I admire the work of Dave Sim and Chester Brown. But as comics, the kind you buy at the comic store to take home and read, Cerebus and Underwater are busts.

The recent addition of Spirits of Independence tour dates to the cover of Cerebus was the symbolic final nail in the coffin for that comic’s transition from Cerebus to The Dave Sim Show starring Cerebus. Editorials now leap off the inside front cover and push the comics back three or four pages. Add the space for formal editorials to that set aside for letters, transcripts, and previews, and editorial content dominates the magazine. I don’t presume to tell Sim what to publish in his magazine; indeed, I envy the circulation he enjoys with his forum. But I can’t help thinking the serialized Cerebus chapters are the carrot offered the weekly comics shopper so they’ll enter into Dave’s World. At worst, this may be the alternative comics’ version of the foil-embossed cover, pandering to the desires of Cerebus fans to remain up-to-date on the latest story in order to get them to buy something which is at heart completely different. At best, it’s an unbalanced read.

At least there’s something in each and every issue of Cerebus. The first three issues of Underwater took me about 90 seconds to read. Total. I suspect that in order to survive, Brown needs the income generated by a quarterly comic in addition to that which would be generated by a collection. That doesn’t make the individual issues worth buying. I also admire Brown’s choice of decidedly uncommercial material that resists easy division into chapters. But producing such work and presenting it for public consumption are two different things. Underwater may be a masterpiece; time will tell. But I wouldn’t recommend seeing Citizen Kane in half-minute segments, either.

You won’t find this glorious tome at your local Comics ’N’ Games. But if you’re a fan of bandes dessinées, you want — no, need — a copy of this book, a collection of illustrations and non-comics work by Yves Chaland, who died in 1990 in his early 30s.

In Europe, Chaland was lionized as a successor to Franquin and Herge. In the U.S., he’s virtually unknown except to the cognoscenti who collected volumes of his clean-line work. This 1995 book features page after page of beautiful full-color (and duotone) magazine covers, ads, postcards and other pieces, the kind of stuff that shows just how blinkered and out-of-touch we American comics fans are. Chaland, a virtuoso comic artist, entered the mainstream in a way we reserve for film directors and pop stars.

Almost best of all, the text (including a chronology of his life) is presented in French and English, so we monolings can learn all about what we missed. It’s a pricey number, but its lavishness and sheer size (it’s a bit bigger than the similarly proportioned Completely MAD) make it the book of the year for B.D. buffs.

I would think of him as a talent deserving some recognition. Though a relative unknown to comic book fans, I assume Steve Purcell does quite well for himself drawing and designing for games at LucasArts. (Games that Evan Dorkin argues now fill the need for pulse-pounding action in the people who used to get those kicks from superheroes.)

This book contains all the published Sam & Max material to date. From the obscure one page color strips that appeared in LucasArts’ game magazine to the black and white stories (which remain in black and white, as God and Steve Purcell intended them) they demonstrate that Purcell has all the tools. If you can, mentally filter Dorkin’s Milk & Cheese wit and obsessive detail through Jeff Smith’s animator’s craft, you’ll have an idea of how Sam & Max works on the page. Now mix in Frank Miller’s pseudo film-noir parodies and you’ll get an idea of the type of stories you’ll read. The fusion isn’t that clear cut. Sam and Max don’t dish out the unbridled misanthropy of Milk and Cheese, nor the “big picture” storyline of Bone. And while Purcell approaches Sin City’s level of action, he stumbles by not including the subtle, Campbell-esque archetypes we see in Miller’s diminutive ninja hookers. So Sam (a dog) and Max (a rabbit) settle for a supporting cast of giant moon cockroaches and demonically possessed boxes of sugared cereals.

But hey, Sin City is intended as serious noir and Sam & Max isn’t. I think.

Anyway, the only thing I can’t quite choke down is what’s written on the book jacket. (Serves me right for reading it.) Marlowe & Company, the publishers, call this thing a “graphic novel.” It has pictures which are indeed graphic, and the dialog is usually novel, but... I’ve read Maus, sir, and The Collected Sam &Max is no Maus. It’s no Kings in Disguise, or Why I Hate Saturn either.

You’ll laugh out more than once, though.

There have been a lot of extraordinary issues of The Comics Journal, and a lot of extraordinary features in individual issues, but my favorite is still issue #38, for reasons both sentimental and historical.

When my path crossed that of Gary Groth and Mike Catron in the fall of 1977, they had spent a year trying to make ends meet on the tabloid incarnation of The Comics Journal, which they’d picked up from another publisher with #27. Wallowing in debt, they had made the do-or-die decision to switch to the far more expensive (but potentially more profitable) magazine format with the upcoming issue, #37. I quickly wormed my way into the operation, and was granted an instant Associate Editorship for my pains. When Mike received, and accepted, a job offer from DC Comics a few weeks later, I moved into the “Editor” position and, under “Executive Editor” Gary, began my run on the Journal with #38.

It may not look like much now (that IBM typeface! those headlines!), but #38 was something of a revelation. For one thing, there was the cover feature: An interview with Gil Kane, then riding high on his new strip Star Hawks. I well remember Gary and me fretting over whether readers would actually sit still for an interview that ran an unprecedented 12 and a half pages. It was also exciting to present a major article on Asterix — a much-needed broadening of the Journal’s scope, courtesy of our international comics expert Dwight R. Decker — which included a tribute to the series’ just-deceased writer René Goscinny, illustrated by a popular fan artist of the time: Don Rosa.

The issue also included an article on “the ever-rising cost of comics,” prompted by DC’s announcement that its line was being converted to a 40-page/50-cent format (the horror!); an ad for the fanzine Omniverse, “the first and only magazine about reality in comics,” edited and published by two continuity-obsessed fans, Mark Gruenwald and Dean Mullaney; typical Journal-style savagings of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (by guest critic Dennis O’Neil) and the entire oeuvre of Burne Hogarth; the first, relatively mellow, review from Marilyn Jo Bethke, whose scathing critiques and combative interviews would create a firestorm of controversy in subsequent months and years; and my (downright prescient) retitling of the letters page from “Viewpoints” to “Blood and Thunder.” For fans of embarrassing juvenilia, the issue also includes reviews by Gary and me that we’d just as soon forget we ever wrote: Gary opining that with Allegro Non Troppo director Bruno Bozzetto had “impregnated the emotional imagery [of animated cartoons] with thought,” and me fulminating that in re-writing Spider-Man’s origin in the syndicated strip to match the TV version, Stan Lee had committed “one of the foremost acts of treason ever perpetrated by a comics creator.”

In January 1978, when I held the first printed copy of The Comics Journal #38 in my hand, I thought it was one of the greatest magazines ever published. I still do.

Perversity dictates that Journal # 53 is high among my favorites. There are many reasons:

That issue came out in 1980, and for me that period — from, say, the beginning of the Journal in ’76 to the mid-’80s — was characterized by youthful exhuberance mixed with deadly naivete and a growing exhiliration among cartoonists over the capabilities of the comics medium (Raw, Weirdo, and Love and Rockets all came out within a year).

It began a long, tumultuous relationship between me and Ellison that ultimately crashed and burned; Ellison’s moral instability and complex, mercurial temperament is every bit as fascinating in life as it is in literature (though somewhat more tragic), and coping with it for seven long years during the subsequent lawsuit filed by Michael Fleischer is one of those grotesque experiences that’s horrendous to have lived through but yields a rich (and often farcical) dividend afterward. (You can’t imagine how many Ellison stories I have to tell at parties.) On a personal level, this was a fascinating odyssey, because I started out as an admirer and ended up, after witnessing a series of repugnant indecencies, eyes finally open, as a detractor. It was, as they say, a learning experience.

It was also a time in the comics profession when opinions mattered, when artistic and moral questions were discussed, debated, and fought over with the kind of passion that indicates a healthy public arena. In contradistinction to today where all artistic issues have been subsumed by financial imperatives or reduced to ephemeral irrelevancies. and mindless bickering on the Internet. Ellison was, in 1980, still a decent provocateur, and the value of his interviewed resided in his ability to kick a dull, complacent industry in its ass. His best qualities on display there (his championing art over commerce, for example) have since receded while his worst tics (his unfortunate ignorance of comics, promoting artists not because they represent excellence but because they play pool with him, etc.) have come center stage. So, in a sense, it’s an historical landmark because one can use it to chart Ellison’s public disintegration from then to now (although admittedly, the machinery was in place even then).

Then there was The Lawsuit: the $2 million libel suit filed against me and Ellison by Michael Fleischer. This dragged on for seven years, cost me (and the Journal) $200,000 (much of which was paid for by insurance and benefit books we published for ourselves, so no sympathy required). This beggared the imagination, but it proved a good testing ground for our principles (our being Kim Thompson and I, the Journal principals at the time) as well as our endurance. The Lawsuit divided the industry into two camps (Friends and Enemies) and, in a disquieting way, tested everyone’s principles who took — or refused to take — a stand.

All in all, a good time.

TCJ #115, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways: 1) Hideous cover portrait of Jim Shooter by “Dandy” Don Simpson; 2) Splendid news reporting by journalist-in-training Joe “Scoop” Sacco; 3) Exposé of former slimebag distributor/publisher Scott Rosenberg; 4) Marvel announces that they will no longer communicate with the Journal; 5) Rob Rodi’s brilliant analysis of Love and Rockets; 6) (and this is the kicker) The overview of the libel suit brought by Michael Fleisher against Fantagraphics, Gary Groth and Harlan Ellison, wherein many funny things are said, most of them by Jim Shooter.

I can think of no single issue of a comic or of a magazine about comics that provides a greater insight into the creative and professional aspects — and most notably, the politics therein — of the comic book industry than TCJ #115. I was 16 years-old when this issue came out (1987), and in looking back I can see what a singular influence it was in the development of my own critical attitudes towards the medium. So much so that that five years later I applied for an internship with the Journal — and now, five years after that, I’m still here. Here’s to another 20!

I actually read this in the summer of 1990, when you could no longer get new issues of The Comics Journal in East Central Indiana. It cost $1.00. I don’t remember anything in the issue except Gary Groth’s massive Robert Crumb interview, a 72-page masterpiece every bit as gut-wrenching as the Zwigoff movie and much more revealing, particularly about his art. I never much cared for Crumb before reading the interview, and had seen very little of his work. The interview gave me a framework with which to understand Crumb’s comics, and may be solely responsible for my transition from adolescent comic book fan to adult comics reader.

The best Journal interviews are those with creators who have either contributed to the field or lived extraordinary lives somehow associated with the medium. The ideal interviewee also possesses an intelligent and engaging manner of “speaking,” as well as a plethora of interesting anecdotes and embarrassing stories.

Perhaps the best example of this can be found in the Matt Groening interview from TCJ #141. In his compelling conversation with interviewer Gary Groth, Groening demonstrates a sense of humor befitting the creator of The Simpsons and a solid understanding of what he has accomplished: the delicate treading of the fine line between art and commerce. Add to that the biographical information that Groening imparts, and issue #141 is a satisfying read based on his interview alone.

What elevates it to the ranks of “all-time greatest issue,” however, are the following: a lively and frank back-up interview with alternative superstar Julie Doucet, featuring a truly funky double-spread title page; an interesting editorial by Gary Groth that discusses the age-old question of why alternative comics do not sell; advertisements for M. Dalton Allred 1992 series Grafik Muzik and the first issue of Ed Brubaker’s Lowlife which lets one and all declare, “We knew them back when…”; an offbeat piece on Israeli comics; a hilarious one-page Hey Kids, Comics! by Scott Russo in which he reviews Aquablue #2 and concludes that “European comics really suck, and no one is willing to admit it”; and, finally, a high-spirited look at the state of the newpaper comics page circa 1991 by the inimitable R. Fiore.

TCJ #141 is informative, enjoyable and funny — all the things that make up a truly great issue.

The recipe for the best issue of The Comics Journal: First, get a copy of #164, rip out the fascinating, thought-provoking and hysterical interview with Jim Woodring, and put the rest aside. Now, staple that interview to the back of #161, and look at what you’ve got: talks with two terrific talents, painter Robert Williams and Mark Newgarden (who talks at length about Ernie Bushmiller). Add to that TCJ co-founder Mike Catron’s extensive report on the Sobocinski incident — a tale of intrigue, deception, and grand theft auto. This is my favorite FBI scandal story. Add to that a side article on a simultaneous wave of “pranks” that struck the Seattle cartooning community, and keep in mind that you’ve got work from Richard Sala and David Collier. Not to mention a report on the state of Polish comics. I could go on and on about this one.

The Comic Strip Art of Lyonel Feininger is a book no serious scholar of the comic strip form should be without. Lyonel Feininger’s entire American comic strip output is handsomely reprinted in this oversized book, along with an interesting (though flawed) introduction by Bill Blackbeard. Reading The Kin-Der-Kids and Wee Willie Winkie’s World will undoubtedly cause many readers to experience a sense of regret that Feininger did so little, and that the comic strip wasn’t his life’s work. This is an understandable reaction, but wrong. If Feininger had continued to be a professional cartoonist, he would never have developed into a painter, and his paintings are far more important artistic works than his comics. His oeuvre as a painter has fundamentally greater significance and power than his comics and cartoons.

Blackbeard touches on Feininger’s career as a painter briefly in his essay, but in a surprisingly dismissive way. Feininger earned his bread as a cartoonist for about twenty years, and during part of that period, he was Germany’s most successful political cartoonist. If he had died before drawing The Kin-Der-Kids, he would still be assured a relatively prominent place in the history of cartoons. The Kin-Der-Kids and Wee Willie Winkie’s World simply form an astonishing climax to an already distinguished career. And yet, he gave all this up for painting. And it was not painting in a commercially viable style; Feininger threw his lot in with the avant garde at a time when no modernist painter could hope to make a reasonable living for himself. Feininger was not independently wealthy, and had a wife and children to support, yet he still gave up a lucrative career for a very speculative one. Why? This is a fundamental question which Blackbeard fails to address in his introduction. (The other major question about The Kin-Der-Kids strip is answered in Blackbeard’s introduction — namely, why did The Chicago Tribune publish such a bizarre strip in the first place?)

The answer is that Feininger had certain things he needed to express, emotions and ideas and visual forms drawn from his soul and put on paper or canvas, that simply could not be expressed in comics. When we look at great comic strips and comic books from the early part of this century, we so admire their art that we fail to see what is fairly obvious to any objective observer — that comics (at that time) were an industrial medium that had severe limitations on what could be expressed. (In this, they might be compared to movies made under the studio system.) In addition, even when they weren’t explicitly drawn for children, they had to be acceptable for children — newspapers hate to get angry letters from parents. No art that labors under these kind of restrictions can hope to express what can be expressed in freer arts. (What we in English call the fine arts are called the “free arts” in Germany.) Feininger the cartoonist simply couldn’t produce a work of art equal to, say, a novel by Thomas Mann or a painting by Paul Klee, because the medium wouldn’t allow it.

Feininger was born in the U.S.A. of musical parents in 1871. (His family had immigrated to the U.S. as refugees from the political oppression that followed Europe’s revolutions of 1848.) As a child, he was fascinated by New York and by mechanical things; he was obviously in love with the modern world in a very romantic sense rarely seen today. Trains held a special fascination for him. He began to draw at an early age, and he and his friends often drew cartoons of musicians and singers that their families knew. When he was sixteen, he moved to Germany to study; initially he was going to study music, but he drifted instead into art. His art studies in Hamburg were very traditional, and Feininger didn’t understand the most modern art movement of the time, impressionism. (He was even teased by some of his more progressive classmates for his reactionary tastes!) In fact, none of Feininger’s work — whether cartoons or paintings — seems influenced by “realism” or any style that sought a certain optical fidelity, like impressionism. Instead of recording a world, Feininger was always imagining and constructing a world. Hence he was drawn to art styles that reflected this artificiality — symbolism, fauvism, art nouveau, and most important, cubism.

This is a point that seems to have eluded Blackbeard. In his introduction to The Comic Strip Art of Feininger, he writes, “[T]he creative yeasts working in the Parisian art world in the new areas of impressionism and cubism captured his attention early and brought him to oil and the easel before World War I.” One mistake Blackbeard makes is to lump impressionism and cubism together — they were different movements, different styles, and happened at different times. But more important, Blackbeard implies that Feininger left cartooning behind for something completely different — painting in various modern styles. Painting is different from cartooning, but many of the impulses, including the impulse to imagine and create a world, that are visible in his cartoons are also present in his paintings.

In the 1890s, Feininger moved to Berlin and began his career as an illustrator and cartoonist. Some of his earliest professional drawings were illustrations for fairy tales published by Harper’s in New York. Some artists — Matisse and Edward Hopper, for example — created art that was always adult in subject matter and execution. Some, like Picasso and virtually every underground cartoonist, frequently returned to adolescent concerns and energies. But Feininger was always looking to his childhood for inspiration, as a cartoonist and illustrator as well as a painter. Even his hobbies as an adult were somewhat childish — building model ships, bicycle riding, and carving toy locomotives.

His cartooning career took off in the mid-1890s when he became a staff cartoonist for Ulk, the Sunday humor supplement for the newspaper the Berliner Tageblatt. Berliner Tageblatt was a left-liberal paper, and Feininger’s political cartoons reflected this. He was never a radical, but was always on the left. By the turn of the century, Feininger was one of the most popular and highly-paid cartoonists in Germany.

Looking at Feininger’s cartoons from this period is very instructive. They appear similar to a lot of cartoons from that era, but there are distinctive touches that would become more prominent in The Kin-Der-Kids — the oversized hands and broad, flat colors in particular.

Having scaled to the heights of caricature and cartooning, Feininger found himself unsatisfied. In a letter to a friend of his from art school, he wrote the following:

I don’t love these things, caricatures and whatnot, but they are simply the outcome of artistic frustration to realize the beautiful. The quietly, reposefully beautiful I can never hope to reach, for I am too extravagant in feeling, but I am stirring towards something better, nevertheless, than this output of distortion.

Feininger moved to Paris in 1906 to become a painter. He studied with Matisse and ran in the most advanced artistic circles. But this kind of painting couldn’t support himself and his wife, so he continued to do cartoons for money. This was when he drew The Kin-Der-Kids and Wee Willie Winkie’s World, as well as a series of brilliant cartoons for the Parisian journal Le Témoin. (A very interesting companion volume to The Comic Strip Art of Lyonel Feininger would be a collection of Feininger’s Le Témoin cartoons and a selection of the best of his earlier cartoons.) Feininger considered this work a horrible compromise he made in order to earn enough money to live. And yet, when we see these cartoons and comic strips now, it is clear that they surpass everything he had done before. It was here that Feininger went from being a very good cartoonist of a particular school, to being a great cartoonist and a unique talent in the history of cartooning.

Feininger created a comic language that was his alone. I’ve already mentioned the “big hands” aspect of his drawing. Feininger developed ways of showing humans in motion without motion lines — as shown by the wrestlers and soccer players in The Kin-Der-Kids. The large, flat, uninflected areas of color (as in Cousin Gussie’s blue hat and coat) are ways of depicting figures and objects that no one else ever imitated.

In some ways, Wee Willie Winkie’s World was even more radical. You won’t see clouds like those on page 40 until Mattotti enters the scene 80 years later. Likewise, virtually no one has ever carried anthropomorphism to quite the degree that Feininger did in this comic strip (one thinks of a few early, weird Disney cartoons and some of Kim Deitch’s work). Naturally, Feininger’s obsessions from childhood remain — the tall, narrow buildings (see the chimney sweep page in The Kin-Der-Kids), the big black steam locomotives throughout.

One wonders what would have happened if Feininger remained a cartoonist. He might have spawned a new stream in American comic art. Although there are certainly exceptions, it seems to me that virtually every American comic strip and comic book falls broadly into one of four stylistic spheres. The earliest (and strongest) is the scratchy style associated with Barney Google, The Gumps, Mutt and Jeff, and Krazy Kat. Then came a realistic illustrational style associated with the work of Hal Foster and Alex Raymond. The clean, brush-work oriented style of Disney is one important stream (with Pogo as its highest achievement), and finally the modern minimalist style that Peanuts pioneered.

Feininger’s work clearly is outside of all these currents. However, if Feininger had managed to continue drawing American comic strips, I suspect he would have ended up like Winsor McCay — producing a body of work recognized for its brilliance but essentially uninfluential.

But Feininger left cartooning behind for the very good reason that cartooning and comics were inadequate forums for his art. For most of their history, comics have been industrial entertainments tied up with the circulation-building needs of newspaper magnates and comic book publishers, for whom comics were nothing more than a way to sell papers. Anything that would interfere with selling papers — drawing comics with strong personal content and high artistic aspirations, without censorship — was not only discouraged, it was unthinkable. The same goes for comic books.

This is no longer the case. This changed in 1967 when Don Donahue published Robert Crumb’s Zap #1. (Similar changes were happening with other “industrial” arts at the time, such as movies — the decline of the studio system — and pop music.) Now it is possible for artists like Crumb, Lorenzo Mattotti, Dylan Horrocks, Chester Brown, or Jason Lutes to produce comics that are equal in intent and accomplishment to the paintings Feininger produced. Perhaps if Feininger had been born 100 years later, he would have never felt the need to give up comics for painting.

Comics Underground Japan, a very diverse collection of Japanese art comics, is a perfect example of great editing. Many of the artists included here have been published here and there in English, but editor Kevin Quigley’s choices are let each artist shine brighter than ever before. If you’ve followed Blast Books’ manga publishing program, you will have seen books by Hideshi Hino (Panorama of Hell) and Suehiro Maruo (Mr. Arashi’s Amazing Freak Show). The former is relentlessly negative, the latter somewhat meandering. But Hiro’s story in this volume, “Laughing Ball,” is a concise tragedy, filled both with freakish horror and pathos. Maruo’s “Planet of the Jap” is bone-chilling — imagine if R. Crumb’s “When the Niggers Take Over America” had been written by a black man with no detectable irony. “Planet of the Jap” cannot very easily be laughed off. When Yasuji Tanioka’s stories appeared in Sake Jock, I thought they were merely juvenile. He’s an artist I simply wrote off. But the two that appear in Comics Underground Japan are extremely clever and witty, brimming with cruel and unexpected humor. Takashi Nemoto had an excellent story in Pictopia #3, but it doesn’t compare with the emotion and brutality of the excerpt of Future Sperm Brazil that appears here (I sincerely hope that some adventurous publisher will publish the full graphic novel version of this story).

The variety of this material is stunning. The unalloyed brutality of Future Sperm Brazil can be contrasted to the childish warmth of “Cat Noodle Soup” by Nekojiru and Hajime Yamano. But all the stories in this volume can be said to have a deep tension that distinguishes them from formulaic genre comics. Irony, contempt, transgression, absurdity are all modes of expression employed by this remarkable collection of artists. Likewise, drawing styles are all over the road. Takashi Nemoto and Hanako Yamada (“Mary’s Asshole”) have aggressive brut styles not unlike Gary Panter’s. Muddy Wehara (“Bigger and Better”), Kazuichi Hanawa (“Mercy Flesh” a bizarre story of a medieval nobleman who captures wild Buddhas), and Maruo have hyper-detailed eye-candy styles. Carol Shimoda’s drawing style simplifies and parodies Japanese romance comic conventions, and her story, “A Love Like Lemons,” seems to ridicule romance comics by showing the one excluded element, sex.

If there is any complaint with Comics Underground Japan, it’s the production. The book itself is beautiful, but the stories sometimes are rather clunkily converted into English, with typeset balloons, Japanese sound effects with incongruous subtitle, and unflopped pages. All these things were done, I assume, to honor the work by not changing it too much. But translation invariably involves changes; all the more so with Japanese comics. If there is ever a sequel to this volume, or if any of these artists have stories translated elsewhere, I recommend the services of Studio Proteus. Toren Smith and his crew of letterers and retouchers are experts in the craft of taking a Japanese comic and making it easy for a Westerner to read. But this is a minor quibble with what is a magnificent introduction to the Japanese underground. Kevin Quigley and Blast Books have performed an invaluable service.

The Cowboy Wally Show, newly reprinted by Marlowe & Company, follows the career of a beer-swilling, faux-celebrity with the looks of W.C. Fields, the morals of Fatty Arbuckle, and a fondness for alcohol that is more than the sum of the two parts. Watching him host the kiddy show Cowboy Wally’s Shoot ’Em Up Laugh Riot, and following his film career from Ed Smith: Lizard of Doom to Hamlet (shot in a jail cell), we see the type of Hollywood hack that nobody seems to like, yet is always in demand. If there’s any truth in Wally’s story, it’s a combination of amazingly good timing, friends in the right places, and hanging on to the negatives. The book has attained mythic status (in part by virtue of very few people having read it), even though it’s not Kyle Baker’s best. The art reflects his confidence, but sometimes Baker strains to end every page with a punchline. He manages to deliver the punchline well almost every time and each story taken alone is funny. The unifying thread, that of making a documentary of his career, holds things together and provides some of the best scenes - except for the last one, which falls flat following (too closely) on the heels of the same kind of rapid-fire and hilarious deus ex machina effect he used to end his best book, Why I Hate Saturn.

Recently, Baker has spent his time animating music videos, writing for HBO, working for MAD magazine, and illustrating a weekly cartoon strip for New York magazine. He says he loses money every time he does a comic (he originally did The Cowboy Wally Show for $5000), but what do I care? I’d like to see this book redone, now that he’s had more experience in Hollywood. Well, maybe I wouldn’t at that - I’d settle for a complete “You are Here,” his current graphic novel in progress (you can get a glimpse of it in Dark Horse’s Instant Piano.) or just about anything from him, actually. So buy this book and help put Baker, forgive me, back in the saddle.

One welcome result from the recent market viability of the trade paperback format is the re-release of poorly-distributed and/or out-of-print work. Parts of Debbie Dreschler’s moving Daddy’s Girl have already seen print in anthologies like Drawn and Quarterly Vol. I and as a strip in The Stranger. Having them in collected form not only gives these quality stories a second chance to be seen, but allows them to be read in a way that deepens their emotional impact.

Daddy’s Girl, like the more widely-known Ernie Pook’s Comeek, is written from a child’s point of view with artwork that’s accomplished but is nonetheless appropriate to the narrator’s voice. But Dreschler goes beyond investigating the emotional impact of everyday issues and family troubles and explores those issues in the light of something horrible happening to that child. In the case of the Daddy’s Girl narrators, that “something horrible” is sexual abuse.

That’s where any comparisons stop. Dreschler’s formal treatment of the incidents - given their overwhelming narrative weight - is masterful, and the emotional honesty in the writing is effective and understated. Best of all, there’s a seamless quality: one can’t shake the memory of the incidents in subsequent scenes, and the incidents carry more weight due to the fully-realized characterizations of the narrators. Daddy’s Girl is unforgettable comics - no matter how much you may try.

Dear Julia, is an engrossing, darkly comic mystery from the creator of the excellent Frederick & Eloise. Boyd Solomon is standing atop of a San Francisco apartment building, intent upon proving to the world he can fly. As the back cover states, “Dear Julia, is the story of how [he] got there.”

Biggs engages the reader immediately with his absolutely stunning pen and ink work, putting remarkable detail into each panel — necessary detail which actually furthers the plot and warrants scrutiny. The way Biggs delivers almost everything through Boyd’s shaky state-of-mind makes for a fascinating narrative. Chunks of the past (centering around a trip to Tucson, Arizona) and glimmers of the present blend comfortably, revealing just enough to spark the reader’s curiosity while not giving too much away.

Biggs is becoming one of contemporary comics’ best and most overlooked cartoonists. Hopefully, Dear Julia, will put him on the map. Check it out — you won’t be disappointed.

I suppose if one is puritanical enough, all pleasures are guilty ones. Still, my long-standing interest for the work of Pat Mills and Kevin O’Neill has to be one of the less explicable of my comic book guilts.

Since 1987, Mills and O’Neill steered one character of theirs, Marshal Law, through a series of books from Epic, Apocalypse, and Dark Horse. Law was the chief executioner within grotesque, baroque Grand Guignols that mutilated superheroes and dissected their associated conventions. He cut a wide swath through costumed fodder even as he himself became progressively more narrowly focused on and beholden to those conventions. Still, the relish with which Mills and O’Neill continued to vivisect the genre was fearsome and invigorating. Their ingenuity and brazenly entertaining sang-froid sustained the stories after the gruesome novelty paled and even after their subject matter, comic book heroes, became more like — and hence more immune to the thrust of — their dark parodies.

The Mills/O’Neill brand of mayhem rolls on in Death Race 2020, whose protagonist, in leathers, chains, and metal costumery, owes much of his righteously vicious gusto to Marshal Law. The comic series takes up the storyline from the conclusion of Roger Corman’s Death Race 2000, a 1975 film whose original hook was an automobile contest in which the goal was to run down pedestrians; the more helpless, the more highly valued. It starred David Carradine as Frankenstein, the government bred-and-trained driver who ultimately wins the race and becomes President of the land.

In this comic, Frankenstein has outlawed the Race for some 20 years, resisting both an unappreciative voting public as well as his own implanted disposition to run that same public over. Governing within the mobile, skyscraper-sized Roadforce One, Frankenstein is politically opposed by Arch Deacon Miskin, First Primate of the Capital city of Hollywood, who tools around within his automotive pyramid, the Pit-Stop Cathedral.

Events, of course, conspire to return Frankenstein, his killer instincts unchained, to the driver’s seat. After an audacious take-off of the Kennedy assassination in issue #2 (“Oh no, viewers… She’s doing a ‘Jackie’… get back in the car.”), Frankenstein falls from office in issue #3. This issue also contains a segment on the training of Frankenstein and his fellow racers in nurturing government laboratories. There, as children, they work their way from running down kittens to killing, as adolescents, their first humans (“if you can call psychotherapists human…”). There’s also the eyeball-popping, leg-shearing apprehension of the assassin, an automotive stalking that goes bloodily awry, a rescue with spectacular property damage, assorted vehicular accidents with visceral smears, and multiple minor acts of corporal malfeasance.

Tony Skinner joins Pat Mills in writing, yet the level of mirthful destruction and rampant irreverence could be mistaken as vintage solo Mills. The satire is more social, more broad than in the Marshal Law stories, yet it lacks that earlier narrative’s laser-targeting of cloistered, ingrown superheroic inanity. Still, this is buoyant rudeness, blithe and blunt, unrepentantly inventive. Plotting is rickety, sometimes abrupt and nonsensical (in keeping with the spirit of Corman’s films), yet remains entirely serviceable thanks to the manic pacing.

Plus there are those laughs: When a female death racer-in-training faces down a Post-Freudian Resistance Unit member who claims that “The car is nothing but a phallus…” she responds, “What would you say if I ran you over with a doughnut?” And then there’s a brand new death racer loosening up on the circuit, “The Alcoholic.” Of course, these are guilty laughs.

Kevin O’Neill’s art, as if reflecting the sharp brutality of this world, has grown even more angular and agitated. He employs irregular “patches” of coloring to replace shading and gradations in contours and features, a device reminiscent of recent Keith Giffen. There’s also a bulbous futurism that reminds me of Moebius. But fortunately he (and I hope I am correct in crediting this to O’Neill) has continued the running graffiti, the omnipresent commentary in sign and symbol, that functions like a dissonant Greek chorus for dystopian times (the rear bumper of the Alcoholic’s car reads “Don’t Think and Drive”). That O’Neill’s headstrong imaginings and graphic exuberance are critical to the book’s presentation can be demonstrated by issue #4’s work of another artist.

But best of all might be the “Celebrity Car Crash Corner,” a feature that brings together various artists and automotive victims in inventive one-page strips. So far there’s been Pat Moriarity on Jackson Pollock, Bob Fingerman on Margaret Mitchell, and Dave Cooper on heavy metal guitarist Cliff Burton.

Yet for all this, reading three issues of this comic in quick succession for professional purposes brought a surfeit of its particular type of pleasure. In an interview in Subliminal Tattoos, Robert Boyd, editor of Death Race 2020 (and Journal contributor), says the book was intended to be “a good adventure/action comic that’s really over the top, for any teenage boy who wants to read it!” That’s a pretty accurate assessment, which, of course, only made me feel more guilty.