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Comic and
Zine reviews
Mark Pawson
First up in this issue's selection of reading material you definitely
won't find in the local W H Smiths is Crap Hound - a picture
book for discussion and activity, 92 pages crammed-full of clip-art culled
from innumerable sources and several decades worth of graphic imagery.
Crap Hound #6's themes are the inevitable - death, the inescapable - Telephones,
and the indispensable - scissors. For each theme there's pages
of painstakingly arranged image tableaux, not an inch of valuable space
has been wasted or left empty - look closer and you'll realise
that it's all assembled manually with scissors and glue - not
a scanner or Mac in sight, no wonder it took two years for this issue
to see the light of day. Crap Hound is the equivalent of a Dover pictorial
Sourcebook for the post-slacker zine-producing generation. Seeing Crap
Hound for the first time is a visual onslaught, I can imagine being totally
overwhelmed by it and being deterred from ever picking up scissors and
a glue stick again. Crap Hound is the image bankers' image bank,
all your image requirements are in here, leaving us to play spot-the-source.
I'd advise buying three copies, one to cut up and use, one to file
away intact and another to lend to friends which you'll never see
again.
Book Happy and Comic Book Heaven both take forgotten and
neglected books of yester year for their subject matter, they have lots
of fun rescuing and rehabilitating old books that most people would be
happy to forget ever existed.
If you like the idea of discovering cheap secondhand books, but are put
off by dusty bookshops with strange odours and equally strange proprietors,
then help is at hand. Book Happy is the latest publication from Donna
'Kooks' Kossy, your guide to the world of incredibly strange
books and loopy literature - none of which is ever likely to appear
in 'collectors price guides'. In Book Happy #4 Donna owns up
to her internet book auction addiction, she's reached the stage of
checking several times a day to see if she's still in the bidding,
'Epidemic of Bad Drug Books' looks at the genre of 1950's
and 1960's drugs education/exploitation titles, there's a great
article about Theodore L Shaw's thirty year war against Art Critics,
during which he published eight books with titles such as 'Precious
Rubbish' and 'That Obnoxious Fraud: The Art Critic'. In
'Book Hell - where bad books go when they die' Dan Kelly
tells how he staked out and tracked down a cache of serial killer and
true crime books. There's plenty more on self-published autobiographies
and the worst science fiction novel ever written. Get Book Happy - where
enjoying cheap books doesn't mean getting the latest bestseller for
50% off at the local supermarket.
Comic Book Heaven celebrates the world of weird and absurd comics
from the '50s/ '60s. A fanzine that revels in the sheer ridiculousness
of these empty-headed entertainments! This issue has Advice for Girls,
some spurious Helpful Hints Ripped From the Pages of Actual Romance Comics
of the Fifties, a hilarious section of plot summaries from some of the
most bonkers comic book stories ever! Facts about Commies is a collection
of words of cold-war wisdom from fightin' men in the comics.
The three page list of comics with the word 'Death' in the title
is wonderful found poetry, and deserves to be heard recited -
Death Relay
Death Rides High!
Death rides the 5:15
Death Rides the Guided Missile
Death rides the Iron Horse!
Death Rides the Rails
Death Rides the Stagecoach!
Death Rides the Storm!
Death ridge!
Death Rises Out of the Sea!
After two magazines devoted to old books what next? How about two comic
books about Art Students...
Art School Superstars by Grennan & Sperandio and Meet the
Art Students by Les Coleman are both collections of art student portraits,
they approach similar subject matter from different continents and vastly
different perspectives.
Grennan & Sperandio interviewed students at the School of the Museum
of Fine Arts Boston, and then selected sound bites to represent them and
accompany their portraits. The 28 privileged SFMA students are happy and
proud to tell us what they like and how long they have been at the school,
they're all-positive all the time. Grennan & Sperandio's
full page portraits of photogenic students, in flat bright colours adorned
with speech bubbles look like a collaboration between oral historian Studs
Terkel and Andy Warhol's portrait screenprints.
Les Coleman's caricature observations are based on his 20 years lecturing
experience in art colleges around the UK. Drawn on endless train journeys
to and from Newcastle and printed in graphite grey on newsprint, they
are partly intended as a critique of the educational establishments funding
cuts, his class of forty-eight are each represented with a portrait, quote
and title that gently mocks and sums them up. Immediately recognisable
characters include: 'inner conviction', 'traditional values',
'the new philistinism' and 'art rage'. Compared with
the Americans, British art students are mostly ambivalent, most of the
time. With his wobbly lines courtesy of British Rail rather then Grennan
& Sperandio's smooth-rough line style achieved via custom computer
software programme, Coleman's student portraits say much more in
less space, than Grennan & Sperandio's, and as inert and lacking
motivation as they are I somehow have more time for the hapless British
Students than the over-confident Americans, one of whom gladly admits
"I'm studying Art because I didn't do well in Physics".
Born out of Manhattan's lower east side residents struggle for affordable
housing and the right to exist free from police and state oppression World
War 3 Illustrated's commitment and political agenda remains just
as sharp and focussed as ever after a decade of publishing. Issue #27's
theme is Land and Liberty, with comic strips and illustrated stories about
Shell Oil in Nigeria, M11 Road Protests in East London, the historical
struggle over who controls the land in Mexico, Reclaim the Streets New
York style and the fight to keep a lower east side neighbourhood community
centre. Whilst the strongest work in WW3I will always be the stark agitational
graphics of founders Seth Tobocman and Peter Kuper - equally suitable
for a spraypainted wall or the printed page, the editorial board put their
beliefs into practice by setting up workshops and playing an active part
in community education programmes, thus nurturing new artists and writers
and providing a forum for them to see their work in print.
Mentioned briefly last time, and on comic shop shelves now is the reissued
EC comic 'people searching for peace of mind through Psychoanalysis',
truly one of the unlikeliest comics ever published. Each issue has three,
long, inaction-packed on the couch strips. Speech balloons take up so
much of the frame that the patients seem obliged to lie down on the psychiatrists
couch at bottom of the picture. Each session opens with 'The Psychiatrist',
an archetypal pipe-smoking authority figure whose name we never learn,
opening the case notes for a monthly session with one of his patients.
How many therapy sessions does it take? As many as the subject's
problems take before they are resolved when 'The Psychiatrist'
pronounces "We've gone as far as we can! You know the cure of
your problem! You know the facts about yourself! Do you think you can
go ahead now without my help!" and then proceeds off to write 'therapy
completed' on the case notes and thus closes the file. Psychoanalysis
doesn't go so far as to have a big red star on the cover saying "All-Freudian"
but it may as well have done.
Robot Publishing Co put out a series of two-dollar minicomics which they
call 'lunchtime stories'. I've seen two so far, The
Envelope Licker and Binibus Barnabus - they're both
printed in stylish midnight blue, with oh-so-strokeable matt-laminated
covers.
The Envelope Licker by Ante Vukojevich is a meandering tale of
a family equally blessed and cursed with talented tongues. After a wild
youth the youngest settles down and makes his fortune as a champion envelope
licker, buys the company, then looses it due to modern envelope-sealing
technology, then he starts a new life and finds love with a stamp-collector
who works at the post office. In Binibus Barnabus by Robert Goodin, we
meet Binibus Barnabus an everyday stevedore whose life revolves around
working at the dock, the baseball game, and dreams of a brand new cadillac.
One day at work he sees a "mer-mare" in the docks, falls in
love and jumps into the water after her: turned into a merman when they
kiss, we leave them happily swimming off to a new life together, far away
from the docks of New York.
There's probably more 'lunchtime stories' out by now, if
they are as enjoyable as these two they're well worth looking out
for.
Beer Frame - the Journal of Inconspicuous Comsumption, a consumer
products review magazine that asks 'What the heck is this? rather
than just 'Which?' Raising product reviewing to an artform,
Paul Lukas searches for the most unlikely and superfluous products he
can find on supermarket shelves. In Beer Frame #9 we get a round up of
products with suggestive names: Mr Long Candy Bars, Cock Soup and Meat
Sticks - they're all real, with photos to prove it, this could
easily turn into a long-running feature. We also learn more than anyone
really needs to know about pizza box lid supports - those little white
plastic three-legged things that look like dollshouse coffee tables. Beer
Frame celebrates their status as functional yet innocuous items that we
rarely pay attention to, and warns they could disappear forever if pizza
companies upgrade their cardboard boxes. There's also a look at advertising
characters who take their responsibilities to the extreme, they don't
just want to publicise their products, they want to be eaten themselves!
- think of the old Birds Eye Country Club adverts with skinny peas
and wrinkly runner beans being turned away at the gates as buffed beans
parade around inside.
(Reviewer's declaration of interest: a Heinz Meat-Free Ravioli label
which I sent to Beer Frame is mentioned on page 9)
Very little is known about Mexican Masked Wrestlers outside their homeland,
From Parts Unknown, the mexi-mask-pop-culture magazine! is a great
way to find out more. The tag-team of masked editors have plenty of fun
putting their magazine together. From Parts Unknown #5 has articles and
interviews with Blue Demon, Zebra Kid and Super Astro, there's a
mexican tour diary, behind the scenes report with the men who make the
masks, japanese masked wrestlers, a comic art gallery with some esteemed
contributors and there's plenty on silver-masked El Santo the most
famous lucha libre star of all, veteran of innumerable Z-grade films and
his own series of photonovellas. From Parts Unknown keeps the photonovella
tradition alive and up to date with their Stacked Grapplers supplement.
Contact Details
Comic Book Heaven #1
36 pgs $1.95
SLG Publishing
http://members.aol.com/scottjava
Crap Hound #6
A4 92pgs $6+p/p
PO Box 40373, Portland )OR 97240-0373 USA
available in UK
from disinfotainment
Book Happy #4
A4 36pgs £3.00
Donna Kossy, PO Box 86663, Portland OR 97286 USA
http://clubs.yahoo.com/clubs/bookhell
KOOKS WEBSITE?
www.teleport.com/~dkossy/
giftshop.html
available in UK
from disinfotainment
From Parts Unknown #5 A4 £2.95
PO Box 54-1133, Waltham, MA 02454-1133 USA
http://people.ne.mediaone.net/
frompartsunknown
available in UK
from disinfotainment
Beer Frame #9
A5 48 pgs £1.95
160 St john's Place Brooklyn NY 11217 USA
http://www.core77.com/inconspicuous/index.html
available in UK
from disinfotainment
Psychoanalysis #3
$2.50
gemstone PO Box 469 West plains, MO 65775-0469 USA
http://www.gemstonepub.com
Meet the Art Students
£4.95
Arc Publications, Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road, Todmorden, Lancs, OL14
6DA
Art School Superstars
A4 28pgs No Price Given
Fantagraphics Books 7563 Lake City NE Seattle WA 98115 USA
Lunchtime Stories
$2.00
Robot Publishing Co, 542 s.los robles, pasadena, CA 91101
http://www.robotpub.com
World War 3 Illustrated #27
68 pgs $3.50
PO Box 20777, Thompkins Sq Sta, NY NY 10009 USA
available in UK from AK distribution POBox 12766, Edinburgh EH8 9YE
http://www.akuk.com
and Tower Records
disinfotainment
PO Box 664 London E3 4QR www.mpawson.demon.co.uk
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