising Sun flag) and his demon brother Jaki in their battles against a vast skeletal monster mother…

Holmberg describes in fascinating and forensic detail the origins of the assorted stories, the state of political and social play in Japan and the emotional turmoil which drove the artist to produce such eye-catching, earnest comics but the real draw is the sheer graphic escapism, spectacular storytelling and astoundingly skewed views of a driven, inspired craftsman.

Not for the squeamish, nor the naïve, Gold Pollen and Other Stories is a challenging ride no serous lover of comics will want to miss.

This book is printed in ‘read-from-back-to-front’ manga format.
© 2013 Seiichi Hayashi. Translation and essay © 2013 Ryan Holmberg. All rights reserved.

Posted on

Betty Blues


By Renaud Dillies, translated by Joe Johnson (NBM/ComicsLit)
ISBN: 978-1-56163758-4

Renaud Dillies belongs to that cool school of European artists who are keenly aware of the visual power imbued by using anthropomorphic characters in grown up stories – a notion we’ve all but lost here in Britain and one primarily used for kiddie comics and pornography in the USA and Asia.

Dillies was born in Lille in 1972, the inveterate dreamer, artist and storyteller in a brood of five kids. Music was a big part of his parents’ lives: British Pop – especially The Beatles and John Lennon – and Jazz, mostly Big Band, Swing and Satchmo, and the lad listened and learned…

After college – studying Humanities, Graphic and Decorative arts at Saint-Luc School of Fine Arts in Tournai – he began his comics career, like so many others, at Spirou, drawing backgrounds for prolific cartoonist Frédéric Jannin (Rockman, Germain et Nous and many more) and also inking Frédéric “Clarke” Seron on sorceress comedy Mélusine.

The young author blended his twin passions for comics and music in his first solo work and Betty Blues – published by Paquet in 2003 – took the “Best Debut” award at that year’s Angoulême Comics Festival.

He followed up with Sumato, Mister Plumb (with Régis Hautière) and Mélodie du Crépuscule (Melody of Twilight) before moving to Darguad in 2009 to and create Bulles et Nacelle with Christophe Bouchard (available in English as Bubbles and Gondola) and, in 2011, Abélard (again with Hautière and also available in translation from NBM/ComicsLit).

During this period he still toiled as a jobbing Bande Dessinées creator. Under the pen-name “Jack” he drew comedy sports features Les Foot Maniacs and Tout sur le Rugby for Bamboo and illustrated some Arboris’ erotic short stories for the series Salut les coquinas.

Coming from the same dark place and cultural sources as Benoît Sokal’s wry, bleak and witty Inspector Canardo detective duck tales, Betty Blues is both paean and elegy to the unholy trinity of Modern Cool and Shattered Idealisms: Noir, Jazz and Lost Love, all focused through the mythologizing lens of cinematic Fifties Americana.

The tragic, flawed star of this intoxicating fable is Little Rice Duck, possibly the greatest bird ever to blow a trumpet in the seedy clubs and wild environs of the West Wood. Starring at the nightspots and making music are his life but his hot girlfriend Betty is getting pretty tired playing second fiddle to his art.

She’s a pretty bird who needs lots of loving attention, the Good Life and Expensive Champagne, so on one more tedious night when Rice is deep in the spotlight blowing hot and loud, she calamitously listens to an unctuous, sleazy fat cat at the bar who offers her plenty of all three before sneaking off with him…

Her disappearance hits Rice as hard as he subsequently hits the bottle, and his too-late regrets shake him to the core. Going downhill fast, the always-angry little guy throws his magnificent trumpet – which has cost him true love – off a high bridge and hops a train heading “anywhere but here”…

The Horn hits a boat-riding sap and thus begins to affect the lives of a succession of other poor schnooks whilst, elsewhere uptown, Betty begins to reconsider her hasty decision as the downsides of being a rich guy’s trophy – or pet – start to become apparent…

For Rice, the end of the line finds him deep in a forested nowhere-land dubbed “Kutwood” where he is befriended by the owl Bowen who is both lumberjack and radical environmental terrorist.

Slowly he is drawn into the affable agitator’s world of violence, sabotage and anti-capitalist polemic, but all he is really thinking about during so many late night conversations is the tatty old trumpet nailed high up out of reach on Bowen’s cabin wall…

And Jazz: sweet, hot Jazz music…

Back in city Betty starts to fear for life, soul and sanity on the chubby arm of her mercurial plutocrat-cat, as the portentous trumpet begins to reshape the lives of many ordinary folk innocent and venal. And then one day Betty meets an old friend of Rice’s who tells her he’s gone missing…

Sad, grim, brooding and surprisingly suspenseful, this captivating riff on complacency, ill-considered aspirations and lost chances is beguilingly constructed and subtly realised, with a smart undercurrent of bleakly cynical humour counter-pointing the Noir flavour and motif of inescapable doom.

Betty Blues will delight mature readers with a well-honed sense of the absurd and an abiding taste for the dark…
© 2003 Editions Paquet. English translation © 2013 NBM.

Posted on

VIP – the Mad World of Virgil Partch


Edited by Jonathan Barli (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-664-5

Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: impossibly inventive – an all-year-round treat… 9/10

Virgil Parch is another of those almost forgotten key men of comedy cartooning: a pervasive creative force working away for years, making people laugh and slowly, steadily changing the very look and nature of the industry.

Although largely unremarked upon and unremembered these days, Virgil Franklin Partch II (1926-2004) is probably one of the most influential – and most successful – American cartoonists in history.

His arch, absurd, rude, sly, subtle, skewed, whacky and astoundingly unique gags, strips, stories and animated shorts were generated with machine gun rapidity from a seemingly inexhaustible well of comedy excess, which could be rendered in a variety of styles which completely revolutionised the American publishing from the moment in 1941 that the artist switched from Walt Disney Studio ideas man to freelance gag-maker.

He is most well regarded for his cavalier abandonment of traditional form and anatomy. Partch is the guy who liberated gag-cartooning from the bonds of slavish attention to body detail: replacing broadly human shape and proportion with a wildly free and frenetic corporeal expressionism – perhaps even symbolism – which captivated legions of fellow artists and generations of fun-starved readers. He’s the guy who made 19 fingers on one hand work…

This superbly comprehensive and lavishly huge (260x315mm) landscape hardback art book/biography (in monochrome & full-colour) covers his life and career in scrupulous detail through a wealth of his best cartoons – many shot from original art – and includes oodles of roughs, sketches, layouts and doodles, all accompanying the bright and breezy life-history by James Barli, and all augmented with loads of intimate photos.

The joyous journey begins after a heartfelt Introduction by stylistic and thematic heir Peter Bagge with ‘Partch ad absurdam’: broken down into easily digested chapters beginning with ‘Prologue: Under the Volcano’ which introduces the man’s remarkable forebears whilst ‘The Call of the Wild’ and ‘Of Mice and Men’ details his early life and the eclectic education which led to his joining the fabled Walt Disney Studio in its golden, pre-strike prime.

‘Brave New World’ and ‘The Divine Comedy’ reveal how the assembled animators’ habit of pranking each other with gag cartoons led friend Dick Shaw to dispatch many of Partch’s drawings to magazines such as Collier’s and The New Yorker in 1941, whilst ‘A Farewell to Arms’ covers the new family man’s stint in the Army where his gift was exploited by Forrest J. Ackerman, beginning his own stellar career as editor of Army newspaper Bulletin…

On demobilisation Partch’s path was assured and he became the most prolific gag-seller in America: it was almost impossible to find a magazine or periodical that didn’t carry one of his cartoons, and when Playboy debuted in 1953 there was one of his women sharing cover-space with Marilyn Monroe…

As seen in ‘Point of No Return’ and ‘The Genius’, whilst working as an animator (for Walter Lantz on Woody Woodpecker) and as a cartoonist for leftwing New York newspaper PM, Partch started a constant stream of book collections in the fifties which captured and reflected the risqué, hard-drinking sophistication of the era as well as simultaneous lives as an ad man and writer for other draughtsmen, and worked with futurist economist William J. Baxter on a series of prognosticative books which warned of such nebulous dangers as out-of-control capitalism, the Military-Industrial Complex, “1 Per-Centers” and even Global Warming…

His passion for sports – especially sailing – is covered in ‘Three Men in a Boat’ whilst in

‘As a Man Grows Older’ changing times and the urgings of old pal Hank (Dennis the Menace) Ketchum provoked the restless creator to launch his comicstrip Big George! whilst increasingly becoming a cultural ambassador for his craft and art form. He also upped his range of commercial and design projects and invented the grittier strip The Captain’s Gig.

The rise and rise of Virgil Partch is covered in ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ whilst ‘Epilogue: the Death of Virgil’, like a bad punch line, recounts the truly stupid and meaningless end of a legend when both the artist and his wife perished in a car crash on August 10th 1984…

The Unknown Quantity then focuses on his astounding output through ‘A Partch Picture Gallery’ subdivided into ‘Cartoons from PM‘, ‘War in Pieces’ (military madness), surreal and absurd ‘Reality Bites’ and the boozy world of ‘Cork High and Bottle Deep’.

His laid back view of sex is recapitulated in ‘The Eternal Chase’ and ‘Battle of the Sexes’ whilst ‘The Sporting Life’ and ‘Partched’ focus on his other overweening interests…

His graphic expertise and design triumphs are celebrated in ‘Covered’ and ‘(m)Ad Man’, his skewed view of the world’s leaders in ‘Political Partch’, after which a selection of his articles and stories kicks off with ‘The Private War of Corporal Partch’, before ‘The Vipper Comes to Town’, ‘Bourbon and Watercolors’, ‘Vacation for Vipper’ and ‘Inland Cruise of the “Lazy B”’ bring this glorious tribute to times past and an incredible artist to a close.

Virgil Partch was blessed with a perpetually percolating imagination and a unique visual point of reference which made him a true catalyst of cartoon change, and Fantagraphics Books have once again struck pure gold by commemorating and celebrating this lost legend of graphic narrative arts.

Most importantly this is an astoundingly funny collection: the vast accumulation of funny drawings and clever stories still as powerfully hilarious as they ever were, and all brilliantly rendered by a master craftsman no connoisseur of comedy can afford to miss.
© 2013 Fantagraphics Books. All text © 2013 Jonathan Barli. All images © their respective copyright holders. Introduction © 2013 Peter Bagge. All rights reserved.

Posted on

Fran (Continuing and Preceding Congress of the Animals)


By Jim Woodring (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-661-4

Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: A beguiling glimpse on a different kind of party … 9/10

There are a few uniquely gifted and driven comics creators who simply just defy categorisation or even description. There’s a pantheon of artisans: Kirby, Ditko, Hergé, Eisner, Clowes, Meskin, Millioniare and a few others who bring something utterly personal and universal effective to their work just beyond the reviewer’s skills (mine certainly) to elucidate or encapsulate or convey. They are perfect in their own way and so emphatically wonderful that no collection of praise and analysis can do them justice.

You just have to read the stuff yourself.

At the top of that distinguished heap of funnybook glitterati is Jim Woodring: a position he has maintained for years and clearly appears capable of holding for generations to come.

Woodring’s work is challenging, spiritual, grotesque, philosophical, heartbreaking, funny, beautiful and extremely scary. Moreover, even after reading that sentence you will have absolutely no idea of what awaits the first time you read any of his books (or even if you’re a confirmed aficionado) – when opening a new silent peripatetic classic like Fran…

Set in the general vicinity of Woodring’s wildly, warped universe, this is a time and relativity shredding adjunct which can be read before, after or even during his 2011 milestone Congress of the Animals..

Cartoonist, fine artist, toy-maker and artistic Renaissance man, Woodring’s eccentric output has delighted far too small an audience since his first mini-comics forays in 1980. Even though the reader may have avidly adored his groundbreaking Fantagraphics magazine series Jim (1986), its notional spin-off Frank (of which the volume Weathercraft won The Stranger 2010 Genius Award for Literature), maybe Tantalizing Stories, Seeing Things or the more mainstream features such as his Star Wars and Aliens tales for Dark Horse Comics, there is still never anything but surprise waiting when his next story appears…

Woodring grows rather than constructs solidly surreal, abstractly authentic, wildly rational, primal cartoon universes wherein his meticulous clean-lined, sturdily ethereal, mannered blend of woodblock prints, R. Crumb landscapes, expressionist Dreamscapes, religious art and monstrous phantasmagoria all live and play and often eat each other.

His stories follow a logical, progressional narrative – usually a non-stop chase from one insane invention to the next – layered with multiple levels of meaning but totally devoid of speech or words, boldly assuming the intense involvement of the reader will participate and complete the creative circuit.

Fran is another such vertiginous vehicle but adds a cruel patina of lovelorn tragedy and loss to ongoing tribulations of dog-faced Frank and his regular crew of irregular pals and foes in a perilous perambulation of innocence lost, where pride, arrogance, casual self-deceit, smug self-absorption and inflated ego leads to a shattering downfall.

Put bluntly, Fran was his wonderful girlfriend and through mishap, misunderstanding, anger and intolerance he loses her.

…And no matter what he does or wheresoever he wanders with his faithful sidekicks at his side, poor Frank just can’t make things right and perfect and good again…

Through madcap chases, introspective exploration and the inevitable direly dreadful meetings and menacings in innumerable alternate dimensions, True Love takes a kicking – and all without a single word of dialogue or description.

Here, the drawn image is always king, even if the queen has gone forever – or is it just a day?

Many Woodring regulars return, as both eponymous Krazy Kat-like ingénues work things out on the run through a myriad of strange uncanny places and there are absolute mountains of bizarre, devilish household appliances, writhy, clawing things, toothy tentacle things and the unspeakable Thingy-things inhabiting the distressingly logical traumic universe of his author’s fevered sensorium.

Of course Woodring’s work is not to everyone’s taste or sensibilities – otherwise why would you need me to plug his work so earnestly – and as ever, these astounding drawings have the perilous propensity of repeating like cucumber and making one jump long after the book has been put away, but the artist is an undisputed master of graphic narrative and an affirmed innovator always making new art to challenge us and himself. And, of course, he makes us love it and leaves us hungry for more…

All art-forms need such creators and this glorious hardback monochrome chronicle of Forbidding Love could well change your reading habits for life.

Now aren’t you curious to take this trip…?
© 2013 Jim Woodring. This edition © 2013 Fantagraphics Books. All rights reserved.

Posted on

Spain: Rock, Roll, Rumbles, Rebels & Revolution


By Manuel “Spain” Rodriguez (Burchfield Penney Art Center/Last Gasp)
ISBN: 978-0-86719-782-2

Manuel Rodriguez was one of the pioneering lights of America’s transformative Underground Commix movement: a mainstay of the counterculture which subversively reshaped the nation’s psyche in the 1960s and 1970s. However, although always a left-leaning radical, infamous for his raucously hyper-violent, audaciously sexual urban vigilante Trashman, Spain was also a quietly dedicated craftsman, historian, educationalist and graphic biographer.

Born in Buffalo, New York state in 1940, the Hispanic kid spent a lot of time with notorious biker gang the Road Vultures and these experiences, as much as his political upbringing and formal education at the SilvermineGuildArtSchool in New Canaan, Connecticut (1957-1960), moulded and informed his entire creative career.

In the 1960s he became a regular contributor to landmark alternative magazine the East Village Other, which not only utilised his burgeoning talents as illustrator and designer but also commissioned, in 1968, his groundbreaking tabloid comicbook Zodiac Mindwarp. That insert proved so successful that EVO subsequently sponsored a regular anthology publication. Gothic Blimp Works was a turning point and clarion call in the evolution of underground publishing.

However, the excessive exploits of Trashman – “Agent of the 6th International” – against a repressive dystopian American super-state were only the tip of the creative iceberg. Ardent left-winger Spain founded the trade organisation the United Cartoon Workers of America whilst contributing to many of the independent comics and magazines which exploded out of the burgeoning counterculture movement across the world.

Manuel Rodriguez was also an erudite and questioning writer/artist with a lifelong interest in history – especially political struggle and major battlefield clashes, and much of his other work revealed a stunning ability to bring these subjects to vibrant life.

The breadth, depth and sheer variety of Spain’s work – from gritty urban autobiography (American Splendor, Cruisin’ with the Hound: the Life and Times of Fred Tooté) to psycho-sexual sci fi (Zap Comix, Skull, Mean Bitch Thrills) is a testament to his incredible talent but the restless artist also found time to produce a wealth of other cartooning classics.

Amongst his dauntingly broad canon of comics material are literary adaptations (Edgar Allen Poe, Sherlock Holmes’ Strangest Cases), historical treatises (War: The Human Cost) and biographies (Ché {Guevara}: a Graphic Biography, Devil Dog: the Amazing True Story of the Man who Saved America {Marine Major General Smedley Darlington Butler}) as well as educational and design works such as You Are a Spiritual Being Having a Human Experience and Nothing in This Book Is True, But It’s Exactly How Things Are (both with Bob Frissell).

He also produced the ongoing comics serial The Dark Hotel for American current affairs, politics and media news aggregation website Salon.

In 2012 Spain finally lost a six-year battle against cancer and this superb book – actually the Exhibition catalogue for a career retrospective at the prestigious Burchfield Penney Art Center at Buffalo State College – celebrates his tumultuous life and spectacular contribution to the art form of graphic narrative with a compelling series of essays as well as a superb selection of the great man’s best pieces including some little known lost treasures.

The appreciation begins with ‘Stand Up’ by Anthony Bannon (Executive Director, BPAC), before the biographical ‘Grease, Grit and Graphic Truth’ by Edmund Cardoni (Executive Director, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center) explores Spain’s past, whilst

‘Keep the Flames of Buffalo Burning’ by Don Metz examines his lasting effect on comics and society.

However the true value of this chronicle is in the 60+ covers, designs, story-pages, roughs, panel excerpts and strips both vintage and recent, monochrome and full-colour which demonstrate the sheer talent and drive to communicate that fuelled Spain for his entire life.

The Partial Spain Bibliography 1969-2012 and Selected Spain Exhibitions only hint at the incredible depth and lasting legacy of his career and I’m praying that some enlightened publisher like Fantagraphics or Last Gasp is already toiling on a comprehensive series of “Complete Works of…” volumes…

Stark, shocking and always relevant, the communicative power of Spain is something no true lover of comics can afford to miss.
© 2012 Burchfield Penney Art Center. All rights reserved.

Posted on

Marada the She-Wolf


By Chris Claremont & John Bolton (Titan Books)
ISBN: 987-0-85768-632-9

Scantily clad hot chicks swinging swords have been a staple of fantasy comics from their very inception, and probably nobody has done it better – certainly visually – than Chris Claremont and John Bolton. So this smartly recycled, supremely satisfying, luxuriously oversized (302 x 226mm) hardback compilation of their collaborative fantasy saga should be a welcome addition to the shelves of all aficionados of wild adventure and stirring sagas – especially in a world where mystical/historical dramas like Game of Thrones, Atlantis and Da Vinci’s Demons are garnering new interest in “Things Old, Things Forgotten”…

As detailed in Jo Duffy’s Introduction and collection Editor Steve Cook’s background essays ‘Birth of a Warrior’, ‘The Art of War’, ‘Epic Tales’ and ‘Legacy’ these stories – set in the cosmopolitan days of Imperial Rome – originally ran in Epic Illustrated (Marvel’s answer to Heavy Metal magazine) beginning with #10, February 1982. Originally the strip appeared in beautiful monochrome wash-and-line, and although I would have preferred them to have been left that way for this collection, Bolton’s sensitive conversion of the art to painted colour is lush, lovely and stunningly effective.

By the way, that possibly waspish crack about recycling doesn’t just refer to the art, superb though it is. The original story started life as a Red Sonja yarn for black and white anthology Bizarre Adventures, before Claremont & Bolton reworked the thing and, by inserting the whole kit and caboodle into the “real” world of the Ancient Roman – albeit embroidered with Celtic myth and legend – added a satisfying layer of dramatic authenticity to the mix which still leaves it head-and-shoulders above all other Sword and Sorcery “Bad Girls” tales, as well as most fantasy fiction…

The literary pre-game warm-up also includes an effusive memo from the author as ‘Claremont on Bolton’ offers more creative insight on why these seldom-seen stories are just so darn good before the wonderment unfolds in the initial tale ‘Marada the She-Wolf: The Shattered Sword’.

The ferociously independent warrior woman is a wandering mercenary whose grandfather was Julius Caesar. When her parents fell into political disfavour she was whisked from the Eternal City to live free and grow wild. Now, years later in the deserts around Damascus she is rescued from slavers by charismatic Warrior-Magician Donal MacLlyanllwyr, but the indomitable Marada he remembers is gone and all he liberates is a broken doll, traumatised by some unspoken horror and utterly devoid of will and spirit.

Mystically transporting her to the arboreal citadel of Ashandriar amidst the misty hills of distant Britain, the baffled soldier seeks the aid of patron sorceress Rhiannon to diagnose, if not cure her malady.

As she gradually recovers the warrior woman forms a bond with Donal’s daughter Arianrhod; a girl of vast, if unschooled, magical power. Before long the ghastly secret of Marada’s malaise is revealed when a demonic creature invades the mystic keep, killing Donal and abducting Arianrhod.

Enraged and desperate Marada is forced to brave Hell itself and slash her way through an army of devils to rescue the child she now considers as much daughter as friend from the wizard and demon conclave who initially broke her as part of a convoluted scheme to reign on Earth…

The re-galvanised She-Wolf is ultimately victorious but the horrific confrontation leaves her and Arianrhod stranded in East Africa. With no other option, the triumphant, exhausted duo begin the long walk home to Albion…

From Epic #12, ‘Royal Hunt’ is a shorter, self-contained tale wherein Marada and Arianrhod, after escaping the Infernal Realm, are taken by Ashake, barbaric Empress of the Amazonian kingdom of Meroë. The Battle Queen offers her captives the dubious distinction of being her quarry in a hunt (a competent if cheekily uninspired variation of Richard Connell’s landmark 1924 short story – and equally influential 1932 movie The Most Dangerous Game).

Sadly both predator and prey are unaware that malign male mercenaries are lurking about, with the worst of all intentions for the unsuspecting women…

Hard fought combat and the sudden intervention of the sneaking male scum makes allies of Ashake and Marada and leads to the voyagers’ final tale, ‘Wizard’s Masque’ (Epic Illustrated #23-24, April & June 1984) which finds the long-lost Europeans aboard the merchant ship Raven, bound for Roman port Massilia. However impetuous Arianrhod gets bored with their slow progress and attempts a transportation spell, opening a portal to nether realms and letting something really ghastly out of hell…

Beating the beast back, Marada falls though the gap in reality to materialise on an Arabic pirate ship currently engaged in a life-and-death clash with soldiers of an Eastern Kaydif. Her sudden presence turns the tide and soon she is partner to flamboyant corsair Taric Redhand, who swears to get her back to her home and lost “daughter”…

Unfortunately Marada has also been noticed by sinisterly seductive sorcerer Jaffar Ibn Haroun Al-Rashid. Although he purports to be a friend – and potential lover – able to reunite her with The Raven, he conceals a connection to the same demonic alliance that originally targeted the She-Wolf in faraway Rome. He is also, in all things, a creature of passion and self-serving convictions, capable of absolutely anything to achieve his own ends…

Ultimately however, the lost warrior woman knows she can only depend upon herself to find her way back to Arianrhod and home…

Moody, passionate and powerfully evocative, this is a classic work of comics fantasy that at last has a home and format worthy of it, and will certainly all delight fans of the genre.
© & ™ 2013 John Bolton and Christ Claremont. All rights reserved.

Posted on

School Spirits


By Anya Davidson (Picturebox)
ISBN: 978-1-939799-02-9

Sometimes art – and especially comics – defy dull ration analysis and, just like the music your parents didn’t like, grabs you way below any conscious level. Such is the case here as prodigious printmaker, mini comics auteur and cult musician Anya Davidson (Barbarian Bitch/Kramer’s Ergot, Child of the Sun, Coughs & Cacaw) who at last breaks into the big leagues with a cool, cruel monochrome hardback which lifts the lid on those terrible teenager people with a wry and macabre quartet of tales defining modern School Spirits.

Through freewheeling progressions, flashbacks, daydreams and conceptual digressions, David carries her girl of the moment Oola and BFF Garf through vicious, monstrous, demonic, occasionally surreal stream-of-consciousness hallucinatory everyday escapades which eerily recapitulate and invoke the best of underground commix and modern independent cartoonists from S. Clay Wilson to Johnny Ryan…

It all begins with a quick pictorial introduction in ‘School Spirits Picturebox Brooklyn’ before ‘Ticket Thicket’ introduce our cast when radio DJ Weird Wally Walczac galvanises a generation by offering a pair of phone prize tickets to the hottest gig in town: Hrothgar‘s Halloween concert…

At ‘Vinyl Command’ we get a quick glimpse at the imagined, nigh-mythological life of the rock god Renaissance Man who wrote Blasphemous Corporeal Stench and Rotting Abortion before Oola wakes up and faints, after which the largely silent ‘Battle for the Atoll’ reveals the powers and mysteries of Primal Woman and leads us to a seat of learning…

‘No Class’ opens with a frantic chase before retreating to school where Oola’s hunger for knowledge and passionate drooling over class stud-muffin Grover is ruined by mouthy dick Jason, who spoils Art and Ceramics only to die hideously in our heroine’s fevered thoughts…

Further bouts of noxious reality – such as the affair between teachers Miss DeLeon and Mister Kirbowski – fall prey to imagination and horny supposition, all similarly despatched and destroyed in dreamscape, until break when the girls can continue planning the big magic spell they’re concocting to really shake up the town…

And thus the time passes progress until the day of the gig when Oola is caught shoplifting and stabs a guard before fleeing into another miasmic multi-reality chase which culminates at the life-changing Hrothgar show ‘In the Great Riff Valley’…

Like some fervent Archie Comics of the Damned, School Spirits readily blends the profane with the arcane, and the regimented tedium of waiting to be in charge of your life with the terrors and anticipation of the moment it all becomes Your Own Fault, in a rollercoaster ride of eclectic images Davidson describes as ‘“Beavis and Butthead” meets James Joyce’s “Ulysses”’. What I know is this: the pace, style and sheer ingenuity of this book is brutally addictive and, despite constantly playing with the vertical and horizontal holds of Reality, never slips up and never loses narrative focus.

Strong, stirring stuff, full of sex and violence, and outrageously amusing all round.
© 2013 Anya Davidson. All rights reserved.

Posted on

Pompeii


By Frank Santoro (Picturebox)
ISBN: 978-1-939799-10-4

A short while ago I carped on about America not producing many historically flavoured comic strips and, as if by condemnatory return, this lovely cartoon chronicle cropped up in my review pile; not only a captivating yarn of ordinary folk trapped in one of the most tragically infamous events of all time, but also a boldly experimental and mesmerisingly effective exercise in reductionist visual storytelling.

Pittsburgh-based Frank Santoro has been a bit quiet since the release of his magnificent Storeyville (except for Cold Heat, Mome, the Comics Comics blog and about a zillion mini comics and other projects) but with the release of Pompeii proves the wait has been worthwhile.

The story is beguilingly simple: exploring not only the complex web of lies which entangle a philandering artist, his wife, new favourite model and naïve assistant (still in the flush of first love), but also the very nature and layered reality of art itself.

The story opens in the blithely unaware doomed city – a flashy resort for Rome’s high and mighty situated in the scenic Bay of Naples – where keen Marcus acts as general dogsbody to the great Flavius, a painter of great renown and salacious appetites.

The lad’s duties include fetching and carrying, cleaning, grinding minerals to mix into pigments, painting backgrounds, and keeping the maestro’s wife Alba from discovering her husband’s infidelities.

There’s a particularly close call as Flavius and the Princess he’s immortalising are nearly discovered by the knowing suspicious spouse and, once the crisis is averted, the master makes his unwilling pupil a full partner in the deception…

Marcus has talent and dreams of being a great painter, but for the moment he and his beloved Lucia toil in relative poverty with little more than their love to sustain them. The hot-blooded girl has come with him all the way from distant Paestum, but now, just as the relationship deepens, Marcus is neglecting her: spending more and more time with Flavius.

Bored and lonely, she’s alternately talking about having children and returning to her family even though she knows her lover would rather die than go back.

During the next sitting the Princess wants to talk about the small earthquake that occurred that morning but Flavius is oblivious: in full swing he invites Marcus to work on the background whilst he is still finishing the figure.

That minor triumph is spoiled at home when Lucia again starts up about Paestum or inviting her mother to live with them in Pompeii. In a rage Marcus storms off to sleep in Flavius’ studio and accidentally overhears an assignation wherein the Princess begs the maestro to move with her to Rome. The besotted noble is even prepared for her artist to bring the inconvenient wife along too…

Fearing the death of his dream and assured of the end of his relationship, the lad is surprised and gratified when Flavius invites him to accompany him to Rome. Everything suddenly stalls, however, when smouldering, somnolent Mount Vesuvius explosively begins spewing smoke and gas for the first time in living memory…

The fates of the assorted characters is a grim and powerful reminder of the power of love in the face of death, and the rough, raw pencil illustrations and tone washes – all created at publication size rather than being reduced for publication – perfectly recall and invoke the loose, flowing style of fresco and pottery images of the time.

Santoro apparently translated his own experiences as student/assistant to painter Francesco Clemente to get inside the head of young Marcus and the result is a timeless and irresistible exploration of human relationships (master and servant, teacher and pupil, lovers, spouses and infidelities) all viewed through an intimate lens of storytelling in its purest and most intimately immediate form.

A perfect example of the vivacious renaissance of Comics as Art, Pompeii is book no aficionado of the medium should miss.
© 2013 Frank Santoro. All rights reserved.