A thought recurred multiple times while absorbing English indie cartoonist Mark Stafford’s Salmonella Smorgasbord: this 7" x 10" softcover is a nicely shaped retrospective of the kind of career that really isn’t supposed to exist anymore. Cartooning is no business for the faint of heart, on any side of the pond. The world in which a person could make a decent living drawing what they want in a manner of their own choosing is long gone, or near enough as to be on the critical care list.
There’s an extended interview in the back of the book, conducted by Jason Atomic, in which Stafford goes down the length and breadth of his career to date. It's an excellent overview, both as a pragmatic walking tour of a rather daunting individual corpus, as well as a more circumspect portrait of a cartooning culture not quite faded in the distant rearview. “I’m not that interested in doing stuff with other people’s IP,” Stafford states, “which seems to put me at odds with much of modern culture, and a lot of other comics artists.” More to the point, it would seem to put him at odds with the explicit goals of any kind of career in the arts in the 21st century. And yet he seems to have done fairly well for himself, at least in terms of keeping at the wheel long enough to build an individual oeuvre, without any stints drawing Batman or doing storyboard work for video game studios, or whatever it is that actually puts money in artists’ pockets these days. Don’t ask me how artists make money. I have no money.
Salmonella Smorgasbord comes to us courtesy of another marvel of the age: that is, crowdfunding. Although Soaring Penguin Press is the listed publisher of the present volume, the book exists thanks to the generosity of the patrons listed on the final three pages. Scanning over the names I see a few familiar-- why, there’s Kieron Gillen, and Bob Fingerman, and Hunt Emerson too. Fraser Geesin, Gary Spencer Millidge, D’Israeli, and Shelly Bond are there, and Gene Ha. Hey, there's TCJ’s own Hagai Palevsky. Stafford's attitude appears to be as much genial amazement as anything else regarding this support. I’m generalizing here, but reading over the interviews and testimonies, he seems as surprised as anyone to find himself in the capacity of constructing a rather enviably stacked retrospective.
So what actually does Mark Stafford do? I admit to being only vaguely up on his work prior to this volume skipping over the transom. Of course, once I flipped through I remembered seeing him here and there over the years. One of the first stories in the book is “Clash of the Behemoths,” a rather ambitious exercise in lush color and action composition, built around a curt conversation between two competing kaiju monsters, taking turns destroying a city and massacring scores of puny humans. Roger is supposed to have the day all to himself: “My gig, as I understand it,” he says, surveying the rubble. “Booked it ages back... first Thursday in July.” To which Julian replies, “It’s Wednesday.” And then, after this mortifying exchange, we pull out and take a closer look at the damage, scores of people left dead and dying in the wake. There’s a push and a pull between genuine horror and awkward slice-of-life, familiar to anyone who’s ever watched British comedy programs where the punchlines are terrible people doing awful things to one another without a laugh track to soften the blow. A little later in the book, “Internal” presents the inner monologue of a serial killer in the vein of Jason Voorhees. “I should be less judgmental,” the killer muses as he graphically murders two people with a machete. “More forgiving. Open minded.”
The first real comparison that leapt to my mind, in terms of presenting an actionable corollary, was Evan Dorkin. Another cartoonist who has remained stridently independent despite the dwindling infrastructure of support for independent cartooning, yes, but more to the point: another artist fixated on closely rendered pitch black genre spoof that owes as much to Will Elder’s density as anything else. There’s a familiar looking devil figure who pops up in a few of Stafford's horror-themed illustrations, and he’s even holding a puppet now and then, so you can see from whence the association emerged. But there’s also a fair amount of Dave Cooper here as well, rounded fleshy figures preternaturally chipper prior to some manner of terrible occurrence.
One of the best pieces in the book, “Accentuate the Positive,” uses horrific irony to great effect. A series of self-actualization bromides are placed over scenes of stark brutality. “I grow in positive ways from each challenge I face in life...” says the blindfolded man in front of the firing squad. “Failure doesn’t exist unless I choose to let it...” says the person plunging to their death from the top of a burning skyscraper. “Every moment I am present and conscious of life’s endless treasures...” says the woman cowering in front of her abusive husband. A kneeling prisoner with a canvass bag locked around their head ends the litany with the statement “Today I will show the world all the love in my heart.” Truly memorable, and memorably upsetting. Stafford’s gorgeous drawings, stylistically polyglot and pleasing even when depicting true monstrosity, communicate horror with bleak irony. A leavening humor that burns on the way down.
“Some of the best, most disturbing horror comes about when creators can’t keep a straight face,” notes David Hine in his foreword. Hine is one of two collaborators (several joint shorts are reprinted here in full) which Stafford has pressganged into text pieces for the present volume; concluding remarks are left to Bryan Talbot, with whom Stafford collaborated on the irregularly published 2007-15 series Cherubs! Hine’s words seem an apt descriptor as to just what Stafford is doing here. He can be both funny and scary, and the former doesn’t seem to interfere at all with the latter. If the early stories I mentioned keep their tongue firmly in cheek, there’s nothing at all facetious about later entries like “Pretty Polly” or “The Unquiet Grave,” genuinely unsettling stories about haunted revenants.
Based on his own testimony, one of the pieces here of which the artist seems most proud is “Kangkangee Blues,” a romantic fable that came about as a result of a cultural exchange program between the British Counsel and the Arts Counsel of Korea - the kind of interesting, substantive arts initiative you wish every decent artist could find in this day and age. If you want to see if Salmonella Smorgasbord is your bag, you could do worse when you find the book than to flip to this piece, towards the end. From horror and whimsy to romance, Stafford is a surprisingly versatile style. Every iconoclast should be lucky enough to find so gratifying an anthology as this.
