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Thrown to the Wolves
Minicomics Round-Up
STUFF #10 Among the various things the comics industry needs these days -- besides more competently run comics stores, bigger markets to sell funnybooks in, more money flowing into the system from outside, and a Modern Library-style publisher to get out-of-print classic comics back in print and available -- is a big minicomix catalog. There have been scores of small mini distributors over the years, like Wow Cool, Matt Feazell's Not Available Comics, John Porcellino's Spit & A Half, and Paper Radio, the most recent being Paul Houston's STUFF. Featuring a rather snazzy front cover by Jesse [SLOW WAVE, ART FLY] Reklaw and an appealingly designed back page from Carrie [THE ASSASSIN AND THE WHINER] McNinch, STUFF #10 offers minicomix and similar publications from three dozen publishers for one stop shopping. Houston's copy oozes buckets of the sort of "Up With Comics" boosterism commonplace in the small press but is often refreshingly frank in spots -- my favorite example is "[this comic is] Not very professional, but I'm sure a few people out there will find it interesting," -- and the "Extended Looks" section lets a potential buyer read a page from a handful of comics before [not] buying. If #10 isn't an update to a larger main catalog, then STUFF's inventory is woefully incomplete -- it took me two minutes to list more [and better] minis that aren't in STUFF than that the ones that are -- but it has potential.
BUTTNUGGETS #1 by Ed Masters The front cover says it all: An obese cartoony pinhead sitting next to a television set -- more accurately, a television set with a large ass coming out of the screen -- droolingly admires a perfectly conical pile of steaming shit. A caption below exclaims, "BOURGEOIS SENSIBILITIES BEWARE!" This must be the underground comic that Time forgot; BN could have been published in 1969 if the copyright dates didn't place it thirty years later. Television sets still have antennas, the cops are drawn as pigs, and rebellious hippies travel via lit-fart jet propulsion. Stoner Scatology will never die, I guess.
HELL CAR COMIX Volume 1 #2 HELL CAR has one of the better openers I've recently encountered in micropress comics: After a contents page that features a "Tuff Drinx" file [how to make a mixed drink], there's a "Hubie the Dead Cow" story titled "That's What Busses Do," by Paul Friedrich illustrated by Gallant. First panel: A sinister-looking dead cow, surrounded by children, asks "Children, which story would you like to hear today?" Their answer: "WE WANT TO HEAR A STORY ABOUT PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION!" Now that's funny. Only three pages long, "That's What Busses Do" is drawn in a stripped-down, thickline style [it might be a woodcut by the looks of it] with complicated layouts that play to the solid writing -- the notion of a bus driver with celery-smelling breath still haunts me somehow -- and brings both the Busses Story and the Story Of The Busses Story to a satisfying end. Paul Friedrich's piece, "Onion Head Monster has Escaped!" is a minimalist mixed bag; there's a clam for every pearl, and few of both often share the page. The art reminds me of Tom Hart, Gary Panter, James Kochalka, and Jhonen Vasquez in turn. The story is too stupidly violent [in a good way] to be traced to anyone in particular. The piece frequently looks rushed, though it displays a decent grasp of storytelling and pacing, and Friedrich has drawn some excellent cityscapes and a few memorable silhouettes [cf. the armada of black helicopters]. The jokes occasionally veer into hackier than hack territory -- aside from "Southerners are barefoot, booze-swilling, trailer-park dwelling, sister-fucking racists" there are few premises more tapped out than "Army Guys are big, violent, mindless morons" -- but any piece with giant robots and mobster lobsters from Las Vegas is okay by me. Daniel Gallant finishes off the issue with the next chapter of his "Danny & Chrissy: Kid Detectives" mystery "Mary Mary." Drawn in the same highly stylized fashion he drew Friedrich's Hubie story in, though told in clearer layouts, "Mary" is a Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys-type story. Having not read chapter one, I can't tell if the piece is supposed to a parody or not; Chrissy finds the missing Mary by simply following a trail to her. Even the plots in Scooby-Doo were a tad trickier. Nice chunky art, though. Rounding out BIG CAR #2 are "Hypnagogic Visions," an inscrutable half page from Aleksandar Zograf and "I [heart] Acne!" a fairly gross page from Smell of Steve, Inc. Since I know it's a big deal in comics: Almost half of HELL CAR's pages are taken up by advertising. In its defense, it's the sort of entertaining adverts common in THE ONION and similar rags; I turned every page expecting an advert from a Raleigh Mexican restaurant promising "Burritos as Big as Your Ass!" or a bar advert featuring a "Drunk of the Month" photo contest.
DRASTIK #1 Holy shit, is this a weird comic, even once you've come to terms with the idea of a thirty dollar pamphlet. Remember when Rich Buckler reigned supreme? Neither do I, but this book reminds me of every Solson comic I've ever encountered, with a healthy dose of Neal Adams' Continuity Comics to boot. The two stories showcasing Drastik the robot revenger, the "Go-Go Golem," hearken back to the 80s, back when supermen were supermen and common criminals [or "street scum," as they were called back then] wore pinstriped suits. When badass robot avengers [you know he's a robot because he has a face like Iron Man's, except Drastik has a line between his eye line and mouth line that makes his face look like nothing except a big "I"] fought crime in a purple turtleneck, but only when out of nehru jackets -- I swear I'm not making any of this up -- but when then wanted to blend in with the crowd they donned a trenchcoat. Fred Carrillo's art is competently designed, the storytelling less than clear in spots, and looks like it was rendered with coloring in mind; it's left mostly open. That it wasn't colored is probably for the best, considering the retina-damaging coloring on the cover. Rowe, in addition to creating and editing the book, did the lettering with what looks like a Comicraft font. I've reviewed a few minis that weren't hand lettered before, but this is the first computer lettering I've seen that drew attention to itself and illustrated for me why "whizbanged" is usually used as an insult. The writing is on par with similar comics -- crooks rob bank and kill a person, or a few people [I can't tell from the art. What's important is the crooks are Badasses Who Kill For No Good Reason], Drastik comes a running and kicks some badguy ass, kills an injured robber after delivering snappy line [Crook, trapped under overturned car: "W-Who Are You?" Drastik, lighting a match: "A keeper of the flame." Inset panel of Drastik's hand throwing the match, Crook: "NO!" Main panel: overturned car exploding. Drastik, walking away: "I knew he was upset ... But that's no reason to blow up at me."] and then Drastik kicks more crook ass and spouts more snappy lines that wouldn't have made the first draft of COMMANDO, Curtain. There's a three page "story" at the end of the book that I thought was a cover gallery or somesuch at first. It's a clever narrative device, even if it reminds me of an 1980s SPIDER-MAN comic I once read:
Anyway, there's a charmingly self-reflexive page discussion of DRASTIK #1 between Drastik and Daphne, his girl Friday, written screenplay style. I like Drastik's lament over the chances of getting a Xeric Grant to publish DRASTIK #1. As if the Xeric folks don't give money to almost any biped who can string a few panels together and ask nicely for a grant. The Henry Boltinff-drawn piece, yet another "Comics is Dead" memorial, features artwork as beautifully spare as Rowe's writing is nauseatingly sentimental. Still, it's self-pitying claptrap like this that makes me wonder if anyone is going to crank out a few "'Comics is Dead' is Dead" eulogies when the next boom arrives. Rowe's 1990 Joe Simon interview article reads more like a CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE MOVIE article with a digression into Simon's life. It's competent fan writing; covers well-covered ground, giving all the information available in a dozen similar articles but does list how much Simon & Kirby's original run on CAPTAIN AMERICA goes for in mint condition [$18,000 in 1990, if you have to know]. There's a Gil Kane-drawn pinup that could be reinked to be virtually any other character Kane ever drew, and scads of badass taglines litter the book; the front and back cover copy make good examples, "Beyond Love and Hate, Good and Evil, Life and Death, There Is DRASTIK" and "Fighting Solves Nothing. Unless You Win." There's a half page more, just as lamely badass-sounding. All of the above said, I love this book. Really. It has buckets of sincerity and, as such, illustrates why sincerity doesn't guarantee Art. It doesn't even guarantee good work. I don't care. It still fascinates me somehow. It's probably sold out by now, costs more than some hardcover graphic novels ten times its size, and I couldn't afford it anyway, but I still love DRASTIK.
LITMUS TEST #9 by Nick Mullins Starting with a sharp linoleum print cover with the [green-shirted - Mullins used randomly chosen colored pencils for each copy, making each somewhat unique] observer protagonist of the main story inside, LITMUS TEST #9 is a mixed bag. The opening feature, "Ghosts," is a Scooby-Doo/Ginsberg parody that is dachshund-with-a crushed-pelvis flat & lame. Mullins probably meant it as a commentary on cable television, but is "Reruns really suck" really a message worth expending the effort to send? The piece reminded me of all the hack standup comics I've had to sit through whose most evolved premise was "What if celebrity A was like celebrity B?" [I guarantee, somewhere in North America tonight, every night, there's a standup who does ten minutes on "What if Jack Nicholson was The Croc Hunter?"] Mullins recovers nicely with #9's feature "Deification," a post-apocalyptic piece about bullies and hero worship. On the Table of Contents page, Mullins acknowledges a FIST OF THE NORTH STAR influence on the piece, and the writing, while not very Fumimura-esque, hits a number of FIST's beats -- bleak barren post-apocalyptic world populated by marauding scavengers, helpless civilians, power crazed demigods, the continuous search for a hero to lead the masses out of their bleak existence -- though I see more Scott McCloud than Tetsuo Hara in the artwork; then again, any manga influenced layout inked with a technical pen reminds me of the B&W sections of ZOT! The observer's narration is chattily overdone, especially in the "quiet" moments -- that it's lettered in an eye-punishing cursive style doesn't help -- though it makes a nice counterpoint during the fighting. Again, the message isn't particularly profound -- "Just because someone beats up a bully who was picking on you, it doesn't mean he's your hero, even after World War III" or somesuch -- but the artwork is quite remarkable, especially the images of the dark-haired stranger. All in all, LITMUS TEST is an attractive package, and one that improves with each issue. At this point, Mullins' work fails more times than it succeeds, but he's still a cartoonist to watch.
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