Into the Black/A Garden by the Sea by Cicy Reay & Benji Goldsmith
A pair of riso comics from UK-based Black Lodge Press.
Into the Black is by Reay & Goldsmith, no indication how they divide up the work. It's an abstract sci-fi piece, its narrative not especially clear beyond an apocalyptic vibe. Not much to it in the end, but there's some nice imagery, I particularly like the pages crammed with lots of small, dark panels.
More recent is
A Garden by the Sea, by Reay on his own. This is a set of comics dedicated to Derek Jarman, with a small quote from Jarman's diaries on the lefthand page and then a page of comics inspired by the quote on the right. It's really well done, with Reay striking a nice balance between illustrating some of the key imagery - and there are some really choice images, Jarman being a great visual writer - and evoking the general mood and idea of the text. It's all in blue riso with judicious dots of red. As in the previous book, the cartooning is very clear and clean, simple almost, but the rhythm is where it excels, the way the page is broken down into all these little panels, each one a seemingly simple image on its own but adding up to a very evocative whole. Those not coming to this with a love of Jarman's work may not get as much out of it as I did but it's definitely quite strong and easily transcends what could have been a simple fanzine project.
Squeak the Mouse by Massimo Mattioli
An infamous pair of books by this Italian cartoonist, the inspiration for the Simpson's Itchy & Scratchy, combining old cat-and-mouse animation with the sleaziest 70s exploitation/slasher B-movies. The result is this grotesque, joyously nasty parody, a gory tits-and-dismemberment shlock-fest delivered with a cheery smile throughout - like Al Columbia with more colors but less self-awareness. A cat chases and eventually kills a mouse, but the mouse returns in increasingly degraded forms, like one of those immortal movie serial killers who's always back for the sequel, and begins ruthlessly killing any cat he can find, working his way towards revenge on the one who did him in. I'm not sure it has a point, and Mattioli seems to delight too much in the questionable conventions of the horror he's satirizing, particularly in terms of attitudes towards women. But if you can look past that - a tall order for sure at times - there's a pure formalist delight and ingenuity in the art, in the way its 12-panel grids move, in the unrelenting rhythms of its horrifying gags, that makes it hard to dismiss.
Superwest by Massimo Mattioli
More Mattioli, this one a bit more free-form, satirizing American superheroes this time, with a cavalier "hero" who always seems to jump into action a bit too late and whose solutions are often as bad as the problem. The main appeal here is the color: Mattioli uses blocks of bright primary colors but applies them unevenly, leaving large swaths of many panels in black and white, and others half-covered in a solid blue rectangle or a splash of red. Again, the content alternates between ghoulishly funny and genuinely horrifying, but it looks consistently amazing, using color and its absence to abstract and play havoc with the storytelling.
Over Easy by Mimi Pond
I mistakenly read the sequel to this,
The Customer Is Always Wrong, first, without realizing it was a sequel, and it was pretty solidly enjoyable. This is a good brisk read too, covering the first half of Pond's tenure as a waitress at a diner seemingly populated entirely with memorable oddball characters. I think this suffers a bit in comparison to the sequel, though also earns some benefit of the doubt from having read it in reverse order. The second book eventually punctures some of Pond's literary mythologizing of these characters by going to some darker, sadder places, giving that book a bit of an edge that this one is lacking. She's in full-on mythologizing mode here, as she herself would probably admit: portraying herself as a naive art-school dropout who's looking at everything through the lens of fiction and drama, seeing all the people around her, and maybe even herself, as playing roles in a story. It's still fun: she's a sharp writer and observer and her breezy cartooning adds to the rich characterization. But without the second book's somewhat richer shadings, it basically just adds up to a fun time in the company of some interesting people.
Map of My Heart by John Porcellino
Nice collection of most of King-Cat #51-61, spanning 1996-2002. An active time in Porcellino's life: in the first issue here he announces he's gotten married and is moving, in between he gets badly ill, gets divorced, then in the last issue he's getting married (to someone new) and moving again. The turmoil, and the depression/anxiety/sorrow, are obvious, though even as his life seems to be repeatedly turning upside-down, Porcellino's comics remain mostly quiet, still, and gently observational. I like that Porcellino's zines always feel like real fragments of his life - text pieces, letters, dreams, memories, music he's listening to, walks he's taken recently - so this format, collecting basically the full contents of these issues cover to cover, is perfect for his work. (All that's left out are the pieces collected elsewhere for various reasons, like the stories that made up his
Perfect Example GN.) Lots of good stuff here, notably a pair of evocative stories about his childhood. There are also plenty of Porcellino's short, poetic pieces, pithy little odes to nature or emotionally resonant moments captured with a few precise words and a handful of simple lines. Porcellino's art is so basic that it's amazing that it works so well, but it does. Only occasionally does it betray him - the otherwise excellent issue-length "Forgiveness," about his boyhood guilt over hurting animals, contains a couple of baffling pages where the simplicity of the art actually obscures what's even happening. Elsewhere, though, there's something so amazing about the way he can let a few lines stand in for a landscape and it somehow looks *beautiful* and haunting.
Coober Skeber #2: Marvel Benefit Issue by various
Famed late 90s anthology in which a bunch of indie creators take on a then-bankrupt Marvel. Feels like there was a long-ass time where so much of alt/indie comics was a response to the superhero mainstream; so many chips on shoulders about not being part of the Big Two. I'm glad we've moved on past that for the most part nowadays. Most of this is as bad and forgettable as any random mediocre superhero comic. A few pieces stand out. I usually don't care at all for James Kochalka but his "Hulk fights rain" comic is justifiably the most famous few pages here, so good and concise and funny that Marvel even got him to redraw it and publish it with them proper. Brian Ralph's wordless Silver Surfer/Man-Thing story is the only other piece that seems like it could work as a "real" superhero comic - not much narrative but Ralph has serious action chops and his drawings have the appropriate Kirbyesque sense of drama. Meanwhile guys like Brinkman and Chippendale (and they're all guys here too, another sign of the 90s) do their usual thing with only the slightest concession to the genre, which is probably why their contributions work too. Brinkman's goofy/menacing vision of Warlock from New Mutants is great. Everything else is pretty lame - Ron Rege is notable for writing a Spider-Man whinier than even the whiniest Spider-Man book Marvel itself ever put out.
Taboo by various
Steve Bissette's late 80s/early 90s horror anthology, most famous for serializing
From Hell, as well as
Lost Girls and Jeff Nicholson's
Through the Habitrails. The magazine as a whole is pretty overshadowed by
From Hell - what comic could stand up to being the other content in a book that regularly printed new 40-page installments of one of comics' best works? It also struggled frequently with censorship and sales, especially as stories serialized here started getting collected elsewhere, making the actual issues seem less necessary. So I'm not sure how much rep this book has now beyond its handful of famous works, but it seems like something quite special to me even beyond those pieces. The book's focus and aesthetic vision is really impressive, even as it covers a tremendous amount of ground - it's all unified by the idea of exploring horror through multiple lenses, bringing together post-EC traditional horror with more modern underground and 80s alternative influences.
Lots of good stuff here. Charles Burns is represented by some early work, including a forerunner to
Black Hole and an experiment with photo comics (!). Tim Lucas' "Throat Sprockets" is an intense examination of obsessive fetishization, with a third chapter, drawn by David Lloyd, that's especially harrowing and memorable (even though it cuts off pretty abruptly. Eddie Campbell has a few pages about a real Australian unsolved murder, taking a tone that's at once mournful and darkly comic. In the 1st issue, Bill Wray draws a really rich psychological short by Alan Moore, about a morbidly alluring game show where the "winners" spin a wheel to pick their method of death. Jodorowsky and Moebius' "Eyes of the Cat," which patiently builds to a bleak punchline, gets translated and reprinted. Richard Sala, Greg Capullo, Michael Zulli, Phil Hester, Al Columbia, and Charles Vess all show up here, showcasing the range of aesthetics that fit within these overstuffed pages.
Of course plenty of stuff doesn't work, especially a lot of the more undergound-influenced pieces, with S. Clay Wilson's vile, misogynistic street scenes being the worst offender. Some of that attitude unfortunately shows up in "Habitrails" too. I had remembered the blistering corporate satire from when I read the GN long ago, and that material is still as effective as ever on re-read, claustrophobic and depressing, but I'd forgotten how many of the stories were about the narrator's dating woes, and those do not hold up well at all. I also found my eyes glazing over for every Rick Grimes story - an obscure artist, now unGoogleable thanks to
Walking Dead, he's in every issue of this thing for some reason and his work, while undeniably very unique, is also completely unreadable. Eventually, after 7 issues, Taboo folded, plagued by censorship and low sales; it returned at Kitchen Sink Press in 1995 for 2 more issues that have less of an overriding vision and simply collect a bunch of material orphaned by the series' cancellation. Even with all its problems, this is a magazine with big chunks of
From Hell and
Lost Girls, both of which are great, and a ton of inventive, creepy, memorable horror shorts crammed into every issue. Well worth a look even now.
Wizzywig by Ed Piskor
Piskor's first GN as writer/artist is a pretty solid debut, an entertaining fictional account of a young geek who, at the dawn of the Internet Age, half-accidentally gets a reputation as the most feared hacker in the nation. It's interesting to see that Piskor's storytelling style in this fictional story is similar to his later documentary comics - as in
Hip Hop Family Tree and
X-Men: Grand Design there's obviously a ton of research behind this, and the story flows at a brisk clip, with an emphasis on plot over internality. It juggles a lot of big ideas - about media hysteria, the regulation of technology, popular misunderstandings of science and computers, and the ways in which captialism and corporations interact with and drive the law to maintain their control. Unlike in his later works, Piskor's storytelling is a bit of a rough fit for this material, making it tough to get too close to the main character. Piskor is obviously way more interested in exploring all the nuances of the weird 90s culture around computers and the fledgling Internet. Pretty fun and engaging anyway.