The title was quarterly and, per Wikipedia, ran from fall 1943 thru fall 1945, with issue 11 (featuring the Blonde Phantom) being the last. Date these issues accordingly.

And now:

Note: The villains in the second cover appear to be evil French Canadians. World War II would have just ended, but the substitution of space men and Quebecois still seems rather abrupt.

© 1972 Little, Brown and Company, Inc.

We’re looking at the art done by Robert Binks for The Old Dog Barks Backwards, the last book by the poet Ogden Nash. This is the fifth and final post, and the first is here.

For “Sexual Politics Farewell,” a rather double-edged open letter to “Kate Millett, Shulasmith Firestone, Betty Friedan et al.,” as the subtitle puts it:

© 1972 Little, Brown and Company, Inc.

For “Sweet Land of Capitals,” about American cities’ tendency to boast in capital letters about their various claims to fame:

© 1972 Little, Brown and Company, Inc.

For “Which the Chicken, Which the Egg,” a meditation on the human condition: “He drinks because she scolds, he thinks; / She thinks she scolds because he drinks, / And neither will admit what’s true, / That he’s a sot and she’s a shrew.”

The happy couple:

© 1972 Little, Brown and Company, Inc.

For “You Could Knock Some People Over with a Feather,” about a far-fetched language mix-up.

Staying in Italy, a lady afflicted by a mouse asked the bellboy for a cat (gatto). But, for some reason, the bellboy spoke French, so he brought her a cake (gateau). And here we are:

© 1972 Little, Brown and Company, Inc.

And finally, the back cover:

© 1972 Little, Brown and Company, Inc.

And away we go:

For “The Museum of Natural History.” The poem is nice: “The python has, and I fib no fibs, / 318 pairs of ribs. / In stating this I place reliance / On a seance with one who died for science. / This figure is sworn to and attested; / He counted them while being digested.”

Here he is:

© 1972 Little, Brown and Company, Inc.

For “No Trouble at All, It’s as Easy as Falling Off a Bar,” about the unpredictability of guests’ preferences among drinks:

© 1972 Little, Brown and Company, Inc.

For “Please Remind Me Before I Forget,” about the jumble inside the author’s head:

© 1972 Little, Brown and Company, Inc.

For “Recitatifs Never to Be Recited at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts,” illustrating a section about Mozart the young brat:

© 1972 Little, Brown and Company, Inc.

For “The Rejected Portrait,” about capturing personality:

© 1972 Little, Brown and Company, Inc.

He worked for a number of companies but did an especially large amount of Timely superhero covers. Here we have the first few covers for All Select Comics, a quarterly that featured stories about the company’s big three. They had separate stories but got together on the cover to scatter Nazis.

I don’t have info on exactly when issues appeared, but Wikipedia gives the comic’s run as fall 1943 thru fall 1945. Date accordingly.

The first four covers:

Fantagraphics; 32 pp.; $4.95; Color (ISBN: 9781606994221)

This Journal site has been up and running for some six months now, and even in its open-ended, come-one, come-all, higgledy-piggledy, 24/7 content-mad fury, there are still so many noteworthy comics that go uncelebrated within its electromagnetic confines. So it seems a bit prejudicial and blinkered to be returning to an on-going series to consider only its latest issue when so many other worthies go wanting. That’s especially true as I’ve already rendered a passable precis of the comic (or at least one I could not easily improve upon and what is the Internet about if not ease?) for this site not long ago (“… a sense of humor [that] starts with a susceptible contemporary sensibility driven into survival mode by the open floodgates of mass culture, a modern consciousness threatened by amusement and diversion.” Oh baby, that’s still got it…).

I can’t help it, though. I feel like Steve Martin’s character in the movie The Jerk where he dances for joy at the gas station loudly proclaiming to all within earshot, “The new phone book is here! The new phone book is here!”

The new Tales Designed to Thrizzle is here. The new Tales Designed to Thrizzle is here!

The follow-up report is that in issue #6, Michael Kupperman has, to my eye, fashioned the quintessential edition of his title. It’s everything you’ve wanted from thrizzling, given a salubrious goose. Is it still a response to the aforementioned contemporary sensibility besieged by the diversions of mass culture? Check. Does it still confront media amusements through “aggressive accretion, grasping at straws and flotsam and winding up with some very odd however buoyant accumulations?” Check. What about the “cheered-up surrealism … less dark, less troubled, less sexualized, less psychologically freighted” and “dada, but without that movement’s inherent sense of provocation?” Check and check with dancing shoes on.

And that’s the new news here. In every way relevant to a distinctly warped sense of humor, this issue represents a tightening of comedic springs and sweetening of the hurled cream pies. Its funny business appears more consummately distilled, concentrated and unremitting. Every page pays off, ratcheting up the risibility with droll efficiency. There’s synergistic energy, flowing without push, us following without prodding. The first eight pages “Jungle Princess” (“Born to privilege in Fairyland … Raised by animals in the wild”) quite literally does not have a panel that doesn’t add to and raise the level of hilarity, often at oblique angles to the inherent nuttiness of its premise. Likewise, there appears no square inch of comic that hasn’t been professionally tripwired for off-kilter laughs: Wait’ll you see the bargains on “slightly cursed merchandise” in the advertisement for “Ben’s Warehouse of Cursed Savings.”

A large part of this comic’s success lies in Kupperman’s honed sense of comedic timing. At a mechanical level, there’s a fortuitous blend of long and short features where none appears as filler and none runs short of crazed momentum. Writing is unusually fine; it’s unfailingly crisp and purposeful, continually upsetting cognitive and entertainment applecarts. His odd-couple team-up of Mark Twain and Albert Einstein is fleshed out, transcending their loopy incongruities and superficial facial superficialities, to more authoritatively become the sublimely ridiculous action heroes Kupperman intended them to be.

But issue #6 also has something that only the collected Tales Designed to Thrizzle volume has enjoyed so far: As the cover blurb puts it, “Now With Too Much Color.” Armed with full spectrum polychromatic effulgence, Kupperman’s collage-like composition and intentionally awkward renderings more closely resemble their imagined ancestors, tacky olde timey comic books and comic strips. Thanks to color, his assortment of samples of “Modern Wallpaper” patches resemble very little you’ve ever seen before (well, except that Jungle Princess) (and yeah, those sex blimps that return from issue #1).

I ended my prior post on the series’ #5 issue with a remark to the effect that anytime you pick up a new issue of Tales Designed to Thrizzle you’ll have no idea what you’re in for. While I meant that in terms of its imaginatively unconstrained content, it became truer than I realized: There was no way one could predict Kupperman would make so formidable an advance in sharpening his zaniness and refining its delivery with issue #6.

Images ©2010 Michael Kupperman

First, for “Guess What I’d Rather Be than a Tender Apple Blossom,” a meditation on the whale:

© 1972 Little, Brown and Company, Inc.

For “If Ethyl Vanillon Be the Food of Love, Drink On,” about diet drinks:

© 1972 Little, Brown and Company, Inc.

For “The Madcap Zoologist,” about the odd animal names invented by Eve:

© 1972 Little, Brown and Company, Inc.

Finally, “The Moping Minstrel,” about a Bobby Cassidy-style TV star:

© 1972 Little, Brown and Company, Inc.

Random thoughts on the latest burst of craziness from Michael Kupperman:

1. Going to full color has altered the character of Kupperman’s work, though it is no less intense.  One of the qualities of his comics that gives them their greatest impact is how they are simply an unrelenting visual and textual assault on the senses (and sensibilities!).  Earlier in his career, he achieved this effect through the sheer density of his crosshatching.  It gave a weight to his ridiculous gags that pulled the reader down into the panel, preventing them from simply racing from gag to gag.  Of course, that approach was incredibly labor-intensive, and not just for him.  Indeed, while Kupperman’s first collection of comics, SNAKE ‘N BACON’S CARTOON CABARET, was one of the best books of the last decade, it was also an exhausting reading experience.

His use of color grounds his work now in a similar, but slightly less exhausting manner.  Color is his new crosshatching as a device with which to club the reader over the head.  It’s also consistent with the way he’s always made comics in that its use evokes older (and weird comics).  Instead of bringing to mind old black & white stories and advertisements, the color THRIZZLE now mines the endless well of cheap, awful color comics.  The color scheme is so heavily into the CMYK scheme of old four-color comics, and employed so luridly, that the reader is once again forced to dig into each panel slowly.

2. This approach also allows Kupperman to dig into the sort of parodies he avoided before.  He dips into the scatological well with “Willie Wealth”, a Richie Rich spoof centering around the old idea of Richie and his family eating their wealth, only to have it painfully brought home to them that it would only cause intestinal blockage.  This is pretty clearly a strip where Kupperman came up with a conceptual punchline first and worked backwards to create the parody.

3. Kupperman can jab you with a quick joke like a fake ad or a cover for an old comic called “Cowboy Oscar Wilde”, or he can wrestle you into submission with a shaggy dog joke.  “All About Drainage” reminds me a bit of his old story “Have You Ever Tasted Adventure In Your Own Bathtub” in that it goes on and on about a relentlessly dull subject (toilet training or drainage) and builds an elaborate structure on top of it.  Along the way, he throws in non sequitur after non sequitur (like the King of England needing drainage for his beard when it got full of soup).  The Twain & Einstein stories also fit in this category, as Kupperman has long gone beyond their initial one-joke premise (they’re drawn almost exactly alike) and into bizarre territory like being the stars of a Tony Scott action-epic not unlike ARMAGEDDON.

4. The best feature in the issue was the latest “Jungle Princess” adventure, which combined the usual jungle girl mayhem with the sort of action one would see in a 1950s romance comic.  Indeed, Kupperman played up Jungle Princess’s pouty, full lips (complete with bright red lipstick) like an Al Hartley-illustrated issue of PATSY WALKER.  Throwing in the absurd fashion magazine sequences and revealing that this was the true source of villainy were twin strokes of genius.  With these subtle changes, Kupperman has managed to keep the top humor periodical fresh.

Blood Moon: A Love Story
By Ron LeBrasseur

http://home.earthlink.net/~ronlebrasseur/

At the beginning of Minis Monday’s Second Season a month ago, I lamented the fact that I didn’t get to meet nearly enough of the new-to-me cartoonists at the most recent Maine Comics Arts Festival, let alone gather their wares. Naturally since then I’ve been doing nothing but reviewing the work of new-to-me cartoonists.

Not that Ron LeBrasseur was entirely unfamiliar before. I’d already gotten to commend his “pleasantly riotous” romp of “Too Many Robots!” from Inbound #2, one of the house anthologies from the Boston Comics Roundtable (although I regret pigeonholing it as a “kids’ story.” The lil’ shavers will, of course, dig the frantic action, the child protagonist, the goofy scientist and the various and cleverly modeled robots, for which LeBrasseur gives credit to Harrison King. At the same time, few of the kids are gonna appreciate the genre-busting elements of the tale let alone the joke “Way to totally miss the ‘getting ready’ montage, there!”).

LeBrasseur also had comics in Inbound #4, the issue devoted to the history of Boston. He provided the corroborating visuals for Roundtable founder Dave Kender’s account of living in Cambridge without being associated with Harvard, an existence akin to the Buddhist state of being “in but not of ” the world. He also condensed into five very solid if breakneck pages an account of “The Lost Pirate Treasure of Dungeon Rock” from origins in oddness and lore through haunted guardians, land exchanges, spiritualists and tourist traps to the present-day status of the public park, the Lynn Woods.

Both “Too Many Robots” and “The Lost Pirate Treasure …” appear in LeBrasseur’s pamphlet comic Blood Moon: A Love Story. The titular story concerns itself with the doomed romance between a saxophone-playing vampire with a trumpet-playing nurse, so if you’re following along on your the Topical Character-O-Meter, the comic already boasts bloodsuckers, sweethearts, musicians, pirates, pirate ghosts, automatons, plucky heroes and mad scientists.

To which we must add stories of Drake Marvel, a hard boiled private eye who, on behalf of his alien client, gets mixed up in a spacecraft-jacking; an evildoers job fair in which two slackers pursue a career in a gang of clown criminals; and the origins of “The Wandering Homunculus” as he is liberated from his natal vat. That, ladies and gentleman, is covering a lot of genre bases. (Where are the dinosaurs?)

LeBrassuer has an open, very accessible cartoon style. It will appeal, as do his topics, to children although again, some of the humor will remain the province of adults (Clarabellum, “The Clown Prince of Evil Clowns,” herds his newest employees to their company car with “Come, my stretch limo awaits!” even as his tiny circus car sits curbside). Situations are dynamic (LeBrasseur even makes property transfer as lively as possible), with spirited characters drawn in an animated line. Genre conventions as well as uncharacteristic twists get their due within short stories made shorter still by the territory traversed.

LeBrasseur’s visual style proves amenable and congenial no matter the dictates of subject.  In the context of kids’ commercial comics these days, it is entirely professional. As such, much of Blood Moon would make for a terrific resume.  But as individual craftwork, such careful considered transmissions can sacrifice an element of personal expressiveness, an element that, for instance, enlivens his homunculus tale. There a looser, more spontaneous line brought a handcrafted and evocative sense to the proceedings: At the opening, bendy buildings give the impression of formidable height; at the conclusion, bowed trees stretching away in panorama give a sense of the intimidating vastness of life outside the container. In contrast with the rest of the book, the story’s stark black and white and tentative shading provided a warm, human touch to the machine-smoothed shades that prevail elsewhere. That tale, done in 2001, testifies that LeBrasseur may have moved along technically, but its hand-wrought funkiness retains a charm in this company.

L.Nichols is a young artist who’s aggressively pushing the boundaries of her talent and style.  While she still does a number of standard, quotidian autobio strips, Nichols has started to expand her range into fiction, abstract comics and comics-as-poetry as well.  Her line ranges from naturalistic to scratchy to blotchy to cartoony to grotesque, trying out tricks like gray-scaling, zip-a-tone and even a clear-line style.  The first volume of RADIO GHOSTS sees her working in full color in a manner clearly designed to get across madness as well as tell a story.  She’s leaving no stone unturned as a developing cartoonist, slowly but surely finding her voice as she becomes more comfortable working in a number of different styles.

JUMBLY JUNKERY #9 is the most impressive issue of this grab-bag collection to date.  Her self-caricature (a ragdoll with button eyes) remains one of the more clever such visual representatives in comics, though I think her best comics tend to be non-autobiographical.  Take “Empire” , for example.  It’s one of Nichols’ variations on a distopian fairy tale, one where a civilization fades while no one pays attention.  It’s told in a highly-stylized manner, invoking cave drawings and other primitive but highly expressive mark-making.  In just one page, Nichols gives the reader a powerful set of images; it’s less a story than a brief illustration of decay.

“Tele-Misconceptions”, a story about her childhood, is marked by the kind of blotchy art a child would make.  A former engineering student, Nichols makes great use of equations and diagrams in her comics, for both comic and dramatic purposes.  A diagram is a quick, abstracted way to describe a set of relationships in time and/or space, and their relationship to comics is quite clear.  “SNR” is an exercise in comics-as-poetry, merging the rhythms of spoken-word poetry with the rhythms of comics.  Here, Nichols uses negative space as a storytelling device, equating it with the sort of total sensory deprivation that she craves.

RADIO GHOSTS draws the reader in when a ship sails in, only to have its crew quickly hustled along so as to avoid the poison gases that form when the sun goes down.  That immediately inspires curiosity, especially when presented with the vivid and at times deliberately garish color scheme that Nichols lays out here.  The color gives the entire strip a hyper-intense, almost nightmarish quality.  After that jarring introduction, the premise of the story is revealed: the visitors are a team looking to do research into a particular malady treated at what turns out to be a clinic.

The clinic treats “Virtual Sickness”, an affliction wherein one’s consciousness becomes entirely digital and leaves the body behind.  The problem is that those afflicted go insane and flood communication networks with noise.  This first volume sets up the essential conflict of the series: can the afflicted only be brought back to their bodies through pain because they’re so disconnected, or can prior connections inspire them?  Nichols paints a grim picture of sadistic scientists working for what they consider to be the common good and isn’t all that subtle about it, but I’m curious to see how she explores the inherent dangers of abuse in scientific research, along with the ways in which the mind and body interact.