Comics Journal 126

A
Philistine in Yuppie Land

THE MAGAZINE OF NEWS & CRITICISM
No. 126 $3.50 $ 5 . 2 5 in C a n a d a
THE UNSEEN CRUMB

O M I C S C O M I C S
"...An idealistic artist whose instincts led him to admire Walt Kelly as much as Caravaggio [becomes] a prematurely cynicaland, not coincidental^, definitivecommentator on '60s counterculture. 70s sell-absorption, and '80s aimlessness.. .For the roots of that radicalism, THE COMPLETE CRUMB COMICS is an indispensable and beautifully executed effort." Ken Tucker, LA. Weekly "No one's library can be without it." Alan Moore
Y &WO PI ! flU BUT ; .*s>- T E SOME
VOLUME ONE
A unique c h a n c e to s e e t h e development of o n e of t h e greatest cartoonists of all time, with 127 pages of art from Crumb's earliest surviving sketchbooks, including 9 0 pages never before reprinted. T h e origins of Fritz t h e Cat, a brand new cover by Crumb, a n d a fascinating in-depth introduction by Marty Pahls.
VOLUME TWO
A never before s e e n , 4 0 - p a g e Fritz the Cat story, t h e most complete collection of his " R o b e r t a S m i t h , Office G i r l " strips ever, a 16-page color section, and t h e long out-of-print R. Crumb's Comics and Stories (the notorious Fritz incest story). Plus another new cover and biographical introduc tion.
VOLUME THREE
The Complete Crumb gets serious, with t h e Fritz stories that made C r u m b famous, ultra-rare advertis ing art from Topps, over 3 0 greeting cards from American Greetings, never before reprinted articles from Help! and Yell, a 16-page color section, and four pages of a n unfinished Fritz t h e Cat strip never before published anywhere!
S e n d m e t h ef o l l o w i n g v o l u m e s of Complete Crumb Comics: Complete Crumb Comics One ( s o f t c o v e r ) f o r $ 1 3 . 5 0 Complete Crumb Comics One ( h a r d c o v e r , u n s i g n e d ) f o r $38.00 Complete Crumb Comics Two ( s o f t c o v e r ) f o r $ 1 5 . 5 0 Complete Crumb Comics Two ( h a r d c o v e r , u n s i g n e d ) f o r $38.00 Complete Crumb Comics Two (hardcover, s i g n e d ) for $ 4 8 . 0 0 Complete Crumb Comics Three ( s o f t c o v e r ) f o r $ 1 5 . 5 0 Complete Crumb Comics Three ( h a r d c o v e r , u n s i g n e d ) f o r $38.00 Complete Crumb Comics Three ( h a r d c o v e r , s i g n e d ) f o r $48.00 All artwork 1988 R. Crumb
Send to: FANTAGRAPHICS B O O K s , 1800 Bridgegate St., Suite #101, Westlake Village, California 91361
INTERVIEW
60
THE MAGAZINE OF NEWS & CRITICISM Number 126 January 1989
JAIME, GILBERT AND MARIO HERNANDEZ

A discussion in four chapters that begins with the roots of Love & Rockets, proceeds to a study of technique, and closes with some of the most demanding opinions about the comics field you're likely to find all year.
EDITORIAL
5 15 35 37 43 50 53
HARLAN ELLISON RUNS AMOK

Gary Groth examines the inaccuracies, falsifications, and fatuousness in Ellison's Playboy article on comics.
NEWS
NEWSWATCH
Marvel sold; Comico to be distributed by DC; Lone Star stirs controversy; and more.
LETTERS
BLOOD & THUNDER
Scott Bieser answers his critics; plus com ments on Feiffer, Breathed, Steven Grant and Kenneth Smith.
FEATURES
CRITICISM
FUNNYBOOK ROULETTE
R. Fiore is back with a vengeance reviewing ffastfc Man, WIAbner, the John Lennon movie (!), and the Stay Awake record while getting in a few licks at Batman fans, the Comics Buyer's Guide, DC Comics, and our great statesman.
115
PIONEER PILLAGES AND PLUNDERS T H E PAST

Andrew Dagilis goes after all the product pushers who feel a need to fuck with things, from the profiteers colorizing old movies to the meddlers re-recording Charlie Parker, and specifically the cut and paste team at Pioneer Comics.
BIGOT-BASHING
Rob Rodi focuses on the art and politics of Strip AIDS USA and AARGH asking what's the benefit of benefit books?
PEKAR AND REALISM

Leon Hunt delves into the discourse about American Splendor
T H E CASE O F T H E ARGENTINE EXILES

Frank Stack follows the trail of displacement in Joe's Bar, Sinner, Deep City, and Ana.
123 3 135
SKETCHBOOK
Drawings imported from Milan by Joe's Bar and Sinner artist Jose Munoz.
COLUMNS
OPENING SHOTS
Kenneth Smith on Harlan Ellison's "Magical Egotism."
SOUTH OF OLYMPUS
"Skipping the Ideal for the Real" by Gil Kane.
Front cover by Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez.
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T H E C O M I C S JOURNAL 126 (ISSN 0194-7869). January 1989. Published monthly by Fantagraphics Books. Inc. Editorial and business offices 1800 Bridgegate. Suite 101. Westlake Village, CA 91361. The Comics Journal is copyrightfe>1988 Fantagraphics Books. Inc. Unauthorized reproduction of any ol its contents is prohibited by law. Second-class postage paid at Bethel. CT. and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Please send Form 3579 to T H E C O M I C S J O U R N A L . 1800 Bridgegate Street. Suite 0101. Westlake Village. CA 91361.
THE COMICS JOURNAL #126. January 1989
O P E N I N G
In mid-nineteenth-century France, an obscure clerk Vrain Lucas sold to an august and scholarly member of the Academy of Sciences a series of historical documents proving to any chauvinist's satisfaction the preeminence of la belle France: When Thales wanted political advice he wrote to King Ambigat of Gaul for it; the inhabitants of Gaul were praised by Alex ander the Great in a letter to Aristotle; the Druids were mentioned by the risen Lazarus in a letter to St. Peter; Mary Magdalene cor responded with the King of the Burgundians; Jesus Christ received a communication from Castor, a Gallic doctor. And all of these early correspondents used perfect French! Some of them even used paper containing a fleur de lis watermark. (Curtis D. MacDougall, Hoaxes) It was a vintage year for the dissipation of wits and the redistribution of fortunes, proving decisively that it is more than possible for some people to have Too Much Money for their Own Good. Playboy, in recent decades a top-dollar market, has taken to proving the same principle by attracting big-name authors who suffer from what Dylan Thomas termed "elephantiasis of the reputation." Latest of these dubious coups is a formula-piece by Harlan Ellison that, after all its huffing and puffing, manages to add virtually nothing to the popular lore about comics. Instead, it adds to the Literature of Ego another deliverance from an individual by now renowned as a writer Overfull of Himself. 'On a National Public Radio interview of November 8, 1988, Harlan Ellison understand ably complained about the typecasting that keeps him confined within the science-fiction ghetto. Not so understandablyunless you have fathomed the involutions of ego from which Ellison mightfarmore wisely have wished to be liberatedhe went on to compare his work with the accomplishments of the Latin American Magic Realists (Borges, Amado, Marquez, and others) and with the genius of Isaac Bashevis Singer as well. Mr. Ellison, I have lovingly read most of these authors and been perhaps even more impressed than you; but you, sir, are no Borges or Singer. Other American science-fiction authors or fantasistsfor whose books Ellison is not worthy to write a jacket blurb, even though (the politics and economics of bookselling being what they are) he hasmight well bear up under the com parison: at his best, R.A. Lafferty's great flights of wit and clarity can certainly measure up against Borges, Singer, and, for that matter Calvino and Lem. But Ellison's career and works are made of very different stuff, no matter how
S H O T S
implication, the trend that was about to precipitate a plunge into bathos, and added his own sober cackler to the inventory, which was then solemnly accepted as an art-form just as valid as its fellows. But this anomalous addition was patently not parallel with the others in the list, and is the reductio ad absurdum of what was already a howler of an ideathat the commer cial genres of American media-"product" are just as valid expressions of sublime spirituality as the Pantheon or Ether/Or. That one item is the erup tion of the whole list into overt self-parody, and Ellison bought the premise of the inventory and its kicker with truly radical gullibility. (Can you spot the Anomaly for yourself?) In all the intellectual smog of American media, breathes there a soul so supersaturated that he cannot recall having been assailed with the following formula ten times too many? While your back was turned, while you were busy fighting wars and codifying the rise 'n' fall of the Yuppie empire, comic books went whistling past puberty and reached adulthood.
heartfelt the homage he cares to pay to worldclass imagination. Ellison, erudite interpreter of comics to the Philistinesjust how low have the plebians sunk?puts this sort of hook on his formulaic Playboy article: you rube, you let your mother throw out all your comics, and today a prime item in a \fery Fine would be worth "six grand." Now here is a journalist's hook minutely designed to snag the rueful, materialistic subliminal-loser who is apparently Playboy's current demographic type. Because his mother threw out all his comics, ".. .this guy's kids never got to go to college": I believe a national writer of even ordinary acuity would be ashamed of this con trived lead-in, this clabbered plaque of cliches. Was not this obtuse reflection a lump of obviousness that wore out its welcome at comics conventions already two decades ago? Is is not a display of the delusions of consumerconsciousness at their apex of egocentric
Something's happening, and you don't know what it is, do you Mr. Jones? There is something ineffably sad about a writer who occasionally has done something so right now working with such a tin ear for his own banalities. And what of the basic and arrant inanity of his posturing as a cultural maven? What should we think about the quality-controls in a mind that imagines Dr. Werabsurdity?for if the vast majority of Moms had tham's name is spelled "Frederic," artforum "Art not trashed junior's trove of garish delights, the Forum," and such; or a really hip persona that remaining Near Mints would absolutely not be believes Metal Hurlant is still best-selling, worth 6K. Scarcity is all: fools perish by their Moebius is still a national treasure, and Steve obtuseness and oversights, and the wise prosper Gerber is a "historian"? through their judicious concern. And through it What is it, exactly? What is this happening all, there perdures a market to which the obvious something? What has the gnomic Ellison been can be peddledcuriously, at choice rates. guarding in his cast-iron bowels? It is the realiza Comic books' place in World Lit is secured tion that, in the nearest comics shop, an adult by this flash of critical wit, almost nuclear in its reader can "find magazines and graphic novels density: thatin this different medium of expressionhave as much emotional and intellectual clout as .. .Comic books not only have a claim to the best movies, the best novels and one or two posterity but are one of only five nativeitems on television." And then we are treated to American art forms that we've given the world: jazz, of course; musical comedy as more or less the very sort of audit of cultural we know it today; the detective story as resources we would expect to get from a pundit created by Poe; the banjo; and comic books. for whom there is no distinction between acute significance and "clout." The hitherto-benighted Thus spake Ellison. I presume most readers (of reader is regaled with Ellison's accolades for healthy attention-span) have heard some variant of this reflection several times before; it is Omaha the Cat Dancer, Lone Waifand Cub, The Spirit, John Constanrine Hellblazer ("If Rimbaud unmistakably unoriginal. But apparently, at some and Baudelaire were writing comics today, they point along the continuum of rumor that would acknowledge Delano as their superior in delivered this obiter dictum to Ellison's doorstep, portraying decadence"), The Watchmen ("As there was a mischievous little mutation: some exciting as Hammett, as intricate as Proust, as wag along the way, some kink in the daisy-chain socially insightful as Auchincloss, if comics have of journalistic cannibalism, saw the ludicrous
Ellison's Playboy article climaxes with a witless effusion of tawdry enthusiasms as if these misshapen little credos were the ultimate declarations his soul could disgorge; and perhaps they are.
approached literature, it is here"), Concrete, The Fish Police, and more. We draw back, as from a vertiginous abyss, from the question what caliber of reader will be at all convinced by all this facile name-dropping. Ellison's article climaxes with a witless effusion of tawdry enthusiasm as if these misshapen little credos were the ultimate declarations his soul could disgorge; and perhaps they are. It is not the content of the comic storieslaid out in all their eccentricity and incoherence like the entrails of exotic speciesthat makes these recommen dations seem absurd and desultory: it is Ellison's judgment, what he sees in them. He strikes upon bizarre and injudicious themes as awk wardly as a drunk stumbling across a carillon. I suspect that what makes this phase of his article so stunningly bathetic is that it is, logically, the place where we expect to find Evidence Suffi cient to Convictevidence not only of the superluminary geniuses working (contrary to all con venient belief) in this contemptible medium, but even more acutely, of Ellison's own excruc iatingly lapidary genius. What we find instead is the drivel of a promiscuous mind that will bed with just about anything. Ellison does indeed make the merits of these books look meretricious; but that is the inanity of his own teratological judgments tumbling out, loosed from some cranial fissure. As a declaration of dearly held values, it is a spiritual fiascoa mangled parade of Americans' "hot buttons" to which the mass-popular author learns to affiance his pandering imaginationit is an archipelago of exploitable issues, not a rosary of values by any stretch of the imagination. The moral crux of this article, like the whole panoply of Ellison's writings, is fashioned of the stuff of exploitation, manipulation, trendy shifts in what is hot. Ellison's solid lineage of publica tions in the welter of "men's magazines" is not insignificant here; his checkered career of script ing for TV is no less telling. Ellison from his
earliest and most salacious writings has been a predator on the make in the mass media; he has fostered a career and a persona that would make no one think of Nobel-caliber material. But they would indeed make a perceptive individual understand how the churning, volcanic ego that has made Ellison into such a volatile touristattraction can finally have impelled him to lust for the circles and ambitions of World Literature. After a career very unequally composed of sound-and-fury and significance, Ellison at last would like to make a very big noise indeed; like a boil on the scale of Krakatoa, his ego has come to that turgid a head. It was just this hypertrophy of ego that recommended him so highly to the eternal adolescents of the Me Generation and that goaded him to become the supernova of assholes, gratuitously and sadistically abusing fans, waitresses, and others in a long trail of virtually sociopathic behavior. In all the years Ellison has been writing and emceeing, the turgid sac of his inner delusions has made it possible for him to believe people were attentive because of the quality of his think ing. No, they were reading and listening because there aren't that many provocateurs around in the tertiary stages of outre. There has never been much structure or finesse to his thinking, just tumescence and emotional compression. Seeing this gamy little showman turning by sheer default of age, into one of the media's elder statesmen of SF is an exercise in spectacle with No Sense of the Ludicrous, not different in quality or kind from the apotheosis of Reagan as a philosopher of the New Right. It is not possible to fix either one of these media-creatures in their social and political coordinates without coming to terms with the vicious, incestuous Culture of the Counterfeit that vomited them into prominence. There is a kind of smarmy, inauthentic sen timentality in which all the external indicia of feelings are present but not the intrinsic and heartfelt emotions themselves: such a contrivance
was Nixon's Checkers speech and his other public insistences on his virtue and honor; Reagan's per formances likewise radiate the same emotional and intellectual hollowness. It is curious that the Republicansguilty of repeated offenses against the Constitution and the Legislature, indicted for an unprecedented scale of venality, hoist by the petard of their own proclaimed standards of fiscal responsibilityafter most heinously insulting the intelligence of the American public, should be the persistent beneficiaries of that public's waves of demagogic excess. It is through their firm grasp on mass mendacityon compulsive denial, the imperative to reinforce the American public's fantasies of sustainable privilegesthat the Republicans have prevailed; this is far from misconceivable any longer as healthy selfconfidence, as pride or optimism. It is not the normal charge of working ego but the kind of self-flattery that is the father of lies, in peoples as well as in individuals: this is the delusional sentimentality that Republicans have played upon so long and so expertly that the technology for manipulating it has now become nearly monopolistic with them. It has become the Republicans' Decade (and the boom-years of their kin in the field ofpredatory religiosity, the Bakkers and their ilk) because of an existential dishonesty in the American public mind, an incompetence to discriminate between moral authenticity and inauthenticity. On these grounds we have elected one nebulous phoney after another, a noncom mittal preppy dweeb to follow a dotty old actor, a human narcotic. It is a decade for applying Gresham's Lawthat adulterated currency drives out the real stuffto politics and public morality. The mock-human, the counterfeit consciences that taste just fine to themselves, has risen en masse, and the alienated in soul have reared their own kind to the highest posts. Cynicism, inter mingled with gargantuan naivete, is so abroad in the land that there is no need and absolutely no attempt to keep manipulativeness secret any longer. The rising tide of rightwing ideology awash in the whole worldof which the Reagan Revolution is only the camel's nose under the tent, and of which Islamic fundamentalism is merely another formmerits the profound atten tion of foresightful individuals. For the nation's pathos of low self-esteem, our doddering Dr. Feelgood has peddled his sucrose nostrumsa dope to which we should have said "No!" in thunderand our whole public apparatus of sober thought, press corps included, was lulled into narcolepsy by him. "The people wants to be deceived, therefore it is deceived," runs a Latin adage. Ellison like Reagan knows where the American cranium is soft: he foments a diametric but equally irrational mentality, one that circumvents and stultifies sober reflection no less than does the Great Prevaricator, our soporific Commander-in-Chief. But in Ellison's case it is a constituency of resentful and alienated individuals whose anger is exploited and ego stroked without ever having their incoherence clarified. To them, his abusive and indulgent antics are not personal failings at all but rather the orgasmic climax of Ego free to vent itself wantonly. Viccis Virtue, Hate is Love. It is an Ellison's Wonderland indeed.
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phrase. It is larded with indiscriminate name dropping the quality and quantity of which would embarrass the most shameless mover and shaker at your average literary cocktail party. The sort of writing and judgment on display here would be intolerable in a piece of daily jour nalism; Ellison claims it took over a solid month to compose this, but it reads as though it were written, to use Connor Cruise O'Brien's trope, by a man who has a bus to catch. But even hur ried writing wouldn't explain away the mani pulative and cunning intelligence that abounds, about which more later. The essay begins on a vulgar note lamenting the dearth of profiteering (i.e., if little Johnny's mother didn't throw his comics out Big grown up Johnny could make a killing on the speculator's market), and ends on a vulgar note of philistinism (i.e., that contemporary comics like Fish Police and Concrete are better than contemporary film and literature). The latter is obvious nonsense designed to appeal to the upscale, trendy, semi-literate Playboy reader; the former is a hackneyed journalistic hook that anyone seriously espousing the mature artistic values of contemporary comics would avoid like the plague. I had originally intended to segregate the pure errors of fact from the assertions of questionable judgment where there could be room for dispute, but the essay blends fact and fiction so seam lesslylike a Doctorow novelthat I have resolved simply to plow through the piece as chronologically as I can. After drooling over the current collector's price of Captain Marvel #1 ($2700.00, for those of you who are interested), Cotton Mather and Fredric Wertham (misspelled) are dragged out for their ritualistic flogging, a coupling that demonstrates Ellison's characteristic subtlety of mind. "Gore and protuberant" breasts are defended next, the deprivation of which, we are told, "blighted millions of lives [of children]." It is not made clear how gore and protuberant breasts would enrich the lives of children, but keep in mind that the defense of pre-Code horror comics comes from a man who once wrote, quite correctly I think, of television's "ability to shape and mold manners or morals [of children]" and lamented the "phony shucks put over on kids too young to separate the wheat from the chaff." I don't want to dwell on this particular incon sistency, but it demonstrates the transient nature of Ellison's intellectual commitments. He has been on an anti-censorship kick lately, having been whipped into a frenzy by some friends at DC over D C s proposed labeling policy, and has apparently forgotten his previous position on media's responsibility toward children. Not that
Harlan Ellison's Flamboyant Philistinism for the '80s

A jumped-up fan lectures His Literary Eminence o n the fine differences between fact and fiction, dilettantism and expertise. "Every guy I know who grooved behind horror movies and comic books when he was a tot is today a productive, beautiful person with imagination and a sense of wonder."
- Harlan Ellison, 1968
"...all of the mainstream comics are bland, useless garbage."

- Harlan Ellison, 1979
Harlan Ellison has finally cracked. There is no other way to explain his ugly and shameful performance in Playboy; intellectually, artistically, critically, and morally he has come unglued, and he's done it in public, in front of some three million readers of America's premier magazine for Men. I refer to an article idiotically titled "It Ain't Toontown" (and just as idiotically subtitled "Did your mother throw yours out? Too bad, because funny books are no longer kid s t u f f ) in the December Playboy. Most such articles in the mass media are stupid and superficial, writ ten by hacks, unmindful of aesthetic distinctions, historically ignorant. Such articles make few claims otherwise. But, in a "news story" by Harlan Ellison's unofficial public relations bureau over at the Comics Buyer's Guide, Ellison referred to this article as ' " a serious article,'" claimed that it '"has been.. .the most difficult piece of nonfiction writing I've done in my entire career,'" and that "it had taken him more than a month of actual writing time to do the article and that he used more than 35 reference books" in his research. Furthermore, Ellison referred to comics as one of his "areas of expertise" recently on a nationally broadcast Larry King radio show, and it goes without saying that he considers himself a connoisseur of world art and literature. Given all this, there is no excuse for the innumerable errors of fact, the slovenly and philistine artistic judgments, the historical in
eptitude, the internal contradictions, and the various half-truths, untruths, and gussied-up truths that litter this essay from the first word to the last. The piece moves along at a breathless clip, like a flat rock skimming over a body of water, fromtglib catch phrase to glib catch
Did you know that this w a s "Chandler a n d Willeford a n d t h e antic parts o f H a m m e t t , told a s a n aquatic allegory"? Didn't think so.
con/ticca
he is ever consistent on such matters, mind youhe has also defended the simplistic black and white representations of good and evil in comics and cartoons for being healthy, simpleminded funbut he has not, to my knowledge, ever defended anything quite as meretricious as pre-Code horror comics. "In France," we are told, "comics are held in such high esteem that Metal Hurlant, a graphics magazine, is a best-selling periodical . . . " Of course, Metal Hurlant went bankrupt over a year ago, and was never a "best-selling periodical." As we will see, Ellison and facts are like oil and water. There are many fallacious layers to Ellisonian logic, though; even if Metal Hurlant were a best-selling magazine, it wouldn't mean comics were held in high esteem in France any more than People magazine's best-selling status indicates the high esteem jour nalism is held in here. Naturally, when Japanese manga is discussed, poor Kobo Abe's name must be invoked, the first in a long litany of profaned literary figures, as in: " . . . millions of copies of comic books... [are] sold every week, as thick as the annotated Kobo Abe, read by more adults than children in that most literate of nations, and read as seriously as novels and financial reports.'' There you have it: a nation that takes its comics as seriously as its financial reports. A Utopian premise to a man as preoccupied by monetary value as Ellison, but, alas, it's probably untrue given Japan's superior economic status in the global marketplace and their obsessive attention to matters financial. But, even if it were true, it wouldn't mean much since most Japanese manga is as abysmal as most American com ics. Like so much of what you'll read in Ellison's essay, this is meaningless hyperbole. With that in mind, how seriously are we expected to take this loopy assertion: "In parts of Africa, Marvel's ebony super-hero, The Black Panther, is looked on as a significant mythical figure, in the way Spaniards revere El Cid." Even if this were true, which is highly unlikelywhat parts of Africa consider The Black Panther a myth figure? Facts, p l e a s e how is the deification of a moronic comic book character relevant to the advent of literate comics? The answer is, it is not in the least bit relevant, but these questionable pseudo-statistics are trotted out to impress people with quantity of experience rather than with quality. "Quality of pleasure being equal," said Bentham, "push pin is as good as poetry." Just as a few pounds of Kobo Abe is as good as a few pounds of your average manga. "For more than half a century," we are told, "comics in America have been kept adolescent, considered throwaway trash, beneath the notice of 'serious' critics of a r t . . . " So far, so good, but then he hauls out a list of artists, artisans, hacksamong whom there is no difference in the Ellisonian critical viewand if this fails to impress the reader, there is a list of mediasaturated super-heroes following on its heels. The Playboy reader is told that while he was "busy fighting wars," comic books went whistl ing past puberty and reached adulthood. But,
wait. What wars were Playboy readers fighting when comics went flying past puberty? Korea? Vietnam? Grenada? Wall Street? Surely this means something, but what? The first comic Ellison praises as emblematic of this new-found artistic adulthood i s . . . The Incredible Hulk. I'm not kidding. Consider this for a moment. In a world in which Art Spiegelman's Maus has been nominated for a National Book Award, has been generally praised for bringing literacy and seriousness to a sustained comics narrative, and has sold more copies and received more intelligently favorable press than any other comics album in the U.S., Ellison chooses to introduce Playboy's readers to the world of adult comics by praising some
with typically overheated, melodramatic dia logue, of which this is representative: "I'm the boss here. I'm in charge and no sawed-off runt tells me what to d o . " Brilliant prose. The bully predictably gets his comeuppance by the Hulk and is accidentally shot by his wife, who says: " I . . .1 didn't mean to do that," to which the Hulk cheerfully hops off and replies, "Sure ya didn't. Aw, don't cry, Banner, you should feel good after all.. .you thought you were alone. But you see, there's monsters everywhere." The moral of this odious pap, therefore, being that everyonevictim as well as victimizeris a monster. Ellison considers this "a mainstream examination of.. .the tyranny of town bullies, and the brutalization of women." Actually, it's considerably cruder than an average episode of Route 66 and bears even less relationship to art than one. Something called The Big Prize by "the talented [i.e., mediocre] Gerard Jones" is ballyhooed, and the third specific reference is to William Van Horn's Nervous Rex, long ago cancelled, but which is favorably compared to Walt Kelly's Pogo and the Jay Ward produc tion Dudley Do-Right. The incongruity between Kelly's brilliant Pogo and claptrap like Dudley Do-Right never occurs to Ellisonthough I sup pose if art were like math and you were to average the two out you might wind up with Nervous Rexbut how does Nervous Rex of all things rank so high as to be the third comic singled out for praise? Well, never mind. There are more mysteries to ponder, such as this sentence which imme diately follows the praise for Hulk scripter Peter David, Gerard Jones, and William Van Horn: Those are a mere handful of the creations of a cadre of some of the most innovative, wildly imaginative artists and writers this country has ever produced, work-for-hire talents who have created a vast body of popular art that constantly struggled against Philistine ignorance and market-place brutality toward High Art. What " c a d r e " of "innovative, wildly imaginative artists and writers" is he talking about? Are Van Horn, Jones.and the Hulk team the cadre? Is he referring to that list of names he reeled off seven paragraphs ago? If so, this is some of the most disconnected writing Ellison has ever put to paper. If he's actually referring to the likes of Stan Lee, Bill Finger, C.C. Beck, and Bob Kane, the description of their constant struggle "toward High Art" is laughable. Most of these creators were hacks who never thought in terms of High Art, Low Art, or, indeed, art of any kind. (Stan Lee has probably never heard of High Art ). The problem here may be Ellison's genuine inability to make nuanced value judgments, but more than likely it's also the need to concoct "facts" to fit a thesis. His thesis is that there's "a vast body" of brilliant work in the history of mainstream comic books that has struggled toward High Art. The idea that comics as a monolithic historic whole have always been struggling toward High Art is romanticized
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Ellison t h i n k s t h i s silly h a c k w o r k i s " a mainstream examination of machismo... and t h e brutalization of w o m e n . "
hackwork in an issue of The Incredible Hulk. (Consider also that Maus was not even men tioned once, and you begin to realize the astonishing level of critical incompetence at work here.) The Hulk story is described as "one of the most powerful battered-wife stories you'll encounter outside 60Minutes," simultaneously placing the story into a neat little media category and comparing it to a popular weekly television showwhich more or less exemplifies the dummied-up critical method at work here. But, let's look briefly at the Hulk story, whose author Ellison ranks later with Alan Moore and the Hernandez Brothers. Each and every characterincluding the Hulk is a stereotype. There is the smalltown bully and wife-beater who terrorizes the town in his role as sheriff; there's the long-suffering wife who longingly remembers better days with hubby. The drawing is a bland combination of various artists who have worked in the super hero tradition, such as John Byrne and Gil Kane. The story is told in traditional comic book terms
Mooras's Watchmen is " a s intricate a s P r o u s t . "
nonsense, but Ellison insists upon this because his every statement must be hypertrophically exaggerated to fit some ad hoc thesis. Therefore, he will lump together Jack Cole and Jack Kirby with considerably lesser talents such as Bill Finger and Bob Kane. Stan Lee and Will Eisner occupy the same plane in the hierarchy. They are all the same, you see, all struggling against Philistine ignorance and toward High Art. And this is all populist sophistry designed to simultaneously impress and pander to likeminded dilettantes who share Ellison's super ficial grasp of values. The fact is there are too few first-rate comics creators in the history of mainstream comics to support the proposition of " a vast body" of popular art struggling toward High Art. Even Frank Miller, not exactly known for his Ivory Tower standards of pop culture, referred to the history of comics as "50 years of crap. A n d , " he added, "people talk as if we've got a heritage behind u s . " Yes, people like Harlan Ellison. But, the theory must go on, and so must the sub-theory, which is that popularity=literary greatness, and it runs like this: If one of the unarguable criteria for literary greatness is universal recognition, in all of the history of literature, there are only five fictional creations known to every man, woman and child on the planet. The urchin in Irkutsk may never have heard of Hamlet; the peon in Pernambuco may not know who Raskolnikov is; the widow in Djakarta may stare blankly at the mention of Don Quixote or Micawber or Jay Gatsby. But every man, woman and child on the planet knows Mickey Mouse, Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, Robin Hood... and Superman. But, obviously one of the "unarguable criteria" for literary greatness is not "univer sal recognition," however eccentrically Ellison
chooses to define the term. If the widow in Djakarta knows who Mickey Mouse is but doesn't know who Don Quixote or Jay Gatsby is, it doesn't follow that Walt Disney's studio is collectively greater than Cervantes or Fitz gerald. This is nonsense, but it is nonsense with a purpose for it forms the theoretical founda tion for Ellison's perspective, which is not that the expressive potentialities of the comics form are being refined and exploited to greater artistic ends now than previously, but that comics have always been brilliant, that that brilliance has merely been recognized recently by the mass media, and that said brilliance is actually multiplying because the number of comics being published has recently multiplied. The argument is less artistic than it is economic, which is why it's so artistically impoverished. Artistically, Ellison's argument is a dead end: trashy old comics have always been brilliant in their way, and now they are even more brilliant because there are more of them. Economically, the argu ment has two prongs: first, the mass media has finally gotten hip and is promoting all this trashy wonderfulness, and second, creators are getting paid better because, after all, independent publishers have stolen so many talents away from Marvel and DC. (The implicit absurdity of this will be made explicit presently.) The revolution, according to Ellison, is just seven years old: "And, at last, in just the past seven years, it has become clear that intelligent adults, lovers of art, discriminating readers, observers of the forces that shape our culture
are rediscovering the comic book." Note the use of the word rediscover. The comics that today represent the most mature use of the form are not derived from those comics that were discovered in the past by children who are rediscovering them today as adults. Contem porary comics that embody an adult, literary perspective are of a different nature entirely. Their creators have refined the form as well as the content. Their work is not revamped superheroes or derivations of old mainstream com ics genres. Their advantage over earlier comic book artists of great talent is that they are not called upon to subordinate their talents to pure ly commercial ends. Their work therefore has the potential of being an integrated whole in a way previous comic book creators working under totalitarian commercial conditions were not. It is a potential that has been realized, in my view, and it points toward the future of literate comics, whereas the "freedom" of creators to reinvent old comics characters does not because such freedom as circumscribed by narrow and trashy parameters is no freedom at all. The comics artists who are using such freedom to worthwhile artistic end would in clude R. Crumb, Harvey Pekar, Peter Bagge, Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, Chester Brown, David Boswell, Spiegelman, Carol Tyler, Gilbert Shelton, Jim Woodring, a number of others who are even lesser known, and others who show great potential but haven't produced enough work by which to make a reasoned judg-
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ment. Ellison would not think to mention these cartoonists (except for six words accorded the Hernandezes, who were too hip to exclude) or to search out lesser known but infinitely more interesting talents because his tastes lean toward accessible, mass-market kitschas do Play boy's, which is why Ellison's and Playboy's perspectives form such a perfect union. Take a look at his list of characters who fit his "unarguable criteria for literary greatness": Mickey Mouse, Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, Robin Hood, and Superman. Of the five, only Sherlock Holmes has any claim to literary
stature, and it's a minor claim at that. The rest all share certain attributes. They are all intellec tually and artistically unchallenging. They are all escapist in nature. They are all positively inoffensive, hence their accessibility and broad appeal. In short, they offer no resistance to and receive none from a public composed of passive culture consumers. Dan Jacobson referred to those "readers who look to fiction simply to make them feel more secure in the views they already hold." In a word, middlebrow. Ellison is one such reader. After a tendentiously dishonest historical
interlude that inexplicably appears in the middle of this essay and destroys what meager focus and momentum it achieved up to this point, and about which more laterEllison finally unveils his favored list of comics that represent the "best" comics available, that "have as much emotional and intellectual clout as the best movies, the best novels, and one or two items on television." One is, by now, unsurprised at the provinciality of such a list: Omaha the Cat Dancer, Lone Wolf and Cub, The Spirit, Hellblazer, Watchmen, Concrete, andI kid you not The Fish Police. Not a terrible list when you
THE
ELLISON T O T E
BOARD As good as: Better Than:
Similar to: Frank Miller Buckminster Fuller Charlie Chaplin Jack Kerouac Ralph Nader Jimmy Stewart Steve McQueen
T h e Spirit
Jamie Delano
Rimbaud Baudelaire Dashiel Hammett Marcel Proust Louis Auchincloss
Alan
Moore
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4 Pounds of Manga The Fish Police
4 Pounds of Kobo Abe Raymond Chandler Charles Willeford Dashiel Hammett The National The Gulag The Gulag film animation novel short story haiku painting Pogo Dudley Enquirer Archipelago Archipelago
The Comics Marvel DC
Journal
Comics
Comics Medium
Comics
Nervous Rex
Do-Right Andy Warhol Roy Lichtenstein
Jerry Siegel & Joe Shuster The Incredible Dean Motter's Mr. X Fredric Trouble Wertham With Girls Hulk Fritz L a n g ' s Metropolis Cotton James Mather Bond 60 Minutes
stop to think about it. The titles are better than the average; they are probably about as good as those one or two items on television, but they are, one hopes and prays, by no means as good as the best contemporary fiction and film. It is the second bestand it is stretching matters to call Hellblazer and The Fish Police even second bestthat Ellison is shamelessly championing. Well, he's not hustling Mercedes on television commercials, either. Two things are striking. The first is the capriciousness of the list. When one eschews the best in favor of second best, the quantity of entries multiplies. There is no real reason why so much space was given to The Fish Police and barely a nod given to Dave Sim's Cerebus when, come to think of it, Cerebus is a much better and more significant book. Why Hellblazer over Nexus? Why not Elfquest as well as Concrete? Elfquest is dear, too. The caprice gives a new, perverse dimension to the old adage, de gustibus non est disputandum. Second, one is struck by how desperate Ellison's encomiums sound. The critical language is thin and hackneyed, the literary allu sions pathetic. Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Proust, Hammett (twice!), Auchincloss, Chandler, Willeford, and Melville are all conscripted into service. My favoriteand it was a close callis comparing Alan Moore's Watchmen to Marcel Proust. This is the proof, in case you were wondering, of Ellison's coming critically unglued. Taste this abysmally awful accompanied by such purported sophistication can't survive without historical verification. Ellison's warped historical perspective completes the picture, and makes for a consistent if preposterous overview of the comics profession. Here's how the growth of adult comics came about, according to Ellison: But seven years ago the creator-owned comic came into existence, and the allpowerful interests that ran the Gulag ' [Marvel and DC] found that the best talents were cleaning up with offbeat and original work for the independent, smaller houses. In a matter of months, direct-sales comics shops were springing up all over the country, selling many times the units that were being sold to traditional newsstanddistribution methods. This is complete, or at least incomplete bullshit. First, the "best talents'" at Marvel and DC did not go to work for the independents, no matter how you define bestor independents for that matter. A mere handful of creators started producing work for the independents and this work was by no means "offbeat and original." It was, in fact, the same adolescent sludge that they'd been producing for Marvel and DC for yearsjunk like Mike Grell's Starslayer, for example. Second, direct-sales shops did not spring up all over the country "in a matter of months"; the direct-sales system was already established and the number of stores had been continually growing since the system's inception in 1974-5. Nor were direct-sales comics shops selling
"many times the units that were being sold by traditional newsstand-distribution methods" in a matter of months. This shift took some ten years to develop, but I suppose to someone who thinks Alan Moore is as good as Proust, ten years isn't much different from "a matter of months." Finally, the creator-owned comic didn't "come into existence" seven years ago; it came into existence some 20 years ago. Ellison may not have been paying attention at the time, but . while he was serving as a "gadfly to the Estab lishment" and making a name for himself on the fast track as the enfant terrible of televisionland by praising Laugh-In and excoriating the "squares" for watching The Beverly Hillbillies, cartoonists such as R. Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, Jack Jackson, Spain Rodriguez, and others were publishing underground comics, which was a breakthrough for creators' rights as well as a revolution in the content of comic books. They owned their work, lock, stock, and barrel. They wouldn't work for the robber barons dominating the comics industry because they couldn't stomach their business practices or their idiot aesthetic. They took economic advantage of the non-corporate counter-culture booming at the time and were published "underground," wrenching comics out of their heretofore unchallenged adolescent context and, perhaps inadvertently, changing public perception of comics as purely juvenile in nature. End of History Lesson #1. Ellison continues: "Companies such as Comico, Kitchen Sink,
Eclipse, First Comics, Quality and Vortex [who's missing, boys and girls?] were stealing away the artists and writers who were produc ing the books that made them the most money." This, too, is completely wrong. Virtually none of these companies published creators who were then working for Marvel and DC; and certainly none of these companies published the creators "that had made them the most money." Comico didn't; Kitchen Sink didn't; Vortex didn't. Quality published no American creators because it's a British firm that reprints British creators in the American market. (If Ellison had ever seen a comic published by Quality, he would've known this.) Eclipse published Alan Moore's Miracleman, but this was when Moore was writing Swamp Thing, which was not a big seller at DC. First published Howard Chaykin and Mike Grell, but Chaykin wasn't working for Marvel or DC at the time and hadn't for quite a while. The only artist with any clout, as Ellison would put it, was Mike Grell. Even Ellison's proof, meager though it is, to support this assertion is misleading. After mentioning Grell, he refers to Sergio Aragones's Groo. But Aragones wasn't working for Marvel or DC, so couldn't have been "stolen" away from them. (And Ellison conveniently forgets to mention that Groo is now published by a member of the Gulag.) Next, he says that Timothy Truman wrote Eclipse's Airboy. Not only did Truman never write Airboy, but he never worked for DC or Marvel either, so he couldn't have been "stolen" away. And that's
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it. That's his proof for this silly, discredited historical thesis. But, of course, there's more. The Fish Police, he says, was "copping reams of critical praise" (it wasn't) and he continues, obliviously ignorant, Eastman and Laird's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was " a gag parody of the profusion of X-Men comics flooding the market" (it wasn't; it was a parody of Frank Miller's Ronin). One of the more absurd themes that runs throughout his essay is that the backs of Marvel and DC have been broken. Ellison writes that Frank Miller ("the ass-kicking, indefatigable spokesman for a new, adult outlook on funnybooks," wouldn't you know) "wouldn't produce for anyone simply with a work-for-hire contract anymore, so DC lured him away with a royalty deal, and he created the astonishing multileveled six-book 'graphic novel' Ronin; and then The Dark Knight Returns... and it was all over for the plantation mentality." This is all wildly deceptive revisionism. Contrary to Ellison's implication otherwise, Miller's Dark Knight was done under a workfor-hire contract; DC (as well as Marvel, from whom Miller was lured away) had already initiated the practice of offering royalties (or "bonuses" as they're slyly referred to); and, most important, it was not all over for the plan tation mentality. But, Ellison actually seems to believe this. Elsewhere, he writes: "It was The Watchmen, following the Dark Knight opus, that kicked the Gulag's door off its hinges." And again: "[Miller] opened the door and, because there were now alternatives to work-for-hire, work at command, other restless creators kicked that door off its hinges and the Gulag began to empty.'' How wrong can one man be, you might wonder. In fact, the Gulag is alive and well. There has been no mass exodus. The Gulag has not begun to empty. If anything, there are more creators working the Gulag than ever before. Insofar as independent publishers have increasingly adopted Marvel's and D C s business practices and begun publishing licensed "properties," (adopting their "artistic" prac tices as well) the Gulagits lack of intregrity, its hack ethps, its work-for-hire requirementhas expanded its franchise. Most creators love this because it means an expanded market. An expanded market means more money. And the money in the Gulag is quite good. (Ellison fails to mention how happy the creators are to take the Gulag's money; needless to say, the analogy between Marvel and DC and the Gulag Archi pelagooffensive on the face of it, an insult to Russians serving time there, and a trivialization of their plightbreaks down almost immediately.) Not only did Miller's Dark Knight and Moore's Watchmen not break the backs of Marvel and DC as Ellison claims, they actually succeeded in popularizing the glamour and status of working in the Gulag, making the Gulag that much more attractive. They also showed young creators where the money was. Miller's success on Dark Knight could hardly have served to
inspire young creators to seek independence, originality, or alternative publishers; rather, its most probable effect was to "inspire" young creators (not to mention older creators on the make) to revamp worn-out old super-heroes and aim for a potload of money and media attention. Miller's and Moore's success at DC is D C s success. The media attention, the economic windfall to the creators, the adulation all rebounded to D C s benefit, legitimizing DC in the eyes of gullible young creators who always dreamed of working in the big time. Far from deflating DC, Miller's Dark Knight only succeeded in inflating the company's reputation. Moore, much to his credit, has renounced the whole racket and begun publishing himself. Miller has, predictably, moved over to Hollywood. Here's History Lesson #2. Ellison should pay special attention. The direct-sales market began around 1974-5 when Phil Seuling started distributing main stream comics directly to comics shops. Presumably there were enough comics shops nation-wide at the time to sustain Seuling's distribution company, Seagate Distributing. Comics conventions were stilUgoing strong. Underground comics, though past their heyday, were still being published by Rip-Off Press, Last Gasp, Print Mint, and Kitchen Sink. Arcade, edited by Art Spiegelman and Bill Griffith, started publishing in 1975 and continued through 1976. Wendy and Richard Pini's Elfquest and Dave Sim's Cerebus the Aardvark started publishing in 1978. The Comics Journal began publishing in 1976. What became obvious was that a legitimate economic market was developing. To some of us it was an alternative to the mainstream market; to others it was another mainstream market with more precise demographicsa marketer's dream come true. But, Marvel and DC comics were the economic backbone of the direct-sales comics shops. Underground publishers were able to take advantage of this market. So were self-publishers like the Pinis and Sim; so were a growing number of small publishers such as Eclipse, Pacific, and Fanta graphics Books. Here's the important part: artistically, there were, broadly speaking, two factions. One was the Marvel-DC aesthetic. Super-heroes, actionadventure, traditionally attenuated comic-booky genre material, EC rip-offs, etc. The division of labor was broken down into its component partspenciller, inker, writer, letterer, colorisj, etc. The format was full-color standard comic book size. Pacific Comics, now defunct (and more or less resurrected as Blackthorne) was the first company to exploit the consumer pre ferences of the comics shops by publishing imitation Marvel-DC comics. (Others were to follow: First, Eclipse, Comico, et al.) Pacific Comics, the first "independent" to publish imitation Marvel Comics, is the hero, according to Ellison, who challenged "the exploitative 'plantation mentality' of the traditional comics publishers" and paved the way for the
renaissance described in all its fatuous glory. But, the second faction evolved from the independent spirit of the underground comics. The predominant aesthetic of the underground was diametrically opposed to mainstream comics. They were political, shrill, excessive, sexual, personal, autobiographical. They were what mainstream comics were not, could not be. Underground comics artists had greater freedom than any comics artists proceeding them; at their best this freedom was combined with values that disdained the standards of mass culture and the synthetic, arbitrarily-dictated tradition of main stream comics. This freedom often became license, but the context allowed for diverse talents the caliber of Crumb, Shelton, Spain, Spiegelman, Griffith, and others to publish. (The underground headshop distribution network began disintegrating in the early-to-mid '70s, but the advent of the comics shop gave undergrounds a new, if comparatively tiny, market in which to sell.) Three things happened in the '80s, one of which is artistically significant, two of which are interesting for sociological reasons. One, the number of comics shops had grown to such an extent that Marvel and DC felt compelled to pay attention to the fan cult who previously repre sented an insignificant percentage of their readership and was consequently ignored. This gave Marvel and DC their first opportunity to pander directly to a recognizable consumer category. Two, the Marvel-DC audience was large enough to inspire entrepreneurs on the make to try to tap into it by publishing MarvelDC type comics (Pacific, First, Eclipse, Comico, et al.and the list of opportunists grows daily). But, third, and most important, there was a flurry of artistic activity that broadly mirrored the principles, ideals, and values found in the underground comics: freedom taken seriously; attempts to confront issues of human relevance; a broadening of content, away from the juvenilia of mainstream comics and into realistic, naturalistic, satirical, and formalistic modes of expression; diverse and highly individual drawing styles. Harvey Pekar deserves recognition in this regard because while I identify him with the burgeoning adult aesthetic of the '80s, he'd actually been publishing American Splendor since 1975 during a particularly bleak period in comics publishing and in virtual anonymity for half a decade. Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly started publishing Raw in 1980. R. Crumb's Weirdo began in 1981. Love and Rockets started publishing in 1982. William Messner-Loebs's Journey started publishing under the AardvarkVanaheim imprint in 1983. Rip-Off Press and Last Gasp continued to publish. Kitchen Sink broadened its editorial perspective and started publishing material outside the strictly under ground tradition. European comics were imported and published in translation. The com bined efforts of a handful of cartoonists and publishers committed to the mature, intelligent use of comics as an artform was finally yielding
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THE COMICS JOURNAL #126, January 1989
concrete results. And it could not have happened as it did or as soon as it did without the liberating influence of underground comics. All of this activity stoodand standsin stark contrast to the institutionalized adolescent perspective of Marvel, DC, and their indepen dent clones; their infantile artistic status quo; their pathetic marketplace acceptance of a degrading cultural norm; and to the "creators" who wereand arecomplicit in the corporatedriven opportunism and economic exploitation of hip trends and debased appetites. Which is more or less what Harlan Ellison celebrates in his extended tribute to the joys of junk culture. Weary readers will remember that several thousand words ago I mentioned that Ellison launched into an egocentric history of comic books in the middle of his essay. It's time to separate fact from fiction once again. Hang in there. This won't take long. Most of this history is actually another variant of the old indignant frothing-at-the-mouth setpiece over Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's mis treatment at the hands of DC. Indignities and inequities are duly chronicled. Hysteria is kept to a minimum, melodrama to the maximum. (One might question the judgment of rehashing this well-known story when the space could be better used by writing in greater detail about adult comics. But, I won't because I have bigger fish to fry.) All of this is tolerable until Ellison tells a couple of "authenticated" stories "that wallop you in the heart." They're straight out of Dickens. The first involves a "shabby old man" standing outside the Broadway premiere of the Superman musical, too impoverished to buy a ticket. You guessed it. The shabby old man turns out to be Joe Shuster. (Even for the sake of wallopping the reader in the heart, it is grossly insensitive to refer to Shuster as " a shabby old man." Particularly when you stop to consider that this gut-wrenching characteriza tion of Mr. Shuster is nothing more than a device meant to dragoon sympathy from the reader.) The second story involves Shuster working as a messenger in New York City. "Broke, going blind, unable to get work in the industry he had helped bring into being, he was deliver ing parcels to midtown offices." As the story goes, he delivers a package to D C s offices and ends up confronting D C s publisher Jay Liebowitzbut this "authenticated" story has four endings! "One version has i t . . . " Ellison blithely writes, apparently unaware that even by the slackest journalistic standards an "authen ticated" story, the sole purpose of which is to indict a corporation as unfeeling brutes, cannot have four endings! It places one's credibility in jeopardy, and frankly Ellison can't afford it. There's a suspicious turn of phrase a few lines earlier that smacks of hedging one's bets when Ellison writes "[Shuster] started to leaveso the tale goesand Liebowitz, the guy who'd gotten the boys to sign over Superman for $130, came out of his office." Look at the bracketed phrase: "so the tale goes," and note the use of the word tale. As usual, no sources are cited,
though he earlier refers to "historian Steve Gerber (who, incidentally, is the creator of Howard the Duck)." This is a little like refer ring to "ace polo player Edward Teller (who, incidentally, is the creator of the atom bomb)." The fact is Gerber is not an historian. Three more anecdotes cast doubt on Ellison's credibility. Ellison strongly suggests that the comic book industry was directly and exclusively respons ible for Wally Wood committing suicide. ("They didn't find his body for three days, there in that squalid little room.") The fact is the comic book industry had not been kind to Wally Wood, but Wally Wood had not been kind to Wally Wood, either. Wood had serious prob lems throughout much of his life, and it is possible the lousy working conditions in the comics industry exacerbated them. It would require, at the very least, a detailed thesis and some offer of proof to suggest the comics industry killed Wood, and Ellison offers nothing of the kind. Wood's extreme case is isolated. Consider that no other artist of Wood's genera tion bottomed out the way he did: Frank Frazetta went on to become one of the most successful fantasy painters in the world; Al Williamson went into newspaper strips and continues to work in commercial comics with no apparent suicidal tendencies; Bernard Krigstein went on to become a teacher and fine artist in New York City; Jack Davis went on to become one of the most successful commercial cartoonists in the country; and so on. Ellison strongly suggests that Joe Maneely's tragic death was a direct result of working conditions in the comics industry. Maneely, "having gone days without sleep to complete work unceasingly thrown at him by a publisher, rode a commuter train out to Jersey. He step ped between cars to clear his headsome say he'd been drinking, but so the hell what?the train took a sharp curve, the cars jostled him and he slipped between them and was crushed to death." I like that bracketed remarksome say he'd been drinking, but so the hell what? Well, so the hell a lot, I'd say. Again, the story requires considerably more proof than Ellison offers (i.e., none) in order to prove his obvious conclusion that the comics industry killed Maneely. (And why doesn't he mention that the man throwing so much work at Maneely was none other than Ellison's good buddy Stan Lee?) Jack Cole is the most repulsively and dis ingenuously exploited member in this grisly litany of death and tragedy. Ellison likewise implies that the comics industry killed Cole, but this doesn't hold up any way you look at it. "...after 20 years of backbreaking labor in the comics Gulag," Ellison writes, "[Cole] said, 'Ah, to hell with it,' and pulled the trigger." In fact, Ellison knows nothing but the barebones facts about Cole's death; he knows none of the circumstances nor the motivations behind his suicide. No one does. Cole had quit comics in 1954; from '54 to '58, he became a successful gag cartoonist appearing regularly in Hefner's new magazine
Three creators w h o weren't adult e n o u g h to m a k e Ellison's Honor Roll: Art Spiegel m a n , H a r v e y P e k a r , a n d R. C r u m b .
11
Playboy; he had also sold a syndicated strip, Betsy and Me, to the Chicago Times Syndicate, which was successful during its brief run. He was, in short, at the peak of his career, out of the comics industry he hated, and by all accounts a reasonably happy man. There was no known and no explicable reason for his suicide. Ellison's attempt to link his death to the comics industry is nothing less than a sleazy historical revi sionism concocted to serve his own image as a tireless muckraker and rabblerouser, and to support his tenuous thesis. This is what I meant when I referred to the cunning and manipulative intelligence at work in Ellison's essay. All of this conniving and historical wheedling is all the more amazing con
sidering that the comics industry is indeed guilty of treating its artists criminally throughout most of its history. The facts should speak for themselves. Why, then, can't Ellison state the facts straightforwardly without their being exaggerated, aggrandized, altered, fiddled with, dressed-up, falsifiedin short, Ellisonized? Must an economic injustice be treated like a tawdry melodrama merely for the sake of con forming to the sensationalistic standards of magazine journalism? Why must Steve Gerber's credentials be inflated to that of an historian? Why must 50 years of crap be transmogrified into "a vast body of popular art that constantly struggled against Philistine ignorance and market-place brutality toward High Art"? Why
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must Alan Moore be favorably compared with Proust? Why must Jamie Delano be cited as better than Rimbaud and Baudelaire? Why must Fredric Wertham be likened to Cotton Mather? It is not just that this is all intellectually defec tive; there's a more deeply rooted dishonesty at work here. AH the name-dropping, the literary references, the topical allusions, the trendy language, the hip phrase-making represents the writerly equivalent of sound bytes or MTV. But, there's an intellectual veneer to this technique that appeals to the pseudo-educated who would sneer at the more obvious attempts to pander directly to their emotions. It's an impressive tight-rope walk on Ellison's part: his rhetorical posturings are blisteringly elitist, but the con tent is pure middlebrow. It's dishonest because it's a strategy built upon intellectual superficiality and rhetorical excess, providing the kind of vacuous entertainment that Ellison professes to abominate. No one seriously interested in art, culture or politics expects to learn anything from Ellison. Basically, he appeals to the weekend intellectual, the upscale liberal who keeps upon civil rights issues by reading Playboy, and who catches a little tit at the same time. It's a shell game of sorts in which he's taken seriously only by readers who are themselves fundamentally unserious. I have just enough stomach left to cite one last instance of vindictive imbecility. In the front page article about Ellison's Playboy contribution in the September 9th Comics Buyer's Guide, Ellison is quoted as saying, "What's the use of having power if you can't misuse it?" This was meant to be taken as a joke, but the joke is on us. At the end of his essay, Ellison plugs his friends at WAP! and the Comics Buyer's Guide (predictably, he gives the wrong price for a subscription to WAP!), and can't resist taking a shot at The Comics Journal. He refers to the Comics Buyer's Guide as a place where "the new, strong voice of an art form coming to maturity can be heard." He refers to the Journal as "a critical journal... in the same way that The National Inquirer is a critical journal..." Think about that for a minute. Let it sink in. It should be obvious to anyone that CBG has no serious commitment to comics as an art form. Pick up any issue and you'll be confronted with front page stories about Spider-Man's new costume, what's coming up in The Punisher, who's drawing The Avengers or She-Hulk next month, ad nauseum. It is a repository of use less up-to-the-minute ephemera. They rarely go to the trouble of actually writing news stories, prefering to cobble them together from press releases. They emphasize the most artistically and intellectually bankrupt aspects of the status quo. Basically, they are an inordinately spineless shill for the largest financial interests (i..e, most well-heeled advertisers) in the comics industry, the companies Ellison would grandiloquently refer to as the Gulag. Whenever there is an issue of significant moral concern, Ellison's newspaper where "the new, strong voice of an art form com ing to maturity can be heard" digs its head as
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deeply into the sand as it possibly can. Earlier in his article, Ellison wrote that "only recently, after a public crusade, has [Jack Kirby] managed to regain a fraction of his originals [from Marvel Comics]..." Where were Ellison's pals at CBG when Kirby was trying to wrench his original art from Marvel? Buried in the sand, of course, though they would pop up occasionally just meekly to remind fans that there were two sides to the story. Who devoted time, energy, and resources to launch a national campaign to aid Kirby in his dispute with Marvel? That's right: The National Inquirer of critical journals. Where was CBG during the ratings-censorship con troversy? In a recent CBG the Thompsons prac tically boasted that they never took a position on this issuethough they were happy to print every half-baked know-nothing opinion from readers and professionals. The National Inquirer of critical journals took a position; it published investigative articles on the relevant issues; it interviewed the major protagonists involved, from both sides of the debate. CBG, where you can hear the new, strong voice of an art form coming to maturity, encourages debate over whether Michael Keaton can play Batman well or not, or if John Byrne is ruining Superman. Important subjects like thar. When the editors actually screw up their courage and take a stand on something, it's usually about something entirely harmless, inoffensive, and trivialsuch as the Batman movie or convention etiquetteor they will go out on a limb and sup port an accepted industry practice, such as the work-for-hire contract. This was their classic editorial stand where they compared the creative act to hauling coal. Eight and a half years ago, Ellison praised the Journal as "an exciting, contemplative, con troversial journal that angers you, causes you to consider the status quo, ask troubling questions, and also provides basic news. It is a muckraking journal in the time-honored tradition of adver sary journalism." Why the switch? One, personal vindictiveness. My relationship with Ellison deteriorated (to put it mildly) during the Michael Fleisher litigation, and I fell from favor. Two, Ellison and CBG editors Don and Maggie Thompson have a rela tionship based upon what could best be characterized as mutual ass-kissing. This par ticular dig at the Journal has less to do with judg ment based upon the integrity of objective merit than it it has to do with personal rancor, just as his praise of CBG cannot (one hopes) be based upon. a genuine respect for an insipid, pusillanimous editorial point of view, but rather out of a perverse loyalty to those who suck up properly. Given this insidiously privatized perspective, how can Ellison's judgment ever be trusted? How can one separate evaluations based upon personal animosity and weird loyalties from those free of such distorting influences? The first answer is that it's impossible to do so, and the second answer is that it doesn't matter, because Ellison offers only the superficiality of prejudice, not the scrupulous reflection of judgment.
T H E COMICS JOURNAL #126. January 1989
I've managed to come up with a way in which Ellison's essay could be made useful, however. Colleges and universities all over the country are now teaching courses in the history and aesthetics of comics. Ellison's essay could be used by the instructors of such classes as a final examina tion of sorts. Any student who couldn't find at least 50 errors would automatically flunk. Students who unearth 80 or more errors of feet or fatuous statements would get an A, and so on. But, alas, there is no real way to undo the consequences of intellectual charlatanism.
Cultural values have once again taken a beating. Public discourse has once again been trivialized. Trendy ignoramuses have once again had their dull-witted taste affirmed. The stereotype of comics as junkor of a brand new stereotype as pretentious junkhas once again been perpetuated. All thanks to the man who once referred to himself as "an agent provocateur gadflying the Establishment," and who Playboy referred to, with greater exactitude, as "a devotee of the superhero set."
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DC to Print, Distribute Comico

DC Comics Inc. will print, solicit, and distribute Comico The Comic Com pany's eight titles as of Jan. 1, 1989. The agreement, announced jointly by DC and Comico November 21, does not render Comico a subsidiary or packaging unit of DC, according to Comico Administrative Director Bob Schreck, though he said DC will "handle all the money" from solicita tions and reorders of Comico books under the agreement. "What this makes Comico is an in dependent publisher, independently owned and managed, distributed by a larger comics publisher," Schreck said, adding that the agreement "frees" the six-year-old, Norristown, Pennsylvania, company from "details" of distribution, and increases its circulation. "All publishers have a difficult time getting their books into the public eye," Schreck said. "This agreement with DC allows us to further the medium with broad distribution of alternative, quality books, and allows Comico to concentrate its efforts on packaging and quality product those things that have always been our strongest suit." Comico publishes Grendel, Justice Machine, The Fish Police, The Maze Agency, Trollords, Robotech: The Macross Saga, Elementals, and The Trouble with Girls. Independent. According to DC and Comico's official announcement, "Comico will continue to handle all editorial and creative aspects of their publishing line independently of DC Comics from content and schedul ing decisions through finished artwork and text pages... The company will also continue to be responsible for all advertising, promotion, and publicity for their tides. DC Comics' role will begin with printing, binding, and shipping. DC Comics will also be solely responsible for all sales functions on the Comico titles, including order solicitation and order processing and fulfillment." Schreck emphasized that "Comico retains total editorial control; there is no editorial input from DC," and declined to discuss details of the agreement. "The arrangement is obvious and should be to anyone: DC is not doing us a favor; it's not two guys getting together over dinner and having a laugh, it's a business arrangement that we think and hope will benefit us both. "DC would not be doing this if there was not some kind of compen sation for them, but the structure of our agreement is between us, not the public; it's nobody's business but our own," he said. DC spokeswoman Tammy Brown echoed that sentiment: "All the infor mation we're going to distribute about the agreement is contained in the press release. All the points we wanted to get to the public are there, and that's really all the comment we'd like to make about it at this time." DC Executive Vice President Paul Levitz, as quoted in that press release, said: "This is one of those mutually beneficial relationships that happens so rarely in the business world. Comico's quality line of comic titles will benefit from our superior strength in distribu tion and printing. Readers and distributors wjll benefit from DC Comics' and Comico's titles shipping smoothly from a common printer. DC Comics will benefit from adding their titles with ours and by helping out a truly worthy publisher that serves an important niche in the comicbook
S o m e of t h e n e w D C [distributed] titles.
17
market." The release also quotes Comico Editor-in-Chief Diana Schutz: "We really have the best of both worlds, as this allows us to share in DCs 50-plus years of experience in the areas of sales and distribution, while at the same time we maintain total in dependence of approach towards all of our publications." Precedented Move. Schreck insisted the agreement is neither unusual nor particularly newsworthy. "This is nothing new," he said. "This happens all the time in the record and film industries. In fact, this would not be news in the record in dustry, but it is in this industry because of the people's perspective or lack of perspective in it." Schreck equated the DC-Comico ar rangement with the small Rhino Records label's distribution through Capitol Records, and called the move mutually advantageous for the com panies, and beneficial to the comics in dustry as a whole. "We wouldn't do it if we didn't think it would increase sales or be a positive move for everyone involved and for the industry," he said. "I'm sure eVery publisher would like to see sales increase; we believe this is one way to promote the advancement of Comico, and the industry. "It helps the medium because this gives an alternative publisher the benefit of the heavier clout of a 50-year entity that's going to be heard by retailers, a lot of which call themselves direct sales retailers but don't carry independents. This will get us in some of those shops." Precedents. Schreck was not alone in drawing the record industry analogy. An industry insider who wished to remain anonymous likened the deal to Warner Records distributing smaller "independent" record labels. "The difference," the insider said, "is that Warner injects money into the labels, using them as a sort of farm system, reaping profits from popular bands at a lower contract price and then moving them up to the big leagues the major label when they real ly get popular and can make significantly more money with the broader distribution of the parent label. We haven't heard that DC will invest money in Comico projects. "That's one theory why DC might want to help out Comico," the insider continued; "the other is that the big label can use the small companies as buffers against sharp increases in pro fits. For instance, if Warner was to make a hugely successful film, it would have to pay lots of capital gains. Warner could use the smaller label to
recognized titles. If that's their goal to gain an Epic Warner's cor porate method would be to acquire an independent. "That's not necessarily bad," he added. "Warner hasn't interfered with the direction of most labels they've ac quired because it's not in their business interest to. That the people at Com ico say they have editorial control is not inconsistent with typical Warner acquisitions or distribution deals, in this case. As with Sire Records, which doesn't have a huge backlist and must acquire new artists to keep alive, Warner hasn't touched Seymour Stein; they've left him alone to run it." Webb agreed that Warner might link itself to an unstable company for "write-off purposes. The Rocketeer and (below) "It would make sense, if they were Grendel: A b o o s t f r o m 5 0 y e a r s of planning on any sort of significantly DC sales a n d marketing clout? profitable divestiture, or if they ex pected large profits they wanted to write some of that off in losses it could even bankrupt these companies keep, to acquire some losing com pany," Webb said. "Of course, it's for the write-off. "So it may seem odd to 'help out' fairly well known that Comico is in a the competition," the insider conclud great. ..financial mess... what with a ed, "but these are long-term corporate large debt to their printer [Sleepeck Printing Company, see Newswatch, strategies." Journal #118], and I've heard some Steve Webb, former entertainment editor of Arizona's Scotsdale Progress thing about them having payment and an entertainment reporter of more troubles with their color separators, than a decade's experience, supported too." Asked why DC would acquire Com that analogy, and addressed its ico as a "sort of Epic" after sinking significance. "Two things make sense," he said. time and money into Piranha Press, "First, Warner Records has built their Webb said, "Tell me what Piranha has market share by acquiring smaller published; I haven't seen anything." An independent publisher requesting labels." According to Webb, Warner lured anonymity echoed Webb's view of reputedly unstable singer Frank Sinatra from Capitol Comico's Records in the '60s with the promise economy. "I was told that if [Comico] didn't of his own label, Reprise. In 1965, Warner bought Adantic Records the do this, they'd be out of business in leading New York independent label eight months," the publisher said. at the time from Ahmet Ertegun, "Now, DCs got to be taking 20 to 30 with the stipulation that he would re percent net for a distribution fee, so tain artistic control. Seymour Stein the question is [how much] would signed his label, Sire Records, for Comico have to increase sales just to Warner distribution in 1978; Warner stand still?" bought Sire in 1983 with the understan ding that they would not interfere with Industry Response. Eclipse Publisher Stein's direction. Jac Holzman started Elektra Records in the mid-60s, sell ing to Warner in 1973; when Holzman left the label, David Geffen took com mand, joining it with the Asylum label he had overseen for Atlantic. The "WEA" distribution firm noted on many of these labels' records stands for "Wamer-Elektra-Atlantic," Webb said.
COMICS
Dean Mullaney called the agreement "interesting." "I don't see any real benefits for either party," he said, "other than from a corporate perspective. Eclipse Editor-in-Chief Cat Yronwode also saw a record industry parallel. "You see, Warner is beginning to see the expansion of comics like that of records in the 60s," she said. "Once the smaller companies got a foothold, Warner couldn't regain the market shares they'd lost. The distribution agency role allows them to gain a larger share in a different way, and the bigger clout that gives with printers, distribution, retailers." First Comics Publisher Rick Obadiah claimed "mixed reactions" to the move. "On the one hand, I'm happy for [Comico President] Phil LaSorda and the people at Comico in that they saw a deal they wanted and they have it," Obadiah said. "On the other hand, that deal shows the problems that indepen dent publishers in our industry have. "In the early 80s, many new in dependent publishers began First, Pacific, Capital, Eclipse as real competition and alternatives to the big two," he said. "Since then, many have gone by the wayside Pacific and Capital and you had many holding on and doing their jobs Fan tagraphics, Comico. But now you have Eclipse withdrawing from the monthly comics market I think Dean Mullaney cited that he could not com pete in the color comic book market with Marvel and DC and he's refocusing his editorial directions for survival [see Newswatch, Journal #125]. "Comico obviously couldn't survive in that market, either, as we see by this deal with DC," Obadiah continued. "So you have, of the three so-called middle publishers, the big three in dependents Comico, Eclipse, and First only First remaining in the monthly comic business. That's a blow for independent comics. "There are repercussions," he said. "My only real point of view on this is if the company needed to survive, I'm happy they've found a way to sur vive. But there's something that needs to be noted here, and that's that some of the independents have withdrawn from their competition with the ma jor publishers, or have sought an agreement in this case of dependence with them. "The bottom line is that one of the major independents is now dependent on DC Comics. That certainly has repercussions for the challenge that the independents have represented," Obadiah said. "As for DC saying they're doing this to help Comico out, I can't believe that that DC Com-
"Second, it seems to me that DC Comics wants another line of comics, sort of like [Marvel's] Epic," Webb said. "If that's what they want, with this agreement or with a straight buy-out of Comico DC would be picking up some strong titles that are high profile, and without the develop ment time and money: immediately
18
ics, a subsidiary of Warner Books, is "does the cost of this kind of agree good deal." tise would provide us with exactly the not doing this primarily for some self- ment paying someone to move your Despite several requests, Comico kind of growth opportunities we need interested reason: they're a major cor books is it less than what you'll President Phil LaSorda was not at this stage in our business life. We're poration; they obviously have some make from the increased distribution? available for comment, but was quoted thrilled that DC Comics and Comico financial motive or else they're not If you can really decrease costs, you in the DC-Comico release: "We ap were able to come to this un might be able to knock down serving their stockholders." proached DC Comics and only DC precedented agreement." GSB Obadiah called Comico's overhead, then that would be a real Comics knowing that their exper "reliance" on I X Comics "a very sad affair for the industry for the creators and retailers, for the readers." "Distributors and retailers have to look at the repercussions of this deal," he said. "If they were unhappy with the two-company system of the 70s, they're just a few publishers away from that now." That ominous note was paralleled by Webb. "Remember that DC's dominance of comics throughout the '40s, '50s, and '60s was because they owned the distribution," Webb said. "When people talk about the distributors for cing the Comics Code on the industry, they're talking about DC they are the ones who set up the system in which pretty much only they could survive. "Now, if DC wants to establish a low-cost unit, this is a good way, without the overhead of starting up," he said. "When the New York com ics industry closed up around Marvel and DC, it locked in to an extent editorial and production costs. I hear DC pays an assistant editor about $18,000 a year. Can you imagine liv ing in New York on that? The only person who'd do it is someone [25 years] or younger who's just starting out. "Now, to draw them out and give them some polish, you could send them to Norristown [i.e. Comico]. They could certainly survive there on that salary, while honing their skills. "DC is set up to reduce [Comico's] per unit costs," Webb said, "and if DC bumps up their market share three points or so by joining with Comico they get better distribution, which makes their market share even better." Vortex Publisher Bill Marks offered his perspective on the deal: "It's not surprising. I proposed a very similar deal to DC a couple of years ago looks like they reached an agreement with Comico, whose books are more 6fttuJ( COLLECTORS ITEM ONE-SHOT \/m compatible with DC's line than ours were. "A strongly A t t e t t Y w drmwinf-styta mmd ti "DC's going to make money on it," Pteac >end mc die t o t u m j U m d U r ~ r i t n u m itmuom make thu mnmqne a piaasstre to prrv**. Htm, tmmay, U r * Urwtliy M ^ l i i i H#l II N t ! mmd twinging Marks said. "It increases their clout I ;Amnhtrng Omes! t i 41-fWfc i o k w I w <*oryi -The legend, NEW MUSICAL EXPRESS <6 p a * cotor Lloyd u o r y ) | | [J.OYD U.EWEUXN SPECIAL #1 in the marketplace by three points, in Together with n a m i n g Carrot mmd Rett Fleming it rmmks creases their volume and their in as on* of the very most comic books of the ' M i . " Pot* Scott, FANTASY ADVERTISER fluence with retailers and distributors. ''IfBemit Krigstein hmd drawn o beatnik-infitsled SF vorIt's just like the record industry non of K i u Me Deadry for Air. it wouid've been laughed offas a feeble imitation ofstories like The Crazy Hot-Rod CBS would rather make money on Dropouts from Beyond Jupiter" mmd "The Geo." - A r t Black, AWAY FROM THE PULSEBEAT their competitors, so it'll distribute " . . like the efforts of m demth-row inmate who was asked them. to be funny." -K A. Jones, AMAZING HEROES L 1 "The question is," Marks added,
19
$ 8 2 . 5 Million T a k e o v e r Effective January 1
Revlon Chairman Buys

New World Entertainment Ltd. and The Andrews Group, a holding and acquisitions management firm con trolled by Revlon Chairman Ronald 0 . Perelman, reached preliminary agree ment November 7 for the transfer of the Marvel Entertainment Group, ac cording to nationwide newspaper reports. The sale does not include the Los Angeles-based Marvel Produc tions animation unit. Marvel Comics Editor-in-Chief Tom DeFalco would not comment on the deal, which his secretary confirm ed. Marvel spokesman Steve Saffel claimed to have received "no official word" of the sale. "We've heard nothing but what's been in the papers," he said. Spokesmen for both companies said they were uncertain when a final agreement would be signed, but con firmed The Andrews Group agreed in principle to pay New World $82.5 million for Marvel, apparently netting the movie company a substantial return on its $46 million purchase in December 1986 of the nation's largest comics publisher [see Newswatch, Journal #113], Analysts quoted in The Wall Street Journal warned, however, that this apparent large pre tax gain an estimated $36.5 million may rise or fall because of undefin ed "adjustments made since the pur chase." New World announced its intention to sell all or part of the Marvel Enter tainment Group in July after repeated financial setbacks. Every division of the movie conglomerate with the exception of Marvel reported losses, totalling $18.5 million, in the fourth quarter of 1987, according to Variety and The Wall Street Journal. New World posted losses of $24.2 million ($29 million by some reports) in the first six months of 1988 on revenue of $203 million. In addition, the company carried $285 million in long-term debt as recently as midSeptember, when it claimed to have wrestled the figure to $55 million by redeeming $141.5 million in bonds at 55 percent of face value through GE Capital, which thereby boosted its stake in New World to 15 percent. New World shares ranged from $4,875 to as low as $1.75 over the last year; those same shares sold for
Marvel
$20.25 when issued in April 1986. By contrast, Marvel Comics (now Entertainment) Group has been consistently profitable since 1975, posting $73 million profits in 1985 alone. Ac cording to The Wall Street Journal, Marvel Comics posted revenue of $63.7 million last year and contributed $2.3 million in operating income to financially strapped New World, while Marvel Productions posted revenue of $26.5 million and remained "marginal ly profitable." Marvel Comics commands an estimated 40 percent of the $300 million comics market, publishing about 50 monthly tides with a combin ed readership, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulation, of 7.4 million. Rumors of potential Marvel buyers have circulated since the sale an nouncement four months ago, purpor ting such interested parties as media magnate Rupert Murdoch, the French publisher Hachette, the giant Japanese publisher Shogakukan (parent to Viz Communications), Walt Disney Pro ductions, and even Warner Com munications (parent to DC Comics). Monza Capital Corp., a small Los Angeles investment firm, claimed to have offered between $70 million and $90 million for Marvel in May. An unidentified "industry insider" quoted November 8 in The Hollywood Reporter called Marvel "a cash cow." "Anybody who buys it is going to be able to pay for the purchase very readily," the insider said. "Its profit margins are extremely high and, more to the point, the amount of money it makes per dollar expended is tremen dous." Pam Dovale, Stan Lee's secretary at Marvel Productions, said the former Marvel Comics editor-in-chief had no comment. "Stan Lee doesn't have anything to say, really. We don't believe anything's been worked out, and we won't know what will result until the beginning of the year," she said. The Daily News of Los Angeles described The Andrews Group as a Los Angeles-based "shell company" owned by MacAndrews & Forbes, a Perelman investment firm which lists among its subsidiaries the New Yorkbased Revlon Group Inc. cosmetics company. The Andrews Group will assume control of Marvel's comics and children's book publishing, licen sing, and merchandizing operations on January 1, according to New World, which will retain the Marvel Produc tions animation and television produc tion operation. GSB
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VII
L o n e S t a rC o m i c s O w n e r B u d d yS a u n d e r s
Retail Policies D e b a t e d at Dallas Con

Lone Star Comics President Buddy Saunders became the subject of debate on a Censorship in Comics panel at the Dallas Fantasy Fair November 26. The outspoken comics shop owner and industry critic, who did not attend the panel, was blasted by Wasteland writer John Ostrander for policies ex pressed in the eight-store chain's in ternal Zeta Beam newsletter, which Ostrander received from a former Lone Star employee. Three sections of the newsletter, one dropping Wasteland from store inven tory, formed the core of Ostrander's complaint against Saunders. From Zeta Beam Sequence No. 199: Do not make any DC comic Comic of the Week without first clearing it with me. It is Lone Star's position that DC comics [sic] is acting in a less than responsible manner with regard to content in some general audience com ics. I do not want any comic DC or otherwise made comic of the week if it cannot be offered to ALL customers. NOTE: All policies such as these are NOT to be discussed in any way with customers or in the presence of customers. From Zeta Beam Sequence No. 203: Lone Star's policy is not to promote any comic that contains graphic violence, crude language, sex, nudi ty, etc. if that comic is intended to be sold to minors, i.e. anyone younger than 18. Most super hero titles from DC now fall into this category along with some comics from many other publishers. As DC is the clear leader in the production of tasteless pander ing, you are to make every effort to caution parents as to the inappropriate content their child is likely to en counter in most DC titles. To the best of your ability, shift younger readers to Marvel titles or other alternate publishers such as Gladstone. Promo tional material for DC titles such as posters, flyers, news items, etc. are NOT to be posted in your store with out first being cleared by me. Addi tionally, no DC comic is to be made comic of the week without office clearance. In essence, our goal with regard to DC, is to meet the buying needs of our regulars while at the same time doing everything possible to avoid creating new DC readers. As a Lone Star employee, your support and understanding of this effort is both ex pected and required. From Zeta Beam Sequence No. 203: We will no longer be carrying WASTELAND. Issue 11 goes beyond any reasonable standards of taste and provides more than enough justifica tion for dropping it. If a customer asks for this title, tell them you don't think you've received any, but do not say that we have dropped the title as this is likely only to generate further ques tions and complaints. Do not discuss the policies outlined above with your regulars. Which companies we choose to support and which we choose to withdraw support from is none of their business. Ostrander's Rage. Transcripts of the panel, which included Steve Bissette, Joyce Brabner, publisher Denis Kit chen, Michael Price, and Bill Sienkiewicz, were not immediately available and Ostrander could not be reached at home. But the Journal has obtained a letter, here quoted at length, Ostrander sent to industry insiders with copies of the Zeta Beam passages. The emphases are Ostrander's own. "I find the attitudes behind them of fensive not only to the professional but to the customer, involving both ar rogance and a certain hypocrisy on the part of Mr. Saunders," Ostrander wrote. "I should state from the begin ning that I am not questioning Mr. Saunders' right to sell or not to sell whatever he pleases... What bothers me is his attitude towards his customers and his staff. He may have the right to expect his staff to comply with his directives, but he had no right to expect them to 'support and under stand' a policy that tells them, essen tially, to lie to the customer. "I am also at a loss to understand how Mr. Saunders can object on essentially moral grounds to a comic and then tell his managers to lie to the customers as to why the comic is not available. If he feels that DC is 'panderijg' with its books, why is he statement: 'Which companies we choose to support and which we choose to withdraw support from is none of their business.' I would sug gest it is very much their business; a customer gives you their business, they keep you in business, and have a right to expect honest, fair treatment and service. I would further suggest that lying to them and misleading them, to demonstrate the contempt shown in these memos, is not the way to keep their business. "What makes all of this more sinister is that Buddy Saunders is not just another retailer. He has placed himself as a figure of authority in the industry; he has a position in the nomination of the Harvey Awards that, given the bias shown above to DC, causes me to wonder just how im partial those awards can be. "...Perhaps, Mr. Saunders would care to re-think some of his policies," Ostrander concluded. Long Tangent. Kitchen called the panel "a long tangent." "Basically, it was a panel that was supposed to be on censorship, but it never really got past a series of accusa tions against Buddy," he said. "John Ostrander apparently came by some internal correspondence targetting DC Comics, and particularly Wasteland. Now, Buddy wasn't there to defend himself. [Ostrander and Brabner] basically tried and convicted him in absentia" Kitchen said. "I par ticipated on the panel without having any of the facts, but I called Buddy afterward and he said he was downplaying DC material and that he believes DC has been foisting a lot of mature material on the kids, the younger readers, and he was quite displeased by that. "The main contention was that Bud dy was asking his employees to act unethically, asking his employees to lie to the customers, but that was never made clear because the language of the internal memos was ambiguous, real ly," Kitchen said. Saunders' Reply. In a phone inter view, Saunders defended his right to sell only those items "worthy" of his store, and attempted to clarify the in tention behind the questioned newslet ter sections. "Lone Star is a certain kind of store. We can't serve every reader across the spectrum we can't be totally squeaky clean for the really strict parents nor can we carry every book adult readers might want," he said. "But as a primarily family-oriented
'
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/
/ &JT V W A TD OV O U DO fOCi S t V W e B O C VW H C just toptwjed one op âx teachers TO DEATH?"
T h e Dissecting of Mr. Fleming: " I felt t h a t if t h e y w o u l d p u t t h a t i n , they'd probably put anything i n . "
selling them at all? The answer to this, of course, is that if he didn't his customers would go elsewhere and he is not about to risk that. If he thinks DC's books are smut, then he is a smut dealer to sell them at all. "I find incredible his instructions to 'not say that we have dropped the ti tle as this is likely only to generate fur ther questions and complaint.' I bet it would and we can't have that, can we? Why, you might think this was America or something! "Equally incredible to me is his
22
store that's still trying to generate in terest and readership among the young readers, there's limits to what we can carry. "That's my problem with DC," he said. "As a matter of record, there's only one DC book we won't carry: Wasteland. It's a pretty tasteless book, and I wrote it off after issue 11, with the dissecting Mr. So-and-So biology teacher ["Dissecting Mr. Fleming," by Ostrander and Del Close]. I felt that if they would put that in, they'd pro bably put anything in. "DC has turned into a strange com pany," he said. "For a long time, they had a squeaky clean reputation; now, it's almost like their values have been turned upside down the badder you are the gooder you are. "I think DC is focusing far too much on gratuitous violence, like the thing with killing Robin. To me, that's real pathetic stuff; I don't know, maybe they need money. "I think DC has abandoned the younger readers," he said. "What they publish now is pretty sophomoric up and down the line; there's not too much literature to them. Now, com ics has always been basically entertain ment, but DC has done nothing that I can see to get above that. "I have no problem with adult books, but there's got to be some justification," Saunders said. "I want a broad spectrum of books in my store because I think comics have always had a broad base even adults read comics in the '40s; but the difference was that those books were also accessi ble to kids. I think the companies and it's a bad long-term policy have by and large abandoned the young kids. "That may be good for short-term profits, going after the older readers who have the money, but that policy is disastrous in the long-term," he said. "Based on experience, the com ics industry is creating very, very few new readers. If people haven't pick ed up comics by 18, they probably aren't going to. I'm interested in reaching the young readers who'll make up our audience in the future." Thus, Saunders said, he "down plays" DC Comics, and only rarely promotes them as "Comic of the Week." But that doesn't mean talking customers out of buying them or refus ing to stock them, he said. DC's "Pandering." The Zeta Beam instruction to "shift younger readers" away from DC titles "is in reference, basically, to parents who come in with their young kids," Saunders explained. "In our store, most of the DC books are in the older readers section. When parents ask us what might be good for
their kids, we'll tell them most of the super hero comics have what many parents consider excessive violence. If you have no problems with that, try Marvel or some of the other publish ers, but we do not endorse DC com ics because of the violence.
of characters and story. "The violence, all that stuff, is the only thing that makes DC more 'adult' and I think their titles are much more sophomoric than Marvel's. DC's definition of 'adult' is really bizarre that you don't have to have literate
we carry DC comics. We're not sup porting them with promotion, but our customers have had no trouble getting them. We have them here and we take reorders. "Sometimes you do need to amend a policy," he said. "If a customer asked for a book, we'd tell them if we'd drop ped it." More controversy. Saunders had also come under fire at the Dallas conven tion for refusing to stock the Strip Aids, Arrgh, and True North benefit anthologies. Brabner said she called Saunders to discuss Strip Aids. "I spoke with Buddy for about two hours," she said, "and he agreed to look it over. I sent him a copy, and he said he hadn't looked at it careful ly enough, and he agreed to carry it. I think there was some concern in there that kids would see it, but I assured him that it's really too expensive for kids, and that it probably wouldn't in terest them anyway." Saunders said he initially rejected the book because "Lone Star is primarily an entertainment store and Strip Aids sounded like something that belonged in a mainline bookstore." "It didn't seem like a very impor tant book for us to carry," he said. "When I looked back over it, it seem ed worthwhile." Saunders said he chose not to carry Arrgh because "frankly, I'm really ner vous about what [Alan Moore] puts in his books," and that he had no idea why True North had not been stocked. "The only thing I can think of is at the time we were ordering it, I thought it was just another black and white book. There's no reason for me not to carry it," he said. I fully endorse books that help comic shops in trou ble. I mean, of course." A-V Deja Vu. A fourth Zeta Beam passage also raised eyebrows. In that passage, from Sequence No. 194, Saunders established that Lone Star would carry only Cerebus from Dave Sim's Aardvark-Vanaheim, refusing Michael Zulli and Stephen Murphy's Puma Blues. "The reasoning behind dropping Puma Blues instead of Cerebus over a dispute between Dave Sim and our distributor [Diamond, see Newswatch. Journal h 120-123] is business," Saunders said. "Cerebus is already established and our customers ex pect to get it. The negative PR of dropping Cerebus would not be good from a business standpoint; the loss of revenue from not having other Cerebus material available to us is not worth that, but dropping Puma Blues was a way for us to lodge some small protest with A-V as
"I don't consider Marvel or DC to be much different," Saunders said. "I basically view what Marvel and DC, and a number of the others, publish as product lightweight entertainment, not art or literature. Now, there are some things you can go back and say there's more to it than just that. For in stance, I can see why Dave Sim wants to call Cerebus art, or a creation, rather than product. But that's a minority of the work produced, this stuff ground out by the majors. If art is involved, it's pretty incidental. "So, I endorse Marvel to people looking for light reading because Marvel's remained accessible. If you showed your average, literate adults who don't read comics a sample of Marvel and DC and took all the sex, nudity, language, extreme violence from DC and asked them which you would consider more literate, they'd say Marvel. DC's never been able to compete with Marvel in sheer maturity
plot or characters, you just have to have somebody's heart ripped out or [a character] screw a slug [an oblique reference to Wasteland #14]." Amendment. Saunders called the "tell them you don't think we've received any, but do not say that we've dropped the title" passage "oddsounding." "I can see how that's unfair to customers," he said. "My intent was not to lie to customers, but not to volunteer information. If a customer asked for a book, we'll tell them if we've dropped it. "What we did with that was put a PR face on it," he said, "to sort of get around the issue, but, obviously, the best policy is to be straightforward. Seriously believe me, if all I cared about is making money, I'd just carry and promote everything DC publishes. But I can't abandon standards as I know them. Aside from Wasteland,
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a business. It was a business-tobusiness dispute. "The line of reasoning behind it is that we supported Cerebus, and helped it gain an audience. Now Dave comes along and calls us all 'suits and hair cuts' and completely ignores any role we had the distributors and retailers in his success. So, if our support is going to be ignored when all of it is not needed down the line, we're not going to support the new books at the beginning when it is needed," Saunders said. "That's all. Dave may
be a creator, but he's also a hard-nosed businessman he's a suit and a hair cut in his own way, too." The Harveys. Fantagraphics Publisher Gary Groth, sponsor of the annual Harvey Awards, addressed Ostrander's contention that Saunder's "bias" against DC Comics hurt the credibili ty of the awards. "I've learned nothing in the past few years about Buddy Saunders that would indicate he and his organization are not entirely trustworthy, and ful
ly capable of accurately and honestly tallying ballots in the Harvey Awards," he said, "notwithstanding the smear campaign against him begun by Harlan Ellison and Frank Miller, and occasionally perpetuated by a freelancer who stands to lose a few bucks because of decisions Saunders makes about what he sells in his stores. "I happen to disagree with Saunders on any number of public issues," Groth noted, "but I wouldn't call his character into question because of this. I understand he's addressed the ques
tion of impropriety in his internal memo straightforwardly and that, as far as I'm concerned, puts this par ticular matter to rest." The Bottom Line. "When you get right down to it," said Denis Kitchen, "he has the right to carry what he wants. Now, Buddy does carry most things, and he does have a section of adult comics. But no one can force a retailer to carry anything, least of all books he objects to." G S B
Syndicates Offer Standard C o a l i t i o n R e f o r m s Sunday Funnies Sections

Freelance Artists' Deductions Saved
National Tax Laws

Taxpaying artists of all persuasions won a major victory November 10 when President Ronald Reagan sign ed into law the Technical Corrections Act of 1988. This final battle in a two-year grassroots war to amend the Tax Reform Act of 1986 was called "a tremendous victory" by Paul Basista, coordinator for the national Artists for Tax Equity (AFTE) coalition. The measure swept through the House of Representative (as H.R. 4333) August 4 on a vote of 380 to 25, and passed the Senate (as S. 2338) October 22 on a vote of 87-1 after a zero-hour lob bying effort saved it from death in committee. The new law exempts artists from rigid uniform capitalization rules established by the 1986 law. Among the corrections enacted with the president's signature, according to AFTE, "is an exemption for artists, writers, and photographers from the uniform capitalization rules [Section 263A of the Tax Reform Act of 1986] which unfairly treat[ed] them as manufacturers. These rules require[d] creative professionals to deduct their business expenses only when each specific project is sold, rather than deducting those expenses in the year they occur. Artists, writers, and photographers would also have [had] to project the income from each work, and prorate the applicable expenses over that time frame. Unsold works would have to be treated as inventory." [See Newswatch, Journal #123.] Changes. Yet the bill Reagan signed differed from the version approved by Congress, according to Basista. The bill, as presented to and approv ed by Reagan, incorporates two new paragraphs and subparagraphs that establish as "criteria" for the deter-
United Media and King Features Syn dicate began offering standardized Sunday comics sections in September) America's two largest syndicates established their separate ventures as alternatives for smaller newspapers after a recent rate hike by Sunday com ics printer Greater Buffalo Press. UM is the parent company of United Features Syndicate and Newspaper Enterprise Association; King is af filiated with the North (formerly News) America Syndicate (NAS). UM Assistant Sales Manager Lisa Klem Wilson told Editor & Publisher the program offers the "ready-prints" at roughly the same price papers paid . . . M M . I H I M HOUSE- OF KrlESlNTATNCS GBP before the rate increase because, M i l t 001 I l l L EXEMPTING ARTISTS FROM Tut T U UPITAIIZAI10N tw R 5JO-25! NOW though the sections will be printed by i M U M Tut SENATE AMI WE NEED EVERYONE GBP, the printer will need to stop its TO PUSH US TO VICTORY. TELEGRAM, CALL *N0 WRITt m WUA SENATORS TO CO SPONSOR. THE presses and change plates less often. MOYNIWUN/llAtUY I'LL, S T i l l "(OUR ( H E W ) TO DO THE SAME.!! "It was a combination of things," said Jim Nolan of King. "GBP took a look at their costs and saw they were Artists c a n n o w deduct materiel expenses as they always have. skyrocketing. They lost money every time a [client] paper with a different mination of artists and artwork [comics] line-up needed a press stop "originality and uniqueness" of the page. This way, they can print 30,000 work or final product, and "a copies of a comics section for one predominance of aesthetic value over paper, send it out with the appropriate utilitarian value" in the work or final masthead, and keep printing the same section for other papers." product. ' 'I guess that means a sculpture that UM offers both a six-page, has a hole in the middle where you 23-comic broadsheet, and an eightcould put a flower could be interpreted page, 22-comic tabloid. King offers as 'utilitarian,' " Basista said, "but I four-page, 15-comic and six-page, don't think that's going to happen. I 24-comic broadsheets, and an eightthink the legislators were really ensur page, 22-comic tabloid. ing that craftspeople don't slip in there. Both UM packages contain the same We just have to see how the damn comics (plus Jim Meddick's Robotman thing's enforced and, if we have com for the broadsheet), including seven plaints, get back up to speed and from Universal Press Syndicate: Cathy change it again. Guisewite's Cathy, Lynn Johnston's "But for most artists who work For Better or For Worse, Gary Lar traditionally, this is not going to mean son's The Far Side, Millar and Hinds' much," Basista added. "I mean, a car Tank McNamara, Garry Trudeau's toon is a cartoon and you can't use it Doonesbury, Bill Watterson's Calvin for much else unless it's a really bad and Hobbes, and Tom Wilson's Ziggy. cartoon. Brad Anderson's Marmaduke, Pat "It's a really tremendous victory," Brady's Rose is Rose, Jim Davis' Gar he said. G S B field, Charles Schulz' Peanuts, and
ONE DOWN, CM 10 60 (
Jerry Scott's Nancy from United Feature Syndicate and Dik Browne's Hagarthe Horrible, Bill Keane's The Family Circus, Mort Walker's Beetle Bailey, and Young and Drake's Blondie from King round out UM's selec tion, which also includes Berke Breathed's Bloom County, Hart and Parker's The Wizard of Id, Jeff MacNelly's Shoe, Mike Peters' Mother Goose and Grimm, Art Sansom's The Born Loser, and Bob Thaves' Frank and Ernest from various smaller syndicates. King's four-page broadsheet com prises Blondie, Beetle Bailey, The Family Circus, Hagar the Horrible (all King), Garfield, Peanuts (both United), Calvin and Hobbes (Univer sal), and The Wizard of Id (NAS), plus King Features strips Hank Ketchum's Dennis the Menace, Dik Browne's Hi & Lois, Fred Lasswell's Snuffy Smith, The Phantom, Greg Howard's Sally Forth, Tom Batiuk's Funky Winkerbean, and Comics for Kids. Both King's six- and eight-pagers in clude the previous strips and The Far Side, Doonesbury, Bloom County, and Shoe, plus NAS features LuAnn, Reg Smythe's Andy Capp, and Tom Arm strong's Marvin, and Johnny Hart's B.C. (Creators Syndicate), and John Cullen Murphy's Prince Valiant (King). United Press Syndicate National Sales Director Robert Duffy lauded the variety of syndicates represented in the new ready-prints. "The small Sunday market has always been owned by the brokers," he told Editor & Publisher, claiming that, in the past, King and UM's predecessor brokered ready-print pages (different from the current packages in that they were generally supplements to local Sunday comics pages) "loaded up" with strips from their own syndicates. Wilson emphasized that UM evaluated readership polls and national
24
rankings of comic strips before select ing the final group, and that syndicate affiliation had not effected the selec tion. Nolan doubted that UM had con ducted polls. "I'd really be inclined to doubt that anybody did very much surveying," he said. "We all can tell pretty well which are the best comics. It's not too difficult to determine the best strips, the ones people want to see." The subject became an issue when Creators Syndicate President Richard Newcombe blasted UM for favoring strips distributed by its United Features and NEA subsidiaries. "The whole concept of the printer's broker also being a supplier of com ics is highly questionable," he said. "Is United Media saying that Robotman has a higher readership than fiC? That's insane." Wilson replied: "Wfe did not deliber ately slight anyone. We made a judg
ment call that had nothing to do with Rick or his syndicate." Nolan acknowledged that King's packages with 16 of 24 comics from King or NAS favor its own strips more than the UM packages with nine of 22 from Universal or NEA but discounted talk of "loading up." "To some extent, you've got to pro tect your creators," he said, "but we've tried to use the best comics for the best section we could get. We wouldn't include obscure strips, anyway, because no one would want the sections, no matter the cost. The papers want the strips that people will buy the paper to read." Wilson said more than 35 papers each averaging about 23,000 circula tion have subscribed to the UM packages. Nolan said "30 to 35 newspapers averaging less than 100,000 circulation" have chosen the King packages. GSB
Illinois Store Busted in 1987
Friendly Frank's Closes

Friendly Frank Mangiaracina's beleaguered Lansing, Illinois, comics shop is no more. "The way we found out we were being evicted was that our barber [who rented the storefront next to Friendly Frank's Comics] moved out across the street," Mangiaracina said. "This is a guy who's been talking about retir ing for the last 10 years. We asked him and he said, 'You've got to get out of there.' Our landlord hadn't said a thing." Technically, the store busted in February 1987 on charges of disseminating obscene material [see Newswatch, Journal #s 114-118, 120, 122] lost its lease because the landlord decided to remodel. But Mangiaracina's requests to occupy either of the building's other two storefronts while his space was renovated were denied. " I asked the landlord if we could just move next door while he remodelled our store. He said he'd already rented it out. Well, damn! I'd've thought he would've asked me. 'How about the back while you remodel the front?' I asked him. He got really upset when I suggested that. He got really frantic. Of course, they were happy to rent to my lawyer when we sent him around to check on this," Mangiaracina said. "In fact, they volunteered him the information that they didn't like us because we'd been selling dirty books." Refusing dismay, Mangiaracina, who owns two other comics shops in Hobart, Indiana, decided to relocate elsewhere in Lansing. But, he said, he found only two storefronts approx imating his needs. "One place I called up, the first place I'd heard about in all of Lans ing," he said. "As soon as I said that it was Friendly Frank's comic book store and that we were looking to move our store, she said she wouldn't rent to us under any circumstances and hung up just like that. "We also looked at a place diagonally across the street from the Lansing store, an old newspaper of fice with partitions cutting it into five or six little offices. The whole place was less than 1,000 feet, which was really pretty small for us anyway, but I asked the guy if we could take out the partitions and he said, no, those partitions had been there since the building had been there and he couldn't do that. Thirty days later, it was a gift store and those partitions were gone." Perservering, Mangiaracina began looking outside the city. "We got wind of a place in Munster [Indiana], about two miles east of Lan sing," Mangiaracina said. "I did a lot of negotiating with these people because the place was really run down, just a shell, and they wanted a long-term, five-year lease for a place twice the size of the Lansing shop and three times the rent. So they came down a bit on the rent if I'd fix it up myself, which amounted to giving me a couple of months free rent to offset the $10,000 in walls, floor, and electrical.
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"We had agreed on everything," he said. "I went so far as to get them through electrical court because the wife was busy with the kids and the husband was a bigshot contractor in Chicago, always flying off somewhere. So I got them free elec trical quotes, plumbing inspection, and an OK even from the Munster building inspector, who said we could do it as long as our store was not a front for an adult book store, which I easily assured him we are not. "We agreed to sign finally on September 2; everything was ready to go. I hadn't bought anything yet, but we'd talked to contractors and arrang ed to have the ceilings and walls put in on the same day, and we'd told our Lansing customers we'd be open in Munster by September 10. "So I called up the wife for the sign ing and she said, 'Sorry, we've decid ed to rent to The Great Frame-Up,' and that was that," Mangiaracina said. "This was in September and there's still no sign of activity in that place. It's still a gutted building. Nothing's been done since I was there. There's still a sign in the window, you know, saying 'For Lease.' I still have the damn key!" So, Mangiaracina decided, Lans ing's loss is comic collectors' gain: because his other two stores cannot ab sorb the Lansing inventory, Mangiaracina is selling it cheap. "We're selling about 20,000 to 30,000 comics at around 10 or 15 cents each," he said. "About half of them are brand new, the rest is used stuff. We're selling boxes of 300 for
$35 half in very fine to mint con dition and half in good to near mint condition. It's all got to go." Mangiaracina doesn't lament the store's passing. "I had very little to do with that store outside of bailing people out of jail," he said. "When we opened Lan sing, it didn't seem like too good a location, but it was close to [Manager Mike Correa, who was convicted in the bust, quit, and is appealing]. We didn't actually plan on closing the store, but it wasn't really a problem because the staff disappeared about the same time the store did." But Mangiaracina may have the last laugh on Lansing. "I just got some paperwork on [the conviction appeal]," he said. "It's been sent in, but the prosecution's ask ed for an extension. We may be su ing the mayor and the city inspector and Officer Van Gorp [who led the bust] though probably not the city because it looks like they closed our store improperly. "Under the ordinance they used, they said they closed us for selling adult material within 1,200 feet of a residential area. But the ordinance says 'predominantly' adult material, and still allows us advance warning and a chance to appeal before we're closed. We didn't get that, and most of what we sell sure isn't adult stuff," Mangiaracina said. Friendly Frank's attorney, Burton Joseph said the appeal awaits date assignment for oral argument, adding that the long delay was "not unusual."
GSB
$3,000 in Fines
C a n a d i a n S h o p Loses Obscenity Case

Comics Legends of Calgary, Alberta, has lost its much-publicized obsceniProprietors Darren Ott and Dale Clarke were found guilty on two counts possession of, and intent to sell, obscene material and acquit ted of a third intent to distribute obscene material. The store was fined $2,000. Ott and Clarke were fined $500 each. Defense counsel J. Andre Ouellette, on vacation, could not be reached for comment. The case went to trial October 5, almost a year after Canadian Vice Squad and Customs officers seized 92 comics from the store after a parent's complaint [see Newswatch, Journal #125]. Comics seized in the raid in cluded Bizarre Sex #5, Love and Rockets, Grendel, and The Fabulous *
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T h e first in a s e r i e s f r o m T h e C o m ics L e g e n d s L e g a l D e f e n s e F u n d ?
Furry Freak Brothers. As expected, a recent Canadian legal precedent the 1985 R. vs. r\agner, which inculcated feminist principles targetting depictions of violence against, or degradation of, women proved insurmountable to the defense. Ouelette has claimed that he will seek appeal of any decision against the store. GSB
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Spotlight Declares Bankruptcy

Spotlight Comics Inc. of Danbury, Connecticut, has filed under Chapter 7 of the United States Bankruptcy Code. The year-old publisher of licensed Underdog, Mighty Mouse, and Mighty Heroes color comic books will liquidate and distribute its assets under Chapter 7. President and Publisher Richard Maurizio could not be reached for comment. Spotlight's bankruptcy caps the series of financial crises that marked operations since the company's open ing in December 1987. Before the company closed its doors in February of this year, it had earned a reputation for late and erratic, and often partial, payment to creators, leaving unpaid in voices for work as much as a year old [see Newswatch, Journal #122], Jorge Pacheco counts himself among the slighted. Pacheco worked on several Spotlight tides, and pencill ed a 16-page Heckle and Jeckle special that never saw print, and for which he was never paid. "I'm due about $920 for 14 pages of pencils and 2 pencilled pages I also inked," Pacheco said, "but I did get my art back not that I know what to do with 16 pages of Heckle and Jeckle. "Of course I'd like to go after my money, but what can I do? It's far away. Overall, it was a big pain." According to Spotlight's contract, creators are entitled to 50 percent of their negotiated fees if their works are not used within a year of submission. Of course, this provision is abrogated by Spotlight's bankruptcy. Court documents count Spotlight's assets at $10,270, including $10,000 owed by Capitol Distributors of Der by, Connecticut (not affiliated with Capital City Distribution). Spotlight's debt is counted at $224,302, including a $50,000 claim by Maurizio.GSB
Finished Projects Unpublished
Matrix Comics Folds

Without issuing a single tide, the new Matrix Comics has folded. "It's a tough decision to make," said Pierre Fournier, editor-in-chief. "We had assembled the first batch of books for the printer, but [advance] sales on our books were well below what we expected and we figured we'd have to throw a lot more money at it, so we've decided to reconsider." Ludcom Inc. of Canada, publisher of the French-language Croc humor magazine, merged with Mark Shainblum's Matrix Graphic Series last July [see Newswatch, Journal #123], acquiring Shainblum's Northguard and other former Matrix titles The Jam and Gaijin. The new Matrix had also con tracted to publish Gordon Derry and Denis Beauvais' Warlock 5, a popular series originally published by Aircel, which challenged the creators for rights to the title. "One of the things to come out of this is a signed agreement to the satisfac tion of Gordon and Denis," Fournier said "Our lawyers sued Aircel on their behalf and Aircel came around but now we won't be publishing Warlock 5!" Fournier said rights to all books scheduled at Matrix including rights to publish the three issues of Northguard and issues of The Jam, Gaijin, Warlock 5, and The Resistance already finished and paid for have reverted back to their respective owners, and the company's name itself has been ceded back to Shainblum. Fournier said he did not know whether Shainblum who ran into cash flow problems with Matrix' first incarnation would return to publishing; Shainblum was unavailable for comment. "We just pulled out completely," Fournier said. "We did consider redoing our schedule, but that's a pain. There's a strong sense at Ludcom that we should expand into the American market, but we also publish graphic albums in French for the European market and we'll be concentrating on that, and reconsider our American strategy for a bit." GSB
C O P Y R I G H T S : p 106 -: 1989 ACQ; p 33 1989 Charles Addams: p.64, 101a. 101b 1989 Archie Comics; p. 110 1989 Peter Bagge; p 28c, 45b 1989 Brian Bolland. p 108 1989 Lynda Barry; p 24 1989 Steve Brodner; p 44a 1989 Bob Burden; p 40 1989 A. Capp Estate; p. 109 1989 Dan C l o w e s p 5 17, 18 1989 Comico; p. 1 i c , 85a 1989 R. Crumb: p 2 9 1989 Dargaud-Benelux; p.7, p 22. p.37, 38b. 3 9 . 1 0 4 c . 107, 107 1989 DC; p 101c 1989 Walt Disney; p 103, 105 1989 E C ; p i 02c 1989 ERB; p 4 6 a 1989 Hunt Emerson; p . l 0 4 a 1989 Jules Feiffer; p.28 1989 First; p 44b 1989 Gaiman & Gibbons; p.76, 9 8 . 9 9 1989 Hall Syndicate; p.64c 1989 Hallden Fawcett: p.72 1989 Hernandez Bros.; p 65b, 71a, 71c. 87, 8 8 , 89, 90, 9 1 , 9 2 , 93, 94, 9 5 , 98, 9 7 , 104b, 113 1989 Gilbert Hernandez: p.71b. 7 3 , 74. 75, 7 7 . 78. 79. 8 0 . 8 1 , 8 2 . 8 3 , 8 4 , 8 5 , 1 0 8 a , 111 1989 Jaime Hernandez; p.31a 1989 King Features; p 23 Last Gasp 1989; p 38a 1989 Life Magazine; p 59 1989 Lopez s Lopez: p.S, 64a, 76a, 100 1989 Marvel; p.28a 1989 McKeever & Gibbons; p 45a 1989 Frank Miller; p 46b 46c 1969 Moore, Bissette & Totleben; p.28b 1989 Moore & Parkhouse; p 123-128 1989 J . Munoz; p l i b , 4 7 - 5 1 1989 Harvey Pekar; p 43a 1989 Bill Plimpton; p.31b 1989 Punch; p. 43b 1989 Arn Saba; p 53, 5 4 , 5 5 . 5 6 . 5 7 1989 Sampayo & Munoz; p 58 1989 Sampayo A Lopez; p.11a 1989 A n Spiegelman: p 27 1989 Universal Press; p.26 1969 Viacom; p 32 1989 Vortex: p 102a, 102b 1989 Warren.
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Comic Strip Dropped for " P o l i t i c a l E s p o u s a l "

C a t h y The syndicated Cathy comic strip rais ed eyebrows, and flared some tempers, across America during Elec tion Week with left-leaning messages to voters. Some 40 papers lodged complaints, said United Press Syndicate Editorial Director Lee Salem, and "about two dozen" pulled or moved to editorial pages one or more of the two-week series' 12 strips (the series' two Sun day strips apparently ran unchalleng ed). Cathy appears in more than 500 newspapers, Salem said. Papers pulling or moving the strip (or replacing it with earlier Cathy episodes) included the Evansville (Ind.) Courier, the Manchester (N.H.) Union Leader, the Milwaukee Sen tinel, the Portland Oregonian, the Albany (N.Y.) Times-Union, the Raleigh (NC.) News and Observer, and the Los Angeles Times. The Cullman (Ala.) Times replaced one of the strips with a paid advertisement for Republican presidential candidate (now President-elect) George Bush. Only the Cullman paper subsequently cancell ed its subscription to Cathy. "We anticipated some negative responses and that's why we talked with [creator Cathy Guisewite] about it when they came in," Salem said. ' 'She made some cogent points and we went with those points." Among the "points" espoused by Guisewite's Andrea character were detailed statistics on election spending and social programs, including child care and mothers in the work force. "Senate Republicans killed a day care subsidy plan this month," blared Andrea's televison in the October 26 strip, "preferring to back Bush's plan to give families a $ 1,000 tax credit for each child under age four. The Bush plan comes to $2.74 per day per child. While no one could find decent day care for $2.74 a day, his plan would allow each impoverished family to buy a decent VCR. "Not only would children have something to watch while Mommy rips her hair out," the TV continues, "but each VCR purchase would fur ther boost the Japanese economy so they could keep boosting our economy by buying up all our buildings and businesses. Parents, of course, could tape all speeches explaining how well off they are." "Get your bottle, honey," Andrea said to her baby, Zenith, "Mommy has to go to bed for four years." Distinctions. "We draw a distinction between political subjects and overt ly political diatribes," said John Brownell, View section editor for the Los Angeles Times, which dropped Cathy November 2, 3, and 4, before public outcry reinstated it. "[Garry Trudeau's] Doonesbury comments politically with a bit of wit and satire, and takes on politicians in general and some hard issues, but Cathy in this
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LOOK W H A T M O M M Y WROTE
Z E N I T H . . . "25 T b Of T H E CHIL
D R E N I N THE COUNTRY TODAY LIVE WITH A SINGLE P A R E N T . WE NEED DUKAKIS BECAUSE HE SUPPORTS A NATIONAL D A Y CARE PLAN A N D LAWS T O
RAISE DAY-CARE STANDARDS."
"*WTo OF THE WORKFORCE ARE WOMEN, BUT WOMEN EARN ONLY Ml OF WHAT /HEN DO. WE NEED DUKAKIS BECAUSE HE SUP PORTS LAWS FOR EOUAL PAY."
"801b OF THE WOMEN WILL GET PREGNANT DURING THEIR WORK ING LIVES. WE NEED DUKAKIS BECAUSE HE SUPPORTS JOBPROTECTED MATERNITY LEAVES."
. . . A N D W o OF ALL CHILDREN UNOER AGE 3 WILL 5TUFF POLITICAL FLIERS DOWN THE TOILET BEFORE MOMMY HAS A CHANCE TO HAND THEM OUT.
The Los Angeles Times, a m o n g o t h e r s , " [ d r e w ] a d i s t i n c t i o n b e t w e e n political s u b j e c t s a n d o v e r t political d i a t r i b e s , " a n d d r o p p e d t h i s C a t h y s t r i p .
case essentially provided a political en dorsement of the [Democratic presidential candidate Michael] Dukakis campaign. "We're not trying to squelch political debate at all," Brownell said, "but we saw this as an out and out political endorsement. The difference between what Cathy did and, again, what Doonesbury did is that Doonesbury is satire; the strips we deleted in Cathy didn't use satire. [Guisewite] said herself in the article we ran about this [November 2] that she was using the strip to press these campaign issues. " W e have no trouble with Doonesbury taking pot shots at politi cians, but what's different is that she simply made an endorsement," he said. Guisewite was unavailable for com ment but, quoted in that Los Angeles Times article, said she did the strips "just to get people talking about women's issues in relationship to the candidates." "I'm glad I did it," she said. "I knew going in that I ran the risk of alienating some readers [but] it was important enough... to weather the alienation." Political Espousal. The outcry centered around editors' anger at not being forewarned, and their belief that Guisewite departed far afield from the spirit and traditional content of her strip. "We thought she was being unfair and that she double-crossed us," said Indianapolis Star Managing Editor Lawrence S. Connor. Although Con nor didn't pull any of the strips ("I pulled the Doonesbury strip in the '80 campaign and got so much negative reaction 900 calls by noon! that I learned my lesson"), he complain ed to UPS and wrote a personal letter to Guisewite. '' Cathy has been a good strip about young, single women and suddenly we had a blatant piece of political
espousal," Connor said. "I mean, you see, you buy certain things for certain reasons and you come to count on that. I mean, the syndicate didn't even give us forewarning of any kind. Now, OK, Doonesbury and Bloom County are very political and I understand that and I expect that, but not from Cathy, not like this." Connor said the Star ran a story ex plaining that the paper "didn't endorse what she was doing with the strip'' and an editorial "a couple of days later saying we didn't think much of what she was doing." Paul McAuliffe, managing editor of Indiana's Evansville Courier (which endorsed Bush), didn't think much of what Guisewite was doing either. "We felt that she was campaigning for Dukakis and we didn't feel that was appropriate," he said. "We don't have objections to comic strips having a point of view or poking fun at political candidates of course, Doonesbury does that but we feel that in other strips we run, and in strips we don't run, there's an attempt to be evenhanded. These were certainly more strident than what we'd come to ex pect from Cathy." McAuliffe called the strips "diatribes, directed solely at one par ty" and said he replaced six of the strips with 1984 Cathy episodes. "There were four in all that I thought were particularly offensive, targetting the Republicans, campaign ing for Dukakis," McAuliffe said. "I felt all the stuff she mentioned was debatable. Obviously, I think, the other side would have had some countervailing arguments." McAuliffe said forewarning might have helped in "giving us some run ning room rather than having to deal with a fait accompli'' but that he would have moved or dropped the "objec tionable" strips in any case. Syndicate's View. UPS' Salem said the syndicate rarely offers advance notice of a strip's content.
"Traditionally, we do not notify client newspapers on our feeling about a sequence or columns though a lot of editors have requested that we d o , " he said. Salem said the strips had been discussed at length at the syndicate before their release, and that he believ ed they were "strong but worthwhile" and that Andrea had been balanced by other characters such as Andrea's boyfriend, who closed his door on her, saying, "Come back when you have fair, non-partisan, non-subjective facts." Salem also said Cathy had not en tirely broken character. "The strip has dealt in the past, sometimes lightly and also not so light ly, with important issues. We believ ed these strips were not out of the parameters of the strip over the last 12 years," he said, "though I can see how a lot of editors would think that. "But I'm not sure it's fair to expect any comics artist to keep doing the same exact thing they've done for 12 years without some growth." Speech vs. Commercialism? Asked if editors' decisions to pull Cathy was an instance of purchasers' rights outweighing a cartoonist's right of ex pression, Salem chuckled. "Well, I see it more as what my friends say is an impractical view, an aesthetic view," he said. "I think comic strips can be more valuable to news readers, and this is one way they can do it. "The word censorship has not come up here," Salem said. "We support newspaper editors' right to edit their material. But some of the complaints I've heard from editors is that they didn't read the strips before they ran them but wished they had so they might have known to pull them. This smacks of accepting comics as a necessary but unimportant little cor ner of the newspaper. I believe com ics, as readers have proven, are a vital, important part of the paper.
"Political commentary is an area that has yet to be fully explored in comic strips and I mean by that not by strips but as an editorial approach to strips and the comics page," Salem said. "This kind of reaction takes the risk out of comics and I'm not sure that's a real healthy thing. In the last 20 years, comics have become really topical and to take those topical car toons when they might move deeper into politics for a week or two off the comics page hurts the artform, frankly. "We take the position that we'd rather the editors put strips on the OpEd pages than drop it altogether so at least people get the chance to see it and make a decision for themselves," he said, "but, still, to my mind, Doonesbury is a comic strip, not a political cartoon. He belongs on the comics page." Editor's View. The Los Angeles Times' Brownell took the editors' view. "Our decision [to drop Cathy] begs us to answer the question, 'What is the role of the comics page,' and what kind of editorial policy we exercise at this great bastion of the First Amendment," he said. "Everybody's got their First Amendment rights, and cartoonists certainly have the right to endorse political candidates, but that doesn't mean we have to run that endorsement. "We don't want to turn the comics page into a political advertisement," Brownell said. "If a fashion writer wanted to write a piece for the fashion page about why Bush should be Presi dent, I'd tell her 'No way' or I'd take her to the City Desk. "In some sense, yes, the comics page should be the comics page and not the Op-Ed page. The line is the dif ference between dealing with political matter with wit and humor and elegance or being overtly political," he said. "Promoting one candidate that's where we draw the line."
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Top Creators in A1 Anthology First Launches Premier Format

Warrior alumni Dave Elliott and Garry Leach have joined for Al, billed by the British fanzine Speakeasy as "possibly the best comic book in the world." Atomeka Press as Elliott and Leach like to call their joined selves unleashes the 96-page, black-and-white (16 color), squarebound anthology of noted and notable British and American creators in February. Some of the tid bits in store for those with the $9.95 cover price include a boating trip with Brian Bolland's "The Actress and the Bishop," a cautionary tale by Barry Windsor-Smith called "The Big Button," and Hieronymous Bosch as-you-maynever-have-seen-him in Graham Marks and John Bolton's "Bad Bread." Some joining in the American effort are Bob Burden (Flaming Carrot in "The Ban dit Moons," reprinted fromAV in 3D), Dean Motter, Dave McKean, and Bill Sienkiewicz (a new Mister X tale), and Ted McKeever, who is illustrating a Dave Gibbons story and writing a story Gibbons will illustrate. Other luminaries announced by Dave Elliott include Alan Moore and Steve Parkhouse (an all-new episode in The Bojeffries Saga), Pete Milligan and Brendan McCarthy (The Hollow Circus, which Elliott calls "a macabre twist on the Frankenstein monster"), Paris Cullins, Eddie Campbell, Phil Elliott, Mike Kaluta, Al Williamson, and Geoff Darrow. "Originally, me and Garry Leach were supporting this project on our own backs with a smaller book of 48 pages," said Elliott, who served as "basically editor and art director" for Dez Skinn from the end of Warrior magazine through the original version of the Quality Comics line. "But Titan told us if we would let them handle it exclusively, they'd lend us the money to get the first few issues off the ground." Elliott said his main difficulty has been convincing American retailers to order. "U.S. distribution wants to put us under comics rather than as an import squarebound," he said. "They seem to have a lot of trouble with anything else besides the standard comicbook shape." Elliott hopes to overcome those distribution problems and "get the book to really take off by about issue three or four" because he wishes to "establish a forum for writers and artists to really experiment, who want to write really good stories but don't want to have to write a really good Batman story." "We want creators to do whatever they'd like," he said, "and in fact we're encouraging creators to do types of stories they've never done before."GSB
Left, right, below: M c K e e v e r & Gibbons, M o o r e & Parkhouse, Bolland.
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First Publishing (nee Comics) initiates a new line and format of graphic fic tion with the late February release of Twilight Man, by Steven Grant and Tristan Schane. Promotional material bills the First Fiction Project as "a new on-going showcase featuring excitingly in novative approaches to graphic storytelling. To appropriately display these stories, First has developed its new Premier Format, utilizing heavy cardstock covers wrapped around slick, glossy interior pages." "Basically, what happened is that we had a number of proposals around here," said First Sales Director Kurt Goldzung. "We were all excited by them, but we weren't decided how to publish them. We had these good pro posals that didn't sit well in the nor mal genre categories and we also felt that if we published these as your nor mal First comic, they'd get lost in the parade." ThuSfWas bom the "amalgam" First Fiction Project, described by Manag ing Editor Larry Doyle as "what you get when you cross our standard Bax ter format book with a Prestige For mat book and mix in a copy of Marvel Fanfare. "The result," according to Doyle, "is the best components of each for mat combined to create an attractive upscale package at a very affordable price the Premier Format will carry a cover price of only $2.75." Goldzung called the new 32-page format (26-pages of story) to a "hybrid" of upscale packages. ' 'The point is that these are not just knock-off mini-series," he said, "but more like serialized graphic novels. We were looking for a format to set these projects apart, give them a higher production value in terms of color and printing and paper stock, with heavy, painted covers, but not get caught in the $3.50 Prestige format a lot of people believe the contents of those expensive books don't exploit the format to its full potential to be showcased in that kind of expensive book. "So we came up with this sort of hybrid form between the Prestige squarebound and our standard Baxter line," Goldzung said. "It's really an amalgam: the standard 36-page com ic size and binding on Marvel Fanfaretype Hudson stock with heavy, painted covers." The Project will comprise monthly, "self-contained" four-part series and package designs emphasizing the "quality paperback" spirit of the stories. First plans four Project series a year Twilight Man, Sensei in
G r a n t a n d S c h a n e ' s Twilight
Man
May, and Squalor in August have been announced scheduled so the first issue of each successive series is released with the last issue of the preceding series. And, Doyle avers, the last issue of a title will really be its end. "We're looking to tell a whole story, with a definite beginning, mid dle, and end," he said. "And all in only four installments. There will be no surprise issue number five." And no subsequent series. "Making these projects continuing series would be pointless," Goldzung said. "The stories and characters are fully realized in terms of what they see, and they face their ultimate challenge within their four issues. You could tell another chapter in these characters' lives, but the stories have been told; they're realized in these pro jects." Goldzung said the Project will begin with relatively standard adventure fair to "introduce" readers, but will become increasingly experimental. "We really want to introduce these projects to the readership in drips and drabs rather than something really dif ferent all at once that they won't know what to do with," he explained. "So, Twilight Man is closer to your familiar hero-adventure work and Sensei is a fairly straightforward samurai-type adventure with the twist of time shif ting. It's with Squalor that we really kick out all the stops." First Project. The initial First Fiction Project, Twilight Man, premieres in February, written by Whisper co-
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creator Steven Grant, pencilled by Tristan Schane, inked by Eric Vincent, and colored by Bruce Timm. Gerald Brom has painted the "specially designed" cover. "Against light and darkness," pro claims First's promotional literature, "stands... the Twilight Man." "For 10,000 years, Tyrant Gods ruled the world and controlled the fate of mankind," says First. "Then came the expulsion, when magicians and adventurers banded together and cast out the gods. For 1,000 years, the knowledge and weapons of godfighting were passed down from father to son, so each generation would have a champion to stand on behalf of humanity should the gods return. It is now 1989, and 46 years of nuclear ex plosions have torn passageways back into our world. Slowly the Tyrant Gods are stirring. Humanity has one hope..." So the tale of Mick Kincaid, actor and disbeliever in his father's "per sonal demons," begins. Sensei is the story of a timedisplaced (forward and backward) bushido by Roger Salick and Val
Mayerik, who has employed various wash effects to distinguish the tale's past, present, and future scenarios. But, by all accounts, Stefan Petrucha and Tom Sutton's Squalor will be the Project's first real departure from familiar comic book fare. Both Goldzung and Doyle who called the series "an existential satirical science fiction mind-bending political thriller" agree Squalor is difficult to describe. , "Squalor is going to be very, very different," Goldzung said. "I think the best quote about it was [artist] Tom Sutton's. He said it was one of the most literate scripts he's ever read literate in terms of the quality of the writing, the approach. Steve uses the standard elements; what is special about the work is his approach to dialogue and the way he sets up ac tion. He'll lead you to certain conclu sions and turn you around. The story has several 180-degree surprises. You really just have to read it to get a han dle on it. Petrucha called Squalor "something of a superhero story, although the character Squalor that's his
nickname, his real name is Harry Keller is not super and he's not ex actly a hero." "His capabilities and problems stem from the fact that he's managed to transcend linear time, but more as a mental state than a physical state," Petrucha said. "I've set the story up like a riddle or a puzzle, so the reader has an inroad into the plot; you're aware of missing pieces, and as it falls together you begin to piece it together, it starts to make sense. All the story elements and information are there, but they aren't necessarily told or presented in the way readers are ac customed to. The storytelling itself is different, dreamlike and subjective. It doesn't move in a linear fashion because Squalor doesn't think and perceive that way." Not An Epic. The First Fiction Pro ject is not necessarily First's answer to Marvel Comics' Epic line, Goldzung said. "We haven't really even looked at it in that way," he said. "We'd been looking for a format to set these books apart, trying to get away from the
48-page squarebound: especially at the levels we sell at, to make a $3.50 book profitable, we have to sell a lot more copies than we do of the normal comics. "We have a good idea about what we think these series are, but we're not sure how they'll fit in the market or where they stand in our long-term publishing program," he said. "Ultimately, these are aimed at a noncomics readership. I won't say they're more 'mature' or more 'adult' because those terms are pretty useless, but these projects are meant to attract the kind of sophisticated reader who doesn't generally read comics." Project founder and supervisor Doyle remains optimistic about the series' reception and role in the market. "We believe these will sell because we believe they are that good," he said. "We keep hearing there's a glut, but still there's precious little to read. There may be a surplus of product, but there's a surfeit of ideas." G S B
Catalan Starts Juvenile Imprint

Europe's esteemed Blake and Mortimer adventure series comes to America next April through Comcat Comics, a new Young Adult imprint announced by Catalan Communications Publisher Bernd Metz. Metz introduced Comcat at the October meeting of IADD in Puerto Rico, and announced that Jean-Jacques Surbeck, currently American agent for Edi tions Glenat, will move to Comcat as chief editor. Metz said Comcat was created to avoid confusion with Catalan, recognized as a publisher of "graphic novels of a mature and adult style and content." While Comcat will retain Catalan's "high standards of art and preservation," Metz said, the books will avoid nudity, sex, and "objectionable language" in appropriate to its target audience of juveniles and young adults. Comcat Comics will also differ from the upscale Catalan Communications line in offering softcover, color books of slightly smaller trim size (8x11) and considerably lower cover prices ($6.95 to $8.95), and specified categories science fiction, western, adventure and series (Blake and Mortimer adventures). "The material in the European markets extends far beyond the adult comics I have published so far," Metz said, "and what I am trying to do now is to widen the base of readers who appreciate high-quality European books in this country... The new imprint will allow growth within a wider arid more established market." Metz said Tintin magazine's motto "For young people from 7 to 77" sums up the Comcat credo. With an eye to the vast youth market, Metz has optioned more than a dozen European series, each with four to 20 titles. Comcat's first release, scheduled for February 1989, is Roger Leloup's Vulcan's Forge, "the first in the 'Adventures of Yoko, Vic, and Paul' science fiction series." As described by Metz, Vulcan's Forge heats up when "Yoko, a Japanese teenager and electronics whiz, is joined by her friends Vic and Paul on a subterranean expedition [where] they discover an extraterrestrial civiliza tion, the Vinans, secretly living and flourishing inside the Earth. An ambitious and ruthless Vinan leader wants to use the advanced technology of his people to manipulate the molten lava under the earth crust to trigger the emergence of new lands, so that the Vinans could claim them as their own." The 48-page softcover will retail at $6.95. Next comes Edgar P. Jacobs' Blake and Mortimer in The Time Trap, a 64-page, $8.95 color album. Metz calls the 12-volume Blake and Mortimer series "a monument in the world of European graphic novels, both in terms of quality and sales." First published 30 years ago, the series has been com
pared favorably with Tintin in its rich visual and factual detail and globe-trotting excitement. The Time Trap finds Professor Mortimer, "the epitome of the British gentleman," trapped in an underground laboratory by his arch enemy (and mad scientist) Miloch. "The lab houses a very intriguing and unusual time-travel machine," Metz reports. "Before he realizes that he's been set up, Mortimer is thrown on an uncontrollable course through the centuries, taking him from fighting for his life in prehistoric times to a revolt in the Middle Ages, ending up..." Well, you'll see. GSB
Blake and Mortimer. " A m o n u m e n t i n t h e w o r l d o f . . . g r a p h i c n o v e l s . "
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Videostore Market Targetted
Dark Horse Announces HIT Comics

Dark Horse Comics will push into the videostore market with a new imprint, Hit Comics. The new "company branch" will specialize in movie adaptations, beginning with 20th Century Fox's successful Big, which starred Tom Hanks. A release date has not been announced for the project, which Mark Verheiden will script to the pencils of Kubert School alumnus Jack Pollock. John Nyberg provides the inks, and Paul Chadwick provides the cover. "We're aiming to produce a steady stream of product for this market," Dark Horse Publisher Mike Richardson said. "But there's nothing else I can announce until after this project pans out." Richardson believes the video market is "a natural" for comics. "For instance," he said, "retailers pay between $64 and $104 for video items, because they get a fairly lousy discount, and here's an item that will be on the low-end of their pay scale for $30 you get 25 copies, a 40 percent discount, which to videostores would amount to something like immediate pay-back. And, we've found that a lot of video retailers are looking for new products for their stores." One of the obstacles Richardson has struggled to overcome is retailer reluc tance hesitation over a new, apparently incompatible item, and the question of redundancy: why read what you can watch on video? "Well, first of all right: video distributors have no idea why they should carry comics," Richardson said. "Video retailers are accustomed to quick release whatever just came out is hot; what came out four weeks ago is not, so it's hard to explain why a comic about Aliens, which was released two years ago, is hot. "So we had to find a product they would find saleable to overcome their reluctance to carry comics materials," he said. "In the case of Big, we found a property that was extremely appropriate to the market," Richardson said. "It's humorous and a big hit and suited to the entire family. "Of course, we're doing this to strengthen our company, Richardson add ed, "but we're also trying to expand comics readership, the market, as a whole. I'm surprised no one has tried it before now because, again, it seems like a natural; there seems to be a natural link between movies and comics." Richardson also foresees the possibility of rich returns. "We're offering Big in a 25-pack counter display. Now, there's about 30,000 to 40,000 videostores out there, so penetration doesn't have to be so high. If you can place one pack in each store, you've sold 750,000 comics you have more than a massive hit. So just assume 10 percent of that, placement in, say, 3,000 stores. With one 25-pack each, that's 75,000 comics again, you have a big hit. "Hopefully, other [publishers] will follow us in," Richardson added. "It doesn't bother us for a lot of material to go into this market because that will build up a sales history and that's good for us, and everybody. "But the whole point of the video market is not just that it's a big market, but that opens up a new market people who would never go into a comics shop can see comics in a videostore and pick them u p . " The Big adaptation will be solicited to videostores through an agreement with CBS/Fox Video, which will carry promotional flyers and ordering instruc tions. The full-color, $2.00 comic is scheduled for simultaneous, though separate, release with the Big videocassette which has been delayed because of the movie's great success. Advance orders for the direct sales comics market are doing "very well," according to Richardson, who added, "It's hard to estimate the actual print run at this point." Richardson said the new imprint was necessary to distinguish tides that don't "fit" Dark Horse's direction. "Big as a type of book doesn't fit into our vision of where we want the com pany, Dark Horse, to go so that's why we created the Hit Comics imprint," he said. "It became clear that a new imprint would provide us the opportunity to publish material that might not be congruent with the Dark Horse line of titles." Future Hit Comics will probably emphasize science fiction and "teen-type" horror movie adaptations "because that's the type the thriller type with the sci-fi edge to it that we like at Dark Horse," Richardson said, adding that he remains "guarded in my optimism." "This is a brand new market and there's going to be some reluctance, I know," he said. "Traditionally, movie comics have a bad reputation; they usually are pretty poor and have none of the life of the original movie, so we're being careful on that end." GSB
Eric Larson Dies at 8 3

And then there were four. Eric Larson, one of Walt Disney Productions' "Nine Old Men" of grand animation, died October 25 at his home in the Los Angeles suburbs. He was 83. During Larson's 53 years at Disney, he helped realize Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Pinocchio and Fantasia (both 1940), Bambi (1942), and Mary Poppins (1964). "Eric was a very dependable animator," said Ward Kimball, a member of the elite Disney core. "You'd give him something and he'd always deliver. I still remember that bird he did in The Three Caballeros. What was his name..?" Walt Disney assembled his core group of animators whom he later dubb ed his "Nine Old Men" in the early '30s. Les Clark, Marc Davis, Ollie Johnston, Milt Kahl, John Lounsbery, Wolfgang Reitherman, Frank Thomas, Kimball, and Larson, established the pace and style of some 25 epic, fullanimation features Disney released through 1986. Born in Cleveland, Utah, Larson graduated from the University of Utah and journeyed to Los Angeles for work as a newspaper reporter. But his drawing ability came to Walt Disney's attention, and Larson joined the Disney studio in 1933 to begin Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first feature-length animated film., "He started out as an assistant animator to Ham Lusk," Kimball recalled. "When it was deemed time for Eric to go out on his own, I became Ham Lusk's assistant." Recognized for his superb animation (with Kahl and Jim Algar) of the animal community that befriended Snow White, Larson earned the job of animating Figaro the cat for Pinocchio and the Pastoral Symphony sequence for Fantasia. "Eric's Figaro is one of the finest examples of pure pantomime ever done at the studio," wrote Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston in Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life. Thomas and Johnston, Kimball, and Marc Davis are the last of the revered group. Subsequently, Larson earned the plum jobs of animating Thumper in Bambi and Peg in Lady in the Tramp (1955), and went on to direct two-thirds of the ambitious Sleeping Beauty (1959).
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With Kimball, Larson also helped arbitrate the near-crippling strike at the studio in 1941. "We were the first two people from the Disney studio to go on the board of the Screen Cartoonists Guild," Kimball said. "Through our efforts, we brought peace." And yet, Kimball said, "Eric always seemed above the various rumors and gossip of the studio. Sometimes he was so quiet, you didn't know he was there. A quiet, unassuming guy. He never beat a drum for Eric Larson." Larson was the last of the nine to leave Disney, calling his commitment to the studio "an emotional thing; I've never even asked for a raise" in a 1979 interview, and spending the last dozen years passing his knowledge to younger animators. ' Larson's work included animation on 18 shorts and six TV specials, and super vising animation on the classic Disney features The Three Caballeros (1945), Song of the South (1946), Cinderella (1950), Alice in Wonderland (1951), Peter Pan (1953), 101 Dalmatians (1961), The Sword in the Stone (1963), and The Jungle Book (1967). He earned his final credit on The Great Mouse Detective, released in 1986, the year of his retirement. GSB
Lockhorns' Creator
Bill Hoest Dead

Cartoonist Bill Hoest, best known for The Lockhorns one-panel gag cartoon, died from complications of lymphoma November 7 at the New York Medical Center. He was 62. A resident of Lloyd Neck, Long Island, Hoest created the bickering Leroy and Loretta Lockhorn in 1968, eventually reaching more than 500 newspapers through King Features Syndicate. The Lockhorns garnered awards for "Best Syndicated Panel" from the National Cartoonists Socie ty in both 1976 and 1980. Hoest began his career in the greeting card industry before freelan cing magazine cartoons in the 50s. After a short stint with the My Son John comic for what is now Tribune Media Services, Hoest found his niche with his alcoholic husband and disculinary wife team. Hoest was a prolific creator, pro ducing daily and Sunday Lockhorn panels, daily Agatha Crumm and What a Guy strips (both through King), three weekly cartoons (including Laugh Parade and Howard Huge) for Parade magazine a weekly newspaper sup plement he also served as cartoon editor and a weekly panel for Na tional Enquirer. His 25 published car toon anthologies include 15 Lockhorns and three Agatha Crumm books. Hoest was elected president of the National Cartoonists Society in 1988, but soon resigned because of his ill health. Hoest assistant John Reine* 31, will continue the three King features as well as the Parade cartoons under the supervision of Hoest's wife, Bunny.
G&Bh
Cartoonist 'ffolkes' Dead

Brian Davis, famed as a Punch car toonist under the pseudonym Michael ffolkes, died in a London hospital Oc tober 18 of cirrhosis of the liver and acute pancreatitis. He was 63. Born in London, Davis attended Leigh Hall College (Essex) and St. Martin's School of Art (London). His cartoons were published in Playboy, Reader's Digest, and The New Yorker. For several decades, ffolkes illustrated film reviews for Punch, the British humor magazine, and his work ap pears in more than 50 books. One memorable ffolkes cartoon shows four pigs at a trough, a fifth pig remarking, "Pigswill, yes, but great pigswill!" In another, a stone-faced, bearded mathematician stands before a blackboard filled with complex equa tions; two pleased associates eye the blackboard intently and comment, "Witty, Professor, very witty." William Cole and Mike Thaler, in The Classic Cartoons (1966), includ ed ffolkes in the top talents at Punch: "Punch has always had a stable of regulars, just as The New Yorker has had: Anton, Langdon, Fougasse, Sproud. Smilby, Taylor, Brockbank, and a half dozen others could always be depended on for solid work. In re cent years, they have taken on two notable cartoonists, Michael ffolkes and the American Bernard Handelsman..." British cartoon authority Denis Gifford found ffolkes to be in "the rococo traditions" of Timothy Birdsall, Rowland Emett, Ronald Searle, and cartoonist Arnold Roth, and, taking note of ffolkes' interests in "19th cen tury fiction, poetry, and music," viewed his work as "anachronistic, sophisticated, yet simple." Indeed, ffolkes himself once pro claimed, "I don't care what century I'm living in." Ffolkes lived in London with Elfa Kramers, his companion of many years, and is survived by two sons and
a daughter. Bhob
THE LOCKHORNS
I NAP B E C A U S E IT'S CHEAP.
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V o r t e x P r o n o u n c e s Itself "3rd Largest Independent"

Howard Chaykin's Black Kiss is "the number one selling alternative comic in America" and its publisher Vortex Comics is "the third largest independent publisher" in the direct sales marketplace, according to Vortex President Bill Marks. ' 'The numbers are based on Capital and Diamond's sales charts," Marks said. "Black Kiss is the number one top-selling independent monthly [it] sells even more than First's Lone Wolf and Cub, if you want to consider First an independent. There's only two tides that do better: [Mirage Studio's] Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and [Dark Horse's] Aliens, but those are not monthly." The Source. According to Capital Ci ty Distribution's Internal Cor respondence newsletter for November 1988, Black Kiss ranks 86th in numbers of copies sold, "based on ad vance orders on all comics placed with Capital City by approximately 1100 direct market retailers." However, Capital City has warned, the list measures comic books only, excluding books and magazines. Capital's "Top 100 Comics" list is veritably owned by Marvel and DC tides but for Black Kiss, the bi-monthly Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (which ranks at 52), and Lone Wolf and Cub (which ranks 94). Black Kiss, which sells for $1.25, does not appear on ICs "Top Dollar Books" list, which ranks tides again, of comic books only accor ding to dollars garnered (a function of cover price), though both TMNT and Lone Wolf and Cub (at $1.50 and $2.50, respectively) and five other regular titles do rank on that chart. Mirage Studio spokeswoman Cheryl Prindle said Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles averages about 100,000 copies in bi-monthly sales, though summer months show slightly higher volume. She added that the book will ship mon thly as of January 1989. A confidentiality agreement between Apple Comics and Richard Pini precluded the company from releas ing sales figures for Elfquest, tradi tionally among the more successful alternative tides. "This is what we mean," Marks said. "Black Kiss is selling 50,000 copies a month. Dark Horse's Aliens is selling 80,000 copies every two months, so in the same period of time, we're actually outselling them, too." Marks also claimed that, according to the September 1988 Internal Cor respondence, "Vortex Comics is the tenth largest publisher in the direct marketplace, and the third largest in dependent publisher." That claim, he admits, hinges on his interpretation of the term "independent." The September IC ranked Vortex (with .84 percent of the market) tenth in terms of market share after Marvel (with 47.06 percent), DC (28.55), First (4.93), Eclipse (3.44), Comico (1.97), Eternity (1.35), Gladstone (1.22), Kitchen Sink (1.04), and Aircel (.99). Once again, Capital cau tions, these numbers are based on sales of comic books only. " 'Independent' is more an at titude," Marks said. "First and Eclipse are fairly corporate; they don't publish what I would consider new or innovative products. First wants to be Marvel; Eclipse, I don't know what they want to be. They're not trying to break new talent, do new or ground-
breaking work. I mean, First is own ed by lawyers." Marks added Comico and Eternity to his list of "non-innovative" publishers, and called Gladstone, which publishes Disney material, "ob viously not independent." Bullshit. Fantagraphics Co-Publishers Gary Groth and Kim Thompson, res pectively, called Marks' claims "lud icrous," and the Capital City market reports "bullshit." A flyer Thompson issued for the October IADD meeting in Puerto Rico reviled Eternity's similar interpretation of IC reports: "Capital City's accoun
ting of market shares does not acknowledge the existence of anything but comic books (with a few arbitrary exceptions). Magazines like The Com ics Journal and Amazing Heroes , books like The Complete Love & Rockets, The Complete Crumb Com ics, and The Reaper of Love [all published by Fantagraphics Books] are excluded from the accounting. " W h y ? " Thompson asked. "Capital tells us its just too darn inconvenient to list anything other than comic books when they calculate these market shares. It seems someone would have to sit at a computer for an
mi
Bill M a r k s s a y s Black Kiss h a s made Vortex t h e "Third Largest Independent Publisher."
Ronald's Printing Drops Black Kiss

Vortex Comics has taken Black Kiss to a new printer after Ronald's Printing of Canada refused the fifth issue. Vortex Publisher Bill Marks declined to name the new printer, but claimed he was not surprised at Ronald's refusal of the book after four issues. "That they stopped printing it wasn't too much of a surprise," he said. "The surprise was that they printed it in the first place." Written and drawn by Howard Chaykin, Black Kiss is a sexually and violendy explicit 10-page, black-and-white monthly that is sent to retailers shrinkwrapped with an identifying card over its covers. "You have to understand that Ronald's is a subsidiary of Bell Canada, the largest public trading company in Canada," Marks said. "It's a very conser vative corporation. Someone sent Black Kiss up their chain of command, and the president of the company said it's not the sort of thing they want to publish, that it contained objectionable material that was their only reason." Marks evinced irritation that Ronald's printed Marvel/Epic's Marshall Law, and DC Comics' graphic Hellblazer, and The Longbow Hunters series, but added, "Well, Black Kiss is a bit more graphic than those." Ronald's representative Angelo Messina said the company had no comment on the decision. "Being a corporation, you understand, we can't discuss it," he said. "Let's just leave it at no comment; it really puts us in an awkward position." Asked if that awkward position derived from printing the book or discussion the decision to drop it, Messina said, "Both." Asked if Ronald's had received complaints for printing the title, Messina said, "It would depend on whether you'd call it a complaint, but we couldn't discuss any of that." Marks said Vortex has received few complaints over the title. "A lot of stores have refused to carry it, but that's their prerogative," he said. "We haven't received any letters of complaint over the book or anything like that." - G S B THE COMICS JOURNAL #126, January 1989
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hour or two to figure out these facts, and it's far easier to just propagate these skewed figures, since only those publishers who are hit by it (Fan tagraphics, Kitchen Sink, and Catalan, among others) seem to notice it." Eternity had interpreted Capital's market share report to indicate that, in terms of dollar volume, the com pany "outsells" all publishers but Marvel, DC, First, and Eclipse in the direct sales market, making it the "fifth biggest" publisher in that market. Thompson countered that "every week during the 10 hottest weeks of the year July 4 to September 15 Fantagraphics Books shipped out more than $100,000 worth of books while Eternity Comics ship ped out less than $25,000 average[d] over the 10-week period
(and... not counting re-orders)." "Welcome to the world of statistics, hype, and good old-fashioned lying," Thompson continued. "Aside from all this, Capital's accounting is for orders received on presold books, not actual sales. This means that in the case of publishers who solicit more than they're capable of publishing, the figures are pure fiction." According to a "Late Titles" feature in the- October 28 Comics Buyer's Guide, thefivepublishers with the most solicited but unpublished material at that time were Eternity with 54 titles, Blackthorne with 50, Fan tagraphics with 21, and Quality and Renegade, both with 18. Delays in production, print, and shipping schedules were the most common reasons cited by publishers.
Comics Only. Capital responded in its IC newsletter: "Who's right? Depends on how you look at it. First of all, it should be made clear what / C s market share figures are and aren't. The numbers are calculated based on the products solicited on the color and b/w sections of Capital City's monthly order form. They aren't a list of Capital City's largest suppliers, or even a list of the largest suppliers to the comic book market. These market share figures are based on comic orders only. Since products that are produced by comic publishers that don't fall into the color or b/w comic categories are excluded from the share calculations, some publishers' shares would be larger if all product categories were included. Also, these share figures are based on orders.
They do not reflect the effect of canceled titles or the impact of reorders. "Given all that, we thought it might be interesting to do another analysis like the one we did about a year ago, in which we considered product from all categories in determining market shares. In examining November figures, this change in calculation method moves Eternity/Aircel from the #5 to the #6 slot. Fantagraphics moves up from #14 to #9. It is worth noting that in examining year-to-date shipping figures (which cover the period prior to Eternity's acquisition of Aircel and do not include books not shipped), Fantagraphics was larger than Eternity by a 4 to 3 ratio."
-GSB-
NOW Comics Adopts Comics Code

NOW Comics joined the Comics Magazine Association of America on October 26, adopting the Comics Code Authority and affixing the CCA "Seal of Ap proval" to its newsstand comics. The move makes NOW the first "independent" comics publisher to embrace the Code, and at two years the youngest member of the 35-year-old organization, which includes Marvel, DC, Harvey, Archie, and Gladstone. "It's a marketing plan," said NOW Publisher Tony Caputo. "Ghostbusters is selling at about 50 percent of print, which is quite good, and Warners [NOW's newsstand distributor] wants to jack that up. "It's basically to get more distribution and more books out on the newsstands of convenience stores," he said. "Places like 7-Eleven really won't carry you if you don't have that seal." The Comics Code Authority was established in 1953 after public outcry some inspired by Dr. Fredric Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent precipitated Congressional investigation into the role of comicbooks in promoting juvenile delinquency. An association of comics publishers, the CMAA, voluntarily drafted and adopted the rigid Code to avoid federal regulation. One of the Code's first victims was William Gaines and his Entertaining Comics line. In recent years, the Code has been largely ignored, particularly by the adultminded independents, as it proscribes depictions of nudity, sex and what its framers considered the more "sordid and lurid" aspects of modern life. Caputo said Code approval won't change the content or direction of his books. "Ghostbusters, Speed Racer, Astroboy, and Racer X are already approved as they are," he said. "The only problems I see are with Ralph Snart, which has pretty consistent beer drinking, and The Terminator that's consistently violent and maybe Rust because of its strange nature. But we'll see what happens with those." Caputo said he would not structure his books "just to get them into more distributors" but was glad to have the added retailers (such as most conve nience stores) Code approval allows. Asked if the move endorses what is largely considered an archaic, and cen sorious, regulatory tool, Caputo said, "I think the Code is there for a reason. I think it's needed; it helps the adults protect their kids." Caputo added that the circulation increase he expects from the move will help the industry as a whole. "Everything primarily for newsstand distribution recruits new fans," he said. "A kid walks into a grocery store and buys his first comic and BAM! he's a fan for life. Most kids see their first comics in grocery stores and drugstores, not comicbook shops those are where the fans go." GSB
Self Portraits at Cartoon Art Museum

San Francisco's Cartoon Art Museum presents "The Face Behind the Laugh: Cartoonists' Self-Portraits" running November 25 through March 4, 1989. Featured self-portraitists include Milt Caniff, Charles Addams, Carl Barks, Fontaine Fox, George Herriman, Al Capp, Rube Goldberg, and MAD alumni Sergio Aragones, Jack Davis, and Mort Drucker (and others!) 125 works in all culled from the private collection of Mark J. Cohen. "Cartoonists are normally artists who sit at a drawing board producing art of observation of the public's follies and foibles," said Malcolm White, presi dent of the CAM Board of Directors. "In this unusual exhibition, we get to see what the artists look like to themselves, and it can be quite revealing." The museum, at 665 Third St. at Townsend, can be visited Thursdays and Fridays from noon to 6 p.m., Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and by special appointment. GSB
Literacy Comics Honored

The Word Warriors and Quest for Dreams Lost benefit comic books produced last year by Literacy Volunteers of Chicago have won second place honors in a national contest for innovative methods of promoting adult education and
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literacy. Offering work donated by more than 50 comics professionals, the two books were noted for their "originality and ability to be replicated by other adult educa tion programs around the country," by William Draves of the Learning Resources Network (LERN). The Network will reprint public service ads from Word Warriors "along with descriptive information about both books in a manual to help programs recruit adult education students," according to an official press release. The six ads, which appeared in the back of Word Warriors, "explain the literacy issue to the general public, students, and potential volunteers." Trina Robbins, Mark Nelson, Mike Vosburg, Mike Machlan, Jack Bender, and Marc Hempley and Mark Wheatley produced the ads. "The award is important recognition by the adult education community for the dedicated work of the many comic professionals who donated to the pro ject," said LVC Director George Hagenauer. "The award and publication in the LERN manual will encourage even more adult education programs to use the public service ads and explore the use of adult comics with their students." LVC reports that Word Warriors, designed for use in literacy programs, has sold 12,000 copies through comics stores and 4,000 copies through adult educa tion programs. Quest for Dreams Lost, "an anthology of some of the best in dependent black-and-white comics," features The Trollords, The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Silent Invasion, Eb 'nn, The Realm, Wordsmith, Reactoman, and Tales of the Aniverse. Copies of the books are no longer available from distributors and most com ics shops have sold out, but LVC will fulfill mail orders at 9 W. Washington, Room 460, Chicago, 60602. Word Warrior retails at $1.50 per copy, Quest for Dreams Lost for $2.00. - G S B -
New Yorker the following year. Working with a fluid, relaxed line, Saxon produced social commentary on sophisticated suburbanites and cor porate executives. Lee Lorenze, art editor of The New Yorker, commented, "Seen as a whole, his work constitutes a unique social history of our time." Saxon's cartoons are collected in Oh, Happy Happy Happy! (1960),
One Man's Fancy (1970), and Honesty Is One of the Better Policies (1984). Saxon received numerous awards, including a New York Art Directors Club gold medal (1963), a Venice Film Festival animation award (1965), and a National Cartoonists Society Reuben Award (1980). He is surviv ed by his wife, two sons, and three
grandchildren. Bhob
M a r v e l Misc
G.I. Joe #86 celebrates 25 years of G.I. Joe toys with the return of the original Joe you know: the one with the solid plastic hair... DeFalco and Frenz continue their redrafting (literal ly!) of the Kirby Thor with issue #402: The Enchantress, convinced the God of Thunder has killed her sister (after all these years of friendship!), teams with Quicksand for the downfall of Odin's favorite son. All this and a DeFalco-Huddle Tale of Asgard, too! ... Spectacular Spider-Man (whatever happened to Spiderman?) #149 asks the unrivetting question, "If Gwen Stacy's clone wasn't really a clone, then wnat were the Spider-Man and Miles Warren/Carrion clones?" On ly Gerry Conway and Sal Buscema can delineate the answer ... "While Ice and Pig go on R&R, the world is wat ching the Paris Peace Talks, the '68 Democratic Convention in Chicago, and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy." You've got it: a special, Real-Time-shot-to-hell issue of The 'Nam (oh, yeah: #29)... Dr. Zero #6. We've just gotta quote the Capital City Order Pat "Zero is captured by a government organization interested in his activities; Zero, on the other hand, is interested in sucking their brains out of their heads." 'Nuff said fo' sho'... Byrne gets his ...er... pencils on SheHulk yet again, and so does (do?) the Ringmaster and his Circus of Crime, in her first issue. Jennifer, Daddy's home ... Speaking of She-Hulk, she (-Hulk) guest stars in the first issue of the new four-issue Damage Control limited series. So do Thor and SpiderMan ...
Bob Garcia Joins First Comics

Robert T. (you can call him "Bob") Garcia joined the First Publishing staff October 31 to edit Nexus, The Badger, Whisper, Lone Wolfand Cub, and develop Erekose, First's next adaptation in Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion series. Garcia brings more than "10 years of preconceived notions about how publishing companies work" to the task, including stints with Cinefantastique, Mayfair Games, and the ill-fated Tesseract Science Fiction and Gameplay magazines. An experienced graphic designer, Garcia has twice been nominated for World Fantasy awards for American Fantasy magazine, which he and his wife began two years ago. Garcia also produced the Tales by Moonlight horror anthology, which proved popular enough to earn reprinting as a paperback. "All my freelance work over the years has been geared towards creating books with beautiful words and pictures," Garcia said. "My years at Cinefan tastique were filled with long discussions about why film adaptations did or didn't work, and why different mediums make different demands on the creators. "I hope to have some dark and grim horror tides in our line-up by next year's Halloween," he added. "If we can find a good series idea that doesn't give us the gleeful revenge motif that has plagued horror comics since the old EC days, I'll be pushing for it." Garcia will also edit Daina Graziunas and Jim Starlin's Pawns serialization in Dreadstar. - G S B -
ly after #642, in which Hal Jordan will pass the lantern to another worthy, with the help of Superman, Deadman, and Nightwing. Everybody pitches in on the Elliot S! Maggin story: Gil Kane, Ty Templeton, Kevin Nowlan, Curt Swan, Jim Aparo, Karl Kesel, and Carmine Infantino and Murphy Anderson . . . At long last! Grell and King offer up their version of Green Arrow's origin in Secret Origins #38, which also recounts the origin of Speedy, GA's answer to the Boy Wonder ... If Green Arrow is GA, does that make Batman BM? Boy, I wonder... Speaking of BMs, Batman suffers through the aftermath of Jason Rubbed-out Todd's death in #431, by solving a murder that never happen ed. Guess the old boy's not handling it all so well ... Wasteland #18 spells the end for that title ... Just in time for Christmas come The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told and The Greatest Joker Stories Ever Told, retailing at $24.95 and $19.95 respec tively ... Speaking of those two guys, they'll match wits again in Arkham Asylum, a hardcover graphic novel by Grant Morrison and Dave recently of Black Orchid fame McKean due after the new year ... Adventures of Bat man, a monthly anthology "in the vein (OUCH!) of Killing Joke and The Cult," appears monthly starting next year, which marks the 50th Anniver sary of your favorite crime-buster, and an excellent opportunity to cash in on his activities...
Charles S a x o n Dead at 6 8
Charles Saxon, cartoonist for The New Yorker since the mid-1950s, died December 6 of heart failure at the St. Joseph Center in Stamford, Connec ticut. A resident of New Canaan, Sax on was 68. In addition to his 725 cartoons and 92 covers for The New Yorker, Saxon created cartoon illustrations for adver tising campaigns by Xerox, IBM, Chivas Regal, American Express, and many other companies. Bom in Brooklyn on Nov. 13,1920, Saxon entered Columbia University at 15, performing in jazz bands and stu dying the drums. Graduating in 1940, he joined Dell Publishing, where he briefly edited Popular Comics and New Funnies. In 1943, Saxon served as a pilot in the Army Air Corps, flying with a bomber squadron over Germany. Discharged in 1945, he returned to Dell to edit Modern Screen and Screen Stories. Saxon's freelance career began in the early '40s with contributions to The Saturday Evening Post, The New Yorker, and This Week, for which he served as cartoon editor. Saxon was the last editor of Film Fun. and a writer-artist-editor for the satirical Ballyhoo (revived by Dell during the early '50s success of MAD). Saxon left Dell in 1955 for full-time cartooning, becoming a regular contributor to The
Hither a n d Y o n
Eclipse: The 72-page Brought to Light, featuring stories by Alan Moore-Bill Sienkiewicz and Joyce Brabner-Tom Yeates, finally ships around December 13 be sure to grab your copy at $8.95, and pass it around. It's not to late to lick the Bush! Fantagraphics: Prime Cuts #11 presents "The Man on Talbiac Bridge," a 73-page adaptation of the classic Leo Malet detective novel by Jacques Tardi often called the greatest illustrator of his generation, and perhaps the last of the great French artists to find American reprin ting ... First. Nexus Legends is a new mon thly series reprinting the six Capital Comics color issues.
DC Miscellany
In the penultimate chapter, Finch's in vestigation finally lea^s-him to a faceto-face confrontation with V in V'for Vendetta #9 ... The all-new, third ren dition of The Huntress reveals her origin in The Huntress #1, shipping January 19 ... The Shadow's stalwart crew Heifer and Baker brings out the two-part Justice Inc. starting in January. The Avenger joins The Agency to infiltrate emerging Third World countries and impersonate their leaders until he finds out the REAL mission, and rebels. GO TEAM! ... Action Comics Weekly drops the week-
34
O N
LOOD
It
FEIFFER'S OVERSIGHT J. KEVIN CARRIER Cincinnati, OH Bummer, man. Here I am, grooving to the Feiffer interview (#124), digging his insights, his anecdotes, his candid self-analysis, the whole bit. Then he starts talking about comic books, and ker-pbp! We're suddenly wallowing in C.C. Beck-style blind-man-and-the-elephantisms. Comic books are nothing but super-hero fight scenes? The Journal does nothing but discuss the same? Frank Miller is a balding, paunchy, bitter old fart? Does this yahoo have any idea what he's talking about? Christ, I don't know whether to send him a care package of Cerebus, Concrete, Love & Rockets, et-bloody-cetera, or to just curl up and die of frustration. I mean, if a brilliant cartoonist, playwright, screenwriter, and novelist who grew up loving comics can't wake up and see how they've matured, what hope is there? (Sigh) wife. The only example of this gag I ever saw was in Sam Hurt's Eyebeam comic strip, published in the mid-1980s although I'm sure it's been used frequently in a great variety of situations. Two other individuals told me they thought I was making fun of people who wear glasses, but realized their mistake upon meeting me and seeing my own bespectacled orbs. As George Carlin said, it's okay to hit your own group. At any rate, I was able to reassure Kate that my intent was not racist but a reference to Cat's specific testimony. Normally my policy is to let my cartoons speak for themselves, but due to the pervasive confusion regarding the Yronwode cartoons I feel I should try to explain what I was thinking One thing I'was attempting with all the car toons was to reproduce, more or less, the artistic styles of the hpoks involved in the trial. With the first three cartoons, I was trying more to pro duce the "feel" of underground comix rather than to imitate any particular artist's style. With the last two, I was obviously imitating Reed Waller; this seemed an obvious choice, given the first name of the star defense witness. The opening cartoon, featuring the penisheaded judge, applied a circular recursion to the concept of "obscene." That the material was judged as obscene was in itself an obscenity, and the best way to comment on that was to use an "obscene" image. Basically, I thought the judge was a prick. His comment, "This is obscene!" relates to the material being judged, the judge ment being made, the judge himself, and the cartoon. The second cartoon portrayed the arresting of ficers as Warner Bros, cartoons (a device sometimes used by underground cartoonists), studying the super-hero posters and Big Two publisher logos plastered all over the comics store. All this illustrated the perception of comics as kid stuff which the police and prosecutor kept emphasizing. It was also meant to convey my opinion that so long as the comics industry is dominated by the super-hero genre and by the packaging and marketing styles of the Big Two, comics will continue to be regarded by the general public as strictly kids stuff. The third cartoon, showing "undercover" police drooling over the underground comics, didn't seem to generate any confusion among the readers, although it probably offended Mssrs. Beck and Saunders somehow. Now we come to the controversial "Yron wode the cat-witness" cartoons. My objection to Cat's testimony was that she made is so easy for the judge to deny her credibility. She rambl ed. She volunteered that she was so "visually handicapped" that she "can't see the (city) buses," which some might think odd for a per son supposedly an expert on graphic artistry. (Yes, I know she can see artwork quite clearly when she holds it nine inches from her face, but an appeals judge reading the transcript won't know that.) She testified that in her entire career, , she had seen only one comic book which she felt was obscene, and that was because the book had no plot at all. She testified she would have no problem with allowing children to read Omaha after numerous graphic sex scenes depicted in that series were described in detail in the testimony. This allowed the trial judge to decide that Yronwode has no standards whatsoever (or at least that her standards were radically at variance with those of the local com munity), and therefore was not competent to render an expert opinion regarding artistic merit. Sure, it was obvious that Judge Foxgrover was predisposed to judge the comics as obscene from the beginning, because of his personal aesthetics or due to some legalistic conspiracy to prop up unconstitutional RICO provisions. What Yronwode's testimony did was make his job easier, and make things tougher for the defense in the appellate phase. For the record, I harbor no personal animosity toward Cat Yronwode whatsoever. I do have some objections to her political philosophy and certain actions of Eclipse Comics, but these had no bearing on my illustrations. No doubt, Yron wode's intentions in testifying were good, but I'm sure even she remembers Ben Franklin's famous quote of what the road to Hell is paved with. This applies to me as well. Despite my inten-
THE FILTH ARTIST
SCOTT BIESER North Hollywood, CA The 'responses from C.C. Beck and Buddy Saunders to my illustrations for "Filth on Trial" saddened me. Not because I care one whit for the opinions of an angry old crank and his intellectual heir, but because theirs were the only letters written or published. I received a variety of unexpected but more interesting reactions from colleagues and fans while attending the San Diego Comics Con. The only one that really bothered me was from Omaha the Cat Dancer writer Kate Worley, who felt I was attacking Cat Yronwode's ethnicity. She informed me that the eyeballs-in-thickglasses bit was originally an anti-Semitic gim mick from the turn of the century. This came as a surprise to me, as well as my half-Jewish
35
tions, the ideas I attempted to express in the illustrations did not get through to many readers. I hold myself partly responsible for this failure to communicate, and hope this letter will clear up the confusion. I regret any hurt feelings that may have been caused to my fellow lenswearers, Jewish readers and animal rights activists. My future work in editorial cartoon ing will be less elliptical and more, shall we say, blatant. APPLAUSE FOR BREATHED
SIMON CUNNINGTON W. Croydon, Surrey ENGLAND The Berke Breathed interview was a splendid study in cynicism on many levels and you are to be applauded for running this thing with a straight face. By allowing the great man to speak for himself you made detailed criticism redundant! One other thing: over here, the slang expres sion " b e r k " means " a fool or dupe" which, considering Breathed's popularity, is cause for concern in itself.
RESENTS SMITH
so the discussion can continue. Now for Norm Breyfogle's letter: I found some of Breyfogle's statements truly astounding in view of who he was talking about at the time (Steven Grant). I will agree that calling Grant "a small crawling thing," as has been done at least once in reference to WAP!, may be a bit excessive, and perhaps referring to those who support him as "middling intelligences" may be that as well, but please let's not put him on the same level as Alan Moore and Frank Miller. After all, this is the man who gave us the Punisher mini-series and Whisper, about which I'll say more shortly. Breyfogle defends Grant's "artistic vision" and his "right to express his ideals and consider himself an artist." He feels you, Gary Groth, have "not really given [Grant's] work a chance." Well, I have given Grant's work a chance. In fact, I've given it 25 chances over the last three years. I began reading Whisper when it appeared in First Adventures in 1985 and followed it into its own series when FA bit the dust in '86. After perusing it for 20 issues; I finally just had to stop. You see, Grant's "artistic vision" seems to be that everyone in the world is a vicious, despicable shit! This is the message that I have picked up from Grant's work in Whisper. Everyone's scum. People are no damn good. The government is run by allpowerful megalomaniacs and there's not a damn thing we can do about it. Resistance is useless. Some ideals, huh? Breyfogle says Miller and Moore are "Artists" not only because they "push present limits," but because "their work is meaningful or beautiful as well." This implies that Grant's work, too, is meaningful or beautiful. Not that I've seen, Norm. What I've seen is an elaborate tapestry of senseless violence and personal humiliation strung together by Grant's confus ing (and, after a year or so, extremely irritating) circular first-person narrative style. Nothing good ever happens in this book! I mean, Jesus Christ, by the sixth issue, the titular heroine has to fake her own death, flee across the country and assume a new identity just to try to pursue a normal life. Of course, she chooses to settle down in Los Angeles and within one issue she's getting involved in all kinds of sick stuff. It never lets up! We get Charlie Manson-like mass murders in a limo garage, a two-page bloody crowbar attack, sexual perversion among the idle rich, an outlaw biker gang led by a cop, lots and lots of beatings and who can forget that fivepoint crucifixion? All done without a sign that anything will ever improve. Where's the mean ing and beauty in that? I finally came to the con clusion that, since I wouldn't pay five bucks to see a movie that was repellent to me, why should I keep forking over $23.40 a year to read the comic? One thing that has really struck me in the months since youre redesign is the vast number of typos that have crept into your copy (par ticularly on relatively simple names, i.e. Jackson Brown instead of Browne, Bobby Harlow instead of Bobbi). Hopefully a new proofreader will remedy the situation.
COMING T O GRIPS WITH THE MACHINERY
ALAN C. CARROLL Salt Lake City, UT On Kenneth Smith's drawn out, egotistical, and eccentric speech which pretended to comment on Chaykin's Black Kiss but instead spewed forth several pages of this own morality and biased recounting of history, never before have I witnessed such a "deluge of shit" in so few pages. I resent that he was even permitted to use Black Kiss as an excuse to flex his repertoire of big words and theology of values. The Editors reply: Forgive us for allowing one of our reviewers to slip some of his own morality into a critique. We'll try to see it doesn't happen again. THE MAN WHO COULDN'T STOP (UNTIL ISSUE #20)
PAUL BALZE Glen Burnie, MD A few thoughts on Journal #125: The "Blood and Thunder" exchange between Crumb and Fiore was fascinating. This is the kind of intellectual debate I'd like to see more of in the fan press, where two obviously intelligent and well-informed individuals discuss a subject on which they disagree without once resorting to childish name-calling or any of the other unsavory elements that have become so prevalent in recent years. I rather hope that Crumb decides to respond to Fiore's response
PO BOX 8 6 1 9 PITTSBURGH PA 1 5 2 2 1
36
NYBOO
Stop me if you've heard this one. There's this tiny, impassioned cult, thought by most to be at least a little nutty, who have decided that a forth coming motion picture about their most revered idol is going to be a mockery and a disgrace. That none of them have seen the film, as indeed it has not yet been completed, matters not one whit. They don't like the casting. They think their idol is going to be ridiculed, to be portrayed as a wimp. They are convinced that this film could send their cause back decades, foiling years of strenuous effort. They fear it will turn possible converts away from their idol. They think that this film is the work of a malicious conspiracy against them which operates on all levels of the mass media, but most particularly in the press. They mount a letter-writing campaign to halt this incipient outrage. Of course, I'm talking about The Last Temptation of Batman. But then, you probably guessed that from the start, since this and every other con ceivable point has already been made half a dozen times during the inter minable brouhaha over this picture. The debate has gone on for so long that even the rational points of view have been expressed. (They fall and disappear like stones dropped into a pudding, and then everyone gets back to the nonsense.) As such, I will limit myself to the insights the case provides into the delusional systems of comics fandom. Normally when a well-beloved work is being filmed, rational people will figure that it's in the hands of the film makers. It will either be a good movie or a lousy movie, or, to put it in its simpler and more likely form, it will be a lousy movie. If the movie is lousy, the worst thing you can say is that it will be a long time before
R.
FIORE
someone else wdl make a lousy movie out of it. The biggest disappointment in this regard is the lousy movie made of Catch-22, which wasted both the book and the kind of cast you're not likely to see again. If the original was that good in the first place, even a good movie would be a secondary creation. For fanboydom assembled, the Batman movie is a much more deathly affair. To these people the Batman TV show of 1966 to 1968 has taken on the shape of a childhood trauma. It has come to represent all
they despise about the public image not only of comic books, but of themselves. It has grown so huge in their consciousness that it has gone from being the symbol of that image to the author of it. They look at this new movie with a combination of anger and despair, certain that it is the work of malevolent forces beyond their control. Which leads us to another session of Fun With Don and Maggie, the Michaelangelo and Michaelangelette of comics criticism. The Batman issue has been burning up the letters pages of Comics Buyer's Guide for weeks, and as it holds no possibility of offend ing anyone in the comics industry, the
Thompsons are happy to jump in with both feet. In CBG #778 and 783 we see a prime example of the Thomp son Two-Step: I.) Say something stupid; 2.) Backtrack. In #778 a letterwriter says in essence, if it turns out to be a camp Batman movie, so what? So this, says Don and Maggie: "The Batman TV show was done for camp, and it is still almost impossible to find a reference to comics in the media that does not refer to that show as typical of comic bookseven if the rest of the reference concerns the fact [sic] that comics are adult reading material!' and "The Batman TV show was done for camp and its release was followed by an industry-wide sales slump that only the creation of the direct-sales market relieved," and "The Batman TV show was done for camp [this is a recitative, and you can all join in], and that television show stereotyped our entire field for two decades [see quote one]" and "The Batman TV show was done for camp, and the comic book was revised into the same thing.. .It took two decades to get from that to 77te Dark Knight [that pillar of literature]." In #783 some Clever Dick points out that Neal Adams and Denny O'Neil returned Batman to the noir mood in 1970, only two years after the cancellation of the TV show, and that there have been a number of contractions in DC's line that had nothing to do with that show. Well, say Don and Maggie, when we say two decades, we don't exactly mean two decades. What they actually mean is that this rehabilitation was only fully and completely "achieved" by Frank Miller. By this I suppose they must mean that it wasn't until then that it was mentioned in the papers. Further, say Don and Maggie, when we say that sales plummeted after the release of the Batman TV show, we don't exactly after the
f a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesi tate," said Nobel Laureate William Faulkner. "The 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies." What this has to say to us is not exactly clear, but it does provide the symbology for the Funnybook Roulette rating system. Comics will be rated on how many old ladies they're worth. While Faulkner implies that his favorite poem is worth a potentially infinite number of old ladies, the value of the more modest comic strip will be limited to four, graded as follows:
The Top, the Coliseum, the Louvre Museum. Ranks with Eisner, Kurtzman, Krigstein. Don't hold your breath.
Peak form of a superior creator.
A good, solid, entertaining comic book.
A little more than mediocre but a little less than good. Also good art/bad story.
*},
Your basic, competent, dopey, uninspired, average comic book.
ft
Not completely devoid of redeeming features. Close, though.
*>
Toilet paper.
37
release of the show. They mean after the cancellation of the show. In a reply to another letter on the same subject, they write, "Batman comic books plummeted when the show was cancelled, their inflated print runs a major liability with drastically lowered sales." They have a novel way of looking at things, don't they? Under this line of reasoning, Frank Miller ruined the sales of Batman, since they plummeted after he left the series. Not to mention Daredevil. The man is the kiss of death. To begin with, if it were to be done as comedy today, it wouldn't be a camp Batman, it would deconstructionist Batman. We have to keep our terminology up to date here. Don and Maggie's indignation at the perfidy of Hollywood and the mass media reminds me of the movie scene where the country bumpkin realizes the beautiful flint-hearted city vamp doesn't really love him after all. The casting I have in mind here is Barbara Stanwyck and Arnold Stang. It's quite a fairy castle they've built for themselves. They apparently thought they had the world won over, that the image of comics as kid stuff had been vanquished forever, and that the general public now saw costumed characters as adult entertainment. In this alternate reality, Batman: Year One was 1966. Up until this point Bat man was a universally beloved hero,
sales were great, and comic books were respected as fine entertainment for all ages. Then disaster struck. The Batman TV series totally warped the image of comics. Suddenly they were seen as nothing but ZAP! BAM! POW!. Batman became a clown. Sales of all comics plummeted. For over 20 years comics creators, fans, and publications like CBG labored to rehabilitate the image of comics. And just when they had gotten that rock almost to the top of that hill, up jumps the devil, another campy Batman to send it hurtling back to the bottom. I will say this much for itit'll give them a good excuse when people con tinue to look at comics the way they always have. ("If it hadn't of been for that damned Batman movie...") In the world where you and I live, the TV show was one of the great cultural phenomena of the '60s. Large portions of the population went, if you'll pardon the expression, Bat-crazy. It resulted in a brief reversal of a sales decline that^had been going on for over ten years. (How, one wonders, do Don and Maggie think the print runs became "inflated"?) It was coupled with a revival of interest in popular culture of the '30s and '40s, which made possible Woody Gelman's collections of classic comic strips, which in turn paved the way for the more serious comic reprints of today. It didn't create the public perception of costumed character comics, it merely presented it, and not withoutaffection. What it actually created was a cliche which is, of course, still in use. It was not unearned. A cursory survey of most comics will reveal that they are indeed ZAP! BAM! POW!. Closer inspection will show that they are ZAP! BAM! POW! with interludes of pretentious and maudlin "character development." Like most diseases, pop culture fads are self-limiting. By 1968, most of the general public had had all the Batman they wanted for the rest of their lives. Or at least until 1986. The Dark Knight did not represent a fundamen tal change in the way the public views comics. Anyone who is famjliar with how popular culture works will recognize it as a crossover, as when a country record makes the pop charts. This does not mean that country records will suddenly become a regular part of the pop charts; it has more to do with the qualities of the given song. The Dark Knight was able to cross over, I believe, because its style was more that of a conventional thriller than a comic book. Whtchmen didn't make it. The Batman TV show
was probably as much a factor in Dark Knight's success as anything; its popularity gave Batman his name recognition, and the contrast created the novelty value. The success of Maus might have been even more of a fluke; certainly no other serious comic has been nearly as popular. Perhaps readers saw it as making monstrous events more compre hensible. What isn't a fluke is the slow building of an audience for comics in bookstores, and the commitment major publishers and distributors are making in it. When Mark Beyer sells in the respectable five figures, something is happening. The appeal of costumed characters to a general audience has been demonstrated by television: once in a while, for kicks, to an audience whose lips move when they read. Oddly, Don and Maggie are just as insistent on absolving television in general of hurting comics' sales as they are on indicting the Batman show in particular. From #783: Comic books did not lose their readership to TV any more than they did to radio or movies or night baseball. Readers are lost because the schools teach reading from the dullest books it is possible to imagine.. When 'educators' find something that kids like to readThe Wizard of Oz, Tarzan novels, pulp
magazines, dime novels, comic booksthey ban the books, bum the comics, and tear up the magazines, punishing the kids for reading for pleasure. Once more from the top: Radio and movies could hardly have eroded comics readership, because they existed long before comic books did, and night baseball started around the same time. Television became com monplace in the mid-'SOs, and indeed, that's when sales of comics went into decline. As television became univer sal in the '60s, comics spiraled ever downwards. The readership actually continued to decline into the '80s; each reader just spends more money. There was far, far more intolerance of Tarzan, the Wizard, and comics in the schoolroom during comic books' hey day, and the schools have become ever more tolerant of them even as reading scores declined. (You will recall in the Tennessee case when fundamentalists tried to ban Baum, he was part of the school's reading program.) While inept education certainly bears its share of the blame, the circumstantial evidence against television is over whelming. There is a common thread running through the Thompsons' reasoning: mindless crap is inherently good; attempts to criticize mindless crap are always evil. Therefore the mindless crap of television couldn't possibly be held responsible for any decline in literacy, even if people do spend seven hours a day watching it. To maintain this fiction they will twist or ignore any history that contradicts it. .The crowning absurdity is that while CBG fights against Batman becoming camp comedy in the movies, DC is making it into black
comedy in the comics. In the same issue of CBG we read a summary of a Batman series in which the Joker borrows a cruise missle from a military man who owes him a favor, then takes it to Beirut to sell it to a terrorist. This is a Wonder Wart-Hog plot. In the same series DC set up a special phone line where readers could vote on whether Robin should die in theehd. ("Kill A Kharacter! Kail Now!") To be fair, CBG editorialized against this too, but they don't seem to realize that it was the work of the same hype department that made Dark Knight a media sen sation. It worked, too; the "Robin Dies" story made papers from coast to coast, and it wasn't even the real Robin. That Batman series is now the hottest comic since you-know-what. The Thompsons seem to blame the media more for taking the bait than DC for leaving it out. It all proves one thing: Batman is a commodity. You can vote to see a character die; you can lobby for what actor is going to play him. As such, I can see an answer to their problems with the movie. They can, as was attempted with Last Temptation of Christ, offer to buy the film and burn it. As it's just a commodity and not a matter of religious freedom, there should be no problem. Except for the money. Given the cast and a gadgethappy director, you have to figure a budget of 30 to 50 million. Call it 40. As you have to make three times the original cost to make a profit in the movie business, we're talking about 120 million dollars, so we better start piling it up now. Make your checks out to R. Fiore c/o Fantagraphics Books, 1800 Bridgegate St, #101, Westlake Village, CA 9D61.
Plastic Man #2 (DC Comics)
* 4
V4
If it were open-ended, I'd give Phil Foglio and Hilary Barta's revival of Plastic Man a decent chance of get ting the bugs out and becoming an entertaining comic. The second issue is certainly an improvement over the first. As it's a four-issue mini-series, I'd have to guess it's going to end a couple of issues before they get it right. It seems as though Foglio and Barta are trying to approximate a style that's not their own, and whose essen tials they haven't quite grasped. That style is a cross between Jack Cole and Harvey Kurtzman, and the feel is actually closer to Kurtzman's "Plastic Sam" than Cole's original. Indeed, I'd almost suspect that they followed Kurtzman because they didn't have enough samples of Cole to copy from. The result is hysterical in the wrong sense of the word, a nonstop frenzy that substitutes constant movement for well set-up gags, or indeed any gags at all. It's as if they thought if they didn't have something wacky happen ing in every panel the whole thing would collapse. In adopting this style Foglio and Barta actually ignore what was at the heart of Cole's humor, characterization. In Cole's comics every cop, crook, layabout, and hillbilly has his own unique personality. The new Plastic Man has hardly the time to introduce characters, much less develop them. The changes made in the "revamp ing" seem pro forma and pointless, not to mention ugly and cynical. Woozy Winks is a homeless evictee from a mental institution, a situation which even those as callous as myself
don't see as particularly funny anymore. The treatment of Eel O'Brian's decision to join the forces of law and order is mean-spirited and less logical than Cole's, cribbed from Brother Orchid though it was (this is a strange time for these people to get shy about cribbing). Barta would be fine with some discipline. What con fuses me is why Foglio is trying to write a Cole version or a Kurtzman version when he could be writing a Foglio version. He's the one they hired, isn't he? One thing I would certainly like to see an end to are those intrusive, cutesy, over-obvious in-group references, represented here by policemen named Cole and Kurtz man. While it's nice to be loved, I'm sure that Kurtzman at least would just as soon have money, all the same. It's especially galling when Jack Cole is one of what I think of as the Prisoners of DC. This acknowledgement is pretty cold comfort when you con sider that the publisher is keeping the cartoonist's own work from being seen. DC doesn't think reprinting Cole's Plastic Man or Beck and Binder's Captain Marvel or Sheldon Mayer's Scribbly would be profitable enough for them, but they're unwill ing to license them to other publishers for fear of hurting the sales of cold crap like this. When one hand throws the creator crumbs while the other takes the whole meal away, I fail to see what relevance any acknowledg ment has.
Right a n d below: A l Capp's snazzy hillbillies.
Li'L Abner 4} 4} A9 A* (Kitchen Sink) H n n H The surprising thing in these collec-
tions is what an elegantly drawn strip this was at the beginning. These have got to be some of the snazziest look ing hillbillies ever. The credit goes, it says here, to Capp's assistant Moe Left', who did the inking beginning in 1935. And speaking of snazzy, the production values on these collections make most comic strip reprints look like mimeo. Credit for this goes to Ray Fehrenbach, who did extensive restoration work. I'd like to take issue or expand on a couple of things R.C. Harvey wrote in his review last issue. First, I can't agree that Li 7 Abner didn't have a "primitive period," even though it was a highly polished strip almost from the start. Li 7 Abner went through two phases (three if you want to count its decline). The Li'l Abner we see in these first collections is like a moored dirigible, buoyant but still tied to the ground. Capp's creativity was constrained by the theatrical country boy vs. city slicker conventions he held to and the relatively straightforward suspense, narrative he employed. It wasn't un til the end of the '30s that Capp made that one small step over the line into the absurd and the irrational that talent became genius. Turning them out the way they are, it shouldn't be long before Kitchen Sink gets there.
Cares?": Blondie, Bringing Up Father, The Gumps, maybe Mutt arid Jeff. As far as I'm concerned, they can continue to languish. There are the worthy strips that probably won't make it for a while either because of age (The Katzenjammer Kids, Hap py Hooligan, Hogan's Alley, and Buster Brown) or obscurity (The Bungle Family, Dok's Dippy Duck). It would be nice but unlikely to see an authoritative chronological collec tion of Peanuts. There are strips like Our Boarding House that I've-got a soft spot for but don't seem to have the popular support for a reprint. And there are the remaining essentials. My list of the strips most in need of reprinting is: 1.) Cliff Sterrett's Polly and Her Pals; 2.) Percy Crosby's Skippy; 3.) Milt Gross's Count Screwloose et al.; 4.) Billy DeBeck's Barney Google; and 5.) the full range of Rube Goldberg's work, usually represented only by the inventions. (Polly is under consideration by a cer tain company whose name you'd recognize in a minute.) Gasoline Alley should probably be in there somewhere, though I've never cared that much for it myself. They're the strips that haven't retained their space in the public memory; they seem cut off from the present in a way that Popeye and Krazy Kat aren't. It's to be hoped that collections of the better known strips will create an appetite for the others.
ImagineJohn Lennon (Warner Bros.)
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For our purposes, Imagine is interesting primarily for the glimpse I would agree that with the Li'l it gives of what a monster Al Capp Abner series and the Turtle became near the end. It comes as part Island/Eclipse Krazy Kat series that of John and Yoko's "Bed-In for most of the essential comic strips are Peace." During this famous protest, being covered. We're even seeing the John Lennon and Yoko Ono invited first color reprints, which I wouldn't the press to watch them sit in a bed have expected so soon. I only hope in Toronto for a week, greeting the traffic will bear them all, because various dignitaries and calling for an there's more to be done. (The Abner end to hostilities in Vietnam. In collections are apparently doing well; response, the United States the first one is going into a second immediately and unconditionally sur printing.) From this point on things rendered. All of this was filmed for become more difficult. We're past the posterity. Capp is one of the invited obvious, universally recognized strips guests. He comes swaggering in, and are getting into the ones that snarling under his breath something aren't the household names they once like, "Here comes the old fascist..." were. This doesn't apply to the one He's decided to confront Lennon on standout adventure strip still missing, two subjects, the nude cover on the the Foster and Hogarth Tarzan, which album Two Virgins and the conceit is being held up by the eccentricities behind both the Bed-In and "The of ERB, Inc. The humor strips I Ballad of John and Yoko," in which would put in several categories. Some Lennon compares himself to Christ. I would term "Popular, But Who Capp certainly has a point, at least on
40
the latter count, and to begin with he does pretty well for his side. He's funny, he's just as glib as Lennon, and probably a bit smarter. But it's not enough for him to put forward a point of view. He wants a victory of some kind, and he wants Lennon to acknowledge it. Now, there were very few people in this life who could ever win an arrogance contest with John Lennon. Lennon won't budge an inch. When Capp realizes this, he loses his grip. The air of invincible condescension he's tried to cultivate crumbles, and this animal viciousness emerges, like a cobra's hood popp ing out. His target, however, is not Lennon but Ono, and more precise ly, her looks. I wasn't taking notes, but one line I seem to recall is "No wonder you think you're being crucified, married to that thing!" (This referring to a human being sit ting not three feet away from him.) At the first opportune moment he retreats, presumably to look for a stray dog to kick. As for the film, while it is very much an authorized biography, it has the honesty of shamelessness. It is so thoroughly convinced in the unimpeachable wonderfulness of everything Lennon ever did that it does nothing to conceal what a titanic airhead he became in the '70s. (It also reveals an interesting way of selfjustification he had. When Capp con fronts him on the crucifixion line, he says he wasn't talking about himself but about everyone. When someone else confronts him about the song "How Do You Sleep," he says he wasn't talking about Paul McCartney but about himself.) Unfortunately, the consequent lack of analysis leaves large holes in the story. We see how the whirlwind of fame and adulation that consumed him in the '60s robbed him of all sense of proportion and reality, and we see that by 1980 he had found his way back to earth, but because the film can't see that anything was wrong in the first place, we get no insight into the process. We can only surmise that, biographies to the contrary, what went on in the interim'couldn't have been that bad. Stay Awake Various Interpretations of Music from Vintage Disney Films (A & M Records) Hal Willner couldn't have possibly found a more diametrically opposed subject to follow up Kurt Weill than Walt Disney. This audacity doesn't quite pay off, unfortunately; Stay Awake doesn't nearly capture the
essence of Disney film music as Lost in the Stars did for Weill. You'd think that the one thing most worth recap turing from Disney films is their bizarre emotional power, that ruthless ability to stimulate feelings you'd prefer to think you didn't have. The spooky introduction, delivered by Ken Nordine in top Wbrd Jazz form, seems to promise that (makes you realize that those whose childhoods were affected by Disney includes just about everyone under 60), but the album doesn't follow through. Willner's liner notes give a clue as to why: "Shortly after starting to work on the research of the Disney L.P., I got very nervous about what I had undertaken... It seemed easy to come up with comical ideas (Public Enemy doing 'Who's Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf?'), but an entire album of that kind of thing wouldn't have worked. I soon found that quite a few of the artists who were roped in for the project were going through a similar process . first agreeing to do the album with a 'wow, what a fun project' attitude and when their
session came closer, anxiety set in..." Then comes a telling sentence: "Through the roller coaster of this album, somehow we were able to capture much of the beauty, nostalgia, humor and even the darkness of Disney while retaining the unique style of each artist." Notice the missing word here: sentimentality. I suspect that those involved didn't quite have the nerve for the dirty work of emotional manipula tion. After all, it's a lot easier to look cool with Brecht and Weill than with Disney. Not that Stay Awake is a bad record by any means. Inevitably in this kind of project there are going to be per formances that pale in comparison to the originals (On "When You Wish Upon a Star," Ringo Starr is to Cliff Edwards what Lou Reed was to Walter Huston on "September Song"), but by and large Stay Awake goes down pleasantly enough. It just doesn't have a whole lot to do with Disney. The musicians treat the material less as something that meant a lot to them in
STAY
A W A K E
VINOUS IIMI-PRVT.UIONS <>] M u s k FROM VINTAGE L)ISIN.\ 1'ILMS
their youth than as another old song to update. Stripped of their emotional context, what you have left is a lot of well-crafted but banal material. Fur thermore, it was banal by design. Disney didn't want any name to stick out other than Disney, or, to put it more kindly, he strove to create a seamless whole. The songwriters he employed most regularly were decidedly second string. Everything in Disney films was calculated to hew strictly to the most conventional tastes. As Nordine says, "it was straight down the middle." All of this militates against distinguished songwriting. (To stick with the airy-fairy idiom, there are probably more first-class songs in the Arlen/Harburg score of The Wizard of Oz than in all the Disney films put together.) It's primarily the performances that make Stay Awake as enjoyable as it is. One consequence is that the quality of the cuts has little or nothing to do with the songs' importance in the Disney canon. For instance, I certainly wouldn't have guessed that one of the highlights would turn out to be "(Drip, Drop, Drip) Little April Shower." Or "Feed the Birds." The cut that's been getting the most attention is Tom Waits's
horror movie version of "Heigh Ho," but he aims for the most obvious irony. You can hear the smoldering fires of greed in his voice, but I tend to think that the bounciness of the original did even more to underscore the lunacy of the lyrics. To me the most completely successful cut, in terms of both capturing the essence of the original and adding something to it, is the Sun Ra Arkestra's loopy version of "Pink Elephants on Parade," which simply sounds like a lot of people having a great time. In fact, the album is most successful in capturing Disney humor. Which is a somewhat dubious achievement; Disney humor always seemed a bit bumpkinesque next to the smart guys of Warner Brothers and MGM. The "Pink Elephants" sequence might have been one of the last times Disney succeeded at being funny and scary at the same time. It might have been one of the last times they wanted to. As "Cruella DeVille," "Castle in Spain" (which is surprisingly worldly, actually), and "I Wan'na Be Like You" demonstrate, after the war Disney's villains were comic first and villains second. Maybe it was the tenor of the times, but when Disney's villains stop
ped meaning it, the movies stopped meaning as much. As this will undoubtedly be my last column of the Reagan administration, I don't think it would be too out of place to consider what sort of monu ment be made to this leader. Several years ago a Republican congressman suggested that Reagan's profile be added to Mount Rushmore. There were deep problems with this admirable notion, however. Republi cans already outnumbered the Democrats on Mount Rushmore by two to one, and unless the Republicans were ready to concede George Washington, to add another would hardly be fair. I believe I have a solu tion. I have heard that Lookout Moun tain in Tennessee, or some portion thereof, has been carved into a giant equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee, a registered Democrat if there ever was one. Adding Ronald Reagan to this monument would be an appropriate acknowledgement of the growing popularity of the Republican party in the South. All that remains is to find the proper place on the monument to make the addition. I myself can think of an excellent position on the horse.
LOUSTAL-PARINGAUX
B A R N E Y AND THE BLUE Nuft
Barney a n d the Blue Note

Superb full-color album traces the biography of a doomed jazzman!
LOUSTAL's work is scheduled t o a p p e a r from three of t h e t o p A m e r i c a n publishers of foreign material this winter: In t h e n e w edition of RAW m a g a z i n e , as a graphic a l b u m from C a t a l a n Communications, a n d as another graphic a l b u m from Fantagraphics Books/Rijperman Press. There's a simple reason for this s u d d e n profusion: Loustal is o n e o f t h e most a m a z i n g talents t o c o m e o u t of Europe in d e c a d e s , Imposing his unique painterly style o n a w i d e variety o f subjects, Loustal has a u t h o r e d t e n striking bold albums. Barney and the Blue Note follows t h e rise a n d fall of a n egocentric, disturbed y o u n g saxophone genius, a n d t h e repercussions his m e t e o r i c c a r e e r has o n his friends a n d a c q u a i n t a n c e s . Told in a n intricate series of flashbacks t h a t cross-cut different periods of his life, Barney is a n 8 Q - p a g e journey into t h e soul of a m a n w h o m you m a y not like, b u t will never forget. This splendid full-color a l b u m (in t h e s a m e format as t h e C a t a l a n books) will b e o n e of t h e winter's most talkeda b o u t volumes!
BARNEY AND THE BLUE NOTE. 88 pages, book, $14.95 ($19.50 In Canada). full-color squarebound
Al
B I G O T - B A S H I N G
Rob Rodi on
Strip AIDS USA
NEVER PUT X>U9. THIN&y IN A WC^VWiS) WHOSITS W / f H O u T ONE OF WHATSIS
and
AARGH
The question we have to ask ourselves is, to what extent do lofty aspirations exempt a cartoonist from doing good work? My answer is, to no extent. A benefit book that isn't very good can't really be said to benefit anyone. And while it's true that when you buy a copy of Strip AIDS USA, you are Doing A Good Thing (all proceeds go to AIDS research), the fact remains: a lot of the work here is unsophis ticated and second-rate. What it's largely missing is the human element. Considering how directly AIDS has shattered not only the lives of its individual victims, but those of victims' families, friends, and communities, I was certain I'd see some passionate, compelling work here. But there are very few contribu tions of this kind. Oddly enough, perhaps the best of these is Arn Saba's "Pages." I only know Saba's work from Neil the Horse, his homage to Fleisher cartoons and 1930s musicals, which didn't quite prepare me for the confident, adult handling of the sub ject he's chosen here. Even his storytelling is sophisticated; by means of letters, journals, and handwritten notes from his characters, he conveys the story of a woman's long involve ment with her dying bisexual ex-lover. I found it extraordinary. Other contributions of merit come from Harvey Pekar, the Hernandez Brothers (Jaime's features characters from his "Locas" series), Sharon Rudahl, Mary Wilshire, Alison Bechdel, Ned Sonntag, Mindy Newell and Barb Rausch, Angela Bocage and
the excellent gay cartoonists Tim Barela and Robert Triptow. Each of their contributions gives you a picture of how people on various fronts are dealing with AIDS and its effects from Sharon Rudahls's mother of a premature baby to Mindy Newell's AIDS ward nurse to Alison Bechdel's "Coupla Dykes Sittin' Around Talkin' About AIDS." Mary Wilshire's con tribution begins very promisingly but ends up a little preachy about HIV testing. , In fact, preachiness may be the book's biggest fallingthere's an air of political correctness about it that's positively suffocating. AIDS is not a purely political issue, it's a social, medical, moral, and personal one. Why do the politics take precedence
for most of the cartoonists here? Their political thinking is a little immature anywaywhat it gets down to is bigotbashing. Not that the bigots don't deserve to be bashed; it's kind of satis fying to see Ronald Reagan take his lumpsbut some of the cartoonists have Reagan acting in ways you can't ever believe Ronald Reagan would. Blissfully ignorant and half-senile? Yes. Vicious and deliberately obfuscatory? Nuh-uh. Anyway, these cartoonists must
A b o v e : F r o m Bill
P l i m p t o n ' s Strip
AIDS
contribution. Below: A r n Saba's " P a g e s , " o n e oft h e outstanding contribu tions in this anthology.
I96fl
43
surely realize that they are preaching to the converted. It seems to be the easy way outrather than analyze AIDS hysteria, rather than deal with members of high-risk groups as in dividuals, rather than examining society's responses to the epidemic, so many of the cartoonists choose merely to make fun of peopfe-who are afraid of public toilet seats. There are also quite a few contribu tions that try to be both funny and preachy about condoms, and they sort of deaden your mind after awhile. (The only one that got any kind of rise out of me was Bob Burden'sseeing the Flaming Carrot with a condom over the tip of his mask is worth the price of the book all by itself.) And there are a few strips about how everyone's afraid to have sex these days, which is certainly a legitimate subject for this collection, but the strips that tackle it all seem so onenotish and alike. No one seems to have thought through his approach at any length. Which is my major criticism of the book as a whole: its lack of thoughtful contributors. For the most part, Strip AIDS USA bombards us with the same exhausted cliches we've been getting ad nauseum from the mass media. Would you believe that, as their back cover selection, the editors chose a standard Will Eisner illustration of the Spirit on a street corner, with the character saying "Victims of AIDS need help, not rejection"? AIDS is a. realigning presence in this countryit's a public health crisis of the first magnitude, and it's only going to get more dramatically destructive as time passes. How can so many of the car toonists here respond in such a banal fashion? There are a few thoughtful pieces in Strip AIDS, and I think those are the ones which put AIDS in a context of some kind. Joyce Brabner and Rebecca Huntington's "Here Comes Cootie Bug" is wonderful in this respectBrabner tells the story of how she was ostracized as a child for having "cooties," an imaginary con dition that rendered her untouchable and subject to the most cruel mockery and rejection. She shows us how the seeds of AIDS bigotry were sown early, in childhood games. She doesn't rail against AIDS hysteria and pre judice; she takes a good, objective look at what it is and where it comes from, and it's a very illuminating little strip. William Messner-Loebs takes a few jabs at such bigotry, but in his own manner: he uses victims of consump tion as stand-ins for AIDS sufferers, and employs his wilderness hero Wolverine MacAlistaire for a pointed comment on the failings of civiliza tion versus barbarism. I generally don't have a lot of patience for "noble savagery" lessons, but this one is very accomplished, and it gives the con cept of the The Victim as Pariah a tell ing perspective by relating it to the 19th Century instead of our own. And Cindy Goff, Raf Nieves, and Seitu Hayden are the only contributors to mention the devastation by AIDS of the African people in their "Mourn ing Son" (although they do so through the eyes of white Peace Corps volunteers). Of course, for every story as fine and as fully-fleshed as these, there are a handful of contributions that are knee-jerk and triteand even offen sive. Brad Parker's "The Experimen tal Cure" gives us an HIV-infected man who rids himself of the taint in his blood by becoming a werewolf. What were die editors (Trina Robbins, Bill Sienkiewicz, and Robert Triptow) thinking of when they accepted this? Were they thinking at all? Because this is a benefit book and cartoonists were donating their work instead of being paid for it, did they think they weren't
Right: " F r o m H o m o t o H o n e y " b y Neil Gaiman and Dave G i b b o n s , f r o m AARGH. Below: B o b Burden's p i e c e i n Strip AIDS.
44
entitled to say "No thank you" to con tributors whose work was substandard or insensitive? I wish I could recommend that you buy Strip AIDS USA, but its ratio of good work to mediocre is too small for me to do so without sincere reser vations. I'm speaking about its quality only; morally speaking, of course you should buy itor just donate the $9.95 cover price to your local AIDS Task Force directly. AARGH (an acronym for Artists Against Rampant Government Homophobia) is the first publication from Mad Love Ltd, and it resembles Strip AIDS USA in a number of respects: both are large-format black & white albums, both boast painted covers (Strip AIDS by Bill Sienkiewicz and AARGH by Dave McKean), and both feature works by prominent alter native and gay cartoonists (some of whom contribute to both books). AARGH ms published as a response to the British Government's proposed Clause 28, which would, if passed into legislation, enable the government to systematically eradicate the very con cept of homosexuality from British cultural life by means of censorship and suppression. As in Strip AIDS USA, the cartoonists take different stands against the clause; some attempt to promote an understanding of homosexuality, some attempt to expose the innate hypocrisy of homophobic persons and institutions, and some attempt to show that Clause 28 is merely the latest reflection of a much larger problem, that being the inherent paranoia and unreason of governments. Even though I'm gay myself, I tend to favor the latter approach. Although showing that homosexuals can be nice, hard working, decent people may be good P.R., it has nothing to do with the larger issueswhich is that private morality should not be dictated by public decree, and that even if we homosexuals were all disgusting little beasts we would still be entitled to the full slate of human and civil rights accorded everybody else in the western world, from street people to skinheads. When I see gay cartoonists begging for acceptance by portraying gay characters as just normal folks, ergo, people worthy of equality under the law, I get a bad throb in my templesurely they must realize that they're playing by the oppressor's rules. Fortunately, there's none of this in AARGH not even a single exam ple. This is a very enlightened book. I admire the work of these car toonists more than I did that of those
in Strip AIDS USA, because there's nothing to hide behind here. Like a society matron, some of the Strip AIDS cartoonists closed their eyes to all but the simple fact that "people are dying," with "people" becoming as abstract a term as possible. Most of the cartoonists in AARGH, however, are stepping onto the ideological front lines. Bill Sienkiewicz, who by everything I've heard is happily hetero, has chosen to ally fiimself with a cause that could, if things turn for the worse, cause his career some harm. And he's done it with simple, elegant convictionunlike Brian Bolland (who contributes here), he hasn't felt obliged to say, "Hey, I'm really straight," just "Hey, I'm really concerned." I've thought that Sienkiewicz's audacious work has achieved heroic proportions before, but this is the first time it's done so in a moral sense in addition to an aesthetic one. Which is to say nothing of publisher Alan Moore's courageas a British subject, he could indeed feel a backlash if Clause 28 is approved. Ditto the many other British car toonists who appear here, all of whom are risking government retribution and possibly even black-listing. (I hate to paint such a grisly scenario, but these are grisly times.) These cartoonists even include people like Kevin O'Neill and Dave Gibbons, who are not known for having done political or ideological work. There's a wider range of material in
this book than in Strip AIDS, too. Suprisingly little of it is autobio graphical. I counted only two strips ("I Was a Teenage Target" by Dave Thorpe and Lin Jarret, and "Grow ing Out of It," by Marcus Vicars, Jaime Delano, and Steve Oakley). There is, however, quite a bit of bigotbashing, most of it aimed at Margaret ThatcherAlexei Sayle's and Oscar Zarate's one-panel "Clause 28" is the best example of this, drawing back the curtain on young Margaret's fascina tion with Nazi book burnings. That cher's cancerous presence saturates this book the way Ronald Reagan's does Strip AIDS. But the range of bigot-bashing is greater than it is in Strip AIDSfrom Howard Cruse's delightful, deco, Belloc-inspired "Penceworth" to Frank Miller's gritty, apocalyptic "RoboHomoPhobe." (Miller's con tribution left me a little uneasy, howeverI was never quite sure lie was on the right side. The Robo HomoPhobe character also appears briefly in Strip AIDS, in a presenta tion of even more questionable taste.) There are a couple of cautionary, speculative looks at post-Clause 28 scenarios, most notably the savage, satirical "From Homogenous to Honey" (sic) by Neil Gaiman, Bryan Talbot, and Mark Buckingham, and the unsettling, Kafkaesque "Insanity Clause" by Geoff Ryman and Grahame Baker, which uses wildly different approaches to put across the same premise: that the eradication of
Left: Will Frank Miller ever draw a picture w i t h o u t a g u n in it? ( F r o m AARGH) Below: Brian Bolland struggles o n his strip f o r AARGH.
4 0 W H A T A M l C O N N S SAY O N THIS PAQB > WELL, l PERSONALLY DON'r iKE W d t H E S . I DON'T M K ET H E u N B O F 1-tANY V O I C E S R A I 3 f i I N HARPIONV. A H A R M O N I O U S ATr+oSMfiftE ttfcEKS OF S T U P I D I T Y AWT IS H O * A i K MC Q U E S T I O N S , N O T B u o w i N C
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the concept of homosexuality from the culture would begin nothing less than the wholesale eradication of in dividuality and even identity. There are very few "Gay Pride" stripsin feet, only one comes to mind: Roz Kaveney and Graham Higgins's "A Short Walk on the Cold Day," which, in its healthy militancy, is like a tonic after the gloom and depression of the rest of the book. (Not that gloom and depression are uncalled for.) There are a couple of allegories, including Steve Appleby's absurdist "Buttockheads Rule the World," and Dominic Regan's "Dom Zombi Unded," which, in its attempt to comment on the oppression of gays by weaving a little tale about the oppression of vampires, struck me as being extremely insensitiveaside from being stupid. There are also a couple of contributions that I just didn't get, especially David Lloyd's "Hand" and Phil Elliott's "A Tale From Gimbley's." Perhaps the most illuminating strip in the book is "Hunt Emerson's Bit." Emerson is the only cartoonist who actually lays out what Clause 28 says and examines its parallels to oppressive policies pursued by nations like the U.S.S.R., South Korea, and Nazi Germany. Instead of responding with rage to the initiative, he shows us exactly what the initiative isand lets it speak for itself. (He does get in a swipe at Margaret Thatcher, though, and a funny one it is.) Some of the contributions defy classification. Harvey Pekar con tributes "A Notable Among Those Present," another of his oddly-
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Right a n d b e l o w right: F r o m AARGH s h i s t o r y of love b y A l a n M o o r e , Steve Bissette, a n d John Totleben. Below: Hunt Emerson offers a straight description of Clause 2 9 . rso, Mm CLAvs2%
compelling verite pieces that arrives at its conclusion without necessarily having arrived at a point. (It's fer bet ter than his contribution to Strip AIDS.) At the other end of the dramatic scale is Dave Sim's highly stylized "An Untold Tale of the Secret Sacred Wars," featuring characters from his Cerebus. While undeniably hilarious, it's bound to mystify nearly everyone who doesn't have a firm grounding in the overwrought vocabulary of Marvel Comics being parodied here. But it's Moore who gives us the most fully-realized piece. It couldn't
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be a better showing for his debut as publisher/creator. "The Mirror of Love" (illustrated by Steve Bissette and Rick Veitch) is his attempt to distill the entire history of homo sexuality to serve as the subtext to a sustained love affair between two hermaphroditic angels, mirror images of each otherI suppose they must represent patron saints of the inverted. As such, the story has to succeed not only as history but as allegory, and it's no feint praise to say that it does just that. At times, his writing gets a touch documentary, and I get a little chill when he discusses the Greek and Roman tradition of man-boy love in approving terms; children are presexual, and pederastry is a separate case, both morally and ideologically, from homosexuality. But for the most part this is a vital, affecting piece of work, with a poetic rhythm mat allows it to move effortlessly from Sappho to Shakespeare to Joe Orton. At tie end, his angels vow: While life endures we'll love. And afterwards, if what they say is true, I'll be refused a heaven crammed with popes, policemen, fundamentalists, and burn instead quite happily with Sappho, Michaelangelo [sic] and you, my love. I'd burn throughout eternity with you. It's exquisitely movingnot because it's a testament to same-sex love, but because it's a testament to love, period, Moore understands that the experience of being human is not restrictive; to understand, you only have to be alive.
SEE
VA LATER. HOPE
BETTER rMORRA.
PEKAR A N D REALISM
This is not a review of American Splendor. If it were, then many of my comments would accord largely with what has been said about it elsewhereI have no desire to dispute the pleasures it offers. Indeed, critical response to the book has been so overwhelmingly positive, in direct contrast to its sales, that it has begun to seem as much of a heresy to criticize it as it would be to suggest to a Marvel fan that he should read it. But, it is not my aim to criticize itthe Harvey Pekar backlash does not start here. I want instead to look at the book in a different way and to examine some of the assumptions underlying its reception. In a medium dominated by juvenile escapism, a book that is apparently both "realistic" and "personal" is in danger of being praised simply for what it is not rather than for what it is, which has been taken for granted. If I do not necessarily feel that the book has been overrated, I do think that some of the issues it raises have been neglected; in particular, the no tions of "realism" and the "per sonal" require some interrogation. What is realism? "Realism" is a much used word in all forms of criticism, yet it begs a number of questions too rarely dealt with. I use the term to include any work which to some degree attempts to conceal the conventions and stylistic devices by which a fictional world is created. But we need to distinguish between classical realism and social realism. By classic realism, I mean anything whose narrative adheres to such pro perties of the 19th century novel as linearity, casuality, psychological consistency; in short, anything which seeksto render a plausible, consistent, and involving fiction. Clearly this would include the majority of mainstream and several independent comic hooks (if not strips, which are a bit more complex.) It may seem strange to think of Spider-Man and Swamp Thing as "realistic." How ever, even if the material is essentially implausible, the aim is as far as possi ble to suspend disbelief and to create a coherent, known' 'world.'' We may not believe in monsters or superheroes, but we are familiar with cer tain laws governing these stories (religious or scientific paraphernalia, narrative patterns, character types) we are in a world which we know and, if it works, we will believe in it for the duration of the story. For evidence of classic realism run amok, we need look no further than Marvel and DC's obsession with creating consistent universes, with imposing oppressive order on a diverse and often contradictory variety of stories. All of those fanboy "Handbooks," depressingly anal in character, display the ultimate desire for an utterly closed narrative system, for stories reduced to a single, irrevocable meaning.
_L2
a set of conventions, practices, laws, and grammatical prinicples (a good example is the cinematic use of shaky, handheld cameras to denote documen tary realism.) Most realist novels and films depend heavily on the economy, the linearity, the identification techni ques, of classic fiction. They tend to a visible "point"the slice of fjow inese people uve m A commune have life has something to say, a definite AN' EVERYBODY IN THE COMMUNE IS INTO PURE FOOP. I'M HOT. SO IT point of view, a discriminative sense CAUSED ME A UTTie PROBLEM AT BREAKFAST THE NEXT PAY. . _j of "relevance." We are left in no ' c o r n FtA*RES?> doubt as to why the story has been AREX>UKIPOIN'?We told. HAVE SOme6KANOLA. THATS ABOUT THE CLOSEST TWN&-. Pekar often violates these conven tions. For one thing, many of his tales are told for the sake of tellingthe story is its own justification. This has resulted in several stories so arbitrary, so "poindess" in conventional terms, that they can elicit response closer to those to non-realist formsWhat is the point of the story? Why tell it? RUT I PIPH'T PI& 6RANOIA ANt> MILK. "Eating Potato Chips in Oregon" (American Splendor %*) is an almost perfect example, a tale of sublime banality and inconsequence. Harvey stays at a commune in Portland and cannot find anything he likes to eat (residents eat only " p u r e " food). He tries to eat granola, but has to throw it away; alas, even that poses a pro blem, because the refuse is organized into classified sections and he can't find the right one. At the one point where the story is in danger of simply being "about" somethinga cultural Social realism is, on the face of it, clash, how Harvey deals withafotena much more unequivocal animal in tially embarrassing situationa tem its resolution to record empirical poral ellipsis finds Harvey about to reality as it is, people as they are, have a discussion on the subject of events as they occur. Pekar's work potato chips, their brand names (and would seem to be closer to this strand. spelling), and where they come from. He has referred to his work halfThis marvellous non sequitur is no jokingly as Neo-Realism. The rela mere recording of reality. It might be tionship between classic and social objected that, for Pekar, that is simply realism is complex and shifting. Time how it happened. That isn't the point. has a way of often turning the latter I don't dispute the accuracy or into the former as formal conventions veracity of these storiesit simply become more familiar to us doesn't interest me, and it is dis yesterday's gritty naturalism becomes ingenuous to claim that the interest of today's Soap Opera. This is partly my these stories is inseperable from their point; realism is as much as anything
' M o s t of t h e stories discussed in this essay c a n b e f o u n d in the Doubleday book collections American Splendor a n d M o r e American Splendor.
Below: "Pickled Okra (Okry)" Right: "Rip-Off Chick"
factual status. The moment a slice of life is turned into a story, it becomes a fiction subject to countless con scious and unconscious aesthetic decisionsthe compression of time which accentuates the incongruity of the two halves, the carefully detailed close-ups of refuse containers and crisp packets, the mixing of narration and dramatization. Pekar has compared what he does with the immediacy of photography: "I look at myself sometimes when I do these shorter pieces like a photographer walking down the street who runs into things; he sees things and he shoots them. It would be dif ficult to explain why exactly they strike me" (Comics Journal #97). One assumes that this principle applies to a story like "Pickled Okra (Okry)" (American Splendor #8), in which a black worker attempts to sell the substance to several office women. Not very much happens, to say the least, but the final line of dialogue "By the way, I also make a very fine pepper jelly"lakes on a peculiar and wholly unexplainable resonance. Pekar's analogy is double-edged. On the one hand, it is very naive to think that retelling an incident in a narrative medium can ever be like taking a photograph; both are representations, but the story will already have become
a rendering, an interpretation however meticulous filtered through the means of representing "reality" available to the medium. The story in question is especially interesting, for Pekar is absent from its narrative space. Either the script or Crumb's art (or both) have attempted to re-create the privileged subjectivity of an observed scene. But Pekar's analogy also sug gests an arbritrary, chaotic, instinctive approach to his work which is part of its fascination. Again, while the story is not a documentary record, neither does it attempt to extract some "mean ing" from its strangely fascinating subject. Only in Pekar's introspective, and usually less interesting, stories is there an attempt, often frustrated, to impose some philosophical order on the world. If I have defined realism as a set of conventions, I would want to go fur ther here by suggesting it is also a con straint, one which Pekar transcends in his best work and which damages his lesser stories Let me just identify two specific limitations of a realist aesthetic. 1. Realism is essentially concerned with accurately reproducing surfaces, how things appear to bethe specific as the universaland is severely handicapped in representing a broader social or psychological context. Equally, a "committed" realism finds itself caught between showing and tell ing, reproducing things as they are and (without resorting to mouthpieces)imagining how things might be. A good example is Pekar's alleged misogyny, seen in a number of stories but most blatantly in the controversial "Rip-Off Chick" (American Splendor #6, again) and the story where a female character is referred to as a "lousy cunt" ("An Argument at Work," American Splendor #4). In his Comics Journal interview, Pekar has defined himself by saying that he is a pro-feminist but has found himself in conflict with a number of individual women. One has some sympathy with thisa common dilemma in our culture is finding ourselves believing in one thing and doing something else. But of course this is not what the stories say, and it has to do with the way they are told. To be fair, neither of the stories is free from self-criticism, but Harvey is unavoidably privileged as the sub ject of the story. For one thing, his capacity for self-analysis becomes another means of identification, and we are told that he is "desperately lonely" in "Rip-Off Chick," while the barely characterized Carla has her
1 EAYESPHOP A N D BY T H E TIME WE'RE RFIAPY TO LEAVE THE PLACE I'VE FIGOPED cm WHO S H E I S .
dialogue reduced at one point to "Ashram.. .Deja Vu.. .Blah, blah." So the woman is denied a real voice, not only because Pekar won't narrate anything so for removed from his perception of the event but because the conventions of the story (part of a whole tradition of male anguish about the impropriety of women) leave no space for such a conflicting perspec tive. It may well be that some women are manipulative and unreliable, but there are strong cultural factors governing the way men and women have on the whole been constructed in roles that are at times damn near incompatible. We only catch glimpses of this if we read the story against itself, and observe the way she is pro jected into the passive roles both by the macho biker we first see her with and by Harvey himself. But, overall, she is the story's object, its problem, and just another treacherous woman to pose moral questions for the male protagonist. How might the story be told differently? Whatever alternative one arrives at, it is clear that it would break down subjective, masculine, "realist" trappings inseperable from its misogyny. 2 . Realism is a closed system of producing meaning. For all its vary ing degrees of "ambiguity" or "com plexity," it essentially places us in a passive position as readers or viewers. Regardless of the desire to create con frontation, the effect is just as likely to be reassuring or bleakly despair ing, which often amounts to the same thingneither suggest that change is possible. Donald Phelps, in the best overview of Pekar's work I have seen (Comics Journal #97), suggests that some of Pekar's stories (especially those depic ting black workers) exhibit a "certain complacency, a susceptibility, even a devotion to familiar norms." The
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question of Pekar's sentimentality, which would be jumped on if he were writing genre material, is certainly a topic for further consideration. It is the desire of most of us to impose a meaning, a limit, an ex planation on a workin Roland Barthes' words, " t h e text is 'explained'a victory to the critic." We have probably all at some time witnessed or shared the frustration of an audience at a fdm that refuses to "end properly," to close itself off neatly. The story goes that when the final episode of The Prisoner was first broadcast in Britain, Patrick McGoohan had to leave the country with his family until a very upset viewing public had cooled down a little. Fan debates about the same series frequently focus on the correct, coherent order of the episodes. In many ways, the reductio ad absurdum of realism is the soap opera or the con tinuous comic book (The X-Men, after all, is Soap-in-Long-Underwear), which postpone closure indefinitely and bend completely to illusions of continuity, consistency, rigid demar cations of time and psychological development. Of course, many realist books and films have open ends, because, in their own terms, "life is like that." But that, in itself, is simply another method of closure, of ensur ing an invioable, coherent piece of fictional reality. In some respects, what I am adher ing to here, although not rigidly, is Roland Barthes' notion of Readerly and Writerly texts. The former refers to works we simply consume, the latter to those which demand that we participate in producing the text, so that we become as much a writer as reader in terms of our response. The Readerly novel, the book that is a "good read," renders us passive, subservient to the experiences and meanings prepared for us by the author at an advanced level, the obsessive worshipping of "great masters" can be an extreme manifesta tion of a Readerly mentality (or a badly resolved Oedipus complex). The Writerly text allows no such easy access to a fixed solutionit is am biguous. But one needs to say several things here. First, these are not two mutually exclusive categories; this is more a question of degree than of kind. Equally, it would be difficult to think of many purely Readerly texts, although the comics medium has doubtless produced more of these than other forms. And while that Writerly text immediately makes one think of books like Ulysses and Gravity's Rain
bow, or films like Last Year in Marienbad and Weekend, the increas ing self-consciousness of a lot of genre fiction about style, narrative conven tions, and cross-referencing also encourages a partly Writerly response. I would suggest that someone reading a Stephen King novel is probably goint through a more sophisticated set of experiences than traditional criticism would have us believe. It may well be more appropriate to speak of Readerly and Writerly responses than Readerly and Writerly texts, although clearly some works will be more "post-structuralist-friendly" than others. What much of this points to is the figure of the author, and the power he either exerts or has ascribed to him by the reader. Certainly if realism won't do the trick in imposing limita tions, a good old-fashioned world view or a dose of personal vision will squash the more feisty narrative. Here's Barthes again: The image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions, while criticism still consists for the most part in saying that Baudelaire's work is the failure of Baudelaire the man, Van Gogh's his madness, Tchaikov sky's his vice. The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more, or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author "confiding" in us. (The Death of the Author) One needs look no further than Donald M. Fiene's extensive overview of Pekar's work in Journal #97, the bulk of which falls under such headlines as "Influences," "Pekar's View of Ethnic and Racial Minorities," "Pekar's View of Women," "Pekar's View of Life: Politics and Philosophy." The problem is twofold. First, in a culture deter mined by specific structures of class, sex, race, power, and money, to adhere to the cult of the "personal view" is to imply that an endless and inex haustible selection of "views" is available. Steve Monaco, in the Jour nal #91, presents Pekar's themes as "alienation, social prejudice, artistic frustration, and the mundane aspects of the working class life"indeed, in large part, the themes of most of the underground artists who have in fluenced Pekar. Pekar's View of Women is of interest only insofar as
it is endemic in so much of the lurk ing misogyny in our societyPekar has not written the world, the world has written him. At the same time, "Pekar" becomes a parameter to limit the readings of his own workas detailed and impressive as Fiene's study is, there is really nowhere to go from it. Only the sec tion on "Influences" opens up the work a little by moving it away from Pekaronly, alas, to re-integrate it into his unique ouevre. Of course, Pekar presents a special problem. It is hardly contentious to say that his work is amongst the most " p e r s o n a l " being produced in comicshe would appear to be the subject of his own work. Like much of Spiegelman and Crumb, his work is autobiographical (and often discur sive), but without the overt distanc ing devices employed in Maus (whose artifice and imperspicuity Pekar is suspicious ofsee Journal #113). What Spiegelman has done in his use of funny animals corresponds roughly with what the Russian formalists called "making strange." Essentially a poetic concept, it refers to a process of defamiliarization, transforming the familiar, the routine, the everyday, into something new and strange, thereby heightening our perception of it and drawing attention to the mediating practice of representation. This is especially apt in Maus. Volumes of films, books, documentaries, and photographs have made the holocaust all too familiar to usdare one say, made it safe for usand one of the book's strategies, consciously or not, is to confront that. Pekar appears to use no such devices. Not infrequently, he speaks to us from the page, addressing us direcdy. And yet that in itself is an unusual storytelling prac tice, departing noticeably from con ventional "realist" practiceshis familiarity is also a form of estrange ment in its overall effect, making the panels all the more tangible. But if Pekar fails or defeats himself in removing the signs of "writing," his work is far from poorer for it. Most of the best and most in teresting comics to have emerged since the stagnation of the mainstream (which in the '70s was at least able to sustain estimable work by minor figures like Gerber, Moench, and Englehart) exhibit a roughly moder nist Writerly sensibility. Under this far from rigorous generic umbrella, I would include not only the major books like Love & Rockets, Neat Stuff, and Maus, but also the self-criticism of Dark Knight and The Watchmen,
49
In " R e a d T h i s " P e k a r alternates between a straightforward dramatization a n d dfrect-to-reader narration.
which aesthetically if not econ omically have taken the super-hero genre apart. It is part of my aim to locate Pekar somewhere on this line, to rescue his work from the suf focating prison of realism. When I say this, I don't necessarily intend to include all of Pekar's work, which is by no means consistent in tone, approach or style. One would need to distinguish between those transparent slice of life stories and those which depart entirely from naturalism. For one thing, there is Pekar's acknowleded debt to stand-up comic delivery. In "Talk Show" (American Splendor #6) he pulls up a friend in the street and encourages him to tell us the story of his pissing on the statue of a Capitalist icon. The story concludes with Pekar lifting his friend's arm and shouting, "Danny Thompson, folksDanny Thomp son." The story is interesting, yet signals from the start, not least in Michael T. Gilbert's art, that it is dif ferent from, and in a sense less serious than, something like "Once Again to Oregon" in the same issue. "Read This," on the other hand, alternates between a straightforward dramatiza tion and carefully inserted direct-toreader narration. But on the final page, the narrator, Harvey, takes over entirely and proceeds to impose a moral on the story in a heavy-handed feshion. But the final three panels shift emphasis again. In the first, the let tering adopts a thicker type as he tells us: This is a tough world, folks. We all need help t'get by. So help yer friends an' make sure they help you or know th' reason why.
A second, speechless, panel shows him pausing, visibly lost for words for a moment. Then finally, he turns and looks off-frame and asks, "Uh, am I still on?" Several things are happening here and I want to draw attention to two: different levels of fiction and the divided author. There are essentially three fictional levels: the actual story located in time and space ("Back fif teen years ago...")the actual nar ration, which is always now, divided between captions and Harvey's directto-the-reader address; but the final panel opens up another fictional space, an absent author-figure who is both apparently in control of the story and separate from narrator and character. Whatever is happening here, it certainly isn't realismit's too self-conscious about the mechanics of storytelling and the relationship be tween fiction, its author, and its reader. At the same time, these levels undermine he omnipotence of the authorinstead of the unified third or first person voice of most classic fic tion, we are offered a divided figure: Harvey as character, as narrator, as author. What is the relationship be tween the three, and is it the latter who is being addressed in the final panel? The link with comic performance is again pertinent, because what this most recalls is Woody Allen's Annie Hallihe play on character, narrator, and author (and star), direct address," and the self-consciousness about fic tional reality (cartoon segment, sub titles, people stepping in and out of character). In his interview with Pekar, Gary
Groth suggests (if I understand cor rectly) that his work might be improv ed by him rendering it himself, however crudely: "It would be truer to your own vision, although you would sell fewer copies." My slightly different perspective inclines me to disagree with this desire to "unify" Pekar's workI believe it benefits from its collaborative nature. The feet that in any issue we see a variety of "Harveys" is one of its points of interest. This is especially true of Robert Crumb's contributions. Unlike most of the other regular artists on the book, Crumb adopts no consistent style for the character. Harvey is in stead divided into a mulitformity of moods, styles, personalities, and stances. In "The Harvey Pekar Name Story," Pekar is simply rendered, a half-formed Harvey, expressive (marvellously so) yet strangely anonymous (appropriately enough a strip which builds up to the question, "Who is Harvey Pekar?"). In "A Fan tasy," the title already questioning the reliability of its author, a spiky rodent like Harvey torments Crumb. "A Compliment" and "Friendly Visits for the Weekend" are more naturalistic, and "American Splendor Assaults the Media" produces a memorably in tense figure, in Steve Monaco's words, "sweating, pop-eyed.. .gnashing his teeth." Other stories give the character different names such as Herschel (ap parently his real name) and Jack the Bellboy. It is important that a sizeable por tion of American Splendor comprises stories about telling stories. "The Maggies (Oral History)" depicts Harvey actually in pursuit of the story for his. striphe stands, pencil and pad in hand, as an irritable, unnamed old man tells the story of people sell ing linoleum to immigrants in Cleveland. Before long, they argue over a statement made by the old man in the second panelhe tells Harvey that linoleum was also called magnoleum and then denies it. The argument is resolved by a quote from Socrates: "Socrates said all men are dishonest, so even he was dishonest." The reliability and significance of the story are both left in doubt.and a puzzled Harvey tells the reader, "There you have it, folks. Now you know all about the Maggies with a lit tle Socrates thrown i n . . . " The final panel is a triangular composition, the retreating old man, flanked by Harvey and a little portrait of Socrates. More interesting is the second half of "Double Feature" (American Splendor #10), a two-part story featur-
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ing Pekar's workmate Toby Radloff, who goes on elaborate journeys to see' films. Part two is about his trip to see Revenge of the Nerds during the sum mer of 1984. The tale fells into three sections: Toby describes the plot of the film to Harvey about a group of col lege outcasts who triumph over the Jocks who give them a hard time; a week later, Toby turns up wearing a badge bearing the words, "Genuine Nerd," puzzling Harveywhy should anyone want to be identified as a nerd? Toby explains: I consider myself a nerd. When I was going to high school I was smart but kids picked on me a lot. I was considered to be dif ferent . . . It made me feel proud when I saw the movie b'cause I felt it was about time that the people who get picked on were made t'be the heroes. Finally, two weeks later Harvey has also seen the film: Toby... I just saw Revenge of the Nerds an' I can't let my story end the way it did, on a note of hope and tolerance. He tries to explain that the film's con nection with Toby's life is a tenuous one:
They're college students whose parents live in big houses in the suburbs. They're gonna get degrees, get good jobs and stop bein' nerds. Toby starts laughing, and a slightly ir ritated Harvey asks him what the joke is: That was pretty good what you said about them living in big houses in the suburbs. The point is that this is about the disputed reading of two stories the film and the actual strip itself. On the one hand, we have two conflicting in terpretations of the same film. But Harvey also attempts to coerce the "meaning" of his own story: "I can't let my story end the way it did, on a
note of hope and tolerance" (again, collapsing and clouding the distinction between author and character). Whether the correct reading derives from his moral cynical response to the film or Toby's apparent sense that Harvey's somehow missed the point is left open. (In some ways Pekar reworks the idea in "My Struggle with Corporate Corruption and Network Philistinism," casting himself in the Toby role.) The intervention of the author (in the guise of character), the attention to ambiguitythese are not isolated moments in Pekar's work. While I have gone to some lengths to demonstrate that Pekar's work is not unproblematically realist, it is clear ly misleading to seperate it from realism altogether. Many of the stories limit one's response to shaking one's head or nodding sagelythose homespun insights, everyday and universal truths do much to obscure more complex perspectives. Never theless, if one is to fully evaluate and explain the fascination of Pekar's work, it is necessary to put aside critical truisms and suggest other ways of exploring his storytelling. I hope to have suggested some of the ways in which that enquiry might begin.
ROCK & ROLL CONFIDENTIAL

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THE CASE OF T H E ARGENTINE EXILES

Frank Stack on Joe's and Ana.
During the Vietnam War dissenters were challenged to "love it or leave it." For most Americans, this was just an insult, a rhetorical challenge to support the Administration's war policy or shut up. Of course, the whole issue was ethically complex. Quite a few dissenters did go to Canada or Sweden to avoid the draft, and others, from ideological fervor, really did give serious consideration to leaving because they couldn't love what the United States was doing. Many of us reacted indignantly, responding angrily with "What right do you have to tell me to leave! I'm as much a citizen of this country as you are!" But deep down we knew the real issue was authoritarianism, and that not far beneath the surface of "love it or leave it" was "Shut up, or we'll kill you." In our art and literature, no one really got around to dealing with the reality and the emo tional implications of the "love it or leave it" challenge: How bad would it be like for me in another country? What if the new country was just as bad? Would I have to leave again? How many times can a person do that? These questions are addressed in depth in the graphic fiction of Argen tine exile writers Carlos Sampayo and Gabriel Solano Lopez and artists Jose Munoz and Francisco Solano Lopez, recently introduced to the United States in the magazines Raw and Prime Cuts, in Catalan Communica tions graphic novels Joe's Bar and Evaristo: Deep City, and in Sinner, a new magazine devoted to Munoz and Sampayo's Alack Sinner detective series. Novelist Sampayo began col laboration with artist Jose Munoz in 1975 with the Sinner stories which they followed with Joe's Bar. Both are in their 40s, now living in Europe as voluntary exiles from Argentina. Their older compatriot, Francisco Solano Lopezwith whom writer Sampayo produced the Evaristo seriesalso left Argentina for ideological reasons. His departure is partly explained by his desire to aid his exiled son, writer Gabriel Solano Lopez, with whom he produced the graphic novel Ana, which just com
Bar, Sinner,
Deep
City,
pleted four-part serialization in Prime Cuts. Sampayo and Munoz's Joe's Bar is a dense and challenging reading. Set in Manhattan during the Iranian hostage crisis, this series of short stories about people who frequent a seedy bar-restaurant is realistic and gritty and clearly not from "our" point of view. It is an American point of view, but it is South American. I do not mean by that distinction that it is ill-informed or simplistic; on the contrary, the dialogue and illustrations are a great deal more authentic and persuasive than those in similar works by North Americans. For a reader simply plunging into this book without familiarity with other of Sampayo's writing, the im mediate sensation may be somewhat disorienting. Joe's Bar is certainly not like other comics, It is really meant for mature readers who understand the literary techniques of stream-ofconsciousness and shifting view points. The stories move fast and sometimes end before the r e a d e r -
accustomed to more straight forward, uncomplicated comic-strip narrativesknows what is happening. Not only must you read it again, you also must look at the pictures very carefully. For the ideological content is carried as often by Munoz's pictures as by Sampayo's words. When we do realize how critical of the U.S. the creators are, our natural knee-jerk reaction may be, "What do these guys know about our country and why are they so negative about us?" What is it that we U.S. Americans don't do when we write about ourselves that makes a vigorous and perceptive view ofjh&TJ.S. social pro blems by someone else so obviously foreign! We aren't tough enough on ourselves, are too sentimental to look at ourselves squarely, maybe afraid of what we will see. Our own reaction to the greed and corruption in this country is indignant and selfrighteous. Someone else is doing i t corporations, the CIA, dope-pushers,
From
Job's
Bar.
53
liberals, right-wingers, street crim inals, wetbacks, some kind of scape goat, certainly not us good clean Americans. Our stories about our social flaws are always from the point of view of a clear-sighted innocent, full of moral indignation, and peopled with morally incorruptible good guys. And why not? It is the "right" attitude, enforced by government agencies and industry ratings systems. To shield out children from disturb ing ideas, we tell social and historical fairy tales. Unfortunately, as adults we never stop believing them. "The elec torate is a majority of decent moral citizens. We are basically good. Our enemies lie about us because they are jealous. The U.S.A. is the envy of the world." We look ourselves in the eye and flinch, or we joke about our flaws (which is flinching). Sampayo and Munoz stare us down in Joe's Bar. They don't blink and they aren't joking, which is not to say the book has no humor in it. The stories are interlinked by the appearance of major characters in one story as minor characters in other stories. Time se quences overlap, as in the novels of Balzac, Joyce Cary, and William Faulkner. Artist Jose Munoz and writer Carlos Sampayo have been working together regularly since 1975 in a wonderfully complementary col laboration. In Art Spiegelman's words, "Munoz and Sampayo work like one brain in two bodies; Sam payo's stories are elliptical and sub tle; Munoz's powerful expressionist drawings take dazzling risks." This is, irkteed, not just a matter of a good ar tist illustrating a good writer's stories,
Below: Pepe, the cen tral character o f t h e f i r s t s t o r y I n Joe's Bar, is d i s c o v e r e d d e a d b y Alack Sinner.
but a truly inspired collaboration in which the story is conceived not on ly in terms of pictures but in pictures that only this artist could draw. Munoz's pictures are in perfect har mony with Sampayo's shrewd terse dialogue and commentary, rich in im plications and detail, but without an unnecessary word or pictorial detail. Like Gilbert and Sullivan or Lennon and McCartney, each seems to be a catalyst to creative power in the other. Working together, Sampayo and Munoz form an exciting and for
midable talentserious, brilliant, and absolutely unpredictable, possibly the very best team in the business. The first story is about Pepe, a sullen political refugee from an unspecified Latin American country, working without a green card, who cleans up the bar after it closes, he reminds us of Joe Christmas in Light in August, William Faulkner's most alienated, dissociated character, proud, angry, and hopeless. Pepe is sick with fear of discovery. On hear ing that the FBI is searching for
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terrorists from his country, he muses, "They're going to capture me, accuse me, deport me, torture and condemn me," making no distinction between authorities in this country and the authoritarian regime he has fled. He rejects half-hearted gestures of friend ship. From his conversation we know that he.is an intellectual, and we learn that he was an architect in the unnamed country from which he has fled, and that he cannot act to improve his present situation. Little tragedies devastate him, as when an aggressive prostitute breaks his glasses in an attempt to stimulate a sexual response. At the end of his resources, he becomes increasingly quarrelsome. Resolving to end his agony he leaves the bar to turn himself in. We see him next sprawled dead on the street, barefoot, with a pack of cigarettes beside him. Our questions about what happened to him after he left the bar remain unanswered. Or do they? As we read more of Sampayo and Munoz, we find that their stories, even their different books, interweave over periods of time. We may learn more about Pepe. Life, such as it is, goes on around Pepe's body. Death, too. Passionate and grotesque characters pass in and out of the panels, speaking of paint ing and literature, politics and dope and gambling, reading books and newspapers. Joe has his bar in a Latino neighborhood (the upper West Side?), Spanish music and lyrics drift through the panels. Trivial and obscene incidents occur in the shadows. Tortured figures and leering, vulnerable faces mutate from de bauched humanity into animals and impossible hallucinatory monsters, suggestive of the characters' tenuous grasps on reality. This may seem a bleak view of life, but the stories are not so negative as they may sound. Most of the characters are recog nizable human beings with common failurespoverty, sickness, anxiety, selfishnesshuman beings who smile and make gestures of friendship to strangers, even to street bums and foreigners. Sampayo and Munoz are not full of hate; they make a point of showing us a broad variety of racial and ethnic characters caught up in individual situations, unthinkingly victimizing each other. The implied criticism is not that one group villainously exploits another group. It is a criticism of a social situation that in such a dog-eat-dog society everyone eventually becomes a victim. The second story is a tragic-comic tale about the absurd show-biz spec
tacle of professional wrestling. Moses Man, a former boxing champion, now a mentally ill street bum, accepts an opportunity for another big payday, a farcical match between boxer and wrestler. In a flashback, we see Man as an arrogantly victorious champion exploited by smug managers when he wins, abandoned to the gutter when he loses. Artist Munoz's formidable satirical powers peak as he describes the preliminary matches before the "Main Event of the Century." These preliminaries caricature world con flicts: a Moslem battles a Jew, a "Disco Fighter" throws phonograph records at this opponents and Siamese Twins square off against each other (the twin on the left wins). Not sur prisingly, Man, who never was very bright, doesn't understand that he is not supposed to hurt his opponent. The fight turns mean and the boxer
After the assignation, Ella sees Pepe dead, and weeps at the sight. (Curiously, Pepe is shown with his glasses on, and in this version of the death scene, the glasses lie beside him. In the earlier story, because his glasses had been broken, he wasn't wearing them when he died. A mistake? Or is it a clue to Pepe's fate?) Ella is the eye that pulls together the book's characters. She notices and photographs Moses Man with the fight promoter bargaining in the bar, noting that his is the face of a ruined man. "I am using others to make a mirror of myself," she muses, perhaps speaking for the authors themselves and through them, for all artists, perhaps for all sentient humanity. Ella's love affair goes sour. Her lover loves someone else. "Black or white?" she blurts out, then apologizes. The other lover is a black man, she learns
. . . I LOST... I LOST AaA\H..

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is hospitalized. Convinced he has lost his championship again, he punches himself in the liver till he dies. Not everyone in this book is aware of what is going on. The tide character in "Ella" is an intelligent but neurotic photographer who takes candid pic tures of people in the street. She inevitably calls to mind Diane Arbus, who photographed the dark side of American with such a cold, objective eye. Ella falls in love with her black doctor and they have an uneasy affair. In the meantime, she is taking pictures of people we recognize from other stories, including Alack Sinner who lives in the neighborhood. (Sinner, incidentally, was the passer-by who discovered Pepe's body on the street corner at the end of the first story.) At one point, as Ella meets her lover in her apartment, we see Pepe pass ing on the street outside the window. later after photographing them together without initially recognizing her lover. "Fifth story" (a curious title, with only four stories in the book) is the only one about reciprocated love, but it isn't a happy tale. Sixteen-year-old Mike helps his father David Wiess run a drug store near Joe's Bar, where he eats lunch and where he frequently encounters his girl friend Rosa Feldman. With his loving father's encouragement, the romance is begin ning to bloom when Mike learns that his father is seriously ill with cancer. The boy's mental balance deteriorates with his father's health. He eats too much and loses interest in everything but his beloved father, including Rosa and the business. As an act of love he kills his father to keep him from suf fering, and his outraged acquaintances beat him almost to death.
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Above: From "Fifth S t o r y ' ' i n Joe's Bar. B e l o w : Sinner # 3 .
This kind of approach to story tell ing may not be very popular with established American comic fans. First, the descriptions make it sound depressing: Why focus on the tragic and the hopeless, one might ask, or evenas Nixon, Reagan or Bush would ask"Why are you guys tell ing what's wrong with America? Why don't you tell about what we are doing right? What are you guys coming over here and picking on us for?" It seems to me that the critically realistic attitude found in Joe's Bar would be depressing only for someone desperately committed to the proposi tion that the U.S. is a paradise of golden opportunity and that all the rest of the world is jealous of that oppor tunity. The tragic possibility that the country one loves may become en thralled to a vicious authoritarianism with no sympathy for civil rights or human dignity is not a vain imagining. Munoz and Sampayo have seen it happen in their country, and I doubt very much they left Argentina because
they didn't love it. It's more likely they were afraid, like Pepe, that they would be punished if they said what they thought. After all, Munoz had worked with an outspoken writer in Buenos Aires who did disappear, a presumed victim of super-patriotic death squads. What Joe's Bar tells us, vigorously if perhaps dbliquely (its creators are artists not propagandists), is that some of what they see going on here (hate, macho violence, exploitation) is not only heart-breakingly sad and destruc tive of natural human dignity, but is generally dangerous, and not unique to the U.S. In fact, it is too familiar, too much like Argentina, the home that they had to leave. Why men do they choose New York as the setting for these stories, instead of Paris or Barcelona? Sampayo offers" this explanation: "New York is a metaphor for the big city. It's the universal city, where everything urban happens.,. New York is the capital of the occidental empire. Spain, Italy, Belgium are provinces." Other of Sampayo's stories (some of which we may have to wait a while to see) are set in other places: Paris, Buenos Aires, Mexico, Spain, Cuba, Poland, and in other times. Sampayo is a philosophical, historical novelist. His stories make sense only in terms of the passage ot time. Time is more important to him that place. Having discovered a stimulating talent that is new to you; the next question (if you are like me) is "Where can I see more work from these guys?" Well, that seems to be what Art Spiegelman and the editors at Fantagraphics Books asked too. Thanks to them, and perhaps par ticularly to series editor and cotranslator Kim Thompson, there is a quite bit more of the work of these remarkable Argentines available. Art Spiegelman's Raw has pub
lished two other stories in the Joe's Bar series, and Fantagraphics has devoted a continuing magazine series to the Sampayo-Munoz private-eye saga of Alack Sinner, now at issue three. The first issue of Sinner, titled "Talkin' with Joe," introduces us to the hero as he tells the story behind his departure from the police force for private investigation. Is "hero" the right word for him? Semi-hero? Antihero? No. Hero is right. Sampayo's detective characters, Sinner and the Buenos Aires police inspector Evaristo (who appears in Deep City) are heroes in a more-or-less tradition al mode. They are strong and compe tent men of flawed character who have self-destructive habits, make mistakes, and are sometimes cruel and violent. But they are men of action, essentially idealistic in their pursuit of their per sonal view of justice, who refuse com promising their honor for personal gain and live grimy austere personal lives, often suffering real pain and social isolation for their moral action. Sinner is a more-or-less traditional private investigator although, like Phillip Marlowe, he refuses divorce cases. Sinner's first two cases (presented in issues two and three) were originally drawn in the mid-'70s, earlier than Joe's Bar. Sampayo's excellent tough guy detective stories are laden with symbolic and allegoric overtones, complex but swiftly told. Munoz shows himself to be a splen did main-line illustrator, but he is not yet up to his full powers in "The Webster Case" (issue two), drawn in the first year of his collaboration with Sampayo. Every panel is beautifully designed and carefully researched. The art is already gorgeous, but there are only hints of the horrific powers that will come to full bloom shortly. Learning his lessons from masters with whom he actually studiedHugo Pratt, Alberto Breccia, and Francisco
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Lopez (for whom he once worked as an assistant)Munoz completely eliminates the stylistic equivocations of gray tones in the panels. Everything is either black or white, no crosshatching and no dot screens. But the drawing never seems simple. He gives us astonishing angles through crowds, reflected images, brilliant light effects, figures lurking in the shadows. The designs are always so bold that nothing ever seems cluttered; yet the drawings are not always easy to decipher. There is so much going on, and Munoz doesn't repeat significant details. The viewer's attention and intelligence is challenged. Blink and you miss something. He gives us more to look at in each panel than we expect to see in a comic; more, it seems, than the apparently simple story calls for. Not that there is anything wrong with the neady plotted story. Sampayo, too, is developing his craft in these first Sinner stories. In these earlier stories, traditional detective stuff as it is, he is already loading up his words and situations. The hyper-realism is a pose. Not far below the surface of grimy reality is the disconnected world of hallucination and madness. Like other South American writers such as Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Sampayo works in the tradition of the fantastic and in a longer tradition that encompasses Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, Feodor Dostoevsky, Edgar Allan Poe, E.T.A. Hoffman, and Heinrich Von Kliest, as well as writers of modern day detective stories like Chandler, Hammett, and Cain. Whether we like it or not, Sampayo's stories tell us that rational sanity is a condition of luxury. Monsters lurk in
the dark corners of our minds. The world is a terrible place when we lose control. In the early Sinner stories he Is developing his control over the form of the crime novel, but he has more in mind than telling a diverting detec tive story. We now know, from Joe's Bar and also from issue one of Sinner, that both writer and artist of "The Webster Case" are on the way to better things. Sinner is a fine magazine. In cases where the Sinner material does not fill the magazine's length, the editors pro vide material from oJher South American comic strip classicsAlberto Breccia's "Red" in the second issueas well as informative and well-researched essays about the creators. We can already declare Sinner a classic, with no doubt that the magazine will improve as Munoz and Sampayo disclose dark and perhaps fatal developments in their hero's character with subsequent stories. Last year Catalan Communications issued Evaristo: Deep City, a series of crime stories written by Sampayo and drawn by Francisco Solano Lopez, and with several notable con trasts to Joe's Bar and Sinner. The time is 1958, the place is Argentina, and the hero is Commissioner Evaristo of the Buenos Aires Police Department. We meet Evaristo in the first story, "Breaking the Tie," which deals with a bank robbery. Fournier, a criminal mastermind whom Evaristo has cor nered in a tense hostage situation, is a rival from the commissioner's younger days. In flashbacks, we follow
an increasingly violent 20-year friendshipand rivalry: opponents in the box ing ring, rivals for the affections of a woman, and, finally, cop and robber. The edge had gone to Fournier in the early days, but eventually they grudg ingly agreed that the score betweeen them is even, the outcome of the next confrontation breaking the tie. But Evaristo is still brooding, shocking readers who are just getting to know him, when he takes an unfair advan tage by bringing Founder's old girlfriend to the scene and using the opportunity afforded by the armed assault on the barricaded robbers to kill his old opponent in cold blood. An aging athelete gone to fat (he looks rather like a football coach), Evaristo is big, cruel and ruthless. He is a bully, full of male swagger, frankly the kind of guy usually presented in fiction as a villain. Yet as we follow him in his duties, watching him try ing to enforce justice in a corrupt situation that leaves few moral choices, we begin to feel something for him. Usually he is doing the best he can. Sampayo has him take dangerous chances pursuing a case that military dictatorship advises him to drop. Another time, he un covers a white slavery plot that takes him out of his jurisdiction to preRevolutionary Cuba. Through this we get a frightening intense picture of the seriously compromised justice system of Argentina in the late '50s. Sampayo is more sympathetic than we might expect to the moral dilemmas that face the hero. Considered as literature, his book is an interesting contribution to detective fiction inviting comparisons
Above: Munoz com pletely eliminates t h e stylistic equivocations of gray tones. Everything is black o r white. Left a n d below: T h e hulking Evaristo from D e e p City.
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Above a n d below: More Francisco Solano Lopez art from D e e p City.
with the comic strip work of Chester Gould and Alex Raymond, and with classic detective writers Raymond Chandler and Georges Simenon. Evaristo alternates between cruelty and decency, abusing his police authority in one story, defending justice in another. It may seem easy to pass a moral judgment on him: he is a Bad Man, symbol of the cruelty of an authoritarian regime. Actually, we hear a lot of criticism of people in a country who have tried to work within a criminalized political system (like that of Nazi Germany or of cur rent Latin American dictatorships). "If thCTareêcent human beings why don't they just leave? They could come to the United States." Most people don't want to leave their home coun try, and probably wouldn't even know how to leave. And the U.S. State Department never has made is easy for ordinary people to emigrate legally, especially from countries that are socalled "friendly nations." Evaristo is a story told by two people who did leave, about one who did not, a man
who probably never even considered leaving an option. Evaristo is a violent man, but he understands that the system is cynical and corrupted, and dangerous for any kind of idealist. His own attitude is jaded, his personal life in ruins, an# the highest purpose of his life is enforcing justice as honorably as he can with his limited equipment. He could be a criminal, a soldier, or a policeman, but pro bably nothing else. His attitude is Quixotic in that he does not take bribes, at least not enought to make him rich. He lives in a seedy apart ment and rides the bus. He doesn't fight the rotten system but he does try to protect innocent people from exploitation. One can hardly quarrel" with Sampayo's literary strategy of implicating his readers in Evaristo's moral equivocation by only partially engaging their sympathies for his heroit worked for Shakespeare in Richard the Third and for Ionesco in Rhinoceros. Artist Francisco Solano Lopez, we learn in the introductory essay by
Javier Coma, is an Argentine who now works in Brazil. At 60, he is 15 years older than Sampayo and has been described as one of Argentina's greatest illustrators. Certainly we can go further than that. He is a solid pro fessional who has been one of the finest graphic artists on the world comic scene for more than 20 years. He obviously relishes the problems of drawing Evaristo: tall, tough, cruel, macho, with his suspicious squint and underlying sympathy for ordinary people. In fact, Evaristo's visual appearance is one of the best things about the book. Even though the Lopez-Sampayo team doesn't work as smoothly as does Munoz-Sampayo the effect is less brilliant, rather more pedestrianEvaristo; Deep City is a rich, dense, and elegant "work, a co operative performance of a very high order. The writing and art are very good indeed. But though Solano Lopez always offers us an excellent professional product, his work is uneven at times. As good as Solano Lopez's Evaristo: Deep City is, his
LEAVE M E K A N D G E T LOST. I DON'T WANT UNDERFOOT.
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work in Ana is even better. Recently Prime Cuts serialized the graphic novel Ana, drawn by Solano Lopez and written by his son Gabriel Solano Lopez. In these four episodes, we find the artist at the peak of his very impressive skills, detailing an extraordinary complex and subtle novel about the political and moral confusion felt by the youth of our par ticular time. As a novelist, Gabriel Lopez exhibits qualities common to Carlos Sampayo but the younger Lopez is harsher, angrier. The title character, Ana, seems to represent a whole class of youth who would be active idealists if they could find a cause they could believe in. Ana is a Parisian student in a not-far-distant
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KM ALLY T H I N K T H O S E ABOUT THIN3SF
future. Frustrated in her attempt to find intellectual anwsers and angered by the sight of soldiers on civilian streets, Ana commits a rash act that leads to a choice between jail and exile. The story is skillfully design ed so that each chapter presents Ana in a different aspect of her character development. In the first episode (Prime Cuts #6) she is a romantic stu dent, eager, curious, in love. She is quickly initiated into a cruel reality, arrested for an act of vandalism and then beaten and raped in jail. Upon release, she sees a friend murdered and, rejecting her lover, shoots a policeman and flees the country. Subsequent episodes appear in Prime Cuts #7,8 and 9. In these Ana's disillusioning experiences have brutalized her. Her impulsive behavior propels her through a se quence of drastic role changes, sex ual dominatrix, drug dealer, murderess. The third episode finds her serving a long term in a Mexican prison as
war devastates Europe. She is 30 years old by the time she is released, with few choices as she returns (in the final episode, Prime Cuts #9) to warruined Paris, the mistress of an insen sitive industrialist. Her career ends tragically and mysteriously in the desolate outskirts of the city, with no -clear moral implication offered by her creators. The younger Lopez gives us an engaging and believable tragedy of an attractive young woman who apparently represents our own striv ing toward a better world. Ana enter tains romantic fantasies, but rejects her lovers because they are imperfect. She snarls at a vicious world, curses men and woman alike. Entering the sexual-political battle, she gives and receives fatal wounds.* Cut in the heroic mold, Ana knows the world has gone wrong, and reacts to this wrong impulsively and ineffectually. She cannot compromise even when she tries. She can only die. Her story is a critique of a philisophically bankrupt social order in which decisive moral action is impossible because there are no satisfactory choices. Even Ana's name, with one N rather than two, is loaded with negative implications: reading the same front to back, it is a palindrome. The Greek prefix ana means "the opposite o f or "without," or (as any crossword puzzle fan knows) a col lection of material about a subjectAna the student is filled with a hodge podge of uncorrelated political philosophies; In Spanish, " a n a " is a medical abbreviation for two equal parts; Ana is also the special name of a Carribean fox, perhaps in this case suggesting a "foxy" lady and pro bably referring to an ancient tradition that the fox is a symbol of perverse sexuality. Curiously, few other characters in this elaborate, densely-
populated story are ever identified with names. This work is serious stuff for comics (or for any other medium), and saddening because it convinces as an authentic view of the death of idealism in our world. Writer-son Gabriel Solano Lopez and artist-father Francisco Solano Lopez work symbiotically, much closer than simply writer and illustrator. The father (older generation) seems sobered and horrified by the son's (younger generation) perception of the world situation, a generational bequest that he would wish different but that he cannot affect by practical political ac tion. With his mature pictorial talent Francisco responds to and enforces his son's words with ferocious images of passion and pain. Ana is a heart felt cry of frustration that heroic ac tion on behalf of human justice is futile. It certainly should be made available as a seperate book title. The work of these four Argentines, writers Sampayo and Lopez and artists Munoz and Lopez, is some of the best graphic fiction yet produced in this still-new literary form.
Panels from Lopez's collaboration with his son, " A n a " (serialized i n Prime Cuts.
Strip AIDS USA is available for $9.95 from Last G a s p , 2180 Bryant St., San Francisco, C A 94110. AARGH is p r i c e d at $4.00. T h e p u b l i s h e r d o e s not fulfill single copy o r d e r s .
Copies of American
Splendor are available
from H a r v e y P e k a r P.O. Box 18471, Cleveland H e i g h t s , O H 44118. Issue # 6 ($2.50), 7 ($2.50), 8-9 ($2.75), 10-12 ($3.00, 13 ( $ 3 . 2 5 ) a d d 5 0 cents p e r issue for postage.
Joe's Bar ($10.95) a n d Deep City ($10.95)

are available from Catalan Communications 4 3 E 19th St, Suite 200, NY, N Y 10003. Add $ 2 . 0 0 p e r b o o k for postage.
Sinner #1-3 ($2.95 ea.) and Prime Cuts #6-9

($3.50 ea.) are available from Fantagraphics Books 1800 Bridgegate, Suite 101, Westlake Village, C A 91361. Add 15% for postage.
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PLEAS MEET
THE COMICS J O W N A L #126. January 1989
T H E H E R N A N D E Z B R O S . I N T E R V I E W "flario, Gilbert, and Jaime Hernandez were born and raised in Oxnard, California, just north of Los Angeles. They grew up reading comic books, >W| watching monster movies, listening to rock and roll music, and, most if j significantly, drawing their own cartoons and comics. In the late 70s they 11 became heavily involved in punk rock, and this phenomenon opened their JlLleyes to the possibilities of expressing themselves in comics. It was Mario who put these ambitions on a practical footing, enlisting his brothers in a selfpublished comic called Love & Rockets. They sent a review copy to Gary Groth, editor and publisher of The Comics Journal, who had a few ambitions of his own. He had wanted to publish a new kind of comics, and here, lo and behold, was a new kind of comics. In 1982 Love & Rockets became the flagship title of Fanta graphics Books. Over the course of the first several issues the brothers' confidence steadily grew (Mario dropped out after the third issue). Initial y they thought they had to present their work in some semblance of genre trappings, but these quickly fell away. Jaime began by interspersing his tongue-in-cheek science fiction series "Mechanics" with more realistic vignettes set in the southwestern barrio Hoppers 13. Emboldened by his brother's example, Gilbert took the plunge wit' "Heartbreak Soup," a series of stories set in the mythical Central American town of Palomar, which would be the setting of most (though not all) of his subse quent work. Eventuatly Jaime's vignettes swallowed the science fiction, and over the last 20 issues or so "Mechanics" has only made token appearances. On the business end of things, Love & Rockets was the first American comic book to successfully adopt the European method of album collection after magazine serialization. The Love & Rockets collections have allowed the brothers to make a decent living despite a relatively low circulationforthe bi-monthly magazine (between 18- and 19,000). Things were not going so smoothly in 1984, however, and in order to make ends meet they agreed to produce the first sbf issues of Mr. X on a work-for-hire basis for Vortex. Mario and Gilbert plotted, Gilbert scripted, and Jaime did the artwork, scrapping all but the bare bones of Dean Motter's original concept. Unfortunately, the contract that the legally inexperienced brothers signed did not stipulate when they were to be paid (it would eventually take three years and some blackmail). By the time they finished the fourth issue they had not yet been fully paid for the first, so they quit the series. (The publisher would later claim that they left because they were unable to keep the schedule, although their issues came out more frequently than any subse quent team's.) * " ^ -& '> yj The fifth Love & Rockets collection, House of Raging Women, has just been released; Book One, now subtitled Music For Mechanics, wil see its third print ing and Books Two {Chelo's Burden) and Three (Las Mujeres Perdidas) wil see their second in 1989. In 1989 there wil also be the Love & Rockets Sketchbook, collecting artwork from the start of their careers to the present. In Love & Rockets #29 Gilbert wil start another long story, "Poison River," and in #30 Maggie and Hopey wil finally be reunited. F L I \. I \ \ \ h The Hernandez brothers were interviewed in several combinations in several sessions. The interviews were conducted by Gary Groth, Robert Fiore, and T/at Powers, transcribed by Thorn Powers, copy-edited by Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, and edited by Robert Fiore. CP mm
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little Mexican world, because nearly everybody I knew, relatives and cousins and even kids in the neighborhood, were Mexican. Then school was a different world. It was pretty ethnically mixed, I had a lot of black, white, Japanese friends. One thing I can remember all the way back is that I never noticed the difference between races except skin color. That's just something I learned. GROTH: r\as the neighborhood that you grew up in fairly isolated in terms of its ethnic character? GILBERT: The street we lived on probably had more Mexicans because the houses were inexpensive. Just a street away the kids were black or Japanese. It was a wellmixed area. GROTH: Did you have any formal religious training? JAIME: We were born Catholic and I did my first Holy Communion; I was confirmed. I did all that, went to Catechism on every Saturday. Boy, school on Saturday! [Laughs] I couldn't believe it. Saturday morning was when all the cartoons were on and I had to go to Catechism! GROTH: This is something that took? JAIME: It didn't, I never took it seriously. It was something my mom tried to bring us up with. But she was never a real church-goer, because she was married in court, and if a Catholic is married in court they can't go to churchI don't know exactly what it isthey can't confess or take communion. Or that was her belief. I don't know the details. There were times when we went to church every week and then we'd stop going for a long time, and then we'd start, and then stop, and then we stop ped altogether. GARY GROTH: I'm interested in how you grew up and where you grew up, and if you could just talk a little about your formative years spent in Oxnard. You were born in Oxnard? JAIME HERNANDEZ: Yeah. Born in a Ventura hospital, but right away, driven over to Oxnard. I grew up there with my four brothers and sisters, and I grew up reading comic books. ROBERT FIORE: How many relatives did you have regular contact with? JAIME: We lived next door to my aunt and uncle who also had six kids, anoVtny grandmother who was around a lot, who was always trading houses to live in. I grew up just a normal kid. GROTH: Were you a close family? JAIME: Sure. We were always drawing together, watching TV together, playing together. If I wasn't playing with Ismael, I was playing with Gilbert, or Richie. Mario was always the big kid, so I kinda kept away from him. It was good. GROTH: You 're Mexican by descent. What generation are you? GILBERT: I was born in the States. GROTH: How about your parents? GILBERT: My dad is from Chihuahua, Mexico and like a lot of Mexicans he came over to work. And my mom is from Texas, but her family g"oes back all the way to when Texas was [part of] Mexico. GROTH: Do you have a sense of Mexican roots? GILBERT: As far as I can tell. Most of my relatives actually came from Mexico to here. It's just this genera tion of kids that were U.S.-born. GROTH: Do you feel those roots in some way? GILBERT: Yeah, because they brought a lot of those old ways, old superstitions, old ways of making food, stories of things that happened back home, simple things like that. I always felt that I was living in two worlds. One was the GROTH: But you were never a serious practitioner of Catholicism? JAIME: No, it was never really pushed. Catechism seemed like a school where the teacher didn't get mad. I never had the ruler slapped on my hand. GROTH: Never got punched out by a nun? JAIME: No, but there were times I thought they were going to do that. GILBERT: Like a lot of Catholics there was a point where it really, really screwed me up. Not that I thought religion was fascistic or anything like that, but it scared the shit out of me. It got to the point where I was so scared of death that I would go to the restroom and shiver. It freaked me out. I couldn't believe that that was going to happen to me. There were two points in my life when that hap pened. But it was one of those things that I would keep to myself, no one else knew about it. I would watch televi sion with my family, we'd be watching some crummy situation comedy, and I'd be sitting there breaking into a sweat because I'd remember that I was going to die some day. And I trace that back to religion, remembering that you're either going to go to heaven or to helland I thought, that means hell, there's no way I'm going to heaven no matter what I do. I was convinced. I don't know how it started, I just got freaked out on religion. What's weird is Jhat I never really blamed it on religion, I blamed it on me. I always blamed it on myself if I was nervous or I got scared or if something pissed me off. GROTH: So eventually you became a lapsed Catholic? GILBERT: Right. GROTH: At what point did you break off? GILBERT: Girls. I just figured I was too horny. I liked girls too much to contain myself, to follow any rigid rules. Because you were only supposed to like girls in a certain way. GROTH: You didn't go to a parochial school, you went to public schools. JAIME: Right. All my life. I can tell you one thing, the
A b o v e : T h e full s e t o f Hernandez brothers. (Left t o right) Jaime, Gilbert, Richard, Mario, Ismael. (c. 1 9 6 3 - 6 4 )
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Catholicism I was brought up with does help my imagina tion a lot. FIORE: How so? JAIME: All the fear I grew up with. It adds to my whole story. FIORE: Were you afraid of hell? JAIME: Yeah, I was afraid of the devil. I'm still afraid of the devil. GROTH: This might be a good time to mention that I think one of your favorite films is Night of the Hunter. JAIME: Yeah. It's one of those movies that I saw when I was real little. My mom said, "Oh, look it's Robert Mitchum." Then Gilbert saw it when we were older and said, "Have you ever seen that movie Night of the Hunter, it's about this and this and this." And I recognized it, but I wasn't sure. Then I saw it and was reborn. It's a gas. I know a lot of it is pretentious, as far as the camera angles and all that. FIORE: But not much. JAIME: No, not that much that I can't still have fan with it. Gilbert, Carol and I went to see a Robert Mitchum film festival in Santa Barbara where they showed Night of the Hunter and Big Bob Mitchum was there and I think John Ireland and everyone was watching this movie with this '80s mentality and they were laughing through the whole movie, at every camera angle. It was ridiculous. I was so embarrassed. I mean, Bob Mitchum was there! FIORE: Did you think it was a snotty attitude on the part of the audience? JAIME: Oh, yeah. There was this asshole behind us going, "Oh, god," "Oh, right," "Oh, my god." FIORE: Night of the Hunter was one of the best perfor mances I've ever seen from Robert Mitchum. Charles Laughton was one of the few directors that managed to keep him awake. GROTH: That and Cape Fear. JAIME: Every time I watch Night of the Hunter I still get those chills. I love it. FIORE: Any parts in particular? JAIME: I guess watching Mitchum and his actions. When the kids are escaping from the cellar and the little girl says, "It's in my doll, it's in my doll," and he says, "The doll!" And then they drop the jars on his head and they dash up the stairs and he's dashing up right behind them with these claws. And he's about to reach them and they take off in the boat and he stares at themhe's neck deep in waterand all of a sudden he gives out this really loud scream. Oh, God, I love that. The whole thing. It's like Touch of Evil. FIORE: Do you like Charles Laughton as an actor? JAIME: Oh, sure. I haven't seen that much of him. Of course, I've seen Hunchback of Notre Dame. I've always liked him. He's one of those guys you feel sorry for in most of his roles. And Touch of Evil is another one. I love watching Welles. He makes himself look so bad. If an actor can make himself look that bad, that's fine with me. That's why I like Raging Bull so much. GROTH: Now what do you like about that quality? JAIME: Well, this may sound corny, but it's really fanny. It's like watching Streetcar Named Desire, and watching Marlon Brando. I crack up, but it's because I love it. It's so wild. FIORE: How is this different from the people who are laughing in the theatre? JAIME: Because I'm laughing for it. It's my way of applauding it. GROTH: You 're not sneering at it.
JAIME: No, I'm not saying, "C'mon, that's so corny." I'm saying, " I can't believe what genius this i s . " I can't believe that they're doing this. I guess it's part of my being a creator, watching this other guy do this and saying, "Why can't I do this?" Why can't I release myself and go bonkers, but be successful at it?
An
Early
Affection
FIORE: You got into comics through your mother, right? GILBERT: Yeah, our mom collected comic books in the '40s, and it's the old story, her motherour grand motherthrew them out, so she didn't have any left. What she did was, she would take a small panel and blow up the face. MARIO: That's how we learned about most JAIME: Golden Age characters. She would show us: "This is Captain Triumph, this is Blackhawk." To us it was really impressive. FIORE: She had drawings she'd made of these characters? GILBERT: Yeah, she would copy and blow them up. JAIME: Luckily, she saved them. GILBERT: And she'd always tell us about the old comics. [To Mario] Actually, you were the one who started col lecting comics. MARIO: Yeah, when I was five. GILBERT: Did she encourage that o r MARIO: I just started picking up comics. I'm not really sure, I just know I started collecting comics when I was five years old. FIORE: So the rest of the family followed your lead? MARIO: Yeah, because comic books got passed around, and we started drawing our own pictures. GILBERT: Jaime and I were born into a world with comic books in the house. That was normal to us. JAIME: I was still a baby when Mario started collecting regularly. I don't remember the first Fantastic Four comic that he got, which was #1, but I remember reading it. It wouhi just be there, along with all the rest, Dennis the Menace, Archies, DCs, things like that. So it was never any discovery for me, even as far as drawing comics for ourselves, t h a t was a natural thing to do because my brothers did it. GILBERT: I distinctly remember Fantastic Four #1 sit ting on the couch, when Mario brought it home. I remember the day I picked it up, and Mario said, "This is great, it has monsters in it." We didn't know who drew it or w h a t . . . MARIO: Comics were everywhere. You'd go to the bathroom with comics, you'd eat dinner with comics, it was pretty lax. You could get away with something like that, just be reading all the time. GILBERT: I imagine our mother let us read comics because she did. It was nostalgic for her, I guess. So, comics were always normal to us, it was an everyday thing. It wasn't until school that we realized that we were abnormal. FIORE: So now you've realized you 're abnormal? GILBERT: Yeah, that it didn't click with any of the other school kids. MARIO: Some kids liked it, but we didn't have friends that read comics. The only comic fans we knew on a regular basis were [people we met] at conventions. Up until then we were pretty much comic book geeks. FIORE: What were the comics you liked most when you first started reading them? MARIO: Just the super-hero stuff, Superman, Adven-
Jaime a n d Gilbert with their father (1960).
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JAIME:
Hank Ketcham is the most subtle of all. I could say he's my favorite cartoonist.
tare Comics, all the DC stuff. And things like Hot Stuff, Richie Rich. GILBERT: Almost anything that was out there, with few exceptions, like westerns. We didn't read too many of them. The DCs, Harvey comics like Richie Rich and Hot Stuff, Dennis the Menace comics, and Archie comics. I guess the strongest influences were those. Still influence us now. GROTH: Can you describe how your interest in comics evolved over the course of 10 or 12 years? GILBERT: I rarely bought comics myself. Mario was buying them all. He was buying most of them up until the big Marvel craze. Then the DCs and the funny-animal stuff and Mad magazines dropped off and it was just Marvels. I liked the Kirby and Ditko stuff, but there was other things that I didn't like, like the Sub-Mariner and Hulk. I thought it was just because I didn't under stand them. I didn't realize that they just weren't any good. I thought I'd grow up and understand what this means later. Kirby and Ditko I loved right away, I didn't have to think twice about them. But when the other guys started coming in, when Roy Thomas started writing the X-Men, things like that, I thought I just wasn't smart enough for it. GROTH: When did Archie come in?
Four,
GILBERT: That was always there, too. I imagine it was because my mother suggested certain things. GROTH: So there was never one kind of comic? GILBERT: Never, until the Marvels came in. After Jack Kirby the old DC comics looked pretty flat in comparison. FIORE: Jaime, your work is constantly compared to Archie comics. How much of an influence is there, really? JAIME: I'm not influenced so much by the stories, but the characters themselves. Believe it or not, they worked. They had a lot of sides to them because Dan DeCarlo and Harry Lucey, the two big artists, had a great way of Three of t h e biggest i n f l u e n c e s o n t h e showing body language. FIORE: When did you start drawing? brothers in their MARIO: As far as I remember, it was about that time, youth.
when I was five years old. JAIME: And for me it was the easiest, because I was following three brothers, so I really don't remember when I started. GILBERT: Actually, our father encouraged us... FIORE: I've never heard you talk too much about your father. GILBERT: Well, my mother tells us that he painted at one time. So it was already in both our parents, it was a natural thing. FIORE: So your father wasn't around? GILBERT: He worked at night and slept during the day, so we didn't see him a lot. He died when we were pretty young... JAIME: In '68. MARIO: He would get a paper bag, tear it open, and give us crayons or pencils and cut us loose. FIORE: When you were very young was one of you thought of as the "good" artist, the one who was ahead of the others? JAIME: It pretty much went by age. Mario was un touchable, he was the big kid, he was grown-up. I mean, the way I saw it. So he did everything better than all of us. He drew. Gilbert was the most imaginative one. He was. always doing the craziest things. He always took it further.than Mario. Mario didn't really get into as much as Gilbert did. GROTH: Now you're talking in terms of drawing. JAIME: In terms of drawing and creating. We were all drawing. All the way down to Lucinda. GROTH: Would that include Richard and Ismael too? JAIME: Yes. They were doing their stuff. Richard less because he was more into sports, but he did draw. He was getting good too. There was always a fight between me and him, who drew better. Of course, he'd say, "I draw better than you." FIORE: Up until what age? JAIME: This was about ten. Richie really slowed down
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on drawing when he got into junior high. He did more sports things, and hung out more. He just lost interest. I don't know why. And Mario as he got older, he started hanging out and he would just occasionally do an illustra tion. He didn't last long actually doing comics, like me, Gilbert and Ismael. We were constantly drawing our own comic books. He only did a few. FIORE: Did you draw strips from the start? When did you start doing that? GILBERT: We were pretty young. Mario did a comic book of Superman, and I did one of my own -called Spaceman. It was really crude, of course. We did it for a while, we did it for maybe a couple of years, and then we just stopped doing it, for a long time. And then one day Jaime and I picked up and started doing it. We'd fold a piece of typing paper in half, draw a cover, and it had art on the inside and a back cover with scribbling on it. MARIO: A lot of them were just covers. FIORE: /To Jaime7 Was it the same thing with you? JAIME: I must have been really young, because I remember always doing it. Just following these guys, copying big brother the whole time. MARIO: The thing was, that Superman was just a lark. It was just a fun thing to do for the day, and then I drop ped it, and everybody picked up on it. And then later on, I remember seeing they were still doing it. I said, "Wow, you guys are still drawing this stuff?" . GILBERT: What I think is really strange is that my first comic book was a character I made up. Whereas usually we did Spider-Man... MARIO: I remember my first few were copies of Cap tain America and stuff, Daredevil. FIORE: When did you start doing your own kind of characters? JAIME: When I was seven or eight years old, we really got hooked on the Peanuts cartoons. GILBERT: Yeah, we started swiping those. JAIME: We started swiping them, and slowly they evolved into our own thing, where we wouldn't go by the rules of storytelling, we would just go crazy, go wild. And our younger brother [Ismael] even started, and he went even crazier. GILBERT: His stuff was pretty close to Crumb's, and he'd never seen a comic like that. Closer to Peter Bagge, actually. FIORE: Did you generally finish what you started? JAIME: Sometimes. There were a lot of times where I ended up with a bunch of half-drawn Batman comics. The last panels were "Pow!", "Bam!", "Sock!" all the way down the line until the end. Then, "Well, that's that!" But Gilbert was always the one who seemed to take it seriously. FIORE: How did you get started reading underground comics? GILBERT: That was a turning point. MARIO: I'd always seen Bob Crumb drawings in articlesI used to get Rolling Stone secretly, because anything with "fuck" in it I had to hide from my mom. [Laughter] I'd always wanted to read them, they looked really intriguing. As I got older, I didn't care any more, I started smuggling these things into the house. They were a really great inspiration. FIORE: Where did you get them? MARIO: There was a head shop in town, that I used to hang around once in a while, get records and stuff. It was interesting, it was Jim Salzer's head shop. Did you know that was the first head shop in Southern California?
GILBERT: Really? MARIO: Yeah. GILBERT: Historic. MARIO: That's where I used to buy a lot of records, and pick up some underground stuff. The first ones were Zap HO and #1, and Crumb's cartooning justit's just right there the first time you look at it. It reminded you of Fleischer cartoons when they were doing really wild stuff. FIORE: Did you start trying to draw like Crumb? How did that change your own drawing? GILBERT: No, I think that was subliminal, because when I t i e d to copy Crumb, it was flat, I knew I didn't have what he had, even though it was easy to draw like that.
I was more impressed with the stories, because he could get away with anything. I mean, it was anything goes. And at that time, I was at the age of starting to hang around with the teenagers and a little bit older crowd, and they had them laying around all the time. Well, even before that, it wasn't that big of a transition, because we picked up on those Wonder Wart-Hog reprints that were in hot rod cartoon magazines. FIORE: It was in Drag Cartoons. GILBERT: I'd gone from Mad to CarToons to Drag Car toons to underground comics, so it wasn't that big a jump. It was pretty gradual. That's what we mean by a little bit of everything. FIORE: You'd been drawing since you were kids, you took some art classes... GILBERT: Well, we took the regular art classes in high school... JAIME: Just so you wouldn't have to take math or something. GILBERT: It was always easy for us, we always got As in art, but then in high school it got tougher. I got a C + and I'd say, "What is this, come on." [Laughter] JAIME: We got lazy. GILBERT: That's because as teenagers we weren't involved in cartooning so much as music, and that's what brought us out of the geek world, because you have to deal with the real world when dealing with people who talk about music. FIORE: Define the "geek world." GILBERT: The comic book guys, the guys who sit home every Saturday, watch every horror movie possible. Didn't really go out and play sports or anything. JAIME: The ultimate fenboys. GILBEKFrEverybody's story. We can relate. We got beat up at school, picked on, the whole bit. I guess time is a lot slower for a kid, because I remember going through what I thought were periods of, like, months without draw ing at all, which must have been just a week or two. But it seemed that we didn't draw or even think about comics for a long time.
I couldn't stand it, I had to leave the house because I liked it so much. A lot of kids had Beatle parties and things like that. I realized when I was a kid that this music was me, it was speaking to me directlyas much as it could be at nine years old. Then I lost interest in Top 40 music because it became repetitious and it was getting to be a formula. I guess that was the late '60s. I wasn't too much aware of the underground scene that was happening, with guys like Jimi Hendrix. Mario was a teenager, so he was listening to that, reading the old Rolling Stone which I thought was a sinful magazine. I thought it was great that people were going nuts, but at the same time I thought, "That's not for me. What am I going to do? I'm 12 years old." FIORE: So all through your youth all that was going oh? GILBERT: It was always there. JAIME: And it was all normal to me. FIORE: So you were also music geeks? GILBERT: No, music was different. JAIME: Actually, I gave up on music in the late '60s because I got into sports. FIORE: Gilbert and Mario say they weren't into sports, but you were? JAIME: Well, I was in it for the fun. I liked playing baseball and I liked catching. It wasn't so competitive for me, and when I actually played Little League, these guys were playing for serious, and I just couldn't get into that. So I would go for a long time without any music or comics. Or I think I did. I started getting back into it in the early 70s, when Mario and Gilbert started getting into the glitter groups: Iggy, Roxy Music, T. Rex, Mott the Hoople, New York Dolls. I would listen at Mario's door, because these guys were big guys, I was just a little guy, I couldn't hang out with them. [Laughter] Their hair was longer than mine was. GILBERT: That was really strange, though, why we got into that glitter-type punky stuff, because before we were listening to Jethro Tull records, I bought the first Paul Simon record. MARIO: It was pretty diverse. GILBERT: But then, the one that really changed us was Slider, T. Rex. We listened to it and we thought it was the world's silliest record, and we kept listening to it, and our tastes were ruined forever. [Laughter] JAIME: Naturally, when punk came out in the late 70s, it just fit. GILBERT: It was the same kind of music, except it was real fast. MARIO: A breath of fresh air. GILBERT: For some reason, I always thought rock and roll, comics, wrestling, and horror movies all sort of mixed, in a way, and when punk came out, that was all those things I suspected were alike. FIORE: Before punk came in, were you involved in any kind of music thing? Did you go to shows? MARIQi Yeah, we went to shows, we saw Blue Oyster Cult, we'd go once a week to the [Hollywood] Palladium. JAIME: And when disco started coming out, I started backing off. And I almost gave into it before punk came along. [Laughs] GILBERT: The first two bands I saw were pretty nifty onesT. Rex and Mott the Hoople. So I started out well, then I dive-bombed into Deep Purple, Queen and really shithole bands like that. Those first concerts I saw were in, like, '73. JAIME: My first concert was Roxy Music. GILBERT: We actually got into punk a year late. The Sex Pistols had already broken up before I bought the
Mostly
Music
A high school photo of Gilbert ( 1 9 7 4 ) .
FIORE: So Mario brought in the first Zap comic. Who brought in the first Sex Pistols record? GILBERT: Actually, this goes back to when we were little kids. I think my mother was expecting Jaime [Laughter] this is a true storyand next to her was a teenage girl expecting a kid, and she would listen to the radio all day long. It drove my mom crazy at first, but after a while she started getting into the songs. This was like '59. After she came home, every day she would put the radio on a major radio station, which was KRLA at the time, and we heard pop music, rock music, all day long. That was another thing. Just like comics being normal, we heard that music in the background. Then my dad would come home from work and listen to a Mexican radio station. So we either listened to Mexican music or rock and roll. GROTH: That would have been in the late '50s, early '60s. GILBERT: Well, Jaime was born in '59, so I remember the early '60s, the Shirelles and the girl groups. GROTH: The Beatles? GILBERT: The Beatles hit like a ton of bricks. GROTH: You must have been about six. GILBERT: Yeah, but for some reason it appealed to me. I guess their gimmick worked with the hairdos and the boots and stuff. I remember liking their music so much
66
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album. FIORE: It wasn't that long between the time the album came out here and they broke up.. ./Laughter/ GILBERT: That's true, but my wife Carol was into it the day the first single came out. But then again, she was around 14, and that makes a lot more sense. Because we had already gone through glitter and all that shit, through Kiss, and all that superficial stuff made us think, "Oh, here comes another one." When the punk thing came I rejected it right away because I had gone through so many different phases in music that right away I determined this was just another phase, I don't want it. This was my late teens or early-20s. Then I saw some TV special on it the new thing in England and I was shocked, I was appalled. But instead of pissing me off, it scared me, because it made me realize that I wasn't young any more, that things were changing, that I was one of the post-hippie era so I was part of the blank generation that they were making fun of. So it made me sit up and think, "Wait a minute, I'm not cool any more?" FIORE: / remember hearing Tito Larriva, who was in the Plugz, telling about how he stumbled into the Masque [an early L.A. punk club] when the Bags were playing, and his first impression was that he was seeing the fall of Western Civiliwtion /Laughter/ and a month later he had his own punk band. GILBERT: It made me sit up and listen to it and I realized that it had all the elements that I liked about rock and roll thrown into a cement mixer. It had all the trashy elements of rock that I always liked. But a lot of bands took it seriously, groups like the Clash and X. They were politically aware. GROTH: Was the punk phenomenon kind of a liberating force for you, or did it clarify things for you? GILBERT: Probably it confused me more because it was such a fragmented scene that nobody agreed on anythingthat was another reason it sort of made itself alive. GROTH: It obviously had a salutary effect. GILBERT: Because it was physical. I read comics, I watched movies, I wasn't a sports guy. But rock 'n' roll was something physical. You stood up, and you sweated and ran around and did things. And punk went even further, you wore these particular type of clothes and people were either afraid of you or beat the shit out of you. There was rarely any in between. So I thought that was great. GROTH: NOW what year would this have been? GILBERT: For me it was about 1978 to '80.
GROTH: Was there violence? Did you get into fights? GILBERT: See, at first there wasn't. The original punk scene in L.A. was pretty much a fun thing, a lot of people just having a good time, listening to a band, bouncing around, dancing. It was more of an art scene I think, there was more of an artsy fartsy crowd. What happened is peo ple came from other areas of rock music started getting interested and a lot of them were sort of stupid jocks and they participated in punk gigs the way they thought they were supposed to. They thought it was a little football game when in actuality even though people were dancing around roughly everybody was polite and if you fell down somebody would pick you up. Then these guys started coming in and if you fell down you got kicked in the ribs and they pretty much forced the old punks out because they weren't physical types. GROTH: What was this new group? GILBERT: Predominantly, they were a bunch of kids from Huntington Beach, from the beaches, surfers... GROTH: White, middle class? GILBERT: Pretty much, yeah. They liked the aggressive side of punk. There were sides of punk that were experimental, brainy, pretentious. But these guys liked the meat and potatoes stuff which was dying out. They had their own bands and they changed the whole scene. And since it was so physical, since it was so intense, the scene just erupted and it brought in so many other ugly elements. Right away it became sexist and racist. Look what some of it's become now, they've got the skinhead movementall over the United States teenagers are follow ing white supremacy bullshit. And you'll see news clips of it and they look just like the kids I used to see around. It's just become perverted, twisted. Even though punk could never merge with the mainstream because it was too exotic, too wildall TV and record companies could do is turn it into new wave, this bouncy affectation. So where could punk go? So it just got more violent and more
Above: T. Rex's Slider, t h e a l b u m t h a t Gilbert says, "ruined our tastes forever." Below: T h e historic Sex Pistols album.
N E V E RM N ID
THE B O L L O C K S
HERE'S THE
67
JAIME:
I never had any drive for anything in my life. I thought I would do every thing half-assed.
violent. Probably the most violent and intense concert I've ever been to was Public Image at Olympic Auditorium in L.A. Public Image is headed by John Lydon, who used to call himself Johnny Rotten in the Sex Pistols, so all these kids from all over went to see Johnny Rotten for the first time in L.A. And Lydon was into something else, into a more experimental, dance-type music, but they wanted something else, they wanted 1977 "God Save the Queen," "Anarchy in the U.K." stuff. By the end of the concert the stage was just knee-deep in spit. It was just ridiculous. That's when I knew this was not for me anymore. It was one of the best gigs I've ever been to, though. GROTH: Did you like the Sex Pistols? GILBERT: Oh, yeah. Like I said, they were all the elements I liked about rock and roll. I don't know why but I always liked noisy music, the noisier the better. I guess it was the old teenage thing that this was my music, my way of communicating, that type of deal. So now I'm an old duffer and I don't really listen to noisy music anymore unless it's in short doses and it's usually stuff I used to listen to. I generally don't listen to that too much any more. Once you play "Louie, Louie" 16 different ways... GROTH: When you look back on that music today do you consider it good music? Does it hold up or is it something you passed through? GILBERT: It's good for me and I know it's good for young people, but I don't know if it's good in the scheme of things. I still feel 16 years old when I listen to it. GROTH: / was going to ask you if there was any single performer or group that really turned your head. GILBERT: At first I pretty much listened to what was around, like the Ramones, Talking Heads, Blondie, but they didn't hit me as much as the British bands. The big kahunas of that were probably the Sex Pistols. But the Sex Pistols only had one album and a number of singles, and you can only listen to the album so much. Whereas the Clash were a new band and they were strong and young and aware and they utilized all the different kinds of music that I liked, and they continued to put out album after album. Then like most good things, like Camelot, in a wink, it's over. The bands started falling apart, the music started getting shitty, ego problems, whatever. It seemed to me like it happened really fast because I was older and time goes faster for an adult than it does for a kid. When you're a kid things seem to go on forever. It seemed like the Beatles were around forever, when actually they were
only around for six years. So when the Clash broke up after four years I thought, "That was quick." Now punk seems old after 10 years, but every once in a while I'll think of it as something new. THOM POWERS: What was the first punk show you went to? GILBERT: The first real punk show I went to was at the Santa Monica Civic, with the Ramones headlining. The Runaways opened up for them. Then I decided to go to clubs. I saw the Jam at the Starwood and the Eyes and the Dickies opened for them. The Eyes had Charlotte Caffey on bass, who later became the Go-Go's better songwriter, and the Dickies are still a goofball band. JAIME: The drummer in the Eyes was Don Bonebrake, who would later be in X. POWERS: What year would that be? GILBERT: It was 1978 in February or March. And that was so much fun I decided I was going to go to these. POWERS: How often would you go to see bands then? GILBERT: Since we lived about 60 miles away from L.A., I guess it was every other week at first. Then it got to be every weekend. That's when we started check ing out bands like X, the Germs, the old Alley Cats, the original Go-Go's, the Plugz, who are now Los Cruzados, the original Bags. POWERS: Would a band like X be playing every weekend? GILBERT: Yeah, you'd see X at the weirdest places, at small dives, colleges. If they were lucky they'd get book ed at the Whiskey-a-Go-Go. JAIME: When I first started going X's shows were always being cancelled. They were having trouble all the time. They wouldn't let them playX was a real dangerous band. POWERS: Earlier you gave a sort of chronology of the timeshow it went from being strictly for fun to more rowdy. But when you were first going in early '78 it hadn't gotten rough? GILBERT: Yeah. It was pretty much a fun thing. People dancing around like savages, but no violence. That con tinued for a long time, up to the big Elks Lodge Massacre, where for no reason cops entered halfway through the gigit was this marathon gig with the Go-Gos, the original Zeros, X, the Plugz, the Alley Cats JAIME: A big event. GILBERT: with all the promising punk bands. And for no reason that anyone could see the cops just came in and started thumping on kids, literally came into the arena and started thumping and throwing kids down stairs. The stairs that the kids were hanging out on were pretty steep. POWERS: You were ai this? GILBERT: Yeah. Jaime can tell you about it in more detail because as the cops came in I was leaving with two girls to go out and get drunk in the car. We came back from the car and the place was surrounded by cops and people were throwing stuff. JAIME: They were coming downstairs swinging their clubs and kids were falling down the stairs. This g u y Jeff from the Middle Classhis girlfriend started getting thumped on so he tried to help and they thumped on him. GILBERT: But it was totally unprovoked as far we could tell. It was a civil affair, the kids pretty much behaved themselves. They may have taken too many drugs, but there was no element of tension. That began the tension between the punks and the cops. Every once in awhile the cops would pull something like that again. POWERS: When was that?
T h e C l a s h ' s first a l b u m , The Clash.
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JAIME: That was March 79, St. Patrick's Day. GILBERT: It's in the Love & Rockets Calendar. The cops were trying to clean up something that really didn't need cleaning up. Then Jaime and I and my cousin went to a gig in Huntington Beach, which is pretty far south. We went to see the Dickies and the Weirdoes, and the au dience was mostly made up of drunk surfers ready for action. Everyone wanted to dance, but no one could dance at this place. When the Weirdoes came on, people main tained their composure. Then the Dickies came on and played their goofy singleslike they did a cover of "Paranoid," the Black Sabbath song. Their whole point was to do this hyper-speed bubblegurn music. And the audience went berserk. I had never seen anything like that before. Tables and chairs were flying, it was all out of fun, everybody was laughing. The bouncers were scared shitless. I got a little nervous because you want to pro tect your eyeballs, but at the same time it was hilarious. As violent as it turned out everybody went home happy and nobody got hurt, except maybe a couple bouncers, but they deserve it anyway. POWERS: Did you like all the bands you were going to see, or did you go sometimes just to be in a place where you could drink and dance? GILBERT: A lot of times we'd go to see a particular band, but there were five others playing. And sometimes we'd luck out and enjoy the bands we had never heard of. We went to hear the music because it was the only thing mak ing us happy in our lives at the time. " POWERS: What did you think of the so-called new wave bands that were a little more poppy? GILBERT: Some of them were pretty good actually, but we didn't like them as much as the harder bands. They weren't very important to us. I can't think of any examples now.. .Blondie. JAIME: Pre-"Heart of Glass." POWERS: The Talking Heads? GILBERT: Yeah. Those were considered more "new wave" bands, and college dorks listened to those. JAIME: A lot of the bands were like the Talking Heads, but I couldn't get into it. They were considered "in telligent" bands, and I didn't want that kind of intelligence in my rock and roll. It was almost snobbish to me. Not all of it. POWERS: What about someone like Elvis Costello? GILBERT: Oh, the first three albums are classics. See I was older, I wasn't as diehard as the younger punk kids who wanted pure noise. JAIME: He got into Costello at the same time we discovered the Pistols and the'Clash. So there was a range. GILBERT: People don't give much credit to the range, they [stereotype] punk. There was different music and sometimes different attitudes, but it was all in the same stew. POWERS: Well, why don't I throw out some band names and you can tell me what your experience was with them. For instance, Black Flag? GILBERT: I never cared that much for Black Flag until they put out a record.. .well, I didn't dislike t h e m . . . They came after the original Hollywood punk scene and they were trying to maintain that really aggressive, fast, hard music while the other bands started to experiment. But after awhile when they started putting out records I started to like them. They put out that first album Damaged years later, and I liked that quite a bit. They were the last of the real evil crash-through-your-house type bands and they spawned a lot of other bands. If you listen to early Replacements, there's a lot of Black Flag influence there.
BLACK
FLAG
Left: Black Flag's Damaged.
DAMAGED
Below: Photo of Jaime from 1980.
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But Jaime was m o r e . . . JAIME: Black Flag was one of the bands that were com ing from the beach cities south of L.A., Hermosa Beach, Huntington Beach. And at first they were just another one of them, sounded like all of them, or so we thought. But as they went on they left the other bands behind. POWERS: Can you put into words what separated them? JAIME: They wrote better songs. And they were also notorious for riots. There was a time where you could literally find the Black Flag gig by looking for the police helicopter. That would have been 1580. For awhile I wasn't really paying attention to them. When Dez started sing ing for them they really boomed, and they were writing great songs. I think even when bands like the Circle Jerks got big, they could never touch Black Flag. Then when tjiey got Henry Rollins and came out with the album they became legitimate. Pretty soon Greg Ginn was considered the best rock guitarist by certain critics. And as the later stuff came out I liked half of it. Each album had at least one or two excellent songs. GILBERT: A lot of bands start out real crude, then they learn to write songs and they keep their songs limited to four minutes at the longest and two minutes at the shortest. And I think with a lot of rock and roll that works best. What happened to Black Flag was they turned into this garage band that did these endless guitar solos and repetitive nine minute songs, and that's when a band starts losing it, I think. * JAIME: That's when they get the heavy metal fans, though. The thing about the Ramones is they knew they're apes and they play what they play and they are the best at that what they do. POWERS: W>uld they play in L.A. very much? GILBERT: Yeah. I've seen them three or four times. A lot of people already consider them a dinosaur band, which is of course ridiculous. But every time they put out a single it's really good. I can't listen to a whole
Right: Gilbert a n d Carol KovinickHernandez (1980). Below: " T h e best band since t h e Clash."
Ramones album, but their singles continue to be really great. POWERS: What about the Go-Go's? It's hard to think of them as a part of that scene, now. GILBERT: Yeah. There was a gig once with the Go-Go's and Black Flag. [Laughs] There was a time when that stuff could go over, but for a short period. POWERS: Did you like their music? GILBERT: Oh, I loved the Go-Go's. When they first came out they were great, they were so innocent. JAIME: They could barely play. GILBERT: But there was real spunk there and they were real happy. That kind of music really knocks me out. I even liked the records. They weren't the world's greatest band, but they had something going. POWERS: So you'd see a band like the Go-Go's before their first record came out. GILBERT: Oh, yeah. We saw the Go-Go's when the band was a month old. JAIME: Of the biggest bands, we saw X and the Go-Go's when they were just starting. We would see X at least once a month. POWERS: What do you think of their whole career? GILBERT: Well, I'm spoiled. I saw them when they were cranking in 1978-79. The only people paying attention then were the fans, the kids going to see them. POWERS: Do you think something has diminished there? GILBERT: A little bit. I think the first record was a little too tight. The second record, Wild Gift, is better. It's actually one of the best rock records. POWERS: Are The Replacements the only good band to come out in the last five years for you? GILBERT: I'll be even more extreme than that. For me The Replacements are the best band since the Clash, and the Clash meant quite a bit to me when they were good. I think they're remarkable. I can't believe a band that young and JAIME: that drunk... [Laughs] I'd say they're the only band that's knocked me out in the past five years. POWERS: Is there any thing you can say about what's good about them other than that they're "fast" and "fun"? GILBERT: They're just everything that I loved about rock and roll since I was five years old. They write good songs, the lyrics are funny... That's just it, the best of rock and roll can not be articulated. You can not articulate why Elvis was so much fun in the early days. I just heard from Peter Bagge the other day that Robert Crumb liked the early Elvisyou're snagged on this Robert! But you can't say Elvis was good because of this or that. It's not going to work. You either get it or you don't. You have to hear
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you like? GILBERT: Well, the greats like Hank Williams, of course. JAIME: I started going further, like Jimmy Rogers. Not the "Honeycomb" Jimmy Rogers, but the old 1920s Jimmy Rogers, the Singing Brakeman. GILBERT: I'm not too crazy about bogus guys like Dwight Yoakum. [Laughs] POWERS: / understand Bob Dylan is the new man on your list, Jaime? JAIME: Yeah. I always liked his singles when I was grow ing up, but I never took him seriously until a few years ago. I started buying all his first albums because they were $4.99 at Tower Records. [Laughs] He's one of the guys you can't ignore. GILBERT: The reason we didn't get into people like Bob Dylan until laterwe always liked him, but we never bought his records. We heard Dylan from the beginning, it's now that we're buying the records because we can af ford decent stereos. [Laughs] But a lot of it was these goddam hippies and their goddam attitudes. You wanted to hate every everything they liked. POWERS: What did you think of the film Sid and Nancy? GILBERT: It's O.K. They got the look down fairly super ficially, but having known the "history" of the whole thing, he actually blew the story. But it turned out O.K.,
JAIME:
I really don't know what punks do after punk.
it; feel it. JAIME: A band can write any kind of song, but as long as it brings out the teenager in me, the youth in me, gets the adrenaline goingthat's wonderful. And The Replacements are the first band to do that in a long time. GILBERT: And the balance is terrific. They'll do a bunch of fast rockers that will ruin your speakers and then they'll do some slower songs, which sometimes I think are even better than the hard rockers, and then they'll do a boun cy song like "Waitress in the Sky," and that's good too. Paul Westerberg is just remarkablethe whole band is. POWERS: Probably out of both your top 15 records lists in Love & Rockets #25 the one that might be a shocker for people is Dolly Parton. GILBERT: Yeah, I didn't understand. They thought it was a joke. I was dead serious. If you look at the lists, all the records here represent what I like about pop or rock and they pretty much represent me. And it's all pretty aggressive, it's all "boy" music, even the Beach Boys, and the Beach Boys is a "girl" band. Do you understand the concept of "boy" music and "girl" music? JAIME: Like girls didn't like Black Flag.. .or weren't supposed to. GILBERT: Boys like the Sex Pistols, but girls like Siouxsie and the Banshees. Boys like Deep Purple, but girls like Fleetwood Mac. And I guess the Dolly Parton record to me-is the girl part of me, because as much as Dolly Parton has made a complete fool of herself in the last few years there was a time when she was actually sincere and warm about her music. On the surface the songs are really corny, but at the same time if you listen closely her vocals are very sensitive. She hasn't had a good record for ten years, of course. POWERS: How about Johnny Cash, Jaime? JAIME: He's my man. I grew up watching his TV show and it was just some country variety TV show, but I kind of liked him. Then I forgot a lot about him. When we started getting into punk, guys like him were brought up a lot because Johnny Cash had some kind of punk thing about him. And I like country as well as rock because it talks about the same things. POWERS: Who are some of the other country musicians
HAUOWeNM6Hrj&>
MUOWeA>At/6#r
B a n d fliers f r o m t h e early ' 8 0 s b y Gilbert (top) a n d J a i m e (middle). Below: From Gilbert's "Ready, Set, G o " (1984).
GIL&RTO RAMOtJE, Lu
U T R A BROTHER
it was enough, and he didn't back off on any of the serious implications of being Sid Vicious. [Laughs] POWERS: Did you see Repo Man? GILBERT: Yeah. I didn't think much of it at all. I think Alex Cox blew his wad with Sid and Nancy, though I know he did Repo Man before. I don't think he's much of a talent. He might come back because he does have a sense of humor, but he's not that good, and Joe Strummer should be in better movies. FIORE: So punk rock had an effect on your world view? GILBERT: Yeah, I took it a little too seriously. I was real gung ho with the Clash, it was like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're going to take over the world!" After a while I realized it was just music. It was just the Johnny Rotten snotty attitude. I was never really snottywell, I guess
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Below: T h e Hernandez b r o t h e r s ' selfpublished Issue of L o i r e & Rockets.
I wasbut I didn't have anything to back it up. These guys were snotty and they sort of had something to say, and I liked that. Wow, you could be snotty and smart! FIORE: Where did you fit in? GILBERT: Just audience, really. We never really had hairwell, Jaime had a mohawk and stuffbut I never went out and hated my mother. I liked my mom. That's the part I never understood about rebel rock and roll, you had to hate your parents. FIORE: That was more of a '60s thing, wasn't it? GILBERT: Yeah, but a lot of kids adopted that. A lot of kids said, "Ah, I hate hippies" but they were exactly like hippies, just different costumes. FIORE: But punk rock affected your outlook on things other than music. GILBERT: Yeah, it's hard to explain. I had a bad attitude about everything. MARIO: Just an opinion about everything. JAIME: Also, it made you realize that you could do what you want. GILBERT: Yeah, it made me cocky enough to believe that I could do a comic book, and it was good and it was all right, as opposed to being intimidated by the Marvel guys. As lousy as they were, at least they could draw buildings. I couldn't draw buildings unless I made it up, and that intimidated me. And so with punk, I took that musical anarchy to comics.
Mario
Has An
Idea
FIORE: You did the first issue o/Love & Rockets in what year? GILBERT: Was it '82 or '83? JAIME: We drew it in '80-81. FIORE: So, in 1980, what were you doing? GILBERT: [Laughs] I wasn't doing anything. JAIME: You were working at t h e . . . GILBERT: Was I working in 1980? JAIME: During "BEM" you were. GILBERT: I got a job after stalling for five years. FIORE: What were you doing? GILBERT: As soon as I got out of high school, I did comics for myself, vaguely similar to Love & Rockets, but they were just for myself. I used some of the characters from Love & Rockets, that would be Inez and Bang, but I got bored with that, because it didn't seem to be going anywhere. I didn't know what to do with it. MARIO: Even people we asked didn't know what to do with it. There was no place to put it. GROTH: At some point did you have an aspiration to draw them professionally? GILBERT: No. As a matter of fact, kids in grade school, junior high, and high school said "You could get a job in comics, you could draw comics, you could work for Disney." But I thought, "What am I going to do there? I don't belong there, there's nothing that I have that they would want." And I've had that attitude all the way up to the first Love & Rockets. GROTH: You never thought of just putting your talent in the service of company characters or whatever? GILBERT: Maybe in the back of my head I sort of dreamed that, "Maybe I can do Spider-Man one day, but naaah." I do what I do because that's all I can do. GROTH: After you got out of high school, did you think of using your drawing skills to get a job in comics? GILBERT: No, because I was lazy. That was another thing. I'm a typical cartoonist. I was already doing strips for myself. I was really naiveI thought I was going to make it by drawing for fanzines, because I had this dumb idea that fanzines were still showcases for new artists. That was during the barbarian fad, and that's all there was in professional comics and fanzines. I drew bar barians and practiced because of course I liked drawing barbarian girls. But that was about it, just sketching. FIORE: Mario, you were married, and I suppose you were working in construction? MARIO: Yeah. JAIME: And me, I wasn't doing anything. I was being a full-on punk rocker. GILBERT: You were going to college. JAIME: I was going to college, and they were paying me, so I didn't have to work. [Laughs] FIORE: You had a scholarship? JAIME:-It was some kind of Social Security deal from when my dad died. GROTH: Was drawing comics professionally a goal for you? JAIME: Well, I never had any drive for anything in my life. [Laughs] I thought I would do everything half-assed and live, work. I rarely have ever had jobs. I mostly loafed, and hung out with friends. I never thought of reaching anything that high. Or as high as I've gotten, as far as Love & Rockets. When we found that we could do Love & Rockets and people were listening, then it wasn't too hard for me to jump in. GROTH: Why do you think you didn't have any career
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ftuj mil L
ambitions? Was it the way you grew up? JAIME: I guess. I guess nothing was that important to me. FIORE: Would you say that was a fairly common feel ing where you lived, among the people around you? JAIME: With all my friends, yeah. They lived, worked, got drunk or high on the weekends. And that's the way I lived for years. FIORE: When you left school wereyou considering any kind of career in art? JAIME: I didn't think what I had to show was any good. I didn't think it was professional. FIORE: But by the time that the first Love & Rockets came out in '81 it was obviously professional work. JAIME: But I didn't know that. GILBERT: Because it still didn't look like a Marvel comic. JAIME: And because we were doing it our own way, and we thought, well, we're doing it wrong. So maybe this will be good for a fanzine... MARIO: And that's why the first Love & Rockets was like a fanzine. FIORE: Also, there weren't any undergrounds then that were going to publish new people. GILBERT: And we weren't interested in doing the "Dealer McDope" stuff that underground comics were doing at that time. What undergrounds wanted seemed pretty narrow. FIORE: Did you ever look into that? GILBERT: Well, no, because we're the world's laziest human beings and we knew you'd starve if you were an underground cartoonist. I knew that right away. FIORE: It makes you wonder just how much talent gets pissed away like that. GILBERT: Oh, yeah. We lucked out, it's that simple. We were doing our stuff, but we were sort of not into it that much any more, and Mario says, " I have a friend that works at a college, and she works in the print shop."
FIORE: Why don't you let Mario tell the story. How did Love & Rockets get started? MARIO: Like I said, we used to do our own stuff, and once in a while Jaime would let me ink some of his early stuff, his early "Mechanics," and then Gilbert would let me ink his Inez and Bang stories, and we did some things we took to conventions that nobody knew what to do with. We had a dry period for a long time, but they seemed to be keeping at it. I kind of lost touch with it, but I *as starting to see that Gilbert was getting pretty good, more professional. And Jaimeyou were doing "How to Kill a . . . " Was that the first thing you did? JAIME: That was one of them. MARIO: I remember you handed me something that had your current style. GILBERT: You were just preparing your little universe. JAIME: Yeah, I had my little universe, but I didn't think it was going to go anywhere, so it was going to be all my own. GILBERT: We'd created all these little universes before [Laughs], and we didn't think they'd go anywhere. MARIO: But the thing is that Jaime's talent went from sort of tannish-looking art to this chiaroscuro style. I picked it up and I was doing flips in my head. I thought, "This is professional art." GILBERT: Jaime's talent blossomed within a year. It just went BOOM, like that. FIORE: Within a year of what? GILBERT: From his previous style. FIORE: From little fanzine drawings? GILBERT: Yeah, it was his characters like Rand Race and Maggie, but they were drawn in the style we came up with when we were kids, without any influence from anybody else, and his style just changed completely. JAIME: And that was at the time I was taking those draw ing courses. GILBERT: This was a surprise to me, too. I didn't know Jaime could draw like that. That's what's really funny.
Above: From Jaime's sketchbook. Below: Jaime with a mohawk (1980).
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He was already living outside of our mom's house, he was living with our cousin. And one day I went and saw his artwork, and I said, "Oh, I didn't know..." JAIME: And when Mario asked me [to contribute] I had no idea of what I was going to do. I just did it as I went along. FIORE: So it was Jaime's work that made you think it was possible? MARIO: It kind of put it over the top. "If this is this good, he'll hold up the book at least. He'll hold it up for everybody else." So I told Gilbert, "We're definitely go ing to do this." And Gilbert started working on "BEM," and his stuff was getting really polished, and I thought, "Oh, Jeez, this is going beyond." So I badgered this girl to get us into the print shop at the local college, and made up negatives of the first issue. Then we borrowed money from our brother Ismael. [Laughter] FIORE: How did he get money? MARIO: It was from Social Security. JAIME: He was the rich one at the time. GILBERT: He was the baby of the boys, so he took the longest to reach 21, so he accumulated more money. MARIO: So we did that, went out and got a printer to print the pages for us, and he did a lousy job of it. [Laughter] We used to see ads for these little 50 cent comic books that guys self-produced, and it had been years sinae I'd last seen one, but I assumed it was still going on. FIORE: Like mini-comics? MARIO: Yeah, but they were just rip-offs of super-hero comics. So I just took it from there, I figured we could always sell it through fanzines. We finally got the book together... JAIME: And we went to a Creation Con and everybody was telling us, "Ah, that's all wrong." GILBERT: "You've got to have a color cover".. .everyone was telling us it was all wrong, and we believed them. We didn't have anything to go by. And who picked it up of all people? It was one of the Schanes brothers. [Laughter] We were in a Carl's Jr [a west coast fast-food chain], and Mario had a stack of them. Schanes looked at them, and he said, "I like these, I can sell these for you." MARIO: So we sold him a bundle of them at 50 cents apiece. We didn't know what the hell he was doing, we just wanted to get it out. And so we gave him a handful of them, and he handed us some money, and we thought, "Great, we got some money back." We showed it around this con, and nobody knew what to do with it. They said, "Yeah, you need a color cover, you've gotta be slick." And I hadn't realized this, that it had gone that far. JAIME: That you had to have color covers. MARIO: So I was really kind of bummed. FIORE: You also sent a copy to The Comics Journal. GILBERT: That was me. We'd been reading The Comics Journal, Jaime had a subscription. I thought, "God, these are the meanest sons-of-bitches in the world. [Laughter] If we can take their abuse, we could take anything." See, that was my punk attitude working. I said, "Fuck these guys, I can send this to those guys, they can't do nothing to me." I got up the courage to send a couple copies straight to Gary [Groth], I was thinking, "Well, maybe they'll review it," being really naive about it. Two weeks later, Gary writes a letter saying, "Wow, this is great, we want to publish our own comics, how would you guys like us to publish you?" For a minute I said to myself, "No, we can still do it ourselves," then I said, "Am I crazy?" [Laughs] And from the beginning Gary was sup portive. "Do it your way." Everybody else had told
us we had to change. He was the first person from the beginning who said, "Do it your way, this is the way I like it." That appealed to us, of course. We could do anything we wanted. Then we slogged out a year of adding 32 more pages to it, because he wanted to put a 64-page book out. Well, actually, it just fell into place. As soon as we got it to Gary it fell into place. FIORE: What do you mean, fell into place? GILBERT: Doing Love & Rockets as we do now. It's been the same since the first issue he published. FIORE: Jaime, were you aware that Gilbert and Mario thought of your stuff as what pushed the book over the top? JAIME: No, doing comics I was always the third brother. I just thought, "Good, I'm in a book with my brothers. I'm going to do the best I can."
P A R T
WOl
GROTH: / think you once said that your drawing really flowered under the tutelage of a college drawing instructor. JAIME: Yeah, when I got out of high school I didn't want to work, and I was going to get paid if I went to junior college full time. So I took all these art classes to take up all these credits. I would take art history and then I would re-take it. FIORE: Would you fail it? JAIME: I wouldn't finish sometimes. I liked learning but I didn't want to take tests or anything like that, so at the very end I would drop out and then I would start up school again. FIORE: So do you have a background in art history? Are you fairly knowledgable? JAIME: Pretty much. I forget names. GROTH: / remember when you took me to the Louvre and gave me a miniature lecture. FIORE: Do you think that's affected your cartooning? JAIME: I think it's helped. I see beyond comic books, FIORE: / don't suppose you thought it would when you took it.
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JAIME: I didn't even think about that. Even after I knew all that stuff I didn't think it would affect anything. But I think it has. GROTH: But prior to that your only real artistic font was comics? JAIME: Comic books and girls. That's where I started learning anatomy. And then I took life drawing. And there was this teacher that Mario had taken, or someone that I knew had taken, the semester before. And they said, "Don't get Deitz, he's a bastard," but I needed credits and I like drawing the figures, so why not. And Ltflok Dietz and he was a bastard, old man, glasses, Growwlll. He's like a junior Burne Hogarth (is he going to read this?). GROTH: He will now. /Laughs; JAIME: In fact, he used Hogarth a lot. He would make us draw from his books, which I found kind of interesting when I first met Hogarth. I thought, "No wonder, they're the same guy." [Laughter] I took him, and he was a wonderful teacher. He taught me like no one has ever taught me anything. He taught me to draw from the inside out, what the figure is doing, not what it looks like. If a guy is running, he says, "Don't draw the hands like this, draw what he's actually doing." He had clever ways of sinking that into our brains. I still don't know how he did it. He taught me how to draw a figure sitting and then putting the chair under the person. And then the other wayhaving us draw a chair and then seating a person in it. And I never lost it. The only thing, that I do that he taught me not tohe taught us to never start with the head. He said start with the hips or leg or shoulder, but always draw the head last. That's the only thing I couldn't keep up. I still draw the head first. FIORE: Did you pass any of that along to anybody? JAIME: I wouldn't know how. I couldn't tell anybody exacdy how he did it. We would go into class and he would make us look at the model for five or ten seconds and not look at the paper and scribble the action lines of what the model was doing. And we would do about five of those at the beginning. Then we went into these one-minute drawings where we would watch her [the model] and draw. He would time it. GROTH: How do exercises like that improve your skills? JAIME: It's practice. It gives you confidence to put down a line. He hated chicken scratching, where you go over the same line over and oyer. By the end of the semester I would look at all my drawingsand we'd go through a lot of tablets because we did all that stuffand I noticed the very first drawings were these chicken scratches: a million lines for one leg. And by the end of it I had one line. GROTH: Was he big on anatomy? Was he big on the for mal elements of drawing? JAIME: Oh, yeah. He would kill me if he knew I was doing comics. The way he would put it, "I hate that Star Wars stuff." [Laughter] I don't even know if he knows that we do this comic. FIORE: You don't have the nerve to show it to him? JAIME: Well, he retired a few years after I had him. FIORE: Is he still alive? JAIME: I think he's still alive. GROTH: Where else did you learn formal elements like composition and deep space and perspective and so forth? JAIME: Parts of that came from other art classes. But a lot of that came from observing good illustrators, mostly good comic strip illustrators. I was never big on illustrators outside of comics. Comics was always the thing I could relate to. Guys like Alex Toth, looking at him. FIORE: While you were going to college, who was your
idea of what was a good comic book illustrator? JAIME: Someone like Moebius. But then I like the painters, van Gogh and Picasso who weren't illustrators. GROTH: You obviously like Kirby. JAIME: Of course, as a kid I fell in love with the dynamics of Kirby, the big machines and the power and crashing through a wall and all that. As I got older, this might sound funny, but Kirby taught me subtlety. GROTH: How so? JAIME: I can even think of a panel. It was in an early Avengers comic when Tony Stark picks up Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver at the airport, I guess when they first join, and they're dressed as normal people. GROTH: / know that, Avengers #16. JAIME: [Laughter] They're wearing overcoats and I fell in love with that kind of naturalism because I discovered that panel at the time when everything was [John] Buscema and no one could stand still. It was Kirby who actually taught me. When someone could be standing there and lighting a cigarette it was so calm. I thought, "I like when people are standing there now," because I was so tired of the action poses.
Anatomy drawing from Jaime's sketchbook (1979).
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MY IS ANTHONY STARK ' I AM A tW&rViP O P t h e Avetnemt8~iH they h c l o t s < mbbt- JAIME: The 40-page "Mechanics" story that was so i n s c in a e u i i - p i i x s ww.'cw r ^sasb ~<o t h e m > * successful was all the "Mechanics" ideas I had at that t h a t p u r p o s e . T H E Y 4 S K E P MB WE A8 point. I wanted them all to be in one story, and by the THAT K!X9 OF IPESHAPS VOL), IS A*S>, S E T T E R KNOW* TO M E E T Y O U
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time I was done I was burned out on "Mechanics." GILBERT: The reason we did the science fiction things first, and I think this goes for Jaime, too, was because it's so easy. You can please the audience so easily with that stuff. Like, there's a monster in this scene, and we'd do it our way. Most people would have a monster tearing people apart; we'll have a monster asking for change or something. It's so simple for us to do. All I have to do is draw a monster. If you draw a bum doing that it won't have the same impact with comic readers. GROTH: / know a lot of what you like in that first ' 'Mechanics'' story was the fantasy element that you later eschewed. JAIME: Well, actually, no, what I liked was more how Maggie reacted toward it. Sometimes Maggie worried that they were going to be wiped off the island and be killed and sometimes she just wanted to drink beer. It wasn't so much the fantasy stuff that I was having fun with, it was more how people were reactingplaying baseball and over the dinosaur was a home run, stuff like that. And that's what people didn't understand. GROTH: / think there was a point where you made a deliberate decision to put "Mechanics" in the background. And I think that was because you wanted to tell more realistic stories and you were dissatisfied with "Mechanics," is that it? JAIME: No, it'was getting in the way. It wasn't import ant. The more I tried to tell more believable stories, you still wouldn't believe it if there was a dinosaur or a rocket ship in the background. I still love drawing the stuff, but it doesn't fit. GROTH: You obviously made a decision to tell more realistic stories. The earlier stories has a buoyancy to them, an exhilaration, certain fantasy elements and so forth. And lately you've done more realistic stories. Now why did you make that decision? JAIME: I wanted the reader to relate to the story as close as possible. So if someone had a gun and was going to shoot someone, you wanted to get out of there. Or you wanted them to get out of there. Instead of reading it, "Oh, this guy's shooting this guy!" like in every other comic. I tried to make you care, like you feel what they feel. I wanted it to get as close as that. GROTH: What struck me re-reading your work in the first 12 issues or so there was this sense of exuberance and a genuine sense of joy with life. You can see it in the linework. It's not this Spielbergian sentimental bullshit. It's a genuine, joyous reaction to life. JAIME: In the early issues I was pretty lucky because I was doing it without any thought, plan, or goal. I was doing it and it came out and people liked it. The punk mentality helped because I was sneering as I was doing it. It'slike those old panels of Crumb saying, "I'll show them." GROTH: / don't want to put words in your mouth, but would it be right to say that the punk phenomenon charged your own life so much that life itself became more in teresting than the comic books you were reading? JAIME: Oh, sure. I didn't know it at the time until some one told me. "I like your comics because your comics are realistic." "Oh, well.. .1 do them because I do them." Also, when I started the comics I was drawing friends. That became my inspiration instead of super-heroes. Real people started inspiring me. So that helped.
GROTH: //'.s funny you should mention that because Kirby is so well known for dynamism and vitality, people forget he's actually quite subtle. I remember a Fantastic Four he did with the Thing called "This Man, This Monster"but half of them are called "This Man, This Monster"somebody takes over the Thing's place. JAIME: The first "This Man, This Monster." GROTH: There was actually a lot of pathos in his dele tion of the Thing which is pretty amazing. * JAIME: And no one saw that in Kirby, and they still don't. I think it's funny that he's the one of all artists that taught me that naturalism. Then there are other guys I learned from. GROTH: Hank Ketcham. JAIME: Hank Ketcham. When I went back and started looking at old artists I discovered that Hank Ketcham was the most subtle of all. He knew how to make someone droop, sit down, show body weight, everything. He's amazing. I could say that he's my favorite cartoonist of all.
More Love, Less
Rockets
FIORE: Was there a particular point where "Locos' became more interesting to you than "Mechanics"? JAIME: The first issue. [Laughter]
Above: T h e scene drawn b y Kirby from Avengers #16 that helped teach Jaime subtlety. Below: T h e master of body language, Hank Ketcham.
"I t h i n k I got s o m e t h i n ' on m y shoe. .
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FIORE: Are there characters that you can connect with individuals you knew? JAIME: More like people I would see far away. Or a mix ture of people I actually knew. But characters were never based on one person. FIORE: So, say, in a story like "The Death of Speedy Ortiz," which characters in that would be the sort of people you would know, and which would be the sort you d look at from a distance? JAIME: Well, definitely Speedy's friends, the guys kick ing back against the wall with the beers were my friends who I grew up with, and who I still see occasionally. The punks are punks I've known. But what I meant by "see ing people," is that, for example, I saw girls that looked like Hopey, but I never knew them, I never talked to them. I saw them from afar and heard what they were talking about from afar. I didn't know what was in their brains, so I made it up. They were usually bitches [Laughs]. Little brats. FIORE: What made you pick this particular subject, the lives of these girls? JAIME: Going to L.A. punk shows and seeing these little punk girls who I just fell in love with. FIORE: What struck you about them? JAIME: They were so full of life. They weren't like any I knew. They were cocky, they didn't give a shit about anything, they were nice. GILBERT: Then again, being in Southern California, they happened to be really beautiful too, a lot of them. JAIME: That helped. GROTH: Now, this is the question that everyone is going to want answered, and that is, did you date girls like Maggie? JAIME: I didn't date any girls for a long time. I was a dork. [Laughs] I didn't date all the way through high school, even after high school for a long time. I was always too shy. That's how I started doing women in the comics. When I started discovering girls, in junior high, I started worshiping girls, holding them on this pedestal. But I couldn't touch them. I was too scared of them. And then, I started hiding my shyness to talk to them, because I wanted to be near them, they were these "visions of loveliness." Then I thought, well, I can be friends with them and I can be near them at the same time. And I guess that's how that started, how I learned to actually have friends that were girls, sometimes better than my guy friends. GROTH: At some time you must have taken them off the pedestal. JAIME: Oh, yeah. But at the same time I didn't tear them down. It was more like, wow, they're right here. And that's how I learned to like girls so much, actually like them as people, instead of beautiful things. GROTH: It's interesting, when you said you put them on a pedestal at one time, and then of course you got to know them more as friends, but running through your work in Love & Rockets there's a respect for women. There's also a romanticization of them. Do you think that's accurate? JAIME: Maybe it's from still liking to draw them. But I started off with the respect for them, so women were all I did. Now I try to lean it both ways, because at first I had guys who were really nothings. FIORE: How cad you get to putting these girls, or Maggie at least, into this "Mechanics" storyline? JAIME: That was an idea I had since high school. I thought, I'm going to draw a woman wearing a tool belt. I thought that would be really sexydrawing a woman
in a man's uniform. And I drew her on a telephone pole. Then I thought it would be good to do it in space, because at the time that's what I was interested in. At first Mag gie was ajniddle-aged woman, but by the time the comic came out, she was 17 or 18 years old. When Mario asked me to do a comic I asked myself, what do I have to show? And so I took all these old ideas and threw them all together. GROTH: The stories that were in the first Love & Rockets weren't the first time that you played with Maggie and the characters you'd created. JAIME: No, but that was the first time that I put them in actual stories. In fact, those were the first complete, real stories that I had ever done using these main characters. I had done short stories a long time ago, but I never continued them. For years, I was doing drawings of Maggie and Hopey, and I didn't know what I was going to do with them. I wanted to put them in stories. I guess a lot of it was laziness. FIORE: Were you developing the characters in your head, too, while you were doing that? JAIME: They were developing as characters. When I was in high school, Maggie was a 30-year-old woman. I was going to do stories about this woman, science-fiction stories, whatever. FIORE: How close would you say that this 30-year-old you 're imagining would be to Rena now in the stories? JAIME: I would say that Maggie was at first like Izzy. Well, Izzy, in "How To Kill A . . .By Isabel Ruebens." A woman who views all of these weird things happen ing. That's what Maggie was at first. I got the name "Maggie" because I liked the name from Dark Shadows, the soap opera. GROTH & FIORE: /Laughter/. JAIME: The girl that was named Maggie. I always liked that name, and I thought, "I want to make up a character named Maggie." It started with the name. Hopey came about when I started going to punk gigs, and seeing all these cute little girls with short, black hair and mousy voices, really feisty and running around. First Hopey was going to be this cute, nice, perfect little character that you'd love. She was going to be adorable. But right away I thought, no, it would be perfect if she was a bitch. That would be more interesting. Or more realistic. One thing that came from our so-called "punk upbringing" was that we always turned the tables. I had this smart-aleckness, where I decided, "No, I'm going to make her a bitch and make everyone mad." And that's how a lot of the comic book is still done. We'll think, "If we do it this way, we'll really get them mad, but they'll be back for more." FIORE: Do you think that Hopey is an unlikeable character in some ways? JAIME: It depends on who's looking at her. I'm giving you this loud-mouthed, bitchy character. In a lot of ways, I admired that type when I saw them, and I hope people are looking at Hopey that way. Well, I know people are looking at Hopey that way. They admire her. She's pro bably the most popular character in the whole comic. GROTH: Maggie? JAIME: No, Hopey. GROTH: You think Hopey's more popular? JAIME: Oh, I get more response. Unless the Maggie fans just don't speak up. GROTH: Well, is this since she gained weight? JAIME: No, ever since the beginning. GROTH: But Hopey can also be very sweet, when she's engagingly anti-authoritarian. She doesn't feel it. JAIME: I just give you the facts. Because Hopey's the
JAIME:
I thought that would be really sexydrawing a woman in a man's uniform.
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kind of character whose thoughts you're not supposed to figure out. So evetything I give you of Hopey that's what GROTH: Well, how thoughtful is Hopey? Does she do much thinking? JAIME: No, she reacts. GROTH: Spontaneous. JAIME: Yeah, she's just spontaneous. What you see with Hopey is what you get. Whereas Maggie is a different thing. You have drought balloons with Maggie all the time. I tried at a point to make Hopey that way, to go into her mind, but it failed. You're not supposed to know what happening in Hopey's head. FIORE: At times ' 'Locos'' seems like Peanuts grown up, in that there are very few adults in it except for the police and people like JAIME: Adults. [Laughter] FIORE: No, I mean except for larger than life, mythic characters like Rena Tttanon, Penny Century, and Rand Race. MARIO: When you're that age, people are mythic. FIORE: What I'm more interested in is the focus on younger characters. GILBERT: Babes, that's it, Bob. Babes. [Laughter] JAIME: That's part of it. One reason is that you're see ing the story through Maggie's eyes. It's kind of like a normal person seeing their heroes. They see them as larger than life. Rand Race is larger than life to her. Penny (Jentury comes from that world. You know there's another side to her that's not so glamorous. And Rena is just a legend. I just like doing it that way. Also, I want to come up with storiesI've barely touched on it beforewhere guys that are in love with Maggie see her the same way, that she and Hopey are these legendary punk girls and they just wish they could know them. She's this perfect thing to them. I want to show them in a different light. I NaEklHOUSHTI O X X D B E S U C H eaxHm&utmaHS'to THltDTHEWrH. (VE AUlMlS HADTOOCIf UXTH THEM IN ONE UJW (nam. MWSE nsTHt am i HUMS cvrumimte rriME, I Mfrmno. BUT i REAuxHoweyiy i*a> wferm 1 * 6 6 1 6 . * i atTHerREAuy,*Nesnj/ijKDME.a)ot HUHr
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because all you hear are horror stories. Maggie says her mom's crazy... I don't want to make this like some John Hughes film where the teenagers know everything and the grown-ups are evil. FIORE: So Maggie does have parents. I'd gotten the idea that Maggie had more or less grown up on her own. JAIME: She was raised apart from the rest of her family. I got that idea from my mom's oldest sister. She might as well be a cousin, because she was raised by her grand mother rather than her mother, and she's so apart it's like she's from another part of the family. FIORE: There seems to be an economic difference be tween Maggie and Hopey. Maggie apparently comes from a somewhat poorer background, Hopey comes from a more middle class background, and Hopey is more of a free spirit. JAIME: Yeah, it's like Maggie grew up more traditional. Traditional ways, old ways of the Mexican culture, and Hopey never had a family, really. She's reckless. There's nothing to keep her down, like family or love. GILBERT: Luba and Hopey are alike, I just realized while you were talking, because they're both spoiled. GROTH: One of the things I was really struck with, reading over all the published work from the beginning is how astonishingly organic it is. There was a reference, for example, to Speedy, in the very first "Mechanics" story, yet Speedy didn't really appear for any significant extent until quite a while after that. So I'm wondering, when you started the work, to what extent did you have this mapped out? To what extent did you know your characters and know how they were going to interact and so forth? JAIME: Well, Speedy had been made up long before the comic. His name was Steve, though. I changed it to Speedy because I also wanted this Mexican guy, this home-boy, like guys I knew when I was growing up. I was making up people like that, because I knew I'd bring them in later. Ihen you'd say, "Oh, that's the guy they're talking about!" And it almost makes it like you've known that guy for a while, and you're comfortable with it. I did a lot of that because I didn't have enough room to put all those people in, so I only introduced them by word of mouth, and then later showed them. GROTH: Was all this in your head? Do you have a genealogy chart at home? JAIME: Sure [to the first question]. It's like I know my characters so well, and I know what they like, and I know what they don't like. That can become a problem. GROTH: In what way? JAIME: Well, like in the mid-teen issues, the story there became only characters, no stories. After "The Lost Women," when I went into the "Locas" stuff, I was so into the characters that they were writing the stories, so there was no room for a plot, and I didn't realize it until 10 issues later or so. Now I'm aware of that, now I can balance.. I know my mistake. GROTH: Do you consider those stories a mistake? For example, one story was a couple of guys looking for their records which was a great story. JAIME: Well, actually, that was the one where I thought I was actually starting to get things going again. But before that, issues #13-16 were really slow issues. It was "Locas" living life. I'm not sorry for those stories, but if I would have kept that up, I wouldn't have gotten very far. GROTH: You can't do that forever. JAIME: I don't think it really hurt, I can just say it was a slow period in their life. GROTH: One thing I'm really interested in is to what
Panel from " A Date With Hopey.''
FIORE: Is "A Date With Hopey," the story from Love & Rockets Book Three an attempt at that sort of thing? JAIME: Actually, it was a story that really happened. FIORE: To you? JAIME: Uh, yeah. [Laughter] And I wanted to show someone else's view of them. FIORE: / also remember a story where these kids are hanging around their parents' house when the parents aren't present, and it's almost like a world where adults have disappeared. Is that just the way it is? JAIME: With these kids, I imagine. That's where I am right now with the book. Maybe later I'll show more of the adult point of view. I do want to show that Hopey's mother isn't just a bitch, that there's her side of the story,
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extent early on did you know the trajectory of all the characters? And to what extent was it a sense of discovery for yourself as you continued to draw and write? JAIME: It was all a mixture. I was discovering things as I was going along. Characters like Race, I couldn't figure out what their home life was like. That's why he failed. GROTH: As a character. JAIME: Yeah, as a character. So it's better to keep him in the background as the mythical movie star, or something. I can figure out everything about Maggie. But with Race, I couldn't figure out what kind of life he lived outside his mechanics job. So you leave that alone, drop him out of the center. FIORE: Do you think that's possible at all for that kind of character? JAIME: Well, I was going by instinct when I was doing it. Let's put it this way, I'm not going to push a character like Race because he doesn't seem interesting with no background. I have no sense of him being my old buddy. You know, Maggie is my old buddy because I know everything about her. I know how she was as a baby. I know what she was like growing up. Hopey doesn't go below age 15 or 13. She doesn't go past what she is now, because I could never imagine what a girl like that does when she grows up. FIORE: And Maggie? JAIME: Maggie I can picture for the resLof her life, till she's dead. FIORE: Aside from Race, what other major characters have been phased out? JAIME: Penny should be going out real soon. There's not much left of her story. That's also the way it works sometimes. Their story is up. Like Maggie's Aunt Vicki, this was her last story. The next time you see her will be in the background where she began, maybe in a couple panels, if ever. FIORE: Are you through with wrestling too? JAIME: No. I love that. That's why Vicki might come back, but it won't be centered around her and Maggie anymore. Their story had been brewing since "Lost Women," when Vicki was told that Rena and Maggie were dead and she actually had to think about them. FIORE: Is Rena played out too? JAIME: That's a toss of the coin. She could either come back and still be active or the next time you see her she could put on 200 pounds and sit there the rest of her life. I haven't figured that out yet. I want to do a story about her origin, when she was born, how she grew up, all the way up to her winning the championship. GROTH: Rena actually seems like one of the characters most filled with possibilities because of course I think you've gone into at least three phases of her life. Now she's about 48? JAIME: Yeah. An old character is really great to work with because you can go backwards. With a young character you can't go very far back. GROTH: Have you ever thought about jumping ahead 20 years? JAIME: I've thought of it, but I'd jump back again. FIORE: That's turning into science fiction. You'd have to wotk out the social changes of the future. JAIME: And if I jump ahead the decisions I make have to be really carefully planned out because I wouldn't want to have to go back and say, "Oh well, she can't do this." FIORE: How far back would you be interested in going? Wbuld you be interested in writing stories about times before you were born?
JAIME: Oh, sure. Like Rena's time. I want to go back to when she's 15 when she first takes up wrestling. That's the '50s or around there. GROTH: Even the time frame is ambiguous. The pre sent is hardly the present. JAIME: It's a lot closer though. GROTH: Well, it's been getting closer because the stories have been getting more realistic. JAIME: Rena still lives in that outer space world. Not so much with rocket ships, robots and aliens, but in the old days I had people dressing weird. GROTH: Now in "Toyo's Request," was she about 34 then? JAIME: That one's kind of screwed up because she's about 34 but she talks about those events as if she was 21. So she's 21 there, or in her early 20's because she talks about trying to win the championship which she won at 21. It still works. She can look like that at that age. GROTH: Well, if she was around 21, that's years ago... JAIME: So it's an imaginary year before I was born. Anything before me I make up. FIORE: So you're not interested in researching any periods? JAIME: Not for Rena, but for someone else I would one of the Maggie characters. But as far as Rena, it's anything goes. GROTH: Why is that? JAIME: It's the way it started. Rena was born in a foreign country and I make it an imaginary foreign country. The reason I used to separate Maggie's home life and her work life is because reading "Mechanics" is like going to a foreign country. Everything was weird. Just like you go overseas and you say, "We don't do things that way." That's what "Mechanics" was. They have rocket ships over there and we don't have them over here. That's why you'll never see Hopey in a "Mechanics" story. She wouldn't fit. She's too much in the real world. FIORE: As you were saying, you originally had this large cast of characters. Have you deliberately tried to expand it anygince then? JAIME: Umm. It's pretty much evolved as I was going along. It turned out that if I needed a new character I would make up one. Sometimes I have characters that I thought up a long time ago and now it's time to bring them in. Characters like Tex, Hopey's new boyfriend, he came up. I wanted Hopey to be with a total stranger, stranded out there, and he came along. FIORE: In the original stories, as a mechanic, Maggie has a particular trade, something she does outside any relationships she might have. Would you say that's more or less disappeared from the character? JAIME: Yeah. It's like she wasn't happy being what she was, in her trade. GROTH: How much of that was a device to get you away from "Mechanics"? JAIME: I found better things to do with Maggie. GROTH: It does seem odd that she would give up something she was so good at to work at a hamburger shop, which she did at one point. JAIME: Well, Maggie's insecure enough that she would give that all up to forget one bad memory. She's actually trying to forget the memory of herself at that time. She's more mad at herself than anything. She's embarrassed of the fool she made of herself. That's what she's trying to forget, it's not so much Race. In the "Death of Speedy" when she says, "I don't want to want Rand Race anymore, I don't want to want you [Speedy] anymore." She was actually mad, fed up with herself and he wasn't letting
JAIME:
Maggie I can picture for the rest of her life.
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her forget. FIORE: The last time you brought Penny Century back, it seems like she was going nuts with her fantasy life. JAIME: Penny's like the female Race, but she's a lot more fun to do because she's more fun to draw. [Laughter] She always had more than Race because she was flaky, she was crazy. I guess I love screwing with perfect people. Penny's this perfect thing and I love screwing with it. GROTH: This would be a good time to ask you about the fairly common observation which is that your women characters are so fully fleshed out, three-dimensional, and your male characters are so flat. JAIME: I'm working on that. [Laughter] There was a lot I had to tell about the women before I could get the men in there. That's why it took awhile before men actually started showing up. GROTH: Do you think you 're better at delineating women characters? Because Rand is obviously a cipher. JAIME: No. I was having so much fun with them. Like I was saying, in the 'teen issues they were running away. They were carrying me. I wasn't doing them. I was hav ing so much fun. And while I'm still having fun, I want to do the male characters because there's a lot I can't put in the female characters from me. FIORE: There's one or two male characters that are fleshed out, Doyle for instance. JAIME: Doyle and Ray. FIORE: Ray not so much to me. The other one that seemed to have more depth to him is Litos. JAIME: He had been there since the first issue along with Speedy, but I hadn't given him a character until the "Death of Speedy." He's similar to my best friend, this really frustrated guy who wants to bust up. But he doesn't know where or how or who. GROTH: You 're going to be doing some stories focus ing on male characters? JAIME: Oh, yeah. In fact this issue [#28] I have a couple Ray stories with Doyle. And I'm having fun because I'm doing stuff that the girls couldn't do. GROTH: Is there any sense in which you like drawing
Two drawings from
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t h e Love & Rockets 1989 Calendar.
JAIME: [Laughter] I love drawing them. Of all of them I love drawing Maggie. As soon as I made her fat it was
perfect. I was a 100% happier. She was meant to be fat. FIORE: Do you think there was something missing in her character before? JAIME: No, I didn't think that until I started making her fat. Then I thought, this is it, so much better, so much more realistic. She just took on a bigger personality than she ever had. I just didn't know it at first. GROTH: Now you've dragged Maggie through shit for 10 issues or so... JAIME: That's why I gave you a happy ending at the end of #27. Originally, the story was leading to her leaving Ray to look for Hopey and I thought, "No, no." I made myself have her go back to Ray and at least relax for an issue or two. FIORE: When Hopey comes back, is something going to be changed between Maggie and Hopey? JAIME: Well, it's not going to be the same. It's almost like real life because I'm going to try to make it the same, but it still won't be, even to me as I'm doing it. FIORE: Has Hopey changed any because of this trip across the country that she's made? JAIME: She's mellowed out some. I mean, I haven't actually done hybut I have in my mind. FIORE: Mellowed towards what? JAIME: Mellowed towards just giving up. It's kind of like, they're has-been punks now, Maggie and Hopey, but they don't know it. They think they're pretty hip, but they've been out of it for a couple of years. FIORE: So are you going to start playing up the people who aren't punks? JAIME: Yeah. The punk thing is going to be more in the background, because I want to concentrate more on my Mexican upbringing for the next several issues. FIORE: / was never particularly close to it myself, but I'd gotten the impression when I was living in Hollywood that there were ugly aspects to the lives of punks that I don't see in the "Locas" stories, and I was wondering whether that was just a difference between Hollywood and Oxnard or... JAIME: Yeah, basically. There's a lot of stuff that I don't know about Hollywood punks who live in abandoned hotels. That's how they lived all the time. Well, I went home every night. Or, if I stayed overnight somewhere, I was home the next day. It's just something I don't know that much about, so I don't get too deep into it. In the story where Hopey's living on the streets, she's having a miserable time, because where she once had all these people to support her, if not her parents, her friends. She thinks she's pretty hot, but now she's seeing what it's really like. FIORE: When you were involved in punk rock, how far did you go along with the idea of' 'No Future,'' nihilism,
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/ guess you'd call it. JAIME: It was all fun to me. I went and got drunk and we listened to bands and danced and met all these crazy people. It was all fun to me. There was a future because I was actually doing something. FIORE: / understand that in England punk was a reac tion to this life kids were living, where there were no jobs for them and there never were going to be any jobs for them except the most menial kind, and all they had to look forward to is a life on the dole... JAIME: Here in L.A. a lot of it was just bored rich kids. It was more out of boredom than out of poverty. They just wanted something to do. GILBERT: Because poor kids listen to disco. Always have. JAIME: Now, it's rapping. FIORE: In a way, I get the impression that Love & Rockets is about what you do after you've been a punk; Gilbert is reaching back to his roots and Jaime is exploring this community-in-spite-of-itself that grew out of punk. JAIME: I'm just doing what I'm doing. GILBERT: He's doing what's happened after punk, because a lot of people just went straight back to the mainstream, and obviously Maggie and Hopey haven't, and so they're sort of lost. JAIME: Yeah, they're not hip right now. As much as they may think they are, they're not. FlORE: IS there going to be some sort of collision be tween what they're doing and the realities? JAIME: I don't know. I'm still thinking about that. Because I want to show other peoples' views towards them, the so-called hip people that look at them and say, "Oh, punkers, that's so old." I'm still working on it. That's why my work is moving slower than Gilbert's. I really don't know what punks do after punk. I'm just learning. I know what I'm doing, I'm drawing comics, but not everyone can draw comics. I'll be damned if I know what happens to Hopey types, because I've seen people like her, and I've never seen any of them after that. FIORE: Earlier you were talking about wanting to "release yourself, go bonkers, but be successful at it." Have you ever done anything you think is like that? JAIME: Not since the second issue, where I actually went out and didn't care till the very ending when I had to wrap it up. GROTH: You 're referring to the 40-page "Mechanics" story. JAIME: "100 Rooms" had a lot of that, but it didn't have as much as the second issue where I didn't care. I was drawing it panel by panel. GROTH: Do you attribute that to youthful vigor? JAIME: Partly that and partly that I still didn't know what I was doing. GROTH: Do you think you'd ever go back to that frame of mind? JAIME: I'm getting in that frame of mind, loosening up. When I do "Izzy in Mexico" it's going to be a lot looser, wackier and more screwball. FIORE: Gilbert's been saying the same thing. JAIME: Gilbert I think is loosening up a lot. We got caught up in something that wasn't bad, but we like to balance it. It was almost like it got so serious that it wasn't fun. We had fun doing it, but there wasn't much fun going on. I had fun with the "Polar Bears" story with Maggie and Vicki. I'm trying to let myself go and not keep it so serious and tight. "Izzy in Mexico" is going to be closer to "How to Kill A..." That had weird elements in it. But weird within the context of Mexico, with
superstitions, religion, Mexican ghosts, all that. I plan to get wacky in that way. GROTH: In the first 10 or 15 issues o/Love & Rockets with Maggie and Hopey and the characters there's a sense of frivolitythere are very few consequences to their actions and behavior so they can kind of roll through life. And that strikes me as being a kind of youthful perspec tive. Now you've gotten in the last half-dozen or so issues it's gotten much more grim and there are consequences. You can certainly see that in "The Death of Speedy. " Do you think that's you getting older and wanting to face certain consequences? JAIME: It's actually the characters getting older and hav ing to face things like that. GROTH: But is that a deliberate strategy on your part? JAIME: No, it's working out that way. And that's why I want to loosen up again. Even if it's too late for some of the characters, I can do that with the newer ones. GROTH: / want to get back to something that interests me, which is that you so much enjoy drawing the girls. Is there a conflict between the narrative values and your own preferences as to what you draw. In other words, do you have to force yourself to draw the men. Do you have to force yourself to draw stories dealing with the men rather than the girls? JAIME: No, I got over that in high school. In high school all I drew was women. I didn't want to draw anything else. I guess that's why I ended up with so many female characters in the beginning because I had so many. I would rarely draw men. Race was the only male I drew for years. The only normal male anyway. GROTH: You don't find that true today though? JAIME: No. But I sure like it when I get to those Mag gie panels, or Danita...or Terry. Terry's a lot of fun too. I guess it's because she's the only one left that's skinny. GROTH: Well, Hopey's still skinny. JAIME: Right. But Hopey doesn't show off her body like Terry does. FIORE: In the first 16 issues or so the sexual relation ship between Maggie and Hopey seemed ambivalent, or at least you didn V make it explicit. It always seemed to me they were friends before they were anything else. Then there came a point, I guess, when you decided to make it explicit. Was there a lot of thought going on there? JAIME: I showed it when I found out it was a mystery to people. "Are they or aren't they?" "Are they lovers or aren't they?" "No, they aren't." "Well, maybe they a r e . " "Come on, tell us, tell u s . " I didn't mean to make it this big mystery. I think something like that should be handled naturally. FIORE: / think in a way that's the difference between being serious and being lightweight. If you 're not doing it seriously you could keep up that mystery angle forever and ever. JAIME: I showed it because I wanted to be fair. I wanted to say this is natural to them so it should be natural to the reader as well. FIORE: Before you did it I thought if you made it explicit one way or the other it might be less interesting because it wouldn't have that ambivalence to it. But even when it's explicit it still has an ambivalence to it. JAIME: I try. GROTH: That's sort of a strategy you use through the whole strip. Things unravel slowly, gradually, but they 're hinted at. Then you go back ten issues ago and see where something was touched upon. Do you remember in that review I wrote before we published Love & Rockets / think I picked up on the bi-sexuality. The open sexuality
JAEVIE:
There was a lot I had to tell about the women before I could get the men in there.
Maggie a n d H o p e y in Love & Rockets # 1 .

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I WONT RUIN I T R K
MA66IE. AFTER A l l , 5HES ENTITLED TD
Sex out in t h e o p e n . F r o m Love & Rockets # 1 8 (top) a n d 2 6 .
of the characters seemed to be pretty implicit in the first story. JAIME: I didn't come out and tell you, but I always figured that people would know it was there. GROTH: I'm curious about your view towards sexuality. Obviously, the characters are pretty open sexually. How did you come to that perspective? Obviously, you don't have a real conservative view of... JAIME: Maybe in my personal life. I have this open jnind now where anything is possible. I figure, well, they're
lovers. There's a lot of women who are lovers in this world. So it wasn't so shocking. That's another thing that came from my "punk background"that anything was possible. FIORE: What I was talking about in terms of ambiv alence is that there's a difference between friendship and love, and even as lovers, their relationship has more of the character of friendship. GROTH: What I thought is you combine the two so felicitouslylove and friendshipthere was really a kind of ambiguous boundary between the two. You mentioned you might be more conservative in your personal life than what your characters... JAIME: Well, I'm saying my personal life has nothing to do with what I put down as far as sex. I treat whatever turns anyone on"let ' e m . " My own way is my own business. It doesn't reflect. GROTH: Do you feel a need to impose your own values on the story content? In other words, do you make moral judgements on your characters? JAIME: Sure. -You have a certain responsibility on certain things. Like, if I have someone who's a drug addict, I have to have someone who's not, who's fighting it. I have to be fair about all this. Half my characters have been or are still on drugs. Hopey and Maggie did drugs when they were younger, like fiends. I don't know what drugs they took because I never took drugs. They did and drugs are bad, right? So I'm not trying to show anyone that drugs are great. I try to give both sides. FIORE: Obviously, Izzy has done a lot ofPeyote. JAIME: Oh, yeah. GROTH: Do you think the sex in Love & Rockets is frivolously portrayed? JAIME: Well, sex is everywhere in real life. It's something that peopleor people I've knowntalk about openly, freely. And that was another thing that I learned to like about girls when I was becoming friends with them . and actually talking to them and finding out they're real human beings. A lot of punk girls I met would talk about anything. Sex, anything. And I liked that open ness about it. So I never had anything to hide talking about that. GROTH: Do you think your work expresses a permissive view towards sex? JAIME: Sure. I try to portray sex as it is. People talk about it. People do it. People have their own little ways of doing it, their own ways of not doing it. I try to put it down there. And I make up a lot because I know that there are no boundaries. People will go to any lengths. It never surprises me anymore when I hear a new story
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GROTH: But you 're not obsessed about tying up all these loose ends. JAIME: There's some that can be left alone until I feel like it. That's the way I do it. I leave a lot of it open so I can come back, or leave it as it is. GROTH: / find it incredible that you can keep all this in your head. The strip is amazingly organic. Something that is referred to one issue can be referred to ten issues later. It will probably be the subject of many PhD theses because of all this. JAIME: There are times that I'll go back and look at old issues and find things I've actually forgotten. " I remember this. O.K. I'm going to do something about this." And it gives you a feeling that there's a time change. It makes you more comfortable in knowing the characters. GROTH: You said earlier that you can't imagine Hopey being an adult. I suppose one of the challenges you face is when you start articulating your characters as adults. FIORE: How much have they aged since the first issue ? JAIME: Only three years. It's screwing me up because when I do flashbacks they're not in the right time frames anymore. I'm beginning to worry because I'm starting to screw up. The new issues are actually happening in 1984, if you want to be technical. GROTH: When your characters face adulthood it seems to me that's going to be a challenge for you too because that's the time when most of us face a lot of decisions that we didn't have to confront when we were, say, under 21. JAIME: But the way I look at life is that I'm already where I am. I don't see myself changing. I'm going to be like the way I am for a long time. I may change, I don't know. But as far as right now I am where I am. I'm there already. GROTH: Do you intend to chart your characters' lives and deaths? JAIME: I'd like to see it. GROTH: So that's something you look forward to. JAUVJE: Yeah. But not in the near future. I still want to keep Maggie.
on the news about some guy or girl who did something. The way I made Hopey bi-sexual or lesbian or whichever she is GROTH: Are you saying? FIORE: You once could win a lot of money betting whether Hopey had ever been in bed with a man in Love & Rockets, because most people wouldn 't think of that one panel in the first "Mechanics" story. Did you ever think that that might have been a slip or a mistake? JAIME: No, no. That panel was never intended to look like they had sex. That was Zero, the drummer from the band. GROTH: It was ambiguous, you don't know. JAIME: You don't know, but as I was drawing it I was thinking he has smudges on his face, bruises. He got beat up and ran to her house and asked to spend the night because these guys are out to kill him. I wasn't telling you what to think in that panel, that was not the intention. GROTH: Now will a fact like that, that you know but no one else knowsuntil they read this interviewwill that come out eventually? JAIME: It could, it could. It depends on what story I want to tell.
Fan art from '83 (top) and a sketchbook drawing, both by Jaime.
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T h e Mechanics of
Mechanics
JAIME:
You should have seen the 40-page "Mechanics" story in the middle stages. It was a mess.
GROTH: You reminded me of something I wanted to ask you about, which is what I consider this almost unfathomable way you work. Tell me if this is accurate and please expand upon it. You will bring in pages and you will have the first three pages completely finished, the last two pages half-finished, miscellaneous panels between the beginning and the end sort of half-finished; some panels are pencilled, some panels aren't pencilled at all. Can you explain how you work this? JAIME: That keeps me interested. It's the way we've always done it. GROTH: Can you actually describe the process? JAIME: Well, it's a lot tighter now. I actually work, not from a tight script of the whole story, but tight scenes. I used to draw only what interested me at the time. It's the way we think of our universe, how we know our characters. When we're doing a story, it's the same thing"Well, I know I can jump from here to here, because I know there's only a certain amount I can do here in the middle." Sometimes it's the result of being bored with a page. "I don't want to draw this now and if I make myself it's going to take too long and I'm going to waste time, so why don't I jump over here." Then there are times that I want to get to that Maggie panel because she's dressed a certain way and I want to drav* it. GROTH: Now, if I remember correctly there'd be some panels in which you literally didn't know what you were going to put in. And this would be in the middle of the story that was half-completed. JAIME: I guess the best example is that 40-page "Mechanics." You should have seen it, in the middle stages. It was a mess. I was afraid that you would hate it, that you would think, "What the hell did he do here?" I thought I fucked up. GROTH: There's two instances that I remember that demonstrate your talent at this organic construction. One
After Gary Groth wrote in h i s review o f t h e s e l f - p u b l i s h e d Love & Rockets that Maggie "is a Prosolar Mechanic (whatever that i s ) " Jaime drew this page of exposition which w a s subse quently inserted into the story for Fanta graphics' publication o f Love & Rockets # 1 .
was the very first "Mechanics" story which you selfpublished; then we published it and you inserted pages without breaking the flow of the story. JAIME: Two pages. GROTH: Then of course there was "100 Rooms" where you added 6 pages of panels interspersed between panels for the reprinting of the story in Book Two. JAIME: It's not that hard for me. FIORE: When you 're leaving panels blank, is it a musical sort of thing, where you know there's supposed to be a beat here and a beat there, but you don't know what each beat is going to be? JAIME: Exactly. I know I need a page to tell a particular part of the story, but I don't know what I'm going to tell. So I leave that blank. And I still do it that way. And Gilbert still does it that way. It's like a beat. I know there's so many beats that I'm going to need for something, but I don't know what. GROTH: So you generally know what's going to hap pen on a page even if you have a few panels that are left blank. JAIME: And if I don't, I fill it in with bullshit. [Laughter] And that doesn't always hurt. In fact, that makes it a lot more fun. FIORE: Is that what happened when Gilbert does a panel in one of your stories, or you do one in Gilbert's? JAIME: Exacdy. He says, put someone in there because this scene is done. And instead of showing a building far away and saying, "The next m o r n i n g . . . " we fill the blank that way. GROTH: One of the things you do really well is small talk. You might even have a story like "Hey, Hopey'' that's all small talk. But when you finish reading it you realize it meant something. It sort of accrued in some weird way. JAIME: When I have all this small talk I try to wind it up with something meaningful. Not with a moral or a message, but something like, "what goes around comes around." If they "start off talking about something and they go off on a tangent, maybe they'll go back to talk ing about to the original subject. GROTH: What led you to believe that you could do that? JAIME: When people liked it. GROTH: No, no, no. You had to do it first before they liked it. JAIME: Well, like I said, when we first started the comic I just did it and I didn't know if anyone was going to like it. We didn't know if you'd like the first issue. We thought you'd trash it. I did it and then you said, " I like this." And I said, "Oh, good, because that's the way I do it." I try to tell a good story, but I didn't know if my storytelling was any good until I got feedback.. .and an offer to be published. Gilbert one time said he asked himself in his mind, "Why is Jaime writing like that? Are they going to like it? Are they going to allow him to do it, like that?" That's why he did "BEM" and "Radio Zero" first, because he didn't think people were ready for "Heartbreak Soup." "Heartbreak Soup" had been planned since the first issue, or before. And he didn't think anyone would buy it, or allow it [Laughter] until I started getting good reviews and he realized, "Oh, they like this stuff." I liked "BEM" and "Radio Zero," but when he did "Heartbreak Soup" I could tell that's what he wanted to do. GROTH: Was there anything that gave you the idea to use the epistolary form in the "Mechanics" story? JAIME: It was a way of having Maggie narrate it, because I have a very limited vocabulary and I couldn't
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do it in captions. At first I did single page stories, each covering one day, and I left the date blank. Then I took all these pages and put them together. I said, "This will come before this one, wait, I need a page between this and a page between that." All I needed was the settingMaggie in the jungle fixing the rocket ship. I would realize that there should be a little time between this scene and this scene. That's when I'd add two pages. The first page didn't come for awhile. Then I saw I had a story here and I felt the responsibility of having it make sense. When it ended up and I thought, "Oh, god, I hope [Gary] likes it." FIORE: In this last series, with Hopey and the band on the road, did you have trouble imagining the sort of let ter Hopey would write? JAIME: Well, Gilbert kind of came up with that. He said, "Why don't you have it where Hopey's letters don't make sense because she can't write." All her words are jumbled but she understands it so she expects you to understand it. That's how that turned out. I actually threw out a story that used the "Mechanics" device with Hopey's letters this time. And it was talking about how she and the band are doing this, and they're breaking up, and they hate each other, and it went day by day, the same way. It was only a four-page story, but it didn't work out and it was moving too slow. I threw that out and started the story where they're already breaking up and Hopey and Tex are on the street. I wanted to get to that right away, so I threw out the letter part. GROTH: How much stuff do you throw out? JAIME: Sometimes a few pages. Well, a script never turns out the way it started. Or sometimes it goes back to the way it started after eight different changes. GROTH: How much do you revise a single story? JAIME: Most of the stories turn out different. I'd say 99% of the stuff turns out different than what I planned. You know how I jump around and draw part of a page then move onit keeps me from getting bored. I'm as surprised as the reader. The story isn't finished 'til the the last inked panel. GROTH: Does Gilbert's work influence or affect yours? JAIME: Oh, yeah. GROTH: In what ways? JAIME: I think he's so much better than me. GROTH: Better how? JALME: He's more imaginative and a better writer. He always has been. GROTH: Better in the sense that you think he brings greater depth to the characters? JAIME: No, as far as ideas, actually writing stories. I think my stuff is pretty dull compared to his. I'm lucky when I come up with an idea that surprises me. I'm rarely dazzled by my stuffuntil after it's done and published, then I think, "Wow, I did that?" That's always fun. But at the time sometimes I think, "Why am I doing this? This is so boring. No one wants to read this, no one wants to see this. Am I standing still?" It's sometimes hard to tell if I'm dying. FIORE: What sort of effect does all this adulation that the book gets have on you? JAIME: It helps. FIORE: // doesn't make you self-conscious in any way? JAIME: I really still have that innocence. I still have an innocence that when people like it or don't like it I keep thinking, "Well, I'm still going to do it, I'm still going to do it and boy, this is going to be great. I'm gonna show them." Every time I'm doing it I have that feeling of "I'm gonna show them," even my peers or guys who
I think are better than meI'm gonna show them because they don't do what I do. It's back to the old punk men tality of "I'm going to do it whether you want it or not." GROTH: / remember when we were getting all the lettersthe hate mail about Maggie gaining weight and I remember your reaction. It was virulent. You said she was going to stay fat and if anything it was even a more violent reaction that she was going to stay fat JAIME: Yeah. GROTH: maybe the longer you kept getting these let ters, the less you were going to pay attention to them. JAIME: They're still coming. The ones who have drop ped the comic for those reasonsI don't need those kind of readers anyway. FIORE: Do you have readers who think they have a pro prietary interest in the characters? JAIME: Once in awhile I'll get letters from somebody giving me the bottom line. They're telling me, "You should be doing this, there's no question about it." "Oh, wrong, I found Hopey very out of character." A lot of women found Hopey out of character when she wore the garters^n the last panel, in that Penny story. [Laughter] They found her out of character. And I said, "But she wasn't, because I know." When someone said that, Gilbert said, "It just goes to show that Hopey has a bet ter sense of humor than some of her readers." That's the bottom line. She did it as a joke, and she did it. I felt right doing i t . . . so it was. GROTH: What did you think of Crumb's criticism of your work, /that it's too cute/? JAIME: I don't agree, but I can see where he's coming from. FIORE: / think it might have been based more on the first ten issues or so. JAIME: Well, I still think he wouldn't like it. I don't know. Crumb is Crumb. GROTH: Did that bother you? JAIME: Well, for awhile it did bother me, coming from someone who I admire so much. That's always hard when they do something like that. You melt in your chair. You think, "God how could he say that, I like his stuff." [Laughter] After awhile I felt, well, that's him. He's got a different view of women than I do. [Laughter] I look at it that way. I believe what I believe about women and he believes what he believes. Like when he said that's not how women really are. Well, I happen to know some are. GROTH: Do you make a distinction between what you do and soap opera ? Sometimes you 're accused of doing soap opera and sometimes you 're praised for doing soap
Above: A panel from Love & R o c k e t s # 2 5 i n which some readers found Hopey " o u tof character." " I t just goes t o show that Hopey h a s a better sense of humor than some of her readers," says Gilbert. Below: It's R o y Cowboy!
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opera. JAIME: It depends on what you call soap opera. If soap opera is a never ending story of life that goes on, than yes, it is a soap opera. But if they're calling it a soap opera because of dopey plots and unbelievable people and stuff like that. GROTH: / think soap opera implies that it treats emo tions like pornography treats sex, it's repetition. JAIME: Yeah. Soap opera's a bad word, that's why I don't accept it when it's used. But if soap opera means a story that goes on like real life, than that's fine. GROTH: What do you hope to be accomplishing in your workI know that's a terribly broad question. JAIME: I hope it's stuff that will still be fresh 20-50 years from now. I hope it doesn't lose anything in the long run. Even if I'm writing about contemporary things, punks and rock and roll and all that, I hope people can look back at it as a piece of history instead of a gimmick. Because we've never tried gimmicks in the comic from the beginning. Now when we're advertising the comic we use Maggie and Hopey because they're the biggest sellers of the comic. But there was never anything "highconcept' ' about this comic, unlike a lot of other ones that died after 10 issues, and people wonder why.
EA
T T H R E E
GROTH: He was a real ballbuster? GILBERT: I don't know if you remember in your school, but there were a lot of teachers who didn't like you, who did treat you with a prejudice, that did fuck around with you, even in grading. And I just got the feeling that Bergman was that kind of guy. He's a child psychologist or something like that now. GROTH: But your mother accepted the F? GILBERT: Yeah, she accepted it. She was pissed, but I think she felt, this F makes sense, because I was always a problem. I stopped learning in fourth grade, learning properly that is. I'm suprised that I made it this far, that I can think, because I just gave up on school, got bored with it. I just wanted to draw. What year did the Batman TV show come out? '66? I remember since third grade all I wanted to do was draw Batman. Batman meant something to me and long division didn't mean shit. And that's the way it was with me. GROTH: Were you yourself reconciled to life as a failure? GILBERT: Yeah. I never thought I would amount to anything. I just thought, this is me, I want to draw Frankenstein. There was a period when Mario used to collect the Rocket's Blast Comics Collector and I would check out this fan art and have a good time. It was pretty dumb, but I liked it. There was this one guy named Jim Jones who would do these really stylized cartoons. And I thought, these are fabulous. Even as a little kid I liked them. And he did a short article on Dick Briefer's Frankenstein, [snaps fingers] Boom! Fifth grade, that's all I drew, his Frankenstein. I didn't do my homework. The teacher would give us an assignment and I would close my book and start drawing Frankenstein. I resigned myself to a life of stupidity. [Laughter] GROTH: At what point did you realize that you were not going to become a failure and that you were, in fact, headed toward success? GILBERT: Well, I didn't think I was going to be suc cessful, but I had ideas. In high school I had ideas. I wanted to do the ultimate comic strip somehow. I don't know where that came from, but I remember thinking about it and telling my friends, "I'm going to do this ultimate comic strip." Sort of like what I'm doing with "Heartbreak Soup" now, except that "Heartbreak Soup" has some substance. I think it was going to be a space opera. I wanted to cross Gone With the Wind with Forbidden Planet. I just always had this feeling that I had that epic in me. I've got a lot of notes on it, but it's really bad stuff. Actually, I thought more in terms of films, but I also thought there's no fucking way, I'm not going to be a film director. I didn't know how people did that. I didn't know how you got from being a normal guy to directing Star Wars. So I thought, well, I could do it in comics. And I always had an interest in comics, even when I wasn't following them to closely. In high school I didn't follow comics too closely because I was interested in [shouts] GIRLS! and beer and partying and stuff. GROTH: That would have been in the mid-'70s. GILBERT: Yeah. I don't know why, but I started doing stories about women in a more positive sense. I got into the big Star Wars thingtaking the barbarians into outer spacebefore Star Mbrs. That way I could draw rockets and women in skimpy costumes. But I started leaning towards the women characters and giving them per sonalities. I preferred to draw the women, so why create a male character when I can have all the good stuffpersonality, intelligence, whateverin the women characters? Then I started creating women characters who weren't barbarian girls. They lived on Earth and the bar-
Right page: Barbarianettes from spacea sketch b y Gilbert from 1978. Also a panel from "BEM."
GROTH: How were you in school? GILBERT: Back in grade school I was the first person in my family to get an F and I was really surprised my mom didn't beat the hell out of me. I think she saw it coming in me. I think she knew that I was going to be this guy who wasn't going to do well in life. GROTH: An F in what subject? GILBERT: I don't remember actually. I think it was English or Literature. The teacher didn't like me, a guy named Mr. Bergman.. .and if I ever see that guy again I'm going to kick his fucking ass, I swear to God. [Laughter]
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those old Heavy Metal editorials, you don't know what's going on. I was still pretty young. I sort of got lost along the way of doing my women characters, because I was always telling myself, "They don't want to see this. This isn't interesting. I've never seen this in comics before so it's not going to be anything. These aren't the days of undergrounds anymore where you can just do anything." I guess I was at a really depressed state and I didn't think anything I did was worth it. "BEM" was a grab bag of all that Heavy Metal type of humor. I drew Luba the way I did in the first "BEM" because they always have these big-breasted women in these stories, so I thought I'll make mine with bigger breasts. Villains were always stupid, so I'll make mine stupider. I exaggerated everything. I didn't have any real thread. I didn't have any reason to be doing anything. It was almost like doodling. I wasn't really serious about it, but that was the only story I was work ing on at the time. That was the only thing I had, and I didn't want to start something new. That's when Mario said, "Let's do the comic," and so I thought I'd put more chapters on it. If you read the first chapter, it's all bullshit. It's just, now I'll change the scene, now I'll change the scene... FIORE: That's just what I thought! /Laughter/. GILBERT: It's really clear in the first few chapters. Then I figured, "Well, I wrote all this bullshit, let me try to wrap it up somehow." I have to admit, we were always good at that. We could just get ourselves into a ridiculous situation, and somehow manage to get ourselves out of it. Not all the time, but that's how we tell stories. We get ourselves into these rotten situationslike, what am I gonna do?and we get out of it. GROTH: In your 32-page self-published comic there was about half of what eventually became to be the whole ' 'BEM.'' Did you intend for it to become as long as it was? GILBERT: No. GROTH: Because it seems to me that the second half of' 'BEM'' took off in even wilder directions than the first half, and I was wondering if that was planned that way. GILBERT: I think it was going to be more of a straight adventure deal. Then you said we needed 32 more pages. I didn't want to junk "BEM" because I didn't know what else to do. I felt if I was going to end "BEM" I had to make it worth reading, because so far I didn't think it was. GROTH: You once told me that you didn't do "Heart break Soup' 'first because you didn't think anyone would be receptive to it or interested in it. GILBERT: Right. With the second issue of Love & Rockets I basically forced myself to do "Radio Zero" and the "Errata Stigmata" story because I was scared. I did not know what to do. Jaime had already grabbed the Mag gie and Hopey thing. I could have done Bang and Inez, which was somewhat similar, but I thought Jaime had grabbed that and he was already doing a real good job at it. I really didn't know what I was doing, so I bluffed it. I postponed things with "Radio Zero." FIORE: How did ' 'BEM'' turn into ' 'Heartbreak Soup''? GILBERT: "Heartbreak Soup" was with me since my early teens. That was my movie geek period, when I started watching every movie made before 1950 that was on TV. I'd watch anything from before 1950, because there was a romantic feel to those films, good or bad. I had no taste, I liked them all. Then I progressed to '50s movies, and I got into foreign movies, and when I would watch Sophia Loren movies like Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow or when I saw Black Orpheus I always thought, "This would make a great [comic] series." Sort of like Gasoline Alley, but use an exotic locale, so I could draw
barian girls would visit them. I did it because I just felt like drawing girls sitting around some apartment, similar things to what Jaime's doing. You'll see some of that stuff in the sketchbook, the stories about Inez and Bang. They were offshoots of the space-galactic barbarian stuff. Then Star Whrs hit and that's what everybody did. I eventually started drawing the proper size with ink, I learned to use a nib, I learned to use a thesaurus and a dictionary [Laughs]. GROTH: Wis the self-published Love & Rockets comic the first time you actually published your work? GILBERT: We had already sent things to fanzines before that, but that was just spot illustrations. I was desperate at the time. I wasn't working or anything and I wondered what I was going to do with my life. I was in my early 20s and I thought, "I got to do something." GROTH: You were living at home? GILBERT: Yeah, I was living at home, starving, just drawing. I was out of high school and all my friends had moved away. I had to decide what I was going to do. And Mario said, let's put out this comic book. It took about a year to get around to it though because Jaime didn't have any work at the time that he felt was worth printing, so he came up with the Maggie and Hopey stuff. And it was the same with me. "BEM" was the only story I was work ing on at the time. I had abandoned it six months before because I thought it was a stupid story, but when Mario said let's do it, it was the only thing I had. FIORE: Explain what "BEM" is. GILBERT: "BEM" was the first story I did for Love & Rockets. It was a quasi-Weavy Metal-type story. MARIO: Yeah, because we were still influenced a lot by Heavy Metal. GILBERT: The magazine Heavy Metal. I just thought it was really funny.. .you see, I didn't know the transla tions were bad. I thought the stories were supposed to be funny. People tell me now that all those Moebius translations were bad. I thought they were being funny. I thought it was like National Lampoon, it was so far out there for me, that I just thought these were comic books like the National Lampoon, with wacky humor that's so far out that nobody's going to get it. Because if you read
T h e t w o panels in t h e center show Luba's transformation from " B E M " to "Heartbreak Soup." Below: Inez a n d Bang, Gilbert's Maggie a n d Hopey-like characters.
girls in tight skirts with baskets of food on their heads. It was a boyish fantasy. GROTH: At what point did you start seeing foreign films? GILBERT: Well, I'd go to the library a lot and look at film magazines because they had neat pictures. I would always look at the sections on foreign fdms and they would have a scene from Bicycle Thief or 400 Blows or something. And they always intrigued me because, as I was saying earlier, I would think, I don't understand this but I will someday. I always had that attitude. But foreign films to me were a dream world where they did things differently. And they were always kind of sexy. That was before porn movies became a big deal so the closest thing you could do was see pictures of a foreign movie. There's that one shot of Marcello Mastroianni just burying himself in Sophia Loren's chest from Marriage Italian Style or something like that. And I thought, "These people are crazy, but what a life." Then I began actually seeing films by Eellini, Bunuel, and DeSica. I didn't necessarily understand them, but I liked that world, particularly Fellini's, because it was just like a zoo with all these sexy women running around. I thought, this is the life! There was something that was charming about the people. And it reminded me of my background, my childhood. I would watch a Sophia Loren movie and I would get that feeling of recognition. GROTH: Where did you see them? GILBERT: On television. I remember I saw La Dolce Vita late at night. It was dubbed and I didn't understand a word of it, but it was crazy and sexy. So I guess it was just out of indulgence at first, just because they were taboo movies. FIORE: You've also said you'd become interested in your roots... GILBERT: That was falling into place, too. There was always great stories that we'd heard from our uncles and aunts and our grandmother. They told these great stories about when they were living in Mexico or when they were living in Texas, where my mother's folks were from. And we thought, "If we could just tell those stories somehow..." But we figured that nobody white could understand this. We were naive. But, then, at the same time, there were movies about white kids with elements like that, and I thought that if [white people] could get that, maybe they could get this. So, all this was in the back of my head, even though I was still churning out fantasy stories, because I figured fantasy was what people read in comics. I put that element of "Heartbreak Soup" in "BEM," when they have a big party for the solar eclipse. The reason I jumped from that to "Heartbreak Soup" was because Jaime's stories were getting really good response, and mine were getting sort of mediocre response. It wasn't because I was jealous, it was because they were right. They were pointing out things in Jaime's stories, and I was saying, "Wait a minute, I can do that." FIORE: What were they pointing out? GILBERT: They were talking about Maggie and Hopey's relationship, and how Maggie seemed like a real person even if she was in a strange background, and I had been doing stuff like that before with Bang and Inez. I thought, "I understand this, I know this is better, and if they're willing to accept it, I'm willing to do it." But he'd already done Maggie and Hopey, and if I'd used Bang and Inez it would have been the same thing. I had to stand on my own, I had to have something on my own that was just as good but was completely different. So all that stuff, all those Sophia Loren movies and all that stuff came back to me. I dared myself to do "Heartbreak Soup."
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FIORE: So "Heartbreak Soup" is a combination of stories you've heard, movies you've admired, and elements from your own life? GILBERT: Yeah, elements from my own life. Like, when I have the teenage guys talking, that's usually just me and my friends when we were young, talking about girls or whatever. But I understood I had to change it a bit, to make it like a Central American village. FIORE: Did you study Central America at all? GILBERT: No, no, if there's one thing I can't stand, it's research. [Laughs] That's another reason why Palomar is an imaginary town, because I'd hate to do the research. FIORE: The main holdover from "BEM" to "Heartbreak Soup" is the character Luba, who is the center of the stories in many ways. GILBERT: Yes, because I was originally doing "Heart break Soup" as a sort of roundabout way of doing a "BEM" sequel. FIORE: So what was Luba at the start? GILBERT: In "BEM" she was just a voodoo woman, an island lady who wanted power, wanted to take over the world. You know, it was just bullshit. [Laughs] She was sort of like Corben's queen bitch in Den. I just did it, I didn't think about it at all. I decided to do "Heart break Soup" as a sequel to "BEM". At the end of "BEM" you'll remember that Luba starts a revolution. I thought "Heartbreak Soup" would be the story of Luba after she's ousted from the revolutionary party, and she's hiding out in this little town. Then I'd reintroduce "BEM" towards
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be totally obvious. That's why Heraclio was originally just another one of the gang. I always intended him to be the protagonist but I didn't emphasize him so much as I did characters like Luba, Sheriff Chelo. I actually created a lot of these characters just to push Heraclio to the background a little bit, then I brought him out slowly. GROTH: Did you learn about these characters as you drew them? Did things keep coming out and relationships start imposing themselves on you? GILBERT: Sure. Usually, the next story is being writ ten in my head as I'm doing the present one. I have the lives of a character or two planned out to their deaths. FIORE: Do you have any particular themes you 're work ing towards, or are you just telling stories spontaneously? GILBERT: I'm not s u r e . . . MARIO: I wouldn't think it was that spontaneous, because I can remember that as far back as when he was starting "Heartbreak Soup," he was talking about "Human Diastrophism." I mean, he had all this stuff planned out. I couldn't believe it. He says, "One of these days I'm going to do a story about this murderer who does t h i s . . . " GILBERT: I talked about the murder story two years ago. GROTH: I'd like to talk about some of the characters. I think one time you said you were going to do "Heart break Soup" for a long, long time, over the years. Do you intend to explore all of the characters in "Heartbreak Soup"? GILBERT: I plan on using most of the characters, but not necessarily going too much into their past, because some characters just work as they are. Particularly Vicente, the guy with the disfigured face. I recognized that he works best the way he is, not knowing too much about him. I'm almost sorry that I put so much emphasis on Luba, because I think she would have worked like Vicente, more of a force of nature. But then at the same time, it's worked out, because Luba has become the center
BETO: Jaime doing Maggie and Hopey freed me from that because I would have done the same thing.
the end of the story. As I was planning this I thought I've got enough here to tell a real story. And I trusted Gary and Kim to support me in this. I didn't really talk to [Gary] about it much until he saw it, but I figured from reading his views in the Journal that he would support it, and if not I'll just have to cut it off next issue. I took a chance on getting rid of the science fiction elements because I knew that would be a problem with a lot of readers that were reading Love & Rockets for a different reason. There actually is one panel in "Heartbreak Soup" that is from the old "BEM," that I didn't take out because it still works, where Ofelia is telling Luba, "I told you not to talk to the locals." And Luba says, "Oh, we'll be O.K. here." And that's because they were hiding out originally. But I threw out all the "BEM" stuff except that panel. GROTH: Obviously, after you did the first "Heartbreak Soup" you decided to concentrate on that. GILBERT: Yeah, it was at the period when Jaime and I and some friends had been going out to the punk rock scene in L.A. and that opened up our eyes to say, "Fuck everybody else, I'm just going to do my work, my way." I've got nothing to lose. I'm not in competition with John Byrne and Chris Claremont, I'm not doing what they're doing. So my attitude was full steam ahead. I'm going to do this "Heartbreak Soup" strip and I'm going to really go for it. I had nothing to lose. FIORE: How did Luba evolve from the character in "BEM" to the character in "Heartbreak Soup?" GILBERT: She almost wrote herself. At the time I was very sensitive to what feminists were saying about how women were portrayed in popular culture, movies, and comic books. At the time I was thinking, "How could I draw a character like this and think I'm doing something progressive?" So I had to try real hard to make her a good character. And there are still people who won't read it because Luba's tits are too big. GROTH: Did you pretty much know what was going on when you first started "Heartbreak Soup," or was this as much a journey of discovery for you as the reader? GILBERT: Part of it was discovery. What I needed was a protagonist. You have to see things through a particular character's eyes. But I didn't want the main character to
Below: Heraclio w a s introduced a s just another member of the gang s o that his emergence asthe protagonist could b e gradual.
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of "Heartbreak Soup." As I have her kids grow up, the stories will be about her kids and their lives. GROTH: Why did you jump the story between the first ' 'Heartbreak Soup'' and the second one "Act of Contri tion. '' It jumped dramatically from one period to another. H&s that planned from the beginning or did you just choose to do that after you finished the first one? GILBERT: No. When I finished the first one, I had to get away from it. I wanted it to be its own piece, just in case I got hit by a train or something. I didn't want to spoil it with stories similar to it. So I took the chance and jumped ahead a few years. That way I could utilize* the first story as flashbacks. G R O T H : There's certainly this sense in "Heartbreak Soup'' of time having passed and people having a past. GILBERT: I've planned it for 20 years, and five are up. Now, you think, "Twenty years? Oh my god, that's longer than Cerebus\ GROTH: You're talking about 20 of your years? GILBERT: Yeah. When I first told people that a couple years ago, they said, "That's ridiculous." But not really, because five years is up already. GROTH: It's better than doing 62 different super-heroes. GILBERT: Exactly, and they go through so many dif ferent writers and artists. I plan to have just a handful of characters left at the end, and all the others will have either died or moved away. I'm not sure which characters those are, but I'm thinking that maybe Luba and Chelo can be the last two little old ladies living in this futuristic city that's Palomar. I'm just toying with ideas. I don't know who's going to be left. GROTH: Did you know what was going to happen to Tonantzin? GILBERT: No, that just sort of happened. I was never that happy with Tonantzin. I liked drawing her, but she didn't seem right to me. There's something missing about her. She was one of the later characters I created. Her sister Diana was a more complete character. But Tonant zin was just there. She was almost generic. I could stick her in any situation. And then the thing about her becom ing confused and politically aware, that came as a sur prise to me. GROTH: Did you know that Tonantzin was going to kill herself when you started writing "Human Diastrophism"? GILBERT: No, that was the last thing I knew. The other things I knew. G R O T H : It just seemed inevitable to you at that point? GILBERT: Yeah, and not because I had to get rid of her. I could have had that story end, and then gone back to business as usual next issue. I had read an article [in the LA. Weekly] about a man who immolated himself, and the people who knew him kept emphasizing that he
Above: Tonantzin near the end. Below: In happier days.
wasn't crazy. GROTH: Was that here in LA. ? GILBERT: Yeah. And I knew, reading the article, that there are people who are serious and who can't think of any other way of getting their message across. I could just see that some people are serious and we shouldn't dismiss them as crazy, thinking, "They just committed suicide, they just wanted to be on T V . " GROTH: But one did get the impression that Tonantzin was a little bent. GILBERT: Yeah, that's just it. At the end of "Human Diastrophism," nobody but Heraclio knows that Tonant zin died. Of course, that's going to have serious reper cussions in the future "Heartbreak Soup" stories. She's going to be talked about in the past tense. GROTH: Now, will you ever go back and do stories about Tonantzin now that she's dead? GILBERT: There'll be flashbacks. I have a scene in mind where somebody's walking through the town and he's thinking, "God, I miss those fried babosas. I can remember Tonantzin just whipping around the corner, singing to herself." And then I'll have her whipping around the corner. As the scene switches you'll see the guy ten years younger. I'll use a flashback that way. Both Jaime and I decided to use flashbacks that way, because we can jump back and forth as long as we keep it clear how old the character is between the changes. We find telling it that way better than having a character or a panel with 600 words in a balloon explaining something that happened ten years ago. It's a visual medium, it's a way of telling stories. If you'll notice, we're a lot better with flashbacks now. That's one way I think comics work even better than movies, because in a film you've got to hire an actor who looks like that person ten years younger. One of the best usages of that in an American movie was in Godfather Part II, where Al Pacino is thinking about things that happened in the first movie, and James Caan came out. And I thought that was a sweet touch because there was James Caan, he was alive againyou remember in the Godfather he was gunned downand here he is again, he's happy and he's being a jerk and he's bother ing his brothers. And I thought, I could do t h a t . . . GROTH: Is most of the stuff about village and small town life in "Heartbreak Soup" simply made up? GILBERT: A lot of it is made up, and of course there's stuff from movies, too. It's a mythical town. The characters aren't necessarily Mexican. A little kid from Colombia can read it, and think that it's his town, and so maybe it is. GROTH: What's the purpose of keeping it ambiguous, that it's not Mexico and it's not Colombia, and it's not really anything in particular? GILBERT: Because I'd be restricted by too many rules, too many traditions, too many facts about the country. I still like the fact that it's surreal fantasy. People used to talk about it being really gritty and down to earth and banal, the day-to-day drudgery. I thought them Palomarians were having a good time. I never had anybody trudging to work. Usually, when they're dig ging a hole or something, they're goofing around, laughing. GROTH: Do you do any research in terms of architec ture, or family life? GILBERT: Most of it is from what I remember when I was a kid. My momma and my aunts talking about when they were young, telling a story about where they were, "Well, we were next to the train yard and they had this big square, and there was a little market there." Things
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like that. I guess I retain images pretty well from films, and where I've been. Actually, Jaime's really good at it. I'm really surprised at how accurate his portrayal of a small neighborhood is. And Jaime doesn't go out and draw like Crumb and a lot of good artists who go out and they draw and get good at it. He just knocks it off and it's surprisingly close. GROTH: Let me give you an example, the slugs, the babosas. Is that just something you made up? GILBERT: That's something I made up, but everything I make up has to feel like it's real, or seem like it's real. Actually, my wife Carol told me a story about how her dad was working in New Guinea on oil rigs, and they hired some of the local guys. One day they all dropped their shovels, and they started yelling in whatever language it is, and one guy ran up a tree, and grabbed this huge slug, and they were all really happy, because it was a prime delicacy. Where stories like that repulse most people, I thought "That's a great story!" GROTH: Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't you drop a line in one of the stories where you mention that Soledad is Manuel's ex-lover? GILBERT: Yeah. GROTH: You dropped it and left it... is that true? Do you intend to explore that at all or is that going to be one of those ambiguous loose ends? GILBERT: Yeah, you're right. I never intended it to be ambiguous. I thought it was self-explantory that Manuel and Soledad grew up together and experimented like a lot of boys do and that was the extent of it. Manuel didn't realize that Soledad fell in love with him. And since they were friends since birth Manuel just laughed it off and that's why Soledad killed him. GROTH: Because when you say ex-lovers that means to me more than just childhood experimentation. GILBERT: Ex-lovers sounds better than ex-fuckers. Manuel and Soledad were bi-sexual. But I try to emphasize that Manuel never took any relationship seriously, although his lovers usually did. GROTH: You know, when Ire-read the work, even though I had read it before and was aware of it all, Manuel's death almost took me by surprise again because he was such a primal force and a likable character, and of course there was something almost unstoppable about his sense of joy, and youth, and vigor. So I was wondering why you saw fit to have him killed so early in the series. GILBERT: To borrow Michael Cimino's line, it was a dramatic device. I wanted the original "Heartbreak Soup"
story to be a complete story. I wanted to have life, death, birth, coming of age, sexy girls, the whole kit and kaboodle, I wanted it all in this first story, funny kids, funny teenagers, funny adults, and death. I was thinking in classic terms then and I try not to think that way anymore, because it becomes cliched, but I was thinking in terms of grand stories like Les Miserables. GROTH: Now was the death of Manuel any kind of a moral judgement on your part?
Above: Gilbert's fictional "fried babosas" were inspired by a n in-law's anecdote.
LISTEN TO YOVKSeiF... :SOB(.. PIPOWAS JUSTA piece ortieAT TO YOU..NOTHING eise... AND THAT'S THE WAY IT IS. HUH? JUST-JUST SUCK ITUP AND SHIT IT OUT. HAM '
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GILBERT: No. Not consciously. GROTH: In other words, he wasn't being punished for his sexual promiscuity. GILBERT: No, absolutely not. That was the problem that I had when Tonantzin killed herselfshe was Miss Hotpantsso there goes two, Manuel and Tonantzin. Hopefully, that's just a coincidence, because there's no conscious effort to have my characters die because they screwed around. That means Luba should be dead any day now. GROTH: / want to ask you about your attitude towards sex, because in both yours and Jaime's stories sex is very openly discussed and acted upon, there's bi-sexuality in the strips, there's homosexuality, and god knows there's a lot of heterosexual activity in the strips. I guess I want to ask you what your own attitude towards that kind of open sexual display is? Do you impose any kind of moral judgement on sexual promiscuity, homosexuality, bi-sexuality? GILBERT: I don't want to sound old fashioned, but I think if it's between consenting adults then go ahead and have fun. That's become an old fashioned attitude now. GROTH: Has it? With the new conservatism that might be considered out of fashion. GILBERT: You're probably right. But since I was a young teen I figured... GROTH: How did you develop such fairly liberaând progressive attitudes about sex? It would occur to me that your upbringing would have been somewhat conservative since your parents were from Mexico. Or am I wrong? GILBERT: Since I was young I reasoned, "If I can expect to have what I want, then so can everybody else." GROTH: Did those attitudes ever run into conflict with your parents teaching or any religious upbringing or anything like that? GILBERT: I'm not sure. GROTH: I'm just wondering if you expressed these fairly liberal attitudes towards sex to your parents or school authorities or religious authorities and if you ever ran into conflict. GILBERT: I kept this stuff to myself. I never talked to my parents about it. Actually, my dad died when I was pretty young, so it was just my poor mom raising these kids and I never talked to her about things like that. She had enough to worry about. GROTH: / was curious about that because I think I spot ted it in Jaime's work immediately, this casual attitude towards bi-sexuality and then in your work. GILBERT: If I do have all this wild sex, sexy women and horny guys, it's because I myself am a sex-crazed maniac. GROTH: You 're a fairly conventional guy, married at the age of 28 after dating Carol for quite a while. GILBERT: Six years. GROTH: There was one interesting attitude that I saw in your strip that I might have interpreted wrongly. In the ' 'Bullnecks and Bracelets'' piece it seemed to me that you were suggesting that city life represented a kind of decadence in contra-distinction to the life of Palomar a theory that might be blown away with "Human Diastrophism," but then I also noted this story where Heraclio goes to college and his collegemates were deriding Palomar and he stated unequivocally and pretty authoratatively that they were wrong. I was wondering, is that a strongly held point of view of yours, that attitude about small town life? GILBERT: Yeah, I would lean toward Heraclio's point of view...
FUNNY, BUT LUBA AND I HAVE BECOME. PRBTTY GOOD BUDDIES IN THE LAST YEAR OR SO. CARMEN STILL DOESN'T LIKE HER BUT SHE USUALLY KEEPS QUIET ABOUT IT...
Above a n d below: From " F o rthe Love of Carmen."

OUR WHWS WAS NICLl NOBARflHa... NO FI&HTS,
GROTH: Because I don't want to ascribe to you what your characters are thinking, but it came across so forcefully, it seemed like it was almost an opinion you believed. GILBERT: In "Human Diastrophism" the poor guy who's killed, the Swedish archeologist, sees Palomar as a place of beauty and he loves it, because of that simple lifestyle and the great scenery, and he says, "They just can't see the forest for the trees here." And that's basically it, Palomar is a nice little place, it's dull, but it's a nice place to live. People are generally cool there, Chelo has probably only had to shoot the gun six times in her whole career as sheriff. Heraclio is us, so he can see the beauty in i t . . . I remember somebody once saying, why emphasize Heraclio so much because he's such a wimp, and that hit me because I thought, am I being too sen sitive? Is he like Charlie Brown or something? So I had to think about it and I thought, naah, he's not a wimp. GROTH: He's a good character through whose eyes you can see the town, because he's educated and he has a perspective, so he's a good observer. GILBERT: And he doesn't really judge too harshly. He's not too critical of things because the guys he hangs out with are pretty much nut cases, but they're his friends and he loves his friends. When he becomes intellectual he doesn't lose that closeness to people. Heraclio loves his friends. Well, Israel he doesn't any more because of what happened with Carmen and that's going to be ex plored a little more, too. GROTH: Now is there a difficulty in Carmen and Heraclio's relationship where Heraclio obviously has a better education? GILBERT: She's intimidated by him, that's all. She doesn't want to feel stupid. She feels weird enough that she doesn't know who she is. She was found somewhere, they named her Carmen. She doesn't know what's going to happen to her next. Nobody knows anything about her, she doesn't know anything about herself, so she's already spooked. To have Heraclio reading and talking about things that she doesn't understand just spooks her more. So that thing about her rejecting One Hundred Years of
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Solitude, it's just because she's spooked. GROTH: When Heraclio asks Carmen to marry him, she made a very big point of asking him if he'd ever had sex with anyone else. He said no and she married him. I think it was made fairly clear that her decision rested upon his answer, at least he thought so. GILBERT: Yes, he thought so. GROTH: What point were you trying to make there? GILBERT: The same thing: that Carmen is spooked. I thought maybe that some women would catch it, that if he had sex before with other women, then he might have sex with another woman while he was with Carmen. I might have been too vague with that. But I think some women caught that. GROTH: Because that was a fairly important point on Carmen's part. GILBERT: It's just like I said, it's that Carmen's spooked constantly. She hides it by being very gregarious. She's like all my women, she's hot to trot, and she always had this crush on Israel. If I didn't explain that well enough, I will later. That's another thing good about the series that I've got, that if I screw up, I've got plenty of room and time to repair it. GROTH: Right. If you think of something that supersedes something that you wrote and drew before and it doesn't quite fit into a new game plan, will you actually go back and change something? GILBERT: You mean change the meaning of something? GROTH: Rewrite a page, redraw a panel, so you wouldn't be burdened with something. GILBERT: Oh, no. If I write something and it's printed in the book, it's there. I'll edit things for the reprint books, but it won't change what's gone on before. GROTH: Another one of these ambiguities Ifound in the stories that I wanted to ask you about was, Heraclio was deflowered by Luba and was absolutely scared shitless that Carmen was going to find out. Eventually he told Carmen, but off-panel. GILBERT: I just thought there were too many soapy elements in the story as it was, and to have another con frontation was just too much. I'll probably have the con frontation later, and that will lead to another story. GROTH: What does Carmen have against Luba? GILBERT: I don't know. It was just sort of a personality quirk. I just noticed my girl friends in high school, whenever they'd see somebody like Luba or in general a girl with a womanly look, immediately they would throw all self-control out the window and just become completely rude. It always fascinated me you could be as progressive as anybody, but when it comes to those feelings.. .it was a realistic way for a particular woman to react to another particular woman. Not all women are like that of course. Covered my ass. GROTH: One of the things I was surprised at in ' 'Heart break Soup" is how much goes on between the panels, how much is hinted at and how much you don't explain, but the reader is simply faced with and accepts. One of the things of course is Pipo whose life story sort of shot through there like a rocket. First she's deflowered by Soledad, she has a kind of romantic tryst with Manuel, then she marries Gato, but the readers aren't quite sure how that came about, then Gato evidently just turns into a swine, and now she's divorcing him. GILBERT: She's divorced and living in Palomar by herself. GROTH: And then there was a fairly grim episode in "Bullnecks and Bracelets" where she tries to have an affair with Israel.
GILBERT: That was to show how bad her relationship with Gato was. GROTH: Which it did. /Laughter/ Now you could obviously take Pipo's story and write half a dozen stories about her. GILBERT: Yeah, I plan to. GROTH: Is that right?
PIPO'S BACK LIVING IN PALOMAR AND IS IN THE PROCESS OF DIVORCING 01'GATO. THIS MAKES CABMEN PRETTY HAPPY, NOT TO MENTION THE LOCAL BACHELORS.
GILBERT: After the major story I'm doing now, "The Poison River," which oudines Luba's life, from when she's born ugto the first "Heartbreak Soup" story, I'm going to go around to different characters. I might do Chelo's story, because there hasn't been too much about her. Then Pipo too. I'm just going to show parts of Pipo.. .Pipo's barely there. I'm surprised people even recognize her. All that stuff Luba was saying about her in issue #24 was true, about the nose job, the breast implants. She's one of those crazy women that's already pretty and then they go and
pj (above) and discussion of Pipo (below).

p o
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do this stuff to themselves. You ask, "What'd you do that for?" They do it because they can afford it. I haven't emphasized it, but Pipo's pretty well offwhen she was married to Gato she saved a little bundle of her own. GROTH: The story's so organic, do you find that troublesome at all? That you 're locked in, whatever you write and draw? You can't change if you come up with a better idea that would supersede the meaning of a previous story. GILBERT: Oh, yeah, you always get better ideas all the time. One of my clunkiest stories is "An American in Palomar." If I did it now, I would be 60% better, just because I know what I'm doing now. I'm more confident. At the time I wasn't that confident in doing that story. GROTH: Well, you know, it's funny, because I read that, the last piece of your work that I read, and I thought it was actually a little less good than I remembered it be ing. I think it's probably because I read a lot of stuff after ward which I think was actually better. GILBERT: That was at the period where we'd pretty much settled into our little niche and we relaxed a bit. We didn't let it go, we were always concerned about mak ing it good, but it was just a point where we slowed up. GROTH: You were coasting? GILBERT: I guess so. But in the case of "An American in Palomar" it was clunky because I wasn't sure what I wanted to say in it. I've got a lot of pages that I tooWout and re-did, just to make the story clearer. GROTH: Now, how much of an exploiter did you mean to make Howard Miller? Did you mean to condemn him? GILBERT: No, I just really wanted to make a bad artist. He did think Palomar was lovely, but I didn't really emphasize that, I was always having him put it down. Like a lot of foreigners in poorer countries. GROTH: slightly condescending. GILBERT: Yeah, and just not understanding the culture because they're too busy having their vacation or whatever. Like I said, the story's clunky. But it's too late. GROTH: Actually, I thought you humanized the character suprisingly in about a page and a half at the end of 'Human Diastrophism." GILBERT: Right. GROTH: In fact, there was one panel that was excep tionally good, where he came across much more as a three-dimensional character. GILBERT: As a matter tact, later on, I'm probably going to do stories about Howard Miller. See, now that Tonant zin is gone, I'm going to do stories about all the people who were involved with her, what they thought of her.
Howard Miller by this time has grown up. But I haven't really shown him growing up, you just get the result at the end of "Human Diastrophism." He's getting better as an artist, he's getting better as a human being. GROTH: Now, Howard Miller is a white, middle-class, urban guy. Does it intimidate you to go outside the Mex ican milieu? GILBERT: No, because a lot of my friends are from that background, and I have no problem with it. I thought readers were getting a little comfortable with Palomar. That's why I brought in the slugs and stuff like that. They forgot that this was a different culture and a different place. Our prejudices in real lifeI mean, I always joke that if Maggie and Hopey went to Palomar, Hopey'd probably just make fun of the people there behind their backs. Luba would think they were the weirdest people in the world, she'd not understand why they did that to their hair. GROTH: Yes, there is a certain sense of Palomarian nationalism among the characters. I forget which characters in which stories, but occasionally a character would talk about the U.S., how the food is bad and the music is lousy. There's this odd kind of chauvinism. GILBERT: Yes. And then I had Howard Miller saying the same thing. The music was lousy, the food's bad, but the beer's good. Because there's that old cliche, "Well, I don't know about blacks, but I sure like their girls." That sort of thing, "Mexicans, I don't know, but their beer and their girls are O.K." That old thing. Even the worst racists can make an effort to like something about those they disdain. GROTH: Could you tell me a little about how you actually developed your drawing? GILBERT: It's organic. I've taken more time to clarify my art. I don't think I necessarily draw better, I think I just clarify my art better. You're able to look at the draw ing a lot quicker, if you choose, and know what's going on. Whereas before a lot of dialogue was helping out the drawing. GROTH: How do you think you've improved in the last five years in terms of drawing? GILBERT: Making things more naturalistic. Not using so many crutches. Like I said, a lot of times in my stories, the dialogue is helping the drawing a lot. And now I'm using the drawing, the image, and then the dialogue. I just think I'm becoming looser and more confident. And the characters are starting to look different from one another. Some of the characters used to run together, they would look the same. That's a lot of characters, how many is it, 50? I think some fan counted once, and it was 52 or something. GROTH: Do you practice drawing? GILBERT: No, actually I don't. I don't know if you've talked to Jaime about this, but I don't sit around and doodle like I used to. That's all I did up until Love & Rockets. I love doing it, but I never do any leisure drawing, unless I force myself to do it, because all my drawing now is for getting the book out. GROTH: On average, I think it takes you guys about three days a page. If you averaged it out over the course of a year. GILBERT: Oh, sure, it'd be three, sometimes more. GROTH: So where does the time go in doing the stories, is it more in writing or drawing or vice-versa? GILBERT: It's both, but the worst is rewriting. Sometimes it's the drawing that takes longer than the writing. In a way drawing is writing, because if you don't have it typed up in your head, you don't know what you're going to be drawing. The storytelling has got to be right
H o w a r d Miller, originally s e e n in " A n American in Palomar," returns f o r a brief a p p e a r a n c e i n Love & Rockets # 2 6 .
<CATHY, TWffiES A POINT FOR SOME OF US WHERE TALK Oft ART OK PRC PA SAMOA JUSTISH'T CNOU&H... AND M NOT ADVOCATING FASCISN. OR NUTOKISM OR ANYTHING CRA2Y LIKE THAT. gUT-->
IU-" < " < . . . ! TRULY BELIEVE THAT IT TAKES A * M l LOVS 10 WANT TO CO THAT FAR IN HOPES OF MAKING SOFIE KIND OF SSIILOUS CHANGE FOR THE BETTER HOWEVBX MODEST THAT CHANGE
< AND TMAT5 WHAT IT LOOKS LUCE ON MOST PEOPLES T.V. SETS, CAWY, gUT I'VE BTFN TO THESE PLACES AND I'VE SO* WHAT THEY'RE COINC THROUGH.,
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because I only want to do it one time. If I miss something, I don't like to go back; I have, but I don't like to. I've held up stories for a week, just to get a person saying the right sentence. GROTH: / know. GILBERT: [Laughs] Yeah, you'd know. I don't like do ing it, but I'm not doing it for fun. I'm doing it because I want it right. And I've got such a nice publisher and editor who allows me this. Because I know a lot of guys who don't have that privilege. Good artists, too. GROTH: Will, John Byrne sometimes takes four or five minutes to get the right line. GILBERT: I want that in. [Laughter] GROTH: You threw me off. Can you take me through a typical story of how you go about it? What is the first thing you do? What are the stages you go through to do a typical story? GILBERT: Well, I usually start sketching. Sometimes I'll just draw a scene, I'll draw Luba talking to somebody or I'll have her bending over, using a shovel. Then I can write a whole scene around that. Why is she doing it? Who's talking to her? Why are they talking to her? Sometimes I can write whole stories that way. That's how I used to do it. Now, I pretty much have the next story coming together as I'm working on the present story. These last two issues have taken so long because I swear I go through 10 or 11 different stories till I get one. And it's ridiculous because I usually go back to the first one. GROTH: But in "Heartbreak Soup" one story can act as a springboard for the next story. GILBERT: Yes, because it is this whole "expanding universe." GROTH: So a drawing might actually begin the creative process? GILBERT: Sure. GROTH: At what point do you actually sit down and write panel for panel? Or do you write an outline first? GILBERT: Well, with "Human Diastrophism" I wrote an outline, and I found that that worked really well, even if a lot of the dialogue took a long time to write. I knew where it was leading to. Except for the Tonantzin killing herself. I wrote that as I was going along. That wasn't easy to do. I hate sounding corny and cliche saying, "The characters write themselves," but they do slip out of your hands, and it's hard to bring them back. GROTH: Do you write an outline for everything now? GILBERT: I have an outline for "Poison River" as well. GROTH: How long will "Poison River" be? GILBERT: It will probably be longer than "Human Diastrophism," because the chapters will be shorter and I have a lot more to tell. With "Human Diastrophism" I was pretty much wrapping up where "Heartbreak Soup" had been since the beginning. The story is a little long and a little clunky because I had to correct things, I had to make things clear. But at the same time I created more confusion for the future, so you can't win. "Poison River" is going to be new ground for the reader, because nobody lcnows anything about Luba before Palomar. Jaime noted something interesting about the Palomar stories, that the two main protagonists, Luba and Heraclio, are newcomers to Palomar as well as the reader. In that first story Heraclio's been there for three months and Luba has just arrived. GROTH: / can understand how an outline would be essential on a story as complicated as "Human Diastrophism" or as long as "Poison River" is going tobe, butwhat about shorter stories like "Isidro's Beach" or "The Reticent Heart" or something like that?
GILBERT: Well, short stories are the hardest thing for me to do, because you've got to think about an ending within that issue, and a lot of times the endings are the hardest part. So I'm lucky if I ever pull off a story con tained in one issue. Probably my slowest story is "Love Bites" with Carmen and Heraclio. That was the first one that got mediocre reviews. That was because it was a selfcontained story and they're difficult to write. GROTH: So do you have an outline for something like "Love Bites"? GILBERT: I had an outline for that particular story, and I had one for "Isidro's Beach." But if you'll notice, those short stories just aren't that good. GROTH: You don't think so? GILBERT: Not for me. Like "Boys Will be Boys" in issue #13.. ."Reticent Heart" worked because it was a part of another storyit was a part of Heraclio losing his virginity with Luba. "Love Bites" was done to clarify Carmen and Heraclio's relationship as well as how Luba fits in the middle, but now that I look at it I really didn't need to do that story. I liked it, but these short stories don't work for me, they've got to be a part of a long story. GROTH: How precise is an outline? GILBERT: It's mostly just incidents in the story. GROTH: Do you write it page by page? GILBERT: I usually write it first in separate scenes and then I'll put the scenes in order. I just looked at "Human Diastrophism," and I realized there was a scene out of sequence. [Laughs] It still works, but the part where the killer is chasing Diana to the beach looks like it hap pens in a minute where actually it happens over a longer period of time. That's because I made a mistake in put ting the order together. GROTH: When she's walking backwards? GILBERT: Yeah. A good way to lengthen scenes is to put a scene in the middle of another scene, and when you go back to that scene it seems like a long time has passed, GROTH: So how do you pace a story? Page by page? GILBERT: What I usually do if I only have so many pages ft, I'll spread it out to maybe 20 pages on sketch paper, then I'll realizethis happens almost every t i m e that I can fit a scene which took five panels into three or two. That's why my stories are very tight and it looks like, "Wow, this guy knows just what to write." Well, actually I write quite a bit and cut it down. GROTH: Do you know when you write a story how long it's going to be? GILBERT: Usually, Jaime and I talk about that. GROTH: You have to coordinate your efforts in a 32-page comic. GILBERT: Exactly. GROTH: In "For the Love of Carmen," which is very text heavy, it could have theoretically been twice as long simply by spreading the text among more panels. What prompted you to make that particular story more text heavy than others? GILBERT: Why did I? I guess at the time I was reading a lot of Crumb's and Lynda Barry's work and at the time Crumb was doing "My Troubles with Women." I guess I was taking a lead from there. I'd been telling stories in the same old way"Duck Feet" is a wild adventure, then I had that gruesome Israel story, then I thought, how do I do it differently? I figured that since Heraclio is a sym pathetic character, most people will like being in his head. At the beginning of the storyand I meant this for myself as wellhe says, "I'm not a writer so d o n ' t . . . " Even though I tried to write well in the story I knew that I wasn't that good
BETO: There was always part of me saying, this serious movie is better than that horror movie, even though I liked the horror movie.
From "Beep, Beep," Love & Rockets # 2 7 .
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GROTH: You were off the hook. GILBERT: No, I wasn't trying to cover my ass. I was being honest with myself at the time. I was thinking, I know my limits, so I'm just going to talk it out. It worked with Jaime in "Mechanics." GROTH: Well, earlier you said the drawing is part of the writing, and I wonder if you can elaborate on that. GILBERT: That probably sounds really dumb. But what I'm saying is that there's so much in the panel that isn't in the words, and it's got to be different from the words but yet connect. Particularly if a caption describes a lot, and particularly if it describes a scene that moves along in time and different locations and you've got to fit it in one panel. It's very difficult to do. GROTH: Now, I know you pretty well, and I think you have a sense of values when it comes to drawing, to stories, and I guess to culture in general which I happen to agree with entirely and which I think is far more sophisticated than most of the alleged sophisticated artists and writers populating the comics fieldmany of whom have college degrees and occasionally quote Dostoyevskiand yet you don't have a formal education and you don't quote Kant, but it seems to me you have this rockbed of values. I'm curious as to how you think you came to those? You seem to have an inordinate respect for art and try to find an enduring value to the work you do which is very rare in this field. * GILBERT: I should say one good thing about my teachers is that when they told me art is good, art is something you aspire to and that was the best, all the other stuff was just diversion, I believed that. Even if I loved Batman, even if I loved comic books, there was always part of me that would say, "That Picasso stuff looks like a little kid drew it, but it sure looks good doesn't it." I guess adults respected it, so that meant something to me as a youth. If adults respected something, that was important. I don't know why I felt that. I guess I had more respect for adults than I let myself believe. There was always part of me that was saying, this serious movie is better than that horror movie, even though I liked the horror movie. GROTH: You still made that distinction. GILBERT: I might not have dwelled on it too deeply at the time, but I would think about it. I always expected to understand it later. And to be honest I'm not dis appointed. A lot of people become disappointed that way. They say, " I was ready to grow up and for something to happen and nothing happened." But there was a lot of things that did happen, like art and good films and good books. Those books that they told me were good, even if at the time I wasn't going to go near them, turned out to be good. FIORE: Your work has a literary feel, although I under stand it doesn 't come from literature so much... GILBERT: To tell the truth, I'm not that well-read. The things I took from movies, I tried to take farther. And my own l i f e . . . FIORE: Life is what it's supposed to come from anyway... .GILBERT: Yeah, it's only been recently that I've been reading a lot of good stuff. FIORE: Living will get you through times of no reading better than reading will get you through times of no living. GILBERT: I think I'm just lucky, I have this knack for telling stories that seem like they're literate... [Laughter] GROTH: At what point did you start making these kinds of serious aesthetic distinctions intellectually rather than just by intuiting them from the evaluations of adults?
GILBERT: I guess that was in the mid-'70s and late '70s when punk came around andyou're never going to believe this, GaryI started reading The Comics Jour nal. The Journal spoke directly about comics, so it was something I could hold onto. The Journal would talk about specific things in comics, saying this is a bunch of shit. I thought, hmmmmm. But I was so paranoid I thought everything / like must be on their list too. I was very paranoia, very self-conscious. That's why I sent the original Love & Rockets to you, because I figured I couldn't second-guess you guys. GROTH: You just wanted to see it get trashed. GILBERT: I didn't know. Because sometimes you guys would like stuff, like Harvey Kurtzman; but 1 thought, Harvey Kurtzman draws like a funny guy. And [Journal critics] hated the guy from Epic, the guy who used to draw mashed potatoes, Tim Conrad. You'd talk about specific artists like poor Marshall Rogers or something you'd sort of pick on himand so I just became lost. I thought, if I can take their criticism... They're going to bang away, maybe it's better I get it over with now. GROTH: Did you ever read anything in the Journal that blew one of your heroes away and you thought fuck these, guys, they don't know what they're talking about? GILBERT: No, because you guys pretty much stuck t o . . . I don't remember. I might read something like, "Neal Adams isn't that good." And I'd think, well, I like Neal Adams. Then I'd look at those Green Lantern/Green Arrow comics and I'd think, I guess they're right. At the time I wasn't really fighting you guys. I guess it was just the attitude that took me and most people aback. It was just so volatile. [Laughter] When I look back at the letters in old Journals, I think the readers were attacking the attitudes behind the criticism. And I thought that was a mistake, that's why I've never been a letter writer. I thought, naaah, I'd just blow it out my ass and make a big fool of myself. But you guys never attacked anybody I really liked; Kirby was always praised, and D i t k o . . . I didn't have any par ticular heroes at the time when I was reading that stuff, so it didn't bother me, other than the attitude. GROTH: What kind of concrete effect did punk rock have on your work ? Obviously, it had a real effect on Jaime's work because it's in Jaime's work, but no one's going to look at' 'Heartbreak Soup'' and see punk ...or would they? GILBERT: W e l l . . . Maybe two people out there would. [Laughs] I always thought it was in there. GROTH: Where would you point to the influence? GILBERT: Basically I'm doing what I want to do and making a lot of the characters not terribly sympathetic. Sometimes the characters are really intense, and I don't think I would have done that if I hadn't experienced... I'm sorry to say I never read that much. But even when I djd read something it still didn't have t h a t . . . it was still reading: As good as say, Catcher in the Rye wasand I read it twice when I was a teenageras much as I loved it and as much as I could understand Holden Caulfield it didn't have that immediacy of having somebody stand ing up in front of you, sweat drops flying from his head. And I tried to put that in the comic. Because rock and roll was the most immediate thing for me, standing up and just being mad. And I wanted to be original too. Actually, Jaime doing Maggie and Hopey and the punk scene freed me from that because I would have done the same thing or something very similar. My ego is always telling me to be original, be the guy that people say, "He did this strip, it's his strip and nobody's done one like
Below: Henry Mitchell Costelloa Gilbert sketch from 1979.
I like Maus quite a bitI felt that I would have lost a lot of what "Heartbreak Soup" is. I had to make them real. In my mind and in my heart these had to be my people, not rabbits and not metaphors and not symbols. That's the way it works best. That's why film is such a powerful art form. At home watching TV there's all these distrac tions, but when you're in the theater you've paid and you're sitting there and it's looking at you as much as you're look ing at it. That's why someday, I hope, there will be a Love & Rockets or "Heartbreak Soup" movie, just to get it closer to people. But that doesn't look too likely the way Hollywood works. Unless I win 15 million dollars in the lottery it's not going to happen. GROTH: Earlier when I asked you why Gato turned into a swine you replied, "it was business, man." Now does that betray any political attitude or were you just being glib? it." That was always important to me. GROTH: More of a motivational force. GILBERT: Sure. You caught us at an interesting time, when I was getting away from the girl stuff and I didn't know what I was going to do, and Jaime was getting into doing the girl stuff. Now if you'd approached us a year or two before, I would have been doing the girl stuff and Jaime would have been doing superheroes. Back then Jaime was always a few steps behind me, not because I was so advanced, but because he's two years younger than me. And that's how it always progressed until now. Now we're pretty much even. GROTH: Is there a political attitude expressed in your work? GILBERT: Yeah. I mean I'm not hardline anything, like Harvey Pekar said he was a strident leftist. I don't have a lot of political background because I never really followed politics. Listening to people talk about politics I realized it was almost like a soap opera, it was like a game, but the stakes were very high. It seemed so ridiculous to me and horrible too, because of the serious stakes, so I kept away from it. GROTH: Did you see a political content in the punk phenomenon? GILBERT: Yeah, a lot of the punk bands, especially from England, leaned towards socialism. And I had a lot of friends in high school.. .a lot of young people when they get into politics they wind up being Marxist for some reason. So I was exposed to politics that way. When people become Marxists they feel they're going to do it, they're going to help make this world a better place, and I sort of listened. I have a friend named Peter Garcia who's a pretty political guy. He works at a university in New Mexico in the cultural end of it where they're trying to preserve indigenous cultures in the U.S.A. He was the guy who turned me on to a lot of Mexican folk artists. GROTH: One strip that I thought was overtly political ' 'Locker Room.'' Can you tell me what you were doing in the strip? GILBERT: I think there was a line in The Year of Living Dangerously where Linda Hunt as Billy Kwan says, "Star vation makes for a great aphrodisiac." And that really hit me. It's not a good film but that line hit me. And that strip was an extension on it. I did it with goofy monsters and stuff instead of doing it seriously because it attracts people for some reason, and if it has a serious message behind those monsters it seems to be more powerful in certain instances. GROTH: Yeah, I saw them clearly as a metaphor. GILBERT: Right. If I had done "Heartbreak Soup" with monsters or, bunnies or horses or micethough actually
BETO:
I'm surprised I can think, because I gave up on school. I just wanted to draw.
GILBERT: Well, nowadays it sure seems that businessman equals jerk, as far as I'm concerned. If you're an artist or musician who has to deal with business that's different, but if you're a businessman all you do is keep the gears working, you're pretty fucking worthless as far as I'm concerned. [Laughs] Of course there's more to it. I'm not saying that just because a person's not an artist they're not worth anything, but when you're in that posi tion of moving stuff around you better be worth a shit and a lot of these people aren't. I don't know what the deal is. You have farm workers busting their chops and they still aren't paid anything. And you got these fucking jerks that play with video games, and do lunch, play tennis, fly to Dallas and go home and that's it. GROTH: Were you ever seduced by socialism? GILBERT: I guess vaguely, superficially. I never read into it or anything. My friends were interested in it, and the basic things they talked about seemed logical to me free public medical care and stuff, those ideas made a lot of sense. GROTH: Do you have arty kind of overriding goal or aspiration in "Heartbreak Soup?" GILBERT: This sounds really corny, but I just wanted to bring us closer together. I thought it was something that was good, my childhood, my heritage, I thought it was just as interesting as anybody else's. I just needed a way to show it in an interesting and humorous way, without it being boring and academic. When I started it was at the point when "high concept" really took off. Stuff that only lasted five minutes, it was the Star Wars generation, the E.T. generation. I wanted something that would last, and I wanted something that was worth lasting. And the story had never been told. I could go to the movies and I could not seeunless it was a Mexican movie made in the '50s by Bunuel or somebody, which nobody goes to anywayyou just weren't going to see it in popular entertainment. There were the books, the Central and South American writers that are very popular now, but those are books. People don't read books. It's almost impossible to get something truthful on television. I thought, if this comic book simply exists, hopefully it means something. If five people see these stories, maybe it'll have been worth the trouble. I was just thinking in those terms. I wanted something that would last, and something that was original. I was lucky that it was original. If I had done the punk thing like Jaime we would have just been going around in circles trying to top each other with the more realistic punk story. So, I'm really happy I did it. Deadlines are a pain in the ass, but I couldn't ask for a better gig.
Top:
Blonde Beto (1984).
Above: Dr. Smith from "Locker Room."
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GROTH: / have a question for Jaime to open this up with. In the past I've noticed that you've made a point to let me know that you don't use photographs for referenceI think I've asked you if such and such was a photo reference because it either reminded me of a photo or something like thatand I think you were fairly mili tant in saying that you don't use photo reference. And you didn't want to include a couple drawings in the sketchbook because they were taken from photographs. Is not using photo references a matter of principle with you? J A I M E : Well, there were actually two or three in issue #2. A couple people already picked those out, so it's not a secret. After that I didn't want to use them, because I wanted to use all my energy and imagination. I
This page a n d opposite: Selections from t h e Dennis the Menace comic books. Jaime and Gilbert were strongly Influenced by these artists 'ghosting' Hank Ketcham from early o n .
wanted to be pure, without any copying. If there's inspiration I don't want it too close to a swipe. I want to show that you can do this stuff without any form of copying. If I copy a car from a photograph I change the angle. It doesn't look like the photo, sometimes because it's just a bad drawing, other times because I want it to look like it came out of my head. GILBERT: A lot of the cars Jaime draws are made up anyway. I couldn't tell. JAIME: If someone who designs cars reads the book, they'd say, "Who the hell was this designer?" GILBERT: We'd tell him to get fucked. , [Laughter] JAIME: I don't want to do anything with copying because there's too many guys swiping out there who get away with i t . . .except when the Comics Journal finds out. GROTH: Are you as much a purist as Jaime is about photo references? GILBERT: Well, I find them inhibiting. I go crazy if I have to copy. Even when I was young and practiced by copying a Jack Kirby drawing, I'd have to change it because I couldn't do it line for line. It would always turn out to be my drawing no matter whatnot neces.sarily a better drawing [Laughs]but if it's a photograph it always becomes my drawing. I need photos for reference, automobiles, and horses, and things like that. But as far as copying them, I can't do it.
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GROTH: / assume you differentiate between an artist being influenced by another artist and an artist appropriating a drawing. Can you verbalize where you draw the line? Obviously, you've been influenced by any number of sources... JAIME: You don't take from them literally. You take the best parts of that artist. I'm influenced by a lot of artists, but a lot of them you can't tell. GILBERT: There's a lot of people who say Jaime's art is nearly identical to Dan DeCarlo's, which is horseshit. If you compare the two they might have the same feel for figures and layouts, but that's as far as it gets. He was definitely an inspiration for both of us but I don't think you would mistake a Love & Rockets comic for an Archie comic. JAIME: In the Dennis the Menace comic books there were two different artists, or two different studios. I don't know how many artists actually drew them. There was one style that was closer to Ketcham's and there was another style by Al Wiseman that kind of strayed from Ketcham, and the first time you look at them you would
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think Wiseman was the better artist because he was really detailed and neat and drew everything. The drawing was really tight. The people who followed Ketcham's style were'a lot looser and I liked that style, but if you look at my art it looks closer to Wiseman. And we still don't know who the guy we like is, the guy who was aping Ketcham. Is there anyone out there who can tell us? I almost like this guy better than Ketcham. GROTH: What is it that you like about his work? JAIME: He drew so fluidly and the composition was there... GILBERT: He could draw well, but since he was aping Ketcham's style he was rushing it and making it loose. But the drawings are complete and the real artist under it comes through, I think. He was obviously knocking those off a week at a time, but his true talent came through. GROTH: Where would you place somebody like Jack Kirby in the context of the work you really admire? GILBERT: Kirby is mainstream comics. He is Marvel Comics, and I love his artwork to pieces, mostly from the late '50s to the late '60s. It's funny when we tell people this guy is great, this stuff inspires us. And they open a page and they see Thor throwing his hammer through a building and they ask, "That inspires you?" Yeah! It's hard for me to articulate it. I don't know what it is. I can say that Kirby is real good at what he does. This might sound loony, but I've never seen, even in a filmunless you're sitting in the first row at the Cinerama
DomeI open a double page spread of Kirby's and I've never seen power like that in a film. And it's a drawing. He captures size and energy and movement and impact in these small spaces. JAIME: You see someone like Hal Foster, who is an excellent illustrator and could draw lavish castles and things, but Kirby still knocked me over 100 times more. GILBERT: He's also a skilled artist at depicting naturalism, which he hasn't done too much in 25 years or so. But that was another thing I liked. He was able to draw people in casual clothes, walking down a street, hailing a cab or whatever. That was magical too. GROTH: / don't want you to think that this is a stacked deck question, because I don't know what answer to anticipate. But do you think someone like Crumb represents an advance on Kirby? GILBERT: I guess in the true sense Crumb is a better artist because Kirby is limited to that fantasy world. GROTH: / meant in a whole sense, in the sense of a whole artist. GILBERT: I guess Crumb is the more progressive artist, which is more important, but not even Crumb could match that impact in Jack's work. JAIME: I think Kirby has some real importance in the progression of comic books. GILBERT: When I look at sketches by Crumb and he's doodling and making up things, I know exactly where it's coming from. It's almost something that I could ape myself. But when Kirby makes something up, I have no
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BETO:
When I look at sketches by Crumb I know exactly where it's coming from. But when Kirby makes something up, I have no idea where it came from.
Below: Steve Ditko's trademark baggy trousers.
idea where it came from. Gil Kane's like that too. They make up things that don't exist, but there they are and they do exist when you look at the drawing. There's something about that man's talent. Those two-toed monsters, man! GROTH: / think most people would be surprised that you were influenced by Kirby. GILBERT: It surprises people when I tell them. GROTH: Where is it ? I noticed it in Jaime's early work. Occasionally, there were distinct poses and postures, but in your work less so, I think. But obviously it was an influence, so how does that manifest itself? GILBERT: In my work it would mostly be the subtlety and economy of Kirby's drawing. When Kirby wanted to tell something he told it in three panels, "Hey, let's go!" Whereas Barks or Crumb could linger on for five or six panels. That was a thing I learned from Kirby. He was a good self-editor. GROTH: What about Steve Ditko? GILBERT: Ditko's great. He was sort of the dark side of Kirby, the dark side of Marvel. All that old monster stuff up to Spider-Man was terrific. He was so original. I know a lot of those underground guys don't like guys like Ditko, but he had something there definitely worth pursuing. JAIME: My favorite stuff of Kirby and Ditkoand maybe Gilbert's favorite toois their pre-Fantastic Four work, the monster stories. You read it and pass it off, but the artwork was amazing. It was like they had nothing to lose, because Atlas was nothing. They probably thought the same of the Fantastic Four when they started it"We got nothing to lose, let's go bonkers." GROTH: You can believe that if Ditko was born 20 years later he would have been an underground cartoonist. GILBERT: I don't know the guy personally, but from his artwork, he's got to be...different. Actually, his stuff shows up a lot in our work, like the hand movements and the way he drew baggy trousers. J A I M E : A lot of people tell me that my early stuff was
Ditko and nobody else. I don't see it, but I don't deny it. GILBERT: He was real good at drawing baggy suits and you draw baggy suits a lot. JAIME: Ditko was also funny. J. Jonah Jameson walk ing down the street mumbling about how he hates SpiderMan used to crack me up. GILBERT: But if we read the same script with a guy like Don Heck or John Romita... It drives me nuts when I talk to these guys who say that Romita did the definitive Spider-man. Although, Romita drew pretty girls. GROTH: Where would you place Barks in the pantheon? JAIME: I think he's really important as far as story telling. He wrote great stories and his art was great. I would say his contribution is more as a story-teller, in the construction of a story. GROTH: Has Barks influenced either one of you? GILBERT: Oh, sure. I read the Uncle Scrooge adven ture stories when I was a kid and that inspired me to do long stories that were hopefully worth a shit. You could almost call " B E M " a Barks story on LSD. GROTH: Is it safe to say that Barks, Kirby and Crumb all influenced you no matter how different they all were. GILBERT: Oh, sure. Almost equally. JAIME: You may never see it, but it's there. And they would be in the top ten. GROTH: Can you talk about how they influenced you differently? GILBERT: That's really hard. I guess Crumb is closer to the heart, closer to how life is. Barks's work was more of a bouncy adventure. And Kirby was intensity, excite ment and large objects and then the subtle thingsthe guy hailing the cab. GROTH: It seems to me that Barks must have been the most indirect influence because he doesn't have the obvious outstanding qualities that Kirby and Crumb have. Kirby and Crumb are so immediate, you recognize their virtues immediately, whereas with Barks you have to sit down and read him. Perhaps that's because he did duck stories and much of his talent was submerged in his duck
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NO/PLEASE PEPPER.' I LIKE HIS P A C E T H E WAV IT I S /
JAIME: Nice brushwork. GILBERT: Nice brushwork, cute girls, the whole bit. But Eisner was never that big a favorite of mine. Not in large doses, anyway. JAIME: It was really fun to look at. GROTH: You're talking about The Spirit? GILBERT: Yeah, The Spirit of course. I could take or leave the new stuff. GROTH: But he wasn't a conscious influence. JAIME: No. In fact, a lot of people weren't. Barks never was a conscious influence. I liked him, but I didn't know I was using him until I got older. Kirby was a direct influence when I was growing up, because I wanted to draw those machines. A lot of those artists I just liked when I was younger and I didn't know I was using them until I got older. GILBERT: One more thing about Kirby is that his good stuff, all that crazy, super-hero, wild science fiction stuff, CHItPREMs B O O K S .
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milieu and you had read them to actually appreciate the work. With Kirby and Crumb you look at a few pages and it comes off the page. JAIME: Barks had a way with the composition of the panel. Even if he had eight panels on the page, each panel was balanced with negative space and had a flow from one panel to the other. GILBERT: And then there's the Barks attitude. There's nothing mean spirited about his stories. JAIME: But at the same time they're not sentimental. GILBERT: They're not wimpy stories either. Barks had a wonderful subtlety in telling stories, even if they are about wild treasure hunts. There's a gentleness to his art but nothing false. GROTH: Where do you think Eisner fits in? Was he an influence? GILBERT: Well, he had a hell of a way with layouts and action and combining realism with humor.
DONALD, DEWEV, HUEV, L O U l E i I W A N T VOU LAOS TO SAIL WITH M E TO ITALV RIGHT AWAY 1 I ' V E HEARD ABOUT A N ANCIENT TREASURE THERE:
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Three influences: Top: Dan DeCarlo's Josie girls. Center: Little Archie. Left: Carl Barks' ducks.
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"Serious" influences: Angelo Torres (above), Reed Crandall (below), and Jesse Marsh (right).
M O R E ' N T H R E E Y E A R S TILL AT LAST T H E BRAVES G O T <IM A N D H A N D E D ' I M O V E R TO H E R . THEY SAY N O M A N , WHITE O R I N J U N , EVER BEEN S O LONG- A - D Y I N ' .
is funny. You can look at the stuff and not even read it and it's funny. Kirby had a sense of humor. I see all that stuff going on and I laugh out loud. And that's something special he has that a lot of good artists don't. GROTH: What do you think of Milton Caniff? Has he been an influence? Do you admire his work? JAIME: To tell you the truth, I like the work of the people who influenced him and the people who he influenced better than I like his work. It seems to me that Caniff is the generic style of his times, because everybody started off exactly like him but then took on their own. GILBERT: Terry and the Pirates was drawn beautifully. Steve Canyon was too dense for me and I quickly got bored with it. I prefer Roy Crane. Crane's stories were basically the same types of stories, but his artwork was gorgeous. GROTH: What do you think of Toth? GILBERT: He's much better than Caniff. GROTH: You really think so? GILBERT: Sure. Alex is an excellent artist in search of a story. I think the problem with a lot of the new wave artists is they don't look at real drawing anymore. To look at a Picasso painting or a Paul Klee painting is terrific, but they'll take it from there and do this bogus childlike scratching. Now maybe these guys don't draw that well. But the reason we are where we are, I like to think, is that we look at good draftsmen from the old days. We looked at Crane and early Caniff and Hogartheven up
to the '60s with guys like Angelo Torres and even Al Williamson. That kept us serious. Even though most car toonists I know mostly liked funny stuff, I always liked to look at serious work because there was more of a mood. There wasn't much of a mood in funny stuff, not for me. But Reed Crandall with his lines, and Angelo Torres with his darks and lights... check out those early Warrens. JAIME: One artist who's been overlooked is Jesse Marsh, who did the Tarzan comics of the '50s and '60s.
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Toth was influenced by him. He's one of the big dad dies of composition along with Crane and Toth, but he didn't have a slick line. GILBERT: He drew what was probably the crudest Tarzan, but for me he was the best. GROTH: What about Joe Kubert? GILBERT: I always liked Kubert, even though I never liked any strip he drew except maybe Tarzan. No matter what he was doing, it was always drawn well. GROTH: What about Wood? Either of you fond of him? JAIME: Oh, sure. GILBERT: Yeah. Wood was something, huh? In his '50s stuff you could tell he liked girls so much he couldn't stand it. That's what I thought when I was a young boy reading Wood's EC reprints. Even if he overdid the detail a little, it was still gorgeous. What was weird about Wood was that his humor was so expressive and his serious stuff was so flat. I could never understand why he didn't integrate the two styles. JAIME: I find my favorite Wood stuff was in Mad magazine, even after Kurtzman leftwhen he was doing the wash and all that. It was excellent work. It was so alive, while his T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents was so stiff. GROTH: What about Frazetta? GILBERT: I think he's the top of the heap of those guys. Frazetta's artwork is raw, uninhibited sexuality. JAIME: Even his trees. [Laughs] GILBERT: Crumb was saying that he copied some Frazettas and he couldn't get any feeling out of it. I guess that proves we're a different generation from Crumb, because I do get a get a kick out of looking at Frazetta, even if it's a superficial thing. I still manage a grin when I look at those muscular women. JAIME: Frazetta had more life than his imitators. His imitators were copying the line. GILBERT: There's an element of humor in it, too. GROTH: Now when you say his imitators, who would you be referring to? JAIME: Berni Wrightson and Jeff Jones were definitely influenced. Jones escaped because he became an artist on his own. GROTH: He grew away from his idols. GILBERT: But poor Berni. That Spider-Man thing? Tsk. JAIME: Berni didn't go much further than what he was doing in the '60s. GROTH: How Frazetta-influenced is Dave Stevens? GILBERT: Pretty strongly. But Dave's got a ways to
go to catch up to Frazetta, quite a ways. GROTH: Do you think Dave has virtues beyond his Frazetta influence? GILBERT: As a matter of fact, he's better at backgrounds than Frazetta ever was. One thing about Dave is he's got a lot of.. .patience. [Laughs] He'll draw those air strips and that airplane, but he doesn't fuck around, he gets down and draws it. If he has to draw a laboratory, he draws it. And it's integrated right with the figures. That's something I don't do too well. I skimp on backgrounds. But then that's also my styleit gives it a looser look. GROTH: It's interesting that you bring that up about Dave, because that's both a virtue and a liability. It's true that his work is, would you say, more labored? But it's also because of that that it lacks the kind of sensual spontaneity of Frazetta's work I think. GILBERT: Right. Dave's art, particularly in that last issue of Rocketeer, gets stiff once in a while. GROTH: There was such a rawness to Frazetta's work. JAIME: It's like we've been sayingartists copy the wrong things from other artists. I'd like to think that we choose the right things. I'm also influenced a bit by Frazetta, but I don't have that brush line. GILBERT: We're not interested in that. GROTH: Was Rand Race influenced by Frazetta's Johnny Comet? JAIME: Rand Race is really generic, so he is. [Laughs] It was Johnny Comet and about five other things. He could be Buz Sawyer too. He could be Superman. I was accused of ripping off Johnny Comet because of the clothes Race wearsthe black t-shirt and the baggy pants. Actually, I happened to be dressing like that at the time. GROTH: What did you think of Alex Raymond? Do you admire his work at all? GILBERT: I did when I was young, because it was so elegant, and I don't think anybody drew prettier girls than he did. I think Rip Kirby was his best drawn work. JAIME: Of all the "beauty artists" he was the one who most iked to draw the figure; he rarely had any backgrounds, especially in Flash Gordon. GILBERT: I mink we're disillusioning a lot of new wave artists here, guys that draw stick men and stuffto be fair, though, Dennis Worden's Stickboy was funny as hell. JAIME: The comic to end all comics. GROTH: Are there any cartoonists who have influenced you that people wouldn't expect? GILBERT: Dennis the Menace comics, Bob Boiling's Little Archie, Charles Schulz. GROTH: Walt Kelly at all? GILBERT: Oh yeah. JAIME: Sure. GILBERT: Walt Kelly was at one time one of my favorite cartoonists. When I was at school my friends liked Tumbleweeds by T.K. Ryan, but I liked Pogo. Their reasons for not liking Pogo was that it looked too much like a Disney cartoon, it looked too professional. That was the weird way people were looking at things in those days. They liked that stiff humor of Tumbleweeds. JAIME: I guess since Schulz, people have gotten more comfortable with that type of comic. GILBERT: It's almost spoiled things because good draw ing was out, and it still is, it seems. GROTH: You told me that you recognized when you were reading our interview with Feiffer that Feiffer was an influence. GILBERT: Yeah. I had almost forgotten about that. Actually, Feiffer is a strong influence on my artwork.
G R O T H : In what way? GILBERT: In the few scribbles that he does to capture expressions so well, particularly in Sick, Sick, Sick. He's one of the best cartoonists I've ever seen at that. That's where I learned to do it. JAIME: That's why in our artwell, mostly Gilbert's when you see someone who's depressed, he'll cartoon it so that the mouth is drooping outside of the face. But you catch right away what the p y ' s feeling without hav ing to say,' 'And he was very depressed by that incident.'' GILBERT: There's also Feiffer's timing. I think he's actually better than Schulz doing that. Schulz is great, but Feiffer took it even further. FIORE: Is there anybody that you admired when you were young that you don't think much of now? JAIME: A lot of slick guys. FIORE: Steranko? JAIME: I never liked Steranko. Neal Adams I didn't like when I was young because he was this new type of artist. "What is this shit? This isn't superheroes." But I look at Neal Adams the way he came up with that natural way of drawing, actually drawing real people realistically... that's amazing. But it still bores me. Most of it anyway, there's a few good things. I love the vampire story he did for Warren in wash, that was great. There's a few things, but overall he didn't last with me. But I never did like Steranko. I think he's the most overrated comic artist of all. GILBERT: I'm not a great fan of Adams, but at the same time I have to admit it's not easy to learn that photo realistic style. It was natural to him, I think, he was draw ing like that since he was a teenager. That to me is very remarkable. GROTH: What were your inspirations in comics at the time you started doing Love & Rockets ? Were there peo ple doing the same kinds of things that you wanted to do, or at least have the same motivations that you had? GILBERT: My inspirations were the same things I grew up reading. I was influenced by everything I read, even
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the bad stuff. I narrowed things down though. When I think of Marvel I think of three guysI don't want to put down Artie Simek or Sam Rosen or Dick Ayers but it was Kirby, Ditko, and Lee, that's who I narrowed it down to at Marvel. Superman and Batman are so fragmented, anybody could draw them. Of course, there's the Mort Weisinger ones that I grew up with. There's a sense of humor in those that I maintainedLois Lane's head growing big and the Bizarrosthat kind of ridiculous, imaginary story stayed with me. I guess the strongest influences aside from those wereI think Jaime would say this tooLittle Archie, Archie, Betty and Veronica, and Dennis the Menace comics. Because those stand up art-wise pretty well for us. As a matter of fact my art style is a cross between Harry Lucey, who's an Archie artist, and Harvey Kurtzman, which is interesting because I never knew about Harvey Kurtzman until I was well into my 20s. I knew, " I like those stories," but I didn't know who did them. When people talked about Harvey Kurtzman, they always talked about Mad, and that was something I was never really that crazy about, although I can appreciate it now. I preferred the EC horror comics because they had sexy girls. GROTH: A lot of cartooning techniques and stylistic derivation seem to come from Kurtzman, from the war books, from "Hey Look. " GILBERT: The more I look at Kurtzman's artwork the better it gets. You can read the story five times and you've read it enough, but I can look at the artwork over and over and over, and it only gets better. He's one of the perfect American comic book artists. He knew exactly what to put on the page, how much, and like I said I can look at that stuff right now and still get something out of it. It's perfect. GROTH: Was there anything that influenced the struc ture of your stories? GILBERT: I used Gasoline Alley as a model. I just thought the drawing was beautiful. And even though it got kind of boring, I thought I won't be boring, I'll be funny and exciting and modern at least. A lot of people make a mistakethey look to the past and they just try to repeat it and take that kind of sensibility, and brother, it doesn't work. You've got to have a modern... GROTH: Contemporary sensibility. GILBERT: Right. But you can still use what was good about it. GROTH: Is there any Chester Gould influence? GILBERT: Oh, absolutely. There's so many facets to my twisted personality. There's the homey guy who likes Gasoline Alley and Peanuts... Oh, man, I adored
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Peanuts. Whew, I loved that. I would read a Peanuts paperback and then look at a Marvel comic, even a good Marvel comic, and it just looked so ridiculous, it looked so bad next to a Peanuts strip. JAIME: Yeah. Also, Heavy Metal, all the European reprints in that, that was kind of the same thing to me as punk. It was showing me stories of anything. So I thought, "Oh, you can do this stuff and get away with it." That was when I slowly started realizing that I could do any kind of story I wanted and maybe someone would catch on. GROTH: Now, prior to this, what kind of stories were you drawing for yourself? JAIME: I wasn't really completing any stories, because I also didn't think I could. I thought stories had to have certain things to them, had to have big words, had to be "intelligent," everyone had to be a certain way. I had known about undergrounds, but those were Mario's and he kept them in a special drawer. I could only look at the Archies and Dennis the Menaces and the Marvel and DC stuff. There was something about Marvel and DC that I thought was so professional that you had to be schooled to do that stuff. I didn't know that the stories were really bad and dopey because they used big words. GROTH: Like "armageddon." JAIME: Yeah. Stuff like that. FIORE: "Vengeance." JAIME: And I still don't know a lot of those words, but now I know I don't need them. GROTH: Now, did underground comix influence you at any point once you became more familiar with them? JAIME: After Heavy Metal came out, that was actually when I started "experimenting," looking at other things. Crumb I went to first. And of course that was because Gilbert was saying, "Look at this guy! Look at this stuff!" Gilbert read it when Mario got it, in the late '60s, and the early 7 0 s , but then we abandoned it, or that stuff wasn't something to hold on to. We'd go back to Marvel and DC. GROTH: What was it in Heavy Metal that attracted you ? JAIME: Oh, of course, there was Moebius... Tardi is someone I really liked. I liked Den II, the paintinga lot of it, but not all of it. A lot of stuff I overlooked. GROTH: It sounds like it was almost the context of Heavy Metal that interested you. The anarchy. JAIME: Yeah, it was something that I never saw before because I never looked at undergrounds. I wanted superheroes. But at the same time, every summer, publishers would bring out the bags of Archies and Dennis the Menace, and we would read them, but I never made the connection. It was the whole punk thing that made me take a look at that stuff, without any fear.
quite a bit, but those other guys? The Dark Knights and what is itBlackhawk... GROTH: Blackhawk or Black Kiss or black something. GILBERT: Black garters. GROTH: How do you see yourself in relation to people like Chaykin and Miller? JAIME: I don't think we're in the same boat. GILBERT: They're doing high-concept, genre stuff, slick pulp fast action stuff. JAIME: And they've '80-ized it. You have something like Aliens, which is an '80-ized version of a Martian invasion. [The filmmakers] took It, The Terror From Beyond Space and they '80-ized it and the updated characters say, "Let's rock and roll and kick a s s . " And that was a "great movie." GILBERT: You mean that sarcastically. JAIME: Yeah. And people look at it like it's realistic. They think, "People are really like that." They pick up on the attempts at realism and they think it's really great. But really it's an excuse to make more fight scenes. GROTH: How do you differentiate what you do from Dark Knight or Blackhawk? GILBERT: We do our best to drop the genre trappings. When we started out we had images of space ships and ray guns and things like that. But that was always an in-joke, a goof. It was never the integral part of the story.
BETO:
When Love & Rockets first came out it used to piss me off when they compared us to
American Flagg!
Below: A page by Harvey Kurtzman. " T h e more I look at Kurtzman's work the b e t t e r it g e t s , " s a y s Gilbert.
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IT W A S ONLY A STRAY M O R T A R SHELL.' C O U L D H A V E L A N P E P ANYWHERE.' IF ONLY THAT SHELL S P L I N T E R H A P G O N E FIVE MORE INCHES T O THE RIGHT..
O R IP PAUL M A Y N A R P S H E A R T H A P O N L Y B E E N FIVE M O R E INCHES T O T H E LEFT...OR IF PAUL MAYNARD HADN'T EVEN BEEN BORN.
Acting
Like
Adults
GROTH: Whenever some media culture maven starts writing about comics and does the usual comics are becoming more adult piece, there's always about a dozen artists that they pick up on and they use them in various combinations. There's usually you two, Harvey Pekar, Art Spiegelman, Dave Sim, Alan Moore, Frank Miller, and Howard Chaykin. And I wanted to know if you think you fit into that whole crowd of so-called adult comics creators who are usually lumped together. Or do you see differences among yourselves? JAIME: Well, half of them. GILBERT: I like American Splendor and I like Maus
.WOOPEN B E F O R E THE T O W N O F X IN K O R E A , A ROW O F ANCIENT W O O P E N PEVIL P O S T S GRIN P O W N PAUL GRINS F R O M O N E W O O P E N E A R T O THE O T H E R . . . G R I N P O W N U P O N T H E BODY O F PRIVATE M A y N A R P , K I L L E P IN A C T I O N . ' A N P / M A N ' S P E S T I N V G O E S M A R C H I N G O N . '
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Above: Another strip the Hernandezes have a strong fondness forHerbie, d r a w n b y Ogden Whitney and written by Ryan Hughes under thep e n name Shane O'Shea. Below: Jaime's Rocky and Fumble.
Whereas if you dropped all that stuff from Dark Knight, you'd have no story. GROTH: What do you think of Cerebus? GILBERT: I bought one issue and read one issue. G R O T H : Which one? GILBERT: It must have been two or three years a g o . . . Sim's not a bad artist. I thought it was well drawn, but I didn't know what the hell was going on, and when I looked at other issues it didn't look terribly interesting to me. JAIME: Gilbert's read more issues than I have. G R O T H : Hasn't your interest been piqued because of everything you've heard about it? JAIME: Well, it's an aardvark with a sword. They may do it cleverly, but I can't get into it. Maybe it's because the stories have been running for a hundred issues. GILBERT: You pick up an issue and it's got a twoheaded creatureone of the heads is Swamp Thing and one of the heads is Man-Thing.. .uh, right.. .later. I'm always recognizing other comics in it. J A I M E : You see comics in it, and how far can you go with that? Someone who doesn't read comics can read Cerebus and say, "What a cute two-headed monster," but they don't get the inside joke. That's what mainly turns me away from it. I'd like to read it like I never read a comic before. I used to like parodies because I thought, "Look what they're doing to the X-men." But after awhile I was the only one who got the joke, and it makes you feel lonely in the real world. [Laughs] GROTH: Could you assess Sim, Miller and Chaykin as cartoonistsin terms of how they draw. GILBERT: I imagine Sim's the best of the three, even though he relies on super-hero art. GROTH: But purely in terms of drawing. J A I M E : Well, I believe Miller has a long way to go. I noticed he was trying to get away from super-heroes when he did his piece for Strip AIDS. He's trying something altogether new for him. GILBERT: It seems he doesn't know what to do next, actually. He doesn't know how to progress and make it coherent. J A I M E : All he knows are the super-heroes he grew up with in the '60s. G R O T H : / was going to ask you, do you see a progres sion in Miller from his Daredevil days to Dark Knight, a visual progression? J A I M E : It's not going forward.
GILBERT: He's continuing, but it's not necessarily get ting better. G R O T H : Do you find anything in Chaykin's drawing that is interesting? JAIME: Chaykin's drawing has always left me cold. GILBERT: I'm not a big fan of Chaykin's artwork, but there was a period when I was young when I was heavily influenced in Chaykin's design work, particularly in clothes. It's his greatest strength, I think. As far as mainstream artists go, Chaykin is the only person I've seen who could design clothes and make them look like they belong on people's bodies. Those slick boys work their butts off, but you have to ask yourself, is it meaningful labor? GROTH: Are there any mainstream artists you like, even if you don't read the material, just in terms of drawing. Artists at Marvel, DC, First... JAIME: Nobody I'll go back to. I'll look at some of that stuff and see that it's getting polished. GROTH: What did you think of Watchmen? GILBERT: Well, I said this before. I think Alan is a talented prose writer, a talented guy. He's serious about things going on in our crazy fucking world. But it was another super-hero comic to me. The ultimate super-hero comic isn't going to be about revamped Charlton heroes. JAIME: When Watchmen was coming out and it was the big thing, I heard it was supposed to be about what it would be like if super-heroes were in the real world GILBERT: It was the furthest thing from it. J A I M E : If I were doing super-heroes in the real world I would have shown it from the human's point of view, from the normal people watching the news hearing, "This super-hero did this." Then [the reaction], "God, I didn't know there were people like that." Because when you go into the minds of these superheroes they're still superheroes. They're still wearing the costumes. GILBERT: If it really was about super-heroes in the real world they wouldn't be wearing those goddam silly costumes. GROTH: How would you compare something like Cerebus or Watchmen with Maus? GILBERT: They're not even in the same league. Maus is a progressive comic and the other ones, w e l l . . . As talented as Alan is, it's hard to say if he's going to be able to shake off those ghoulies and men in tights. Obviously, they're a big part of him. J A I M E : I don't even know if he wants to. But I do like Alan and there is hope in the work. It's not reached i t s . . . GILBERT: He's physically bigger than us, remember. JAIME: Sorry, man. GROTH: / tend to think Alan is the best writer in mainstream comics. GILBERT: The guy can write. JAIME: But it's the word you're saying, mainstream. GROTH: Did you guys by any chance read The Killing Joke? GILBERT: I skimmed through it. JAIME: I skimmed through it and the one thing I can say about it is that Bolland is loosening up. GILBERT: For some reason people think it's great that Alan Moore has these old characters like Batgirl getting blown away. That's progressive comics? Geeez. JAIME: I was told that when Alan got raves about it he said, "It's a Batman Annual for god's sake." [Laughs] GROTH: At least Alan has perspective. Has any artist come from mainstream comics into a more legitmate mode of expression in comics? JAIME: I would say more artists than writers. These
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artists haven't reached their potential, but it's happen ing right now. There's a guy who drew the Batman: Year OneMazzucchelliwho was aping Toth and one of those European guys [Micheluzzi] and you don't know if he's going to sink right back into the European stuff or if he's going to go further. But he improved 100 per cent when he went to Europebetween his Darevdevil run and Batman: Year One. GROTH: You're talking about in terms of drawing? JAIME: Yeah. But as far as expanding in the world and their writing... GILBERT: I can't think of anybody. JAIME: I think a lot of these guys are happy with the money. [Laughs] GROTH: Well, do you see what Chaykin, Miller, and Moore are doing as any kind of advance on what has gone before? GILBERT: No, they packaged it nicer and had a few more tits and cuss words in it. I don't follow it that closely. But it doesn't really excite me. GROTH: In terms of popularity and acclaim, Concrete is the new Love & Rockets. What do you think of that? GILBERT: I don't care for it too much. In my neighborhood we call it Marshmalbw. It's so cute and lightweight and fluffyoh, the pains and problems of a guy made of rockgive me a fucking break. JAIME: Give me a fucking break too. I can't stand when they put our name with it. It used to be American Flagg!, now it's that. GROTH: Well, that sounds pretty elitist GILBERT: Nah. GROTH: /Sarcastically/ pretty snobbish of you. JAIME: No, snobs look down on people, elitists look down on shit. [Laughter] GROTH: What about Zot! ? That's also been mentioned in your circle. GILBERT: I've skimmed through it, but I never saw anything that would interest me, really. Scott McCloud is trying to do a bigfoot, fan, Captain Marvel, Osamu Tezuka type strip, but like Dave Stevens with Frank Frazetta, he's got a ways to go. GROTH: Fish Police? GILBERT: I never read that. I looked at the cover and that was enough. JAIME: That was a really big seller wasn't it? GROTH: It was published during the black and white boom, so the first issue really took off. JAIME: But it's still talked about. GROTH: Only by Harlan. GILBERT: The car salesman? GROTH: The futurist. GILBERT: The futurist car salesman.* GROTH: What do you think of Omaha? GILBERT: I've only read the first few issues. I really
like the drawing. Reed Waller is really a good artist. But I quickly got bored of the plotline. JAIME: I read a couple issues and it's not something I feel strongly about either way. GROTH: What about Lone Wolf and Cub, which was an enormous hit. GILBERT: That sort of Japanese comics I'm not par ticularly interested in. I like the bigfoot stuff better, because it seems to me more humorous. Talking more about life. Tatsumi's Goodbye was drawn in a semi-bigfoot style, very simple. GROTH: Would you consider that you draw in a semibigfoot style? GILBERT: Yeah, as a matter of fact. The bigfoot thing is mostly a cartoonist's thing. People like George Grosz came close to a cartooning style, but his proportions are different. Rather than drawing large hands and big feet, Grosz drew small hands and small feet, and the effect is better. So I'm switching over, I'm shrinking feet and hands, and it does look better. It gives it more of an edge for some reason. GROTH: Jaime, you wouldn't consider what you draw a bigfoot style, would you? JAIME: No, I'm too trapped in anatomy. I would like to loosen up, but when I loosen up it gets tighter. When I try to make something wackier and faster GILBERT: He draws it with more detail instead of less. JAIME: I'm not trying to give up on the style I do, but when I draw something crashing through a window or something, I'd like to make it look and feel like like it's in motion. GROTH: / think what you said earlier was that you find a conceptual impoverishment in a lot of the current in-vogue super-hero workdo you find anything in the drawing that's interesting? GILBERT: I don't think those guys are even halfway close to guys like Ditko and Kirby. I guess what I'm say ing is that those two are the last super-hero artists for m e . . .1 haven't seen anybodymaybe Gil Kanewho came chjse. But Gil was already around. GROTH: What do you think of Moebius? GILBERT: You've got to hand it to Moebius. As far as drawing he was an inspiration, and he's got an imagination, that's important. That's what sets him apart from the rest. We even went through our Moebius draw ing styles, but I guess a lot of cartoonists did at the time. He's able to give the feeling of realism, then he makes up all this crazy shit. GROTH: Jaime mentioned the other day that people don't appreciate good drawing any more. JAIME: I think what I was saying is that most people in comics, even smarter people who appreciate the top artists and writers, don't really know what good art is. This is my opinion of course. I'll be talking to someone who's really knowlegable and who has high standards but they're fooled by a slick line. They'll like something that's got a fancy ink technique... GILBERT: People will come up and say, "Love & Rockets is my favorite comic, do you like Brian Bolland?" And we don't know how to answer that. We'll say, "We like some of his drawings... I think he's good at single illustrations, but his comic is kind of stiff, he's drawing Batman, blah, blah." And they look sort of hurt. JAIME: Just because an artist has the ink line down or *Harlan Ellison is currently appearing as a spokesman in the West Coast television commercials for Chevrolet's Geo line of imported cars.
Above: David Mazzucchellian . example of a m a i n s t r e a m artist w h o may yet break out. Below: Mario, t h eo n e t o t h a n k f o r Love & Rockets, h a s since been unable t o pro duce m u c h substantial work d u e to various determents.
W h o are the progressive cartoonists? T h e b r o t h e r s list: R. C r u m b , A r t Spiegelman, Chester Brown, Peter Bagge, Dan Clowes, Jose M u n o z . . . a n d Lynda Barry (below).
the shading right doesn't mean there's any real naturalism to it or that the posture is right. The thing I try to point out in my drawings and in the drawings I look at is whether or not the character is communicating to y o u . . . GILBERT: It doesn't have to be photo-realistic, it has to feel right. JAIME: The drawing could be not so slick. But as long as it's communicating, that the person is really acting the way he's talking, I can buy it. GROTH: Now are you talking aboutformal drawing such as anatomy and composition or are you talking about something beyond that? Are you talking about academic skills? GILBERT: Well, I notice a lack of that lately. Whereas in the '50s and '60s you had guys like Reed Crandall who had a basic knowledge of art and even if the work's a little dull I could always look at it. Now, I look at these new guys who have no JAIME: In the old days there were guys who went to school and learned to draw from illustratorsgreat illustrators from the 7 0 s and the turn of the century they copied the great artists, the masters. I guess you could blame it on the Marvel ageat that point the fans became the artist and they were copying from comic books. Now / copied from comic books, but I didn't stop there. That wasn't my whole world. Luckily, when I got older I was exposed to real art. Maybe other guys weren't, or they didn't choose to be. So I saw the balance there, and I took from everything. I love drawing comic books with the tear drops flying and everything like that. But at the same time you got to make it relate to the world. GROTH: Do you think that these guys are sincere when they say they 're trying to impose their vision on Martian Manhunter? GILBERT: Some of them probably are, but if their books
stink they're probably just lousy artists. GROTH: Do you think it's possible to impose some individual vision on a corporate owned super-hero character? GILBERT: You know.. .it's not impossible. It's not likely. GROTH: Do you think it's been done in the last ten years? GILBERT: Fifty years? JAIME: There's been plenty of tries. GILBERT: There's been some pretty good fun super hero comic booksC.C. Beck's Captain Marvel, Ditko and Lee's Spider-Man, Kirby and Lee's Fantastic Four, Herbie, the Bizarro series. Love them Bizarros. But there's nothing that has approached Crumb or Lynda Barry or Charles Schulz. JAIME: Well, the Bizarros.. .Maybe not. OK. GROTH: Would you make a distinction between Ditko imposing his vision on Spider-Man and Miller imposing his vision on Batman? JAIME: Well, Ditko was a much better artist, even if he half-assed some of that stuff. I'm sure there were some issues where he said, "Oh my god, I just got back from vacation and I got to put this out in a week.'' But he was so much a better trained artist than Miller. GROTH: But it was also a less self-conscious attempt. He imposed that vision because that was the way he drew, rather than trying to come up with some elaborate architectural concept... JAIME: He didn't picture himself on a pedestal. GILBERT: Ditko was a killer cartoonist, period.
Decade
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GROTH: What do you think of the position of alternative comics ? Are you optimistic about where things are going ? GILBERT: Well, there's a place for original cartoonists now to make a halfway decent living, like ourselves and good artists like Peter Bagge and Chester Brown. There's a place for them now. They've got their small followings, and that's a healthy sign. But the odds seem really tremendousthe mainstream crap, the reprints of really lousy mid-'70s Marvel comics, things like that. It looks bad, but I guess I have some optimism for the smaller guys. GROTH: Who do you think is at the forefront? GILBERT: Well, of course, it's Robert Crumb. Since 1967 he's been the forefront of things. He's still doing it, it's still great. GROTH: What is it about Crumb's work you like so much? GILBERT: When he started out, it seemed like there was nothing he couldn't do. One second it was really silly, then you turn the page and he would touch on something serious. I hear people saying that Crumb's stuff now is better than it's ever been. I think the old stuff, as silly as it looked on the surface, always had a serious side to it. GROTH: How do you rank Crumb's older work, like late '60s and early 70s with his current material in Weirdo? GILBERT: I guess I prefer the older stuff. I don't think he's burned out or anything. I think he's taking it easy right nowif you look at the last Weirdo [#23], he slows down every once in awhile. He's doing it on purpose pro bably, enjoying himself. I guess I prefer the older stuff because it caught me by suprise and it was unrelenting in its imagination, the artwork was terrific, there was almost no idea he didn't think of. It was almost like there
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was nothing left for me to do. JAIME: I think Crumb took the medium to its limit, but he can still come back without burning it out or having done it before. He's covered every part of life and comics. GILBERT: Then there's the thing with his problem with women. He went to the limit on that. GROTH: You mean in terms of honesty? GILBERT: Honesty, and exposing it on the page. He makes me feel positively normal. [Laughs] GROTH: Where do you think you fit in to the comics field at the moment? Do you see any other cartoonists doing what you're doing? You're doing pretty serious dramatic work in comics form, and there isn 't much of that being done. Most of the other good work in my view is satirical, like Chester Brown's work... GILBERT: You mean like straight fiction? GROTH: Yeah. I mean basically mainstream fiction in the comics form, which is what you 're doing now and which very, very few people are doing. Off the top of my head I'm not sure if I can think of anyone... Crumb does it when he's doing a biography of a blues musician. JAIME: There's a few guys that touch upon it and they do it really wellPeter Bagge, when he does middle class suburbia, hits the nail on the head every time. But he strays away from it. It's not a constant thing. GILBERT: I think we're the only ones doing it in a series form and drawing it fairly realistically, maybe. Others seem to be doing it in short bits. I've always been more comfortable doing it as a series. GROTH: Do you like Pekar's work? GILBERT: Oh, sure. I like Harvey's work a lot. Strident leftist kind of guy. GROTH: Who else today is on the forefront? GILBERT: Spiegelman's Maus is terrific. I think he's finally hit something that he's really good at. I like Lynda Barry a lot, even though I don't like everything she does, but when she's good I think she's real good. GROTH: Do you like Matt Groening? to bring up the second of the pair who are always mentioned in the same breath. GILBERT: I like Lynda a lot more. I really don't read Matt that much anymore. It seems the strip is repetitious now. JAIME: And Lynda hits a nerve when you read her really top notch work, she hits a nerve as if you were there. GILBERT: It's almost like she was peeking into my head when I was six years old. JAIME: And it's without all the "good of days" stuff, none of that sentimental bullshit. GROTH: Next? GILBERT: Of course there's Chester Brown, whose imagination is unstoppable, it seems. Of course, Munoz and Sampayo. Jose Munoz is probably one of the best cartoonists we've ever had, no matter what other people think. JAIME: There's Dan Clowes, who is getting into his best stuff. This new comic that he came out with, he finally found what he wants to do. GILBERT: And I think he's going to get better. He's going to be one of the major cartoonists. GROTH: What do you think of the RAW crew, people like Charles Burns, Mark Beyer... Do you have some favorites there? GILBERT: I like Burns, but he appeals to me in the same way David Lynch films do. There's some twisted part of me that I should probably keep in the closet, but I still enjoy that kind of stuff. Who else is in RAW] Most of the people in RAW are working all over the place n o w THE COMICS JOURNAL #126. January 1989
like Burns. JAIME: Munoz. GILBERT: That's where we discovered Munoz and Sampayo. GROTH: What about Catalan ? Do they publish anything that you've been real fond of? GILBERT: Joe's Bar, but that's back to Munoz and Sampayo. I liked Goodbye by that Japanese guy, Tatsumi. As a matter of fact, that particular book was an inspira tion to how I'm starting my "Poison River" story. He tells his stories directly without any bullshit, and I liked that. GROTH: It seems to meand tell me if you think I'm wrongthat the field is splitting up into two or three fac tions. One is basically mainstream comics and that whole mode of expression, and the other one would be alter native cartoonistswhich would include Crumb, Spiegelman, and you two and a number of others. Then there's probably a third area, a gray area, you could call them upscale mainstream cartoonists, or downscale alternative cartoonists. And I was wondering what your feeling about that was. GILBERT: Who do you mean? Give some names. GROTH: The upscale guys in mainstream comics would be Miller and Chaykin. In alternative comics the ones who hover somewhere in the middle would be Paul Chadwick GILBERT: You mean those guys that they're always lumping us with. [Laughs] When Love & Rockets first came out it used to piss me off when they compared us to American Flagg! I never thought they had anything in common with each other. Our characters never grit their teeth half as much as Chaykin's did. GROTH: How do you feel in relation to these other fac tions in comics? GILBERT: Well, the day Love & Rockets starts look ing like one of those upscale comics, like Dark Knight, or Black Kiss it's time to go underground. [Laughs] GROTH: Do you have any affinity with cartoonists who work irPmainstream comics? GILBERT: I talk to a lot of those guys and we have a good chat, because we grew up with the same stuff and we can talk about a particular Thor comic and have a good laugh.. .but JAIME: We've talked to people who have said, " I really wish I could be doing what you guys are doing." But I wonder if they're talking in terms of quality or just packaging. GROTH: How closely do you follow contemporary comics? GILBERT: I might buy two comics a month. JAIME: Same here. GILBERT: If there's something good outand that's usually reprints of goofy '50s horror comics. I get Weirdo regularly. GROTH: When you started drawing hove & Rockets about six years ago you didn't know anyone in the comics profession; since then you've gone to conventions and so forth. From that can you give me your impres sion of the field, your impression of other cartoonists? How have your impressions of the field grown and evolved over the last five years? GILBERT: We're disappointed about a lot of it, because most people out there aren't really interested in progress ing. They just want to be the next Frank Miller, they want to have the next hot item and they don't necessarily want to improve as far as true art goes. GROTH: Do you find that there's a lack of kinship or
BETO:
When I see an issue of Yummy Fur and Chester Brown has done something I never would have thought of, I think, "Oh shit he scooped me." But I'm happy about it.
From Dan Clowes' latest publication, the

Lloyd Llewellyn Special.
-- H E * 8 K A I N S WE-ffe 9 V C K E P 0 U T T M B 0 U 6 H THESE I TWO H O L E S I N T H E S A 6 E I Of HEP. N E C * ' " A M P WHAT'S I M P t e - H E R S P I N A L CLviC
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Peter Bagge, from Neat Stuff # 1 2 .
a lack of brotherhood? GILBERT: Maybe there is, because everybody seems to be looking out for number one now. The scene doesn't seem as friendly as it was, and we've only been around for a few years. JAIME: I think that's because comics are in Time magazine now, so they're really taking their Marvel and DC titles seriously. GROTH: Do you feel a kinship or do you feel isolated? GILBERT: I'm beginning to feel isolated, because not a lot of cartoonists are interested in doing anything serious, they want to be the next big guy. GROTH: You've met Chester Brown once or twice, right? What was your impression of him? GILBERT: He seemed like a friendly guy. He's real quiet, but at the same time you know all that shit is going through is head. [Laughs] GROTH: Does that worry you? GILBERT: No, because the same things go through our heads, go through Peter Bagge's head, go through Drew Friedman's head. And I've met all those guys and they're all pleasant guys. GROTH: Are there any cartoonists you feel a closeness to? I mean more than liking somebody because he's a nice guy and you can chat with him at a party. But is there anyone you feel a closeness to spiritually or artisiticallythat you 're doing sort of the same filing they 're doing even though you might be doing it in a radically different way. GILBERT: I think the people who we've mentioned Crumb, Lynda Barry, Art Spiegelman, Chester Brown, Peter Bagge, Dan Clowes, Pekar. I don't think we're in competition with them at all. We probably sell better than half those guys so they probably hate our guts behind our backs [Laughs]. But when I see a new issue of Neat Stuff"and think, "Wow, this is better than our last issue," that doesn't bother me. I feel more like, "O.K. Peter, let's do it, rah, rah, rah." Because I know next issue we'll get back into it. I never feel we've lost it. I'm always happy when I see an issue of Yummy Fur and Chester does something I never would have thought of. I think, "Oh, shit, he scooped me." But I'm happy about it. Once when people asked me what I liked I couldn't think of anything.
up to apologize for being insulted. JAIME: If they want to play like t h a t . . . I used to want to be nice to these guys, now I don't care. If they want to play dirty like that and play those little games... what am I worrying about? I'm doing my own work and they're doing what they do. If they want to play games, I don't need that shit. GROTH: Do you guys ever feel under the gun for being published by Fantagraphics, which comes under flak every so often? GILBERT: Actually, it keeps things hopping with me. I don't give a shit. If the whole comics industry starts dumping on Fantagraphics, I wouldn't worry. JAIME: It only makes me want to back you guys up even more. GROTH: Aside from the fact that they lied about us /Laughsy what do you think about the purpose and func tion ofWAP! ? Do you have a sympathy for creators who are trying to better their positions at Marvel and DC? GILBERT: Well, yes I do. That's all a lot of these guys know. When I first heard about WAP! I thought it was a good thing, they should get together and kick Marvel and DC in the ass. But the aim is just to put out more super-hero shit, because that's what they do. JAIME: They're not looking to change the work, they're just looking to change their bosses. [Laughs] GILBERT: I guess they want to knock down walls and build up new ones. I can't feel too sorry for them. GROTH: What did you think of the whole ratings flap? GILBERT: I didn't know what was going to happen. I thought we were doing the right thing having the mature readers label on our comic, because our stuff gets pretty wild and far be it for me to tell what's pornographic and what isn't. JAIME: While some cartoonists were complaining that an advisory would hold them back, I think it gives us freedom. But then again I'm not worrying about that Marvel check either. GROTH: Were you sympathetic to Marvel and DC artists who were worried about the political nature of that whole difficulty ? I think what they were saying is that they didn't mind labels being on comics, but they objected to the reasons Marvel and DC did it. They saw this as a kind of slippery slope and the thing that would happen is the same thing that's happened to the motion picture ratings. GILBERT: I thought in a way that liberated films. You couldn't see Blue Velvet in 1965.1 don't see why that wouldn't have liberated comics. You know, they want to draw nipples on Supergirl, that's the extent of their creative desires. GROTH: Are you not taking this seriously? JAIME: [Laughs] GILBERT: Fuck it man. GROTH: // doesn't sound like you're taking these artists' freedom seriously. GILBERT: Well, I wouldn't call most of them artists. I gue'ss I would call them employees. JAIME: Well, as I understand it, according to Dave Sim we 're employees. GROTH: What do you think of Dave Sim's distinction, that any artist who is published by someone other than himself, is an employee? GILBERT: Hemingway was an employee of Scribners, is that what he's saying? GROTH: Yes. GILBERT: U h . . . [Laughs] GROTH: Is that too self-evidently absurd to comment about?
.ie, a C h e a t , a n d a Rip-Off
GROTH: Here's a question I feel compelled to ask and if it produces a lead balloon we can cut it GILBERT: Thirteen inches limp. Oh, that's not the ques tion? [Laughter] GROTH: / don't think you've ever gone on record about this and I suppose this is a good time to do it. What did you think about the whole WAP! controversy? [WAP! is a newsletter for comics freelancers edited by Steve Gerber, Steven Grant, and Frank Miller. In their first issue they printed a storywithout making any attempt to confirm itclaiming that the Hernandez brothers were paid so poorly for Love & Rockets that they were painting Gary Groth's house to make ends meet.] J A I M E : I thought it was pretty chickenshit. Obviously, it was to get at you. Maybe they felt bad about hurting our feelings, but we were never approached to begin with. I still haven't talked to those guys. I thought it was really chickenshit that they never apologized to Fantagraphics the lie was as much about them as it was about us. I still haven't heard from them. I live in the same state, I'm usually in the same town. GILBERT: And apparendy we're supposed to call them
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GILBERT: Yeah, I guess in the '50s Fellini was an employee of Carlo Ponti. Yep, I'm just a schlepper at Fantagraphics. GROTH: / was having lunch with Spiegelman today and we came to the conclusion that there just weren't enough good cartoonists to really establish a beachhead of good alternative cartooning. GILBERT: Not at the moment. GROTH: Then either Kim Thompson or I also suggested that we thought we could blame the publishers as well as the cartoonists because the publishers don't generally, I think, encourage adult cartooning. So I want for a minute to broach the subject of publishers. I was wonder ing how important you think publishers are in the pro fession and what your general feelings are toward publishers and toward mainstream publishers in particular. [pause] GILBERT: Shit, I don't how to begin. GROTH: Well, let me refocus the question. How impor tant, for example, is ownership of your work? In other words, could you do the work you do now for a com pany that owned the copyright? GILBERT: Absolutely not. I wouldn't be doing "Heart break Soup" or Errata Stigmata stories for anybody else. JAIME: I would still be doing "Mechanics." I couldn't be doing "Locas." GROTH: That's because "Locas" is more personal? JAIME: Yeah. And it's got no hook to it. And publishers, no matter how alternative they want to get, still want that hook. A lot of the fault is the editors. GROTH: When we first started publishing Love & Rockets, were you acutely conscious of creator's rights, of ownership and so forth and so on? GILBERT: I think I was aware that the underground car toonists owned all their stuff even if they were all poor. That was about it. There were things like Star*Reach and I knew that people owned their stuff on that. I talked to Mike Friedrich, we'd write to each other. I sent him my first story for Star*Reach and he rejected it, but it was a nice rejection. He really encouraged me. He said, this is really interesting, it's just not polished or whatever. I sent the story to somebody else in northern California and I never got a response and I don't know where that story is. My first story is out there somewhere. If anybody knows John D. Cothran, he's got my first story. Stupid me, I lost my photocopy. GROTH: Then there was Mr. X. GILBERT: Dum de dum dum! GROTH: Just for the record, why don't you explain how Mr. X came about, how you were approached, and so forth. ' GILBERT: We'd seen the advertisements for it in the Journal and other places, and Paul Rivoche's art attracted us right away. We read about how it kept getting post poned. And one day Ken Steacy, who was the editor, called us and asked us if we wanted to do it. I said, "We've been waiting for it to come out." Apparently Dean Motter and Paul Rivoche had a falling out, and that was at the time when Love & Rockets wasn't doing that well financially. I thought well, this goofball science fic tion would be easy to do. I actually made the decision myself and Mario and Jaime went along with it. That's how it started. GROTH: You guys basically signed a work-for-hire con tract or its equivalent. GILBERT: Yeah, they own everything. GROTH: Did you know what you were doing at the time ?
GILBERT: We knew it was their character, we knew that we would have nothing after we were through with it. JAIME: All we expected from it was to get paid GILBERT: To get paid fairly well. I figured we'd do it for fun and hopefully make some money. It sounds really stupid nowdoing it for money. GROTH: That'll teach you to try to be commercial. GILBERT: Yeah, we tried it, we got fucked over and that's it. Mr. X wasn't even that rewarding artistically, because Mario and I were plotting it and I was scripting it and Jaime was drawing it and we could never make a smooth connection. Mr. X was fragmented. It could have been something if I had written and drawn it or if Jaime had written and drawn it. It would have been a whole different book, and it would have been better, I think, because that's how we work the best. Mario's a good idea man, but he's not trained particularly well in telling an entire story. GROTH: / wonder if you wanted to talk about Mario's contribution to Love & Rockets. JAIME: He was the one who pushed us, at least me. I wouldn't be doing it GILBERT: He was the one who grabbed us by the arm.
BETO:
Mr. X was just something that happened, like a bad zit, and now it's gone away.
Jaime's model sheet for the Mr. X character Mercedes.
_ cmt MI* w**

5
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BETO:
There are other cartoonists serious about telling stories about life. Forget the Dark Knights, forget the yuppy-ized Superman.
We were dragging our feet and he was raring to go. GROTH: Why hasn't he drawn much in the last three years? GILBERT: Mario doesn't practice that often. It's a vicious circle for himhe's got a job, he's got to sup port himself and his family, so he doesn't have a lot of time to practice drawing, and if he can't practice, he can't progress. And Mario's not that confident either. He'll write something, then he backs off and he won't finish it. He might be intimidated by what's expected from us in the book. I don't know, I've never asked him. But there'll always be room for him in Love & Rockets when he's ready. G R O T H : How did Vortex owning Mr. X outright effect you? Did that mitigate your effort? GILBERT: We couldn't do much with Mr. X. He was the protagonist. If you have a comic called Mr. X he's got to be the main focus of things, and I found that for us a character like that didn't work. If we had done Mr. X, our way, he would have been a background character the whole time, sort of a spook running around. Then it would have worked a lot better, and we could have focused on the other characters. Those other characters are ours, by the way. We created most of the characters aside from Mr. X. GROTH: You mean you created them and Vortex owns them? GILBERT: Right. But in God's eyes they're ours. [Laughs] JAIME: If Mercedes is the most popular character in the comic, it's because she's Gilbert's. GILBERT: I've noticed they've turned her into a Hopey facsimile in recent issuesshe's in a rock band and she's even dressing like Hopey more or less. I'm just sorry we didn't flesh out the characters enough, I was never comfortable with them. And we quit by the time Jaime and I started getting warmed up to them. G R O T H : And you quit over a monetary dispute? GILBERT: Yeah, at issue four. We were going to go up to issue six, but it never happened, never will. J A I M E : Gilbert had this great idea of killing off every character he created to set it up for Motter, so he could start it over with the character he originally planned. GILBERT: But they knew a good thing when they saw it, and kept Mercedes. GROTH: Let me ask you a question which might seem obvious, but since Harlan Ellison once told me that be tween Mr. X and Love & Rockets, he thought Mr. X was the real thing, how do you look at Mr. X in com parison to Love & Rockets? GILBERT: There is no comparison. Mr. X was just something that sort of happened, like a bad zit, and now it's gone away. That's all. [Laughs] There are other car toonists who shall remain nameless who have said that Love & Rockets is okay but Mr. X was the real thing. I don't know, maybe what they're talking about is Dean Motter's ideas. GROTH: It seems to me that despite WAP!, which is obviously based upon the self-interest of mainstream car toonists, that there is a lack of solidarity among car toonists. Tell me if you think I'm wrong here, but I always had the impression that you somehow did not fit into any of the various cliques in comics. For example, as you said earlier, you were taken advantage of in the Mr. X deal, and yet no cartoonists came to your defense GILBERT: Maybe not in the press, but we talked to a few people at conventions who told us they supported us. GROTH: But publicly nobody's really come to your
defense, and cartoonists continue to GILBERT: - w o r k on Mr. X, do covers for Mr. X, things like that. JAIME: Then they complain about creator's rights. GROTH: Sure. I was wondering how you felt about that. Would you, for example, feel any obligation to support cartoonists who were in your view taken advantage of by a publisher? GILBERT: We supported Kirby through the whole Marvel mess. Of course, if somebody's being dicked o v e r . . . Shit, I went to see that fucking Howard the Duck movie because Gerber wrote the comic, then he pulls this shit in WAP! Goddam worst movie ever made next to The Color Purple. GROTH: Is there any sense in which you feel somewhat isolated? GILBERT: Yeah, I guess. I see Kaluta did the last cover of Mr. X... I don't know what's going on between those artists and Bill Marks. Chester Brown seems happy at Vortex. GROTH: There seems to be a prevailing ethic in this industry where, ' 'As long as he doesn't fuck me over I'm happy." GILBERT: Exactly. So you're asking if we're isolated?I think we're becoming more and more isolated, but there are people that we can talk tothe Peter Bagges and Dan ClowesesI know they would support us if some shit ever came up, and we'd definitely support them. But as far as the mainstream goes, we seem to be getting fur ther and further away from the whole deal. JAIME: I haven't met one of those guys who has something really personal that he's trying to get out and is being fucked over. The first thing I would say is don't go to a big publisher. Some of those guys just seem to care more about getting more money than getting their vision out. GROTH: Do you feel that you have to act as an advocate or a spokesman in any way for what you see as the pro gressive movement in comics? GILBERT: Whenever we're interviewed I try to emphasize that we're serious about this, that there are other cartoonists serious about telling stories about life, forget the Dark Knights, forget the yuppy-ized Super man, forget it. JAIME: We're also doing it for those guys who aren't selling worth a shit who are serious and talented. GROTH: / wonder how much you guys are a product of your times. That's the old argument Gil Kane and I always have, how much free will is a part of this and how much a cartoonist is a part of his times: And I wonder, if you were born 30 years ago would you be doing Doll Man? GILBERT: It's been good for us because we're in a posi tion of owning our work, of doing whatever we goddam well please. JAIME:. Ten years ago we couldn't do what we're doing now. ' GILBERT: We're very lucky. But that doesn't mean we would have wanted to do super-hero genre stuff. If we wanted to do super-hero stuff we'd be doing it. JAIME: And there's plenty of alternative publishers who are welcoming super-heroes. GROTH: Where do you place the blame for the hegemony of super-heroes and genre crap? Do you place it primarily on the cartoonists themselves or the publishers? GILBERT: It's probably an equal distribution of publishers, cartoonists and retailers. JAIME: The publishers want to sell something and the
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artists are only too happy to give them what they want. GILBERT: And retailers have to survive, so they're going to go with what sells. It's a vicious circle and I'm happy to be at least partly away from it. GROTH: Do you guys ever feel demoralized that you 're fighting against the current? GILBERT: I don't look into it that much. It drives some people crazy. I think Peter Bagge looks into it too muchhe might not have any alternative because his book sells so poorly. But I talk to him about it and it drives him crazy how the market is. I try to keep away from it, because I would get demoralized, my work might suffer. JAIME: I'm able to do what I want to do and I'm able to live off it, so I'm fine where I am. I would love to have more readers, but as long as I'm able to do it comfortably... GILBERT: That's the best we can do right now. GROTH: So where do you see the future of comics going five to ten years from now? Do you see those who we can comfortably call "us" still struggling to produce the kind of comics we are, or do you see a breakthrough? GILBERT: It could go either way. JAIME: When our comic gets a lot of press, maybe not a lot of readers, but a lot of good press, you think people are opening up. But this could just be some big gimmick and it could all fall apart and we'll have to do something else. But I try not to think about it. I'm living for the next day on this comic. Hopefully, I can do it forever, but tomorrow I may be crushed. GROTH: It seems from my point of view that every time there's something that can be called a breakthroughI think Maus could be legitimately be called a breakthroughit hasn't had that substantial an effect, it was almost a fluke. If'Maus, for example, didn't have the theme of the Holocaust it might not have been a breakhrough, if Batman didn't have the gimmick of DC's character, it wouldn't have been a breakthrough. So these breakthroughs are not the breakthroughs we thought. Even though there's a ' 'graphic novel'' trend nowI use the term looselywhat happens is that the breach is filled with all kinds of garbage. So we 're back to square one struggling against this huge tide of mediocre product that manufacturers crank out to fill up a perceived need. GILBERT: If you're asking if I see myself in the same position ten years from n o w . . . if I got to do it, I got to do it. I don't see myself quitting. JAIME: It's been going good for me. I'm really com fortable so far. GROTH: When you say it's been comfortable what do you mean? JAIME: Maybe comfortable's not the word. I've worked at it so long that I can't quit. If I couldn't do what I'm doing I wouldn't be cartooning at all. GILBERT: Some people ask,' 'Is Love & Rockets a step ping stone to something else?" And I like to think that the "Heartbreak Soup" stories are what I've aspired to all my life. There's no end to what I can do with "Heart break Soup." I don't need to do " a more meaningful comic"I can't get more meaningful. This is it. GROTH: How do you feel about merchandizing? You have control over how your work is presented. GILBERT: We like to keep it at some kind of nunimum. But if we didn't do t-shirts and posters, somebody else would. We learned that through the rock and roll, that if the band doesn't put out a t-shirt, there'll be thousands of bootlegs. JAIME: Speaking of rock and roll, there's a b a n d . . .
GROTH: You might as well go on the record. How do you feel about the band Love & Rockets? GILBERT: Well, I'm not to crazy about it, because Jaime and I are musicians and we wanted to call ourselves Love & Rockets. After all, we came up with the n a m e . . . GROTH: Have you guys been intimidated by the press and applause you've been getting? JAIME: If they like it or don't like it I'm going to do it anyway. I used to look at the good reviews and say, "They're right, they're right." And look at the bad reviews and say, "They're full of shit." Now I can't just look at one side because I have to look at the other. There are enough people to support us. GROTH: God bless them. GILBERT: We love you all. Seriously.
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U R ET H E I V E S
BV
A N D R E W DAG
LIS
.emeber those Mad parodies where L classic authors were made to bring their masterpieces up to date, the pretext being that modern viewers, listeners, and readers couldn't otherwise relate to all that old stuff? Remember how funny it was to see Romeo and Juliet in t-shirts and leather jackets speaking Brooklynese, or seeing the Mona Lisa huckstering soft drinks? Hilarious, right? And remember why it was so funny? Of course you do: this "modernizing," negating as it did in one fell swoop the work's historico-social con text, eliminated the reason for the work's manner; people in different times and social cir cumstances face their problems with different means, different mental make-ups, and the humor of those Mad parodies came from the contrast between old manner and new context. Everyone saw how absurd such modernizing was; that's what made it all so funny. Today just such "modernizing" has become a huge industry and it ain't so funny. Not damned funny at all. The past decade or two have been witness to a growing number of instances when a given artistic work of widely established merit has been tampered with by hands other than those of its creators and usually without their consent or, as in the case of the colorization of The Maltese Falcon, in the face of their vehement opposi tion. Ted Turner, the man mostly responsible for the computer tinting of classic black-andwhite movies, is now busy doing the same thing to the Fleischer Popeye cartoons, except that in this case the cartoons aren't being simply col
ored but rather re-drawn. The job is being done by Fred Ladd, the same man who supervised the coloring of those immortal Betty Boop and Porky Pig cartoons 15 years ago in Korea, where native draftsmen traced the original frames of blackand-white film for later coloring and photographing. Except that not every frame was traced and not every detail of the surviving frames was copied either. The results are that a brightly-colored Popeye now moves somewhat jerkily in a a simplified background that would do Hanna-Barbera proud. For many contem porary viewers, this is the only Popeye they'll ever see. (What's worse, the success of these Popeye cartoons will surely inspire others to do the same. Rumors are already flying that Univer sal plans on doing the same with its Walter Lantz Oswald series.) Turner Entertainment is, of course, typically evasive as to how those cartoons have been col ored. When movie commentator Leonard Maltin received a tape from the firm purporting to show how much better the new versions are from the old ones, he discovered that the "before" and "after" footage was nothing more than the same re-drawn scene from which the color was occa sionally dropped, and not a side-by-side show ing of the original and its remake. What this says about Turner Entertainment's commitment to honesty and quality is only too clear. Even Disney's gotten into the act, releasing music videos illustrated with redrawn and recolored Mickey Mouse footage from the '30s. Worse, the Mouse Studios saw fit to celebrate the 50th anniversary reissue of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs by guillotining almost onethird of its artwork. Films maaTtefOTe4he4arJy_ '50s were shot in the nearly-square 1.33 ratio and so can't be shown in theaters equipped with projectors and screens designed for the modern 1.66 standard without leaving some spill-off. Such films can be shrunk into the current-sized rectangle by using special aperture plates but rather than do this, Disney decided instead to lop off the tops and bottoms of their classic animated feature (remember the joke about the undertaker who sold only one size coffin and made everyone fit by chopping off everything that stuck out?). The same thing happened to Bambi and Cinderella; even the soundtracks were re-recorded in fake stereo. That such amputations are unnecessary is
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*TuTiply^YenJ^ Warner Brothers cartoon department's packaging tastyear-ca^'Greatest Hits" assortment of Bob Clampett's Porky?ig~ cartoons, which not only did not slice off any artwork but also did not feel the need fo color them either (God only knows the boardroom brouhaha this decision must have entailed). Sadly, the Warner Brothers menagerie has not fared as well in its Saturday morning reruns, where zealous saboteurs consider it their sacred duty to tame down the wild and zany humor of the originals by re-editing them so that they might not endanger the delicate minds of modern children.
The minds of modern adults need equal pro tection, it seems, if one is to judge byl the rtaBiyjL ?uts demanded by the mainstreart| net works before'ffleybroadcastjnpvies originally shown in theaters. That this violateTthTTnTigrity of a given work is, to the networks, no con sideration at all; movies have traditionally been seen by their financiers and exhibitors essentially as money-making vehicles and if some art sneaks in, well, fine, as long as it doesn't interfere with the movies' prime pecuniary raison d'etre. And if a few more shekels can be wrung out of the old whores by simply pasting some new war paint on them, hey, go for it, that's showbiz!
And thereir| lies the conflict: that the legal owners of works of art fail to recognize at what point some endeavors cease to be mere com modities and become creations of enduring worth. To them it's all product; in fact, in their eyes there probably isn't anything that shouldn't serve the p i n goon gods of Avarice and Stupidity. Certainly such undisguised greed constitutes the admittefl motivation for the recutting of Fritz Lang's Metropolis in order that it better accommodate the insipid rock soundtrack (by Giorgio Moroder) that was then grafted onto it. Need it be repeated that tnis version is the only one w h i p most present-day viewers will ever see? Greed; also lies behind the decision of Reprise Record! and the Hendrix Estate to let producer Alan Douglas rummage through the 600-plus hours of Jimi Hendrix tapes to see what he could come nip with. What Douglas did with this privilege was to exhume throwaway numbers, cut, paste and finally erase all the tracks featur ing Jimi's sidemen and then have some generic funk rythmn beds dubbed in by L.A. session players; Hendrix in a can, so to speak (the pitiful results can be heard on Crash Landing and MidLightning). similar fate befell jazz iconoclast Charlie rker in the soundtrack of Bird, the recent Clint W o o d film about the alto saxophonist's life, nder the direction of arranger Lennie Niehaus, audio engineers simply sliced Parker's solos out F their original accompaniment and stuck them vith suitable digital re-enhancement) over êwly-recorded arrangements (admittedly, blayed by top-rank musicians). And the ques tion has been asked ever since this was first done [ with the voice of Enrico Caruso: why bother? On the Bird album, for example, "Ko-Ko" sounds like nothing so much as fleet-fingered disco; isn't anyone offended that the legacies of such geniuses are being so fundamentally distorted? The standard argument in this case is that "new audiences will be introduced" to the works of these masters. But the real drama of the music of Parker and-Hendrix is in hear ing their accompanists piss blood as they strain and groan and reach beyond themselves while striving desperately to keep up with these master musicians, who were imbued with such power ful rhythmic sense that they often created their own time and accompaniment. No amount of post-hoc rationalization can restore this essen tial musical dimension of interaction. So why do it? Well, in all these cases the idea seems to be that the works in question, be they graphic, cinematic, musical or literary, are insufficiently strong to stand up on their own merits in today's world without the application of extensive cosmetic surgery in order to make them present able to the modern consumer. At the root of it there is a lack of faith in the work, a conviction that it is somehow deficient, incomplete if presented as it was originally created. The subtext appears to be that contemporary achievements are intrinsically superior in quality
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THE DAYS O F KING ARTHUR ay
JY/VOPS/S-D\SGUlStD AS A D E M O N W I T H A HORRIBLE. MASK O F G O O S E SKIN, VAL S W I N G S O N A R O P E I N T O T H E O G R E ' S C H A M B E R A N D LITERALLY SCARES H I M T O D E A T H . T H E W O R K IS B U T H A L F - D O N E . T H E C A S T L E M U S T BE CLEARED O F T H E R E M A I N I N G RUFFIANS
N O A C T O R C O U L D HAVE STAGED H I S D R A M A T I C E F F E C T S T H A N D I D V A L D U R I N G THAT NIGHT O F HORROR .
BETTER
W R A P P E D I N H I S BLACK C L O A K H E I S INVISIBLE I N D A R K C O R N E R S , B U T HIS S U D D E N A P P E A R A N C E S A R E F R I G H T F U L T O T H E O G R E ' S H E N C H M E N .
HIGH A M O N G T H E RAFTERS O F T H E D I N I N G - H A L L , VAL S I T S T H R O U G H T H E L O N G D A Y , HUNGRY AND T H I R S T Y , W A I T I N G F O R DARKNESS A N D H I S FINAL A C T .
W H E N DARKNESS FALLS T H E F R I G H T E N E D O U T L A W S S E A T T H E M S E L V E S IN T H E D I N I N G - H A L L , BUT N O T F O R L O N G . WITH A SCREAM T H E D E M O N SAILS O U T O F T H E D A R K N E S S A C R O S S T H E TABLES A N D DISAPPEARS A G A I N .
IN T H E I R FEAR T H E Y R U S H T O T H E I R MASTER, BUT FIND H I M DEAD W I T H N O SIGN O F A W O U N D f
-NEXT
WEK-
"PANIC!"
and market value and that bygone accomplishments can compete with them only by aping them. Enter Pioneer Comics.
Claiming to be "dedicated to presenting the best in graphic storytelling," Pioneer in fact does little more than resurrect the better adventure strips of the King Features Syndicate and then
"adapt" them from their longitudinal strip shape (in the case of the dailies) to the more familiar multi-tiered look of comic books (the strips adapted from Sunday pages suffer even greater
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WITH A CHOKING M O A N THE OGRE S L O W L Y SINKS I D T H E F L O O R A N D T H E H E A R T THAT K N E W N O M E R C Y F O R OTHERS CEASED BEATING T H R O U G H SHEER T E R R O R .
vVKEN DARKNESS FALLS THE FRIGHTf NED OUTLAWS SEAT THEMSELVES IN THE D I N I N G - H A L L , BUT N O T F O R L O N G . W I T H A S C R E A M T H E D E M O N SAILS O U T O F T H E DARKNESS A C R O S S T H E TABLES A N D DISAPPEARS A G A I N .
IN T H E I R FEAR T H E Y RUSH T O T H E I R M A S T E R , B U T FIND H I M DEAD W I T H N O ' SIGN O F A W O U N D !
Foster's original p a g e (left) a n d t h e s a m e s e q u e n c e w i t h t h e P i o n e e r t o u c h ( a b o v e ) . P e r h a p s i t ' s t o o m u c h t o e x p e c t a s y n dicate (in this case King Features) to regard t h e c o m i c s they license a s art rather than product.
indignities). To date their hit list includes Prince Valiant by Hal Foster, Mandrake by Lee Falk and Phil Davis, Secret Agent Corrigan by Archie Goodwin and Al Williamson (here renamed simply Secret Agent), Jungle Jim by Alex Raymond, Modesty Blaise by Peter O'Donnell and Jim Holdaway, Buz Sawyer by Roy Crane, Johnny Hazard by Frank Robbins, and finally Rip Kirby, also by Alex Raymond. An im pressive list to say the least, including as it does the work of four undisputed masters as well as some of the best features by seasoned profes sionals. And the company promises "still more excitement.. .including new adventures of some of your favorite action heroes from television, films and books...and you'll also see the Pioneer Comics touch in their handling!" That "touch" is in fact nothing less than artistic rape. Having chosen first to resurrect some of the field's best productions, Pioneer's self-appointed "upgraders" then proceed to reframe images, cut off borders, blow up some sections while completely deleting others, run roughshod over painstakingly-developed com positions, eliminate backgrounds, and in generalhaving completely dismembered a masterpiecethen proceed to re-stitch the left over parts into something that compares with the original somewhat as the Frankenstein monster does with a healthy human body, zipper-stitches, mangled brains and all. Hal Foster and Alex Raymond, two of the greatest to ever grace the field, especially suf fer at the hands of Pioneer's mutilators. Within the covers of The Official Prince Valiant, Foster's cinemascope visions clash head-on with Pioneer's TV-sized stuffiness. Gone are the stun ning landscapes, the breath-taking vistas, the awesome pageantry, the sprawling grandeur of
comicdom's noblest illustrator. In a comic pro duced by Pioneer (and what utter gall of them to pick such a name for their company!) insignificant details get blown up to quarter-page size while the rest of the entire panel is thrown away, and oversize panels sometimes get hacked in two and made to look as if both parts had originally been drawn separately. (A similar desecration was inflicted on Winsor McCay when Blackthorne reprinted his Little Nemo in Slumberland in a*7" x. 10" booklet where McCay's exquisite strip, originally designed so that the pages can be viewed as an integral whole, was dissected into an illegible twopanels-per-page format.) For his part, Alex Raymond (clearly a great admirer of Foster) gets raped and buggered at the same time. Not content with mangling his Jungle Jim, Pioneer commits the unpardonable by hacking apart Rip Kirby, his most consistent and accomplished strip. And it looks like the company plans to savage Raymond's work for a while yet since issue #1 starts with "The Scarred Hand," Kirby's first adventure origi nally published March 3, 1946. The Official Jungle Jim #3 is especially objectionable, replacing as it does Raymond's spare panel compositions with pages crammed with bloated word balloons sprinkled with a few facial close-upsbackgrounds in such cases are, needless to say, few and far between, so that the characters often seem strangely suspended, not anchored to any fixed point in space. Con versely, background details are sometimes blown up to the point where one truly wonders what is in the panelhardly a fitting fate for an illustrator of Raymond's caliber and reputation. That well-deserved reputation was earned by Raymond as much for his actual rendering as
for his great skill at composing an image; that is, how he juxtaposed and contrasted the com ponent elements of his images so that they pro duce certain visual effects. This passion for design first flowered in Flash Gordon's episode against the Hawk Men (circa 1934), with its abundance of radical perspectives inspiring ver tigo, its long falls, its dizzying ascents of sheer cliff faces, and its apposite descents into dragoninfested grottos. From that time on, Raymond combined his traditional static full-figure stock shots with the main character erect in the panel's central zone (a type of vertical composition of which he was fond to the very end) with pyramidal compositions, spiral compositions, cruciform compositions, and compositions made up of nothing but diagonals. Raymond was clearly inspired by the essence of the Baroque, where arms hang gracefully in the air, long capes flow sinuous and lazy, and where bodies in opposition balance against one another in complementary geometries of a com plexity rarely seen outside museums. Don't think you're going to see any of that in a Pioneer comic. In these pages delicate spider-lines get blown up to gross obesity and irritating fuzziness, and lettering size varies almost from panel to panel so that it seems the characters whisper one moment and bellow the next. Even minimal standards of quality control are hardly ever in evidence. For example, in The Official Rip Kirby #1, on the fifth page before last, the top panel (showing Kirby being slug ged from behind with a revolver) covers about two-thirds of the page and is a crudely blownup detail of the story's actual scene; the letter ing in the caption is enormousbut nearly illegible since no one thought to refresh the let-
117
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This reproduction here is t h e s a m e size a s it a p p e a r s on the Pioneer page. N o o n e even cared to touch u p the lettering.
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of Juliet Jones, I wasn't even a dream in my father's testicles; when Milton Caniff created Terry and the Pirates, my father was still a year away from being conceived; and when Frank King drew his first installment of Gasoline Alley, my grandfather was a mere child. Reprints are my only link to the birth and formative history of a field that has come to occupy an important place in my life, and I deeply resent the interposi tion of these greedy little middlemen whose med dling can only vitiate the heritage of this muchmaligned art form. Gentlemen of Pioneer, and others of your loathsome breed who may be read ing this: if you have visions of your own to show me, then do soif not, then keep your grubby hands off the accomplishments of your betters. It's impossible for me to recommend in any way, shape or form these abominable travesties being produced by Pioneer; not only are the comics themselves not worth their price, there is also a moral point to be observed here: over the years the true creators of these comic strips have brought me many hours of pleasure and priceless lessons in graphic design and illustra tion; in some ways they have become my friends. And it's hard for me to feel anything less than loathing for people who set out to make money by shitting on my friends.
ters, which have faded. It would be too much to ask for, I suppose, for the editors to include some sort of historical notes about the stories they publish and the creators who made them (though it doesn't seem to be too much for the folks at Gladstone, for instance). But at the very least there should be mention of the diverse hands who have helped the series' main architectsthe submarine episode shown in the last two pages of The Official Secret Agent #1 and the first 10 pages of HI has clearly been inked and in parts re drawn by someone other than Al Williamson (Ralph Reese?) but you'd never know it by reading Pioneer's inside cover texts. The worst part of all this is, there's no coherent reason for this hideous artistic disfigurement. Dragon Lady Press, Ken Pierce Books, Russ Cochran, Kitchen Sink, Gladstone (and its parent, Another Rainbow), Fanta graphics Books, Comic Art Showcase, Arcadia, The Nostalgia Press, all these and others publish (or have published) classic strips without feel ing the need to hack them into giblets in order to make them somehow more palatable to modern readers. More damning still for American publishers is the meticulous care which European publishers like Slatkine,
Futuropolis, Michel Deligne, Glenat, Gilou, Xanadu, Casterman, Serg, Albin Michel (Les Humanoides Associes), Neptune, Les Editions du Fromage, and others lavish ort their collec tions of these same classic strips: heavy bond paper, stitched bindings, extensive introductory and biographical notes, and no tampering. (except for the translation of the word balloons and the captions, of course). As displayed in Pioneer Comics, these classic strips look like they've been autopsied by an epileptic pathologist (save one, The Official Secret Agent, and even that one is scheduled for some exten sive re-jigging after its sixth issue). For whom is all this hackwork being done, one may ask? Collectors and connoisseurs can only gag at the sight of these atrocities while younger readers most probably ignore them; the few non-initiates who thumb through one out of curiosity probably wonder why these strips (and their artists) were so highly regarded in the first place. If the Pioneer products were my first exposure to these classics, I'd wonder too. I'm especially offended since I depend on reprints in order to acquaint myself with the masters from the past. When Alex Raymond died in 1956,1 was less than a year old; when Stan Drake and Elliot Caplin created The Heart
119
Y O UM A YT H I N K IT'S A L W A Y SD A R K E S T B E F O R ET H ED A W N ,B U TR E M E M B
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"Hilarious stuff, full of nihilism and agonizing over the big questions" Robert Crumb
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J O S E
M U N O Z
ose Munoz was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1942. At the age of 14, he entered the Escuela P a n a m e r i c a n a de Arte de B u e n o s Aires, w h e r e he studied under Hugo Pratt and Alberto Breccia. His first published strips appeared in 1959. During the late '60s and early 7 0 s he worked a s an inker for the Francisco Solano Lopez studio, producing material for IPC in London. Even tually Munoz moved to London, where he lived for two years, continuing his work for t h e British publisher. In 1974 he met another Argentinian e x p a t r i a t e , Carlos Sampayo, in Barce lona, Spain. Both were frustrated with their profes sional situations; Munoz depressed over the lack of venues for the personal comics he wanted to pur sue, Sampayo forced to work a s an advertising copywriter to make ends meet. Together they created the detective series
Alack Sinner. Sinner was a
critical hit from the start, and h a s g a r n e r e d top awards in Italy, France and Spain. Munoz and Sam payo were brought to the U.S. in RAW magazine with the story "Mr. Conrad, Mr. Wilcox, reprinted in the anthology Read Yourself RAW. Since then the Sinner stories have been trans lated by Fantagraphics Books, and Catalan has published a collection of a parallel series, J o e ' s Bar. The most recent Sinner story, Nicaragua will be published by Fantagraphics in album form in 1989. Of his art, Munoz has said, "I wanted to express through my drawings the interior reality of t h e characters; their vices, their fears, their desires, their impulses. A face, a body thus becomes the synthesis of what he appears to be and what he is deep down. It's no longer just his appearance, but the individual in his totality. At least, that's what I'm trying to express."
Tftieo Mufio-z, W/fh comic fibTHE COMICS JOURNAL #126. January 1989
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gO The conclusion of the Wolfman and Perez interviews: Carter Scholz on 1994 and life and art as commodities; Little Orphan A n n i e ; and Ellison Bill Gaines interview, with spectacular EC pastiche cover by Bll Stout. Plus Jan Strnad on creator's rights, and Bhob Stewart on Shock SuspenStories. Dave and Deni Sim interviewed; the review of R o n i n ; Barry Malzberg's career reviewed by Carter Scholz; and half a Sim Cerebus cover. The other half of the Sim cover, and of the interview; Tad White points out Rich Buckler's plagiarisms at Red Circle; and Ellison.
Michael T . Gilbert is interviewed, and provides a cover painting of Elric and the Wraith; plus Harlan Ellison, Rick Marschali, and much more. First half of the definitive Robert Kanlgher inter view; Joe Kubert cover; Jan Strnad on rating the comics; Ellison; R o n i n , C o y o t e , and more. Cover feature on Tlntin's Herge; more of the Kanlgher interview; Kenneth Smith on Love and Rockets and RAW; ana the new comics vigilantes. Anti-fight scenes article, with big, funny fight scene cover by Don Rosa; also, interviews with Phil Yeh and George Metzger. The ratings debate escalates with two panels (involving Jim Shooter, Mike Gold, Jan Strnad, more) and a hot editorial: plus Klllraven reviewed. Will Eisner spotlighted, with two interviews (one including Frank Miller), an article, and a new Spirit cover; plus Carter Scholz on Stanlslaw Lem. Al Williamson is cover featured in an interview; plus Ellison on Ed Asner, Cerebus, RAW, Howski Studios, Eclipse, Japanese comics, and more. Special Convention Panels Issue, featuring Gil Kane, Bill Sienkiewicz, Howard Chaykin, Harvey Kurtzman, Joe Kubert, and many more. Undergrounds issue; interviewsjwith Leonard Ritas and Gilbert Shelton, and an article by Denis Kitchen; Marvel's original art controversy. Swamp Thing is spotlighted: interviews with Alan Moore, Steve Bissette, and John Totteben Also, the story behind Pacific's demise, and Ellison
COMESFARRTT H EFASTO f JHGY
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Special Foreign Comics issue, including creators from Argentina, Belgium, France, Italy, Japan, and Malaysia! Invaluable reference! A candid interview with Captain Marvel's C.C. Beck; a Women in Comics panel; Howard Noatrand's autobiography; and Prince Valiant. Dale Luciano's "Newaves" survey begins, with a great newave cover; an interview with Howard Nostrand; Gary Groth on European comics. Harvey Pekar is interviewed, written about, Indexed, with an R. Crumb cover. Plus the Miss Buxtey controversy, Shooter's "little fucks" memo.
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All issues below are available at the special clearour-warehouse rate of $2.50 each; orfiveof your choice for only $12.00. See coupon for details.
33: Shade cover by Steve Ditko; how to make your comics tax deductible. Tabloid format. 37: Interviews with Jenette Kahn and Martin Pasko; Owight R. Decker on communists and comic books. 3 8 : Major Gil K a n e interview; Dwlght R. Decker on Asterix. Kane Star Hawks cover. 4 0 ; Interview with Jim Shooter; John Benson on Art Spiegelman. 4 2 : Cover by J o h n Byrne of Stan Lee; Cat Y r o n w o d e on G e r b e r s Captain America. 46: Eisner interview, PL 1; Spirit cover painting by Eisner; Denny O'Neil on A Contract With God. 43: Eight pages of full color! Weirdworld article, with original Buscema art, plus interviews with Len W e l n and S a m u e l R. Delany. 81: Frank Brunner's angry farewell to Marvel; a pre-Flagg! interview with H o w a r d Chaykin. 5 4 : Marshall Rogers talks about The Batman; Al C a p p ' s final interview; Bill Sienkiewicz cover. 5 6 : Michael Fleisher interviewed; Neal A d a m s replies to Bill Sienkiewicz with a cartoon. 58: Pasko, Shooter, Weln, Wolfman, and Evanler discuss comics writing; cover by Miller. 5 9 : Heavy Metal editor T e d W h i t e interviewed; covers by K e n Macklln and Dennis Fujitake 6 0 ; Shooter interview; Hembeck cover; the legacy of E C comics; RAW magazine. 61: Interviews with R o y T h o m a s a n d Jack Jackson; covers by Kane and Miller/Austin. 62: Dick Giordano interviewed, with Batman cover; Detectives, Inc., Gay Comics, Stewart the Rat.
6 4 ; Gil Kane cover; debate between Kane and D e n n y O'Neil; plus RAW, and slasher movies. 6 5 : J a c k Kirby Captain Victory cover; A r t Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly interviewed. 6 7 : Definitive Harvey Kurtzman interview, with Kurtzman cover; Harlan Ellison sues Jim Warren. 6 6 ; Panels with Frank Miller, Roy T h o m a s , Jim Shooter, more. X-Men cover by Kevin Nowlan. 7 0 : Frank Miller interview and cover; a personal memoir of Wally W o o d by Bhob Stewart. 71: Peter Poplaski Popeye-versus-the-Hulk cover; Mike Frledrich interviewed; and reviews of Elves.. 72: Neal A d a m s is interviewed and provides a new cover: Plus Asterix, Dr. Seuss, Elfquest. 73: Carl Barks is cover featured, with a long retrospective. Curt S w a n is interviewed. 74: X-men cover; Chris Claremont speaks; plus a R A W debate with Spiegelman and Mouly. 7 5 ; J a n Strnad relates his "Brilliant Career at Marvel." J o h n Byrne, Jack Jackson, Gil Kane chat on various panels. Cover by Kevin Nowlan. 7 7 : The debate over Frank Miller continues; Max Allan Collins interviewed; Daredevil reviewed. 7 8 ; Gil Kane cover and feature article; an inter view with Epic's Archie Goodwin; Chris Clare mont and Frank Miller discuss Wolverine. 7 9 : Marv W o l f m a n and George Perez speak; a Teen Titans cover by Scott Hampton; Ellison.
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Get a high-dosage hit of comics history from The Comics Journal, the most independent and uncompromising professional trade publication in the field of cartooning. See for yourself why The Comics Journal has earned the outrage of some and the admiration of others! The Comics Journal has been on top of every major event in the comics world in the last 14 years, with a depth and perspective unmatched by any other publication. And it's only getting better with upcoming material like interviews with Berke Breathed, Ralph Steadman and the Hernandez brothers, coverage of the comics scene in the US, Europe and Asia, artists' sketchbooks, articles on the editorial and political cartooning fields, and all the latest comics news of the day! If you care about comics, you should be reading The Comics Journal!
A rare interview with Alex Toth, with much rare 1; Carter Scholz on Void Indigo; and the Alter native Comics Cadaver Derby. What's wrong with The X-Men anyway? Also, an interview with A m Saba, Archie Comics, and the premiere of Scott Edelman's "Ethics" column. Frank Miller is interviewed, and provides a cover 101 ' Rob'"and Jan Strnad on Shatter, and "Summer Reading of the Pros." Harold Foster's final interview, by Am Saba, with Prince Valiant cover; interview with Ray Zone; and the world of Basil Wolverton Michael Wm. Kaluta is interviewed, and provides a Starstruck/Shadow cover. Plus a debate between Harlan Ellison and Stan Lee, more. Chats with Skip Williamson and Justin Green; R.C. Harvey psychoanalyzes comics; Carter Scholz on Savage Tales; death in the industry. Special issue devoted to Jack Klrby's battle with Marvel over his original art: Frank Miller, Gil Kane, Wendy Plni, Ken Smith speak out! Bill Sienkiewicz is interviewed; Bektra cover. Plus Scott Edelman on sexual discrimination, Dwight Decker on Superman vs. the Nazis, and more. In-depth interview with Milton Caniff; complete "Corto Maltese" episode by Hugo Pratt; plus reviews of Hell on Earth, The Shadow, more. Howard Chaykin speaks out in an extensive interview. Also, the dark side of the Dark Knight, Carter Scholz on Flaggl, and a letter from C.C. Beck. Mike Baron spills his guts, with a Steve Rude cover; a big section on the Jack Kirby art contro versy; R. Fiore savages the Fantagraphics line. Howard Cruse talks about cartooning & being gay; Dan Day speaks; the plight of a Soviet cartoonist; an examination of McGregor and myths. Mark Evanier's gigantic interview begins; cover by Mitch Schauer: C.C. Beck complains about Man of Steel; and R. Flore on the New Universe. Jam cover and dialogue between R. Crumb and Gil Kane; Evanier continues; Harvey Pekar on Maus; and R. Fiore on censorship. Jay Lynch interview with a spectacular cover of his past works; Jeff Rovin gives the inside scoop on Atlas Comics; DanV Knight, Watchmen reviewed.
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Coverage of the Journal/Harlan Ellison vs. Michael Fleisher trial; transcripts of testimonies by Ellison, Jim Shooterand Groth. 146-pages Watchmen Issue; interviews with Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons, and Mori Walker; Groth on the death of the black-and-white glut; R. Crumb's sketchbook. Dave Stevena interview and cover; Garry Trudeau on strip size; summer reading; Russ Heath interviewed; Alan Moore on censorship. Moebiua cover and exhaustive interview; also long interviews with Alan Moore and Frank Miller on the ratings battle with DC; Tony Auth interview. Robert Crumb speaks on everything from communisim to Zap in the Journal's longest interview to date; final segment of Alan Moore's essay.
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Kim Deitch interview and cover; Harvey Pekar on potential of comics; transcripts from the Friendly Frank's trial.
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Julea Feiffer talks about politics, critics, Eisner, cartooning, theatre and more; cover by David Levine. Berke Breathed defends his Pulitzer. Summer Reading Lists. Berke Breathed interviewed on the Pulitzer, Trudeau, Hartland, fans and more.
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B e t h e s d a , M D 20814 Galactic Enterprises 16 C r a i n Highway N . G l e n B u r n i , M D 21061 G e p p i ' s C o m i c W o r l d , Inc. 7019 Security Boulevard
CONNECTICUT
D r e a m Factory 3 2 4 M a i n Avenue, Suite 183 N o r w a l k , C T 06851 (203) 847-0282 D r e a m Factory 130 N e w C a n a a n Avenue Norwalk, C T 06850 D r e a m Factory 5 0 N a u g a t u c k Avenue Milford, C T 0 6 4 6 0 Whirligig Comics 373 E l m Street N e w H a v e n , C T 06501 Whirligig Comics 575 Boston Post Road ( L e i s u r e t i m e Mall) Orange, CT 06770 T h e Nostalgia S h o p 2 9 8 0 W h i t n e y Avenue H a m d e n , C T 06518 ( 2 0 3 ) 281-0577 The Bookie 2 0 6 B u r n s i d e Ave. East Hartford, C T 06106 ( 2 0 3 ) 289-1208
B a l t i m o r e , M D 21207 Past, P r e s e n t , F u t u r e 6186 S. C o n g r e s s Avenue Lantana, F L 33462 (407) 4 3 3 - 3 0 6 8 C o m i c E x c h a n g e , Inc. 8 4 3 2 W. O a k l a n d Park Blvd Sunrise, F L 32803 Sincere Comics 3 3 0 0 N . Pace Boulevard (P.O. B o x 8273) Pensacola, F L 32505 ( 9 0 4 ) 432-1352 The Cartoon Museum 4 3 0 0 S e m o r a n Blvd, #109 Orlando, F L 32822 E n t e r p r i s e 1701 2814 C o r r i n e D r i v e Orlando, F L 32603 (407) 896-1701 Family B o o k S h o p 1301 N . W o o d l a n d Blvd Deland, F L 32720 Frank's Comics & Cards 2 6 7 8 S W 87 Avenue M i a m i , F L 33165 G e p p i ' s C o m i c W o r l d , Inc. 2 2 2 6 East Bay D r i v e (Keene Plaza Shopping Ctr) L a r g o , F L 33541 Peace Chief 5610 14th Street W. ( U S 41) Bradenton, F L 34207 G e p p i ' s C o m i c World, Inc. 8317 Fenton Street Silver S p r i n g s , M D 20910 G e p p i ' s C o m i c World, Inc. 301 Light Street ( H a r b o r P I . ) B a l t i m o r e , M D 21202 T h e C l o f e t of C o m i c s 7319 B a l t i m o r e Aveue C o l l e g e P a r k , M D 20740 (301) 6 9 9 - 0 4 9 9 8 Beetle C o m i c s 5814 Allentown Way T e m p l e Hills, M D 20748 (301) 4 4 9 - 3 3 0 7
MASSACHUSETTS
Alley C a t C o m i c s 6 4 0 M a i n Street H y a n n i s , M A 02601 Bob's H o b b i e s & Collectibles 6 6 3 D i c k i n s o n Street Springfield, M A 01108 C o m i c s a n d R e c o r d s and Fun 3 4 M a i n Street Milford, M A 01757 R&R Cards & Comics 16 South Avenue Whitman, MA 02382 S a m e Bat C h a n n e l 3 8 7 M a i n Street F i t c h b u r g , M A 01420 (617) 3 4 2 - 8 6 0 7 That's Entertainment 151 C h a n d l e r Street Worcester, M A 01609 (617) 7 5 5 - 4 2 0 7 Outer Limits 4 5 7 M o o d y Street W a l t h a m , M A 02154 (617) 891-0444 New England Comics 748 C r e s c e n t Street (East C r o s s i n g Plaza) Brockton, M A 02403 T h e Million Year P i c n i c 9 9 M t . A u b u r n Street C a m b r i d g e , M A 02138 (617) 4 9 2 - 6 7 6 3
(
W A S H . , D.C.
A n o t h e r World 1504 W i s c o n s i n Avenue N W Washington, D C 2 0 0 0 7
DELAWARE
C a p t a i n Blue H e n 2 8 0 E . M a i n Street, Ste # 4 N e w a r k , D E 19711
GEORGIA
T h e Book T r a d e r 1026-10 C h e r o k e e Road Smyrna, GA 30080 Dr. No's 3 4 2 8 C a n t o n Road Marietta, GA 30066 ( 4 0 4 ) 971-3523 Ail-American Comics 5 2 9 5 R. Highway 7 8 Stone Mountain, GA 30087 ( 4 0 4 ) 879-1769 K o m i x C a s t l e , Inc. 4315 P i o N o n o Avenue M a c o n , G A 31206
FLORIDA
K o m i c (Closet 1363-A S. University D r i v e Plantation, F L 3 3 3 2 4 (305) 472-9595 Coral Comics 1573 Sunset D r i v e C o r a l G a b l e s , F L 33143 C o m i c s Bazaar 6 5 0 N E 128 Street M i a m i , F L 33161 (305) 891-6939 Charlie's Comics 1255 W. 4 6 t h Street H i a l e a h , F L 33012 (305) 557-5994 The Colnman's Collectibles 6145 F t . C a r o l i n e Road Jacksonville, F L 32211
NEW YORK
C o m i x 4-U, Inc. 1121 State Street (2nd Floor) Schenectady, N Y 12304 (518 372-6612 C o m i x Plus 2 2 6 M a i n Street M t . Kisco, N Y 10549 (914) 666-4312 Amazing Comics 12 Gillette Ave. Sayville, N Y 11782 (516) 5 6 7 - 8 0 6 9
MAINE
Downeast Comics 12C C e n t e r Street B r u n s w i c k , M E 04011 Moonshadow Comics 10 E x c h a n g e Street P o r t l a n d , M E 04101
NEW HAMPSHIRE
T h e Back Issue 10 S p r i n g Street Nashua, NH 03060 C o l l e c t i b l e s Unlimited 30A W a r r e n Street C o n c o r d , N H 03301
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Comicopia 31 Franklin Avenue Hewlett, N Y 11557 Millenium Parachute 9 5 8 Front Street Uniondale, N Y 11533 (516) 483-1466 Q u e e n City Bookstore 3184 M a i n Street Buffalo, N Y 14214 H o u s e of Fantasy 1709 Pine Avenue Niagara Falls, N Y 14301 Video Ventures 777 Hempstead Turnpike Franklin Square, N Y 11010 Fantastic Planet 14 Margaret Street (Riverview Mall) Plattbsurgh, N Y 12901 Twilight Book & G a m e 1411 N . Salina Street Syracuse, N Y 13208 (315) 471-3139 T h e Incredible Pulp 2140 G r a n d Avenue Baldwin, N Y 11510 (516) 2 2 3 - 0 8 5 6 Flash Point 105 W. Broadway Port Jefferson, N Y 11777 (516) 331-9401 Azusa Collectibles 353 Rte 3 4 7 Nesconset H w y H a u p p a g e Shopping C t r Hauppage, N Y 11788 Bush H o b b i e s 414 H a w k i n s Avenue Lake R o n k o n k o m a , 11779 Collector's C o m i c s 167 D e e r Park Avenue Babylon, N Y 11702 C o m i c Art Gallery 231 E. 53rd Street New York, N Y 10022 (212) 759-6255 Collector's C o m i c s 1971 Wantagh Avenue (at Sunrise Highway) Wantagh, N Y 11793 Fanta C o Enterprises, Inc. 21 Central Avenue Albany, N Y 12210-1391 Funny Business 6 5 6 A m s t e r d a m Avenue (92nd Street) New York, N Y 10025 Jim Hanley's Universe, Ltd. 3842 R i c h m o n d Avenue (Eltingville Station) Staten Island, N Y 10312 (718) 9 4 8 - 6 3 7 7 Long Island C o m i c s 1570 Sunrise Highway (Child World Shopping Ctr) Bay Shore, N Y 11706 Mike's C o m i c Hut II 147-40 N o r t h e r n Boulevard Flushing, N Y 11354 St. M a r k ' s C o m i c s 11 St. M a r k ' s Place New York, N Y 10003 The Omega Zone 4 6 Eighth Avenue New York, N Y 10014 Village C o m i c s 227 Sullivan Street New York, N Y 10014 (212) 777-2770 Wonderland C o m i c s 6 5 4 South Avenue
Rochester, N Y 14620 (716) 4 7 3 - 3 3 0 9
S h a r o n , PA 16146 (412) 3 4 7 - 3 3 9 0 Wild Will's (Mail O r d e r ) 1509 S. M a p l e D r i v e W. M i d d l e s e x , PA 16159 C o m i c ReliefOffice 16 H y b r i d Rod Levittown, PA 19056 (215) 9 4 5 - 0 5 0 6 C o m i c Relief 4153 W o e r n e r Avenue Levittown, PA 19057 (215) 945-7945 T h e C o m i c Store 1264 Lititz Pike Lancaster, PA 17601 (717) 397-8737 Fat J a c k ' s C o m i c r y p t 2 0 0 6 S a n s o m Street. P h i l a d e l p h i a , PA 19103 (215) 9 6 3 - 0 7 8 8 Tigereyes B o o k s Box 172 L e m o y n e , PA 17043 (717) 697-8874 Comix Connection 1201 C a r l i s e R o a d York, PA 17404 (717) 843-6516 Book S w a p 110 South F r a s e r Street State College, PA 16801 T h e C o m i c Store 351 L o e k s Road ( N . Mall) York, PA 17404 Golden Unicorn Comics 8 6 0 Alter Street H a z e l i o w n , PA 18201 Patty's P b k s & C o m i c s 1044 Wayne Avenue Indiana, PA 15701 Bern Presents the Store 622 S o u t h Avenue W i l k i n s b u r g , PA 15221 Showcase C o m i c s 8 2 4 L a n c a s t e r Avenue, #3 (Bryn Mawr Arcade) Bryn Mawr, PA 19010 Dreamscape Comics 4 0 4 W. B r o a d Street B e t h e l e h e m , PA 18018 (215) 867-1178 Excalibur C o m i c s 1610 12th Avenue A l t o o n a , PA 16601
N. C A R O L I N A
Books D o F u r n i s h a R o o m 1809 W. M a r k h a m Avenue D u r h a m , N C 27705 (919) 286-1076 New D i m e n s i o n C o m i c s 9101 P i n e v i l l e - M a t h e w s Rd. (Park PI. S h o p p i n g C t r ) Pineyville, N C 28134
F r e d e r i c k s b u r g , VA 22401 (703) 373-5196 Trilogy S h o p 3 4 0 E . Bayview Boulevard Norfolk, VA 2 3 5 0 3 (804) 5 8 7 - 2 5 4 0 Thore Comics 3512 O a k l a w n Boulevard H o p e w e l l , VA 2 3 8 6 0 (804) 4 5 8 - 9 5 6 1 Fantasy World C o m i c s 8 Schleigh L a n e H a r t w o o d , VA 2 2 4 0 5 (703) 752-9719 Tomorrow Books 1304 King Street Alexandria, VA 22314 (703) 5 4 8 - 5 0 3 0 H o l e in the Wall B o o k s 9 0 5 W. B r o a d Street Falls C h u r c h , VA 2 2 0 4 4 R i c h m o n d C o m i x , Inc. 7822 M i d l o t h i a n T u r n p i k e R i c h m o n d , VA 2 3 2 3 5 (804) 2 7 2 - 9 2 8 8 Fantasy Five & D i m e Sterling Park S h o p p i n g M a l l Sterling, VA 22170 (703) 4 4 4 - 9 2 2 2 Daydream Books 218 W. M a r k e t Street Charlottesville, VA 22901 (804) 971-6523 Mt. Empire Comics 4 P i e d m o n t Street Bristol, VA 24201 B&D Comic Shop 3514 W i l l i a m s o n R o a d N W R o a n o k e , VA 24012 Capital C o m i c s C e n t e r 2 0 0 8 M t . Vernon Avenue A l e x a n d r i a , VA 22301 G e p p i ' s C o m i c W o r l d , Inc. 1775 Jefferson Davis H w y A r l i n g t o n , VA 2 2 2 0 2 G e p p i ' s C o m i c W o r l d , Inc. 8 3 3 0 A R i c h m o n d Highway A l e x a n d r i a , VA 2 2 3 0 6 Mountain Empire Comics 4 P i e d m o n t Street Bristol, VA 24201 (703) 4 6 6 - 6 3 3 7 Mountain Empire Comics (Business Office) 105 W i n d i n g Way Bristol, VA 24201 Atomic Comics Emporium 2 3 W. M e r c u r y Boulevard H a m p t o n , VA 2 3 6 6 9 Benders 17 E . M e l l o n St. H a m p t o n , VA 2 3 6 6 3 Zeno's Books 1112 S p a r r o w Rd. C h e s a p e a k e , VA 2 3 3 2 5 Zeno's Books 3 3 8 C o n s t i t u t i o n Dr. Virginia B e a c h , VA 2 3 4 6 2 W o r l d ' s Best C o m i c s & Collectibles 9 8 2 5 Jefferson Ave. N e w p o r t , VA 2 3 6 0 5
OHIO
Star & H e r o e s ' 779 W. Central Avenue Carlise, O H 4 5 0 0 5 (513) 743-9517 N o r t h C o a s t Nostalgia 5 8 5 3 Ridge Road P a r m a , O H 44129 N o r t h C o a s t Nostaliga 2169 L e e Road Clvd Heights, O H 44118 F u n n i e F a r m Bookstore 328 N. Dixie Drive Vandalia, O H 4 5 3 7 7 Book E x c h a n g e 112 W. C o l u m b u s Avenue (P.O. Box 55) Bellefontaine, O H 43311 The Comic Connection 3125 W. E l m Street Lima, OH 45805 The Compleat Bookshop 14? S. Water Street Kent, O H 4 4 2 4 0 Maverick's 2312 E . D o r o t h y L a n e Kettering, O H 4 5 4 2 0 Maverick's 8522 Winton Road C i n c i n n a t i , O H 45231 Central City C o m i c s 4 3 4 7 E . M a i n Street C o l u m b u s , O H 43213 Central City C o m i c s 1460 Bethel Road Columbus, OH 43220 Dark Star Bookstore 231 Xenia Avenue Yellow Springs, O H 4 5 3 8 7 Kenmore Komics 942 K e n m o r e Road A k r o n , O H 44314 Jeff B r u e g g e m a n 3 5 0 9 Trail's E n d D r i v e Medina, OH 44256 C h u c k ' s C o m i c III 9 4 5 M a i n Street Chillicothe, O H 45601 Baker's B o o k s 4274 O b e r l i n Avenue Lorain, O H 44053 Wizard of C o m i c s 4 4 0 6 Indianola Avenue C o l u m b u s , O H 43214 (614) 267-7479 C.C. B o o k s 4651 W h i p p l e Avenue N W C a n t o n , O H 44718 M o n k e y ' s Retreat 2 4 0 0 N . H i g h Street Columbus, OH 43202 (614) 262-9511
RHODE ISLAND
Starship Excalibur 6 0 Washington Street P r o v i d e n c e , RI 0 2 9 0 3 Starship Excalibur 8 3 4 H o p e Street P r o v i d e n c e , RI 0 2 9 0 6 Starship Excalibur 832 Post Road W a r w i c k , RI 0 2 8 8 6
S. C A R O L I N A
Silver City C o m i c s 9 0 4 Knox A b b o t t D r i v e Cayce, S C 2 9 0 3 3 Legends Comics (Beside Q u i e n c y ' s ) F l o r e n c e , S C 29512
VIRGINIA
Fantasia C o m i c s & R e c o r d s 1 4 1 9 - U n i v e r s i t y Avenue Charlottesville, VA 2 2 9 0 3 (804) 971-1029 Marie's Books & Things 1701 P r i n c e s s A n n e Street
W. VIRGINIA
Cheryl's Comics & Toys 5215-t Maccorkle Ave. SE Charleston, WV 25304 Books & Things 2506 Pike Street Parkersburg, WV 26101
PENNSYLVANIA
Hazelton, PA 18201 Bennie's C o m i c s & C a r d s 462 Sharpesville Avenue
The Golden Unicorn Comics 8 6 0 Alter Street
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BRYAN TALBOT
a n d his c o m i c
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( L u t h e r A r k w r i g h t N o . 1)
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GIL KANE
relief in comics. The opposing view could state that comic art is not so much a degradation of taste as an immature expression. This would be valid if the comics industry held a more balanced perspec tive on its own modest achievements and wasn't so astonishingly confident that it was producing works of high art. Not that there aren't creators attempting to deal with more provocative and mature subject mat ter, but generally both publishers and creators appear opposed to change. Originally, mainstream comics presented a fresh vision because the same old pulp banalities had never been done in this vivid a form. What was once original in comic books have long since passed into the realm of cliche, and comics have since become repositories of received ideas that have been chewed over by movies, TV and popular literature. The striking vitality originally found in comic books suggested that the creators invested their work with a wide range of life experience; their influences had come from outside of comics themselves. Influences within our field create technique; influences from without create a view of life. We should step forward to influences that will deepen the stories we tell and help us skip the ideal for the real. As things currently stand, after better than SO years of comics history, confessing that one reads them for pleasure is admitting to a perverse fascination with banality.
S K I P P I N G THE FOR IDEAL T H E
REAL
Walter Winchell, the radio and gossip columnist, was once asked who he thought the ideal radio sponsor was; "Anyone who produces a project that costs 10 cents and is addicting" was his reply. In the 1940s this seemed like a tunny comment. Today, it sounds prophetic. The addiction of comic books is based upon the ideal: the enter ing into a world of fantasy by very young creators who enthusiastically accept pulp values as substitutes for the real world. Skipping the real for the ideal. Mainstream comics draws its recruits from a ready pool of sensitized, imaginative, inwardlooking adolescents who represent the most committed comic book readers. The appeal of idealized figures and forms is irresistable. We are all familiar with creators who refine their forms so that they cannot draw anything but a traditionally idealized comic book figure; the result is that of a hermetically sealed context where the complexities and uneveness of the real are never touched upon. Mainstream comics inevitably presents a view of life that is accessi ble, agreeable, and sef-confirming. These are the elements that make it "meaningful" to its audience, and to its creators as well. The .problems dealt with in comics usually have nothing to do with the simple problems of life let alone the complex ones. There is, with tedious regularity, the need to rescue some unfortunate from a pulp fate or, failing that, to extract a pulp revenge. Contemporary movies have taken these narrative values and put a spin on them. They recreate all the conditions of reality, with flesh-and-blood personalities mov ing among genuine, believable physical land scapes. But, actors hardly ever play believable people in believable situations within this idiom. Artifice in the form of set designs, staging, and special effects replaces human reality. Such films avoid the ordinary, the real, the commonplace by dramatizing a distorted view of reality. Comics loses the mature creator (not to men
tion its hold on the mature reader) by treating them as expendable while tightly holding to its collective bosom those artists who, by natural affinity, still maintain an emotional connection with a readership that is continually turning over and moving on. The old values prevail, which comes to mean "the same old shit." The real dif ficulty is for the maturing creator who no longer shares the prejudices of his adolescent consti tuency. The big change in recent times seems to be a desire on the part of the creator to do something that involves more than creating simple solutions to simple yarns, to move away from the fixed ways of the traditional comic book universe. It's harder than it seems to avoid the traps of addiction, even when the cultural nar cotic moves from a romantic view of the ideal to a nihilistic one: from Tarzan to Rambo! What we are bringing to comics is a shameless glorification of our subject matter: violence. We continue to create mindless, emotional material suited to the immature appetities of fans who can only see the real at the most simplistic level. Comics' appeal to the young is understandable; the problem is that the creators have to stay perpetually "young" to create work at their readers' level. And where most readers will pass through comics' digestive tract and into a more compelling realm of real life, the creators are lodged permanently in comics' perpetually flatulent preoccupations. By not allowing for more depth and scope in our handling of comics material, we not only debase our creations but our own sensibilities as well. Banality spells
Good Girls # 4
Three strange stories in latest all-girls comic!
ALAN MOORE a n d MATT GROENING
a r e fans of CAROL LAY'S Good Girls
- s o w h a t a r e y o u waiting for? In t h e latest issue, Irene t h e disfigured heiress e s c a p e s t h e island ( s e e t h e e n d of # 3 ) while her blind w o u l d - b e p a r a m o u r Kurt continues t o sink d e e p e r a n d d e e p e r into t h e s o u p
MATURE READERS
GOOD GIRLS 04. 36 pages, black-andwhite comic. $2.00 ($2.50 In Canada).
135
I
ANDREW DAGILIS boasts a four-pronged resume that includes com posing music for commercials, graphic design, and computer management. For several years he also wrote a column for Montreal's now defunct music magazine Pop Rock in which he covered "anything that didn't have to do with music." This issue's article on Pioneer Comics is his first con tribution to the Journal. FRANK STACK also debuts as a Journal writer this issue. Some 20 years ago under the pseudonym "Foolbert Sturgeon" he made his mark in underground comics with "The New Adventures of Jesus" and other tales. In the last few years he's illustrated stories in American Splendor, and written and drawn the "Amazons" series in Rip Off Magazine. ROB RODI makes a living as a writer and producer for an advertising agency in Chicago. He has been writing criticism for the Journal since issue #109. LEON HUNT resides in West Midlands, England. His last contribution to the Journal was a review Charles Burns's Hard-Boiled Defective Stories published last issue. KENNETH SMITH was formerly an Associate Professor at Lousiana State University where he taught for 12 years. (For his perspective on that experience look up his "Dramas of the Mind" columns in issues #123-24.) He now lives with his wife and children in Dallas, Texas. GIL KANE has been drawing comic books for the last four decades. He currently resides with his wife in Los Angeles, California where he works as a freelance cartoonist.
T I S S U E
CALVIN & HOBBES CREATOR DRAWN OUT
Bill Watterson, normally resistant to interviews, sits down with his friend and former schoolmate Richard West for a discussion about the limitless potential of a boy's imagination, and the limiting restraints of the syndication business.
JIM IS BACK!
I S S U E N U M B E R T H R E E O NS A L E N O W !
136
VNOOUD ÔAAeOr^fc
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RALPH STEADMAN SPEAKS

While on a promotional tour of the U.S. last year for his collection Scar Strangled Banger Steadman delivered this address covering an assortment of topics including his new biography of God, the history of comics, and a manifesto for political cartoonists.
God knows there'll be more. Look for the gorgeous Spaceman Spiff water color cover.
#1: Charles Burns. T h e m a c a b r e artist penetrated the mysteries of t h e flesh in #3-5. #2: Eddie Campbell. Alec's creator joined us for t h e space o f 8 p a g e s i n t h e first i s s u e . #3: Susan Catherine. Her " O v e r h e a r d at A m e r i c a ' s L u n c h Counters/London's Snack Bars" g r a c e d # 1 , 2 , a n d 5. # 4 & 5: R. a n d Aline Crumb. T h e grand old couple of t h e u n d e r grounds helped launch the first i s s u e w i t h a t w o - p a g e " D i r t y L a u n d r y " story. A l s o , w e p r e v i e w e d t h e Complete Crumb Comics i n # 3 w i t h a r a r e F r i t z . # 6 : K i m D e i t c h . A gross fullcolor piece o n Hell (#2) upset a lot o f p e o p l e ; p i e c e s i n # 3 a n d 5 w e r e a little m i l d e r , b u t n o l e s s wild. #7: Franquin. Belgium's greatest cartoonist began i n # 5 a n d i s still running.
#10: Peter u s u a l New haunts, he adaptation
Kuper. Far from his York, New York served u p a Kafka in # 8 a n d a cover.
# 2 1 & 2 2 : F. a n d G a b r i e l Solano Lopez. At 90 pages, the shattering " A n a " is t h e longest story r u n yet in P C (#6-9). #23: Spain, the legendary undergrounder, took us back to the '50s in # 2 a n d t h e ' 6 0 s in #6. # 2 4 : Cliff S t e r r e t t . Five s t u n n i n g Polly and Her Pals p a g e s r e p r o d u c e d i n t h e first i s s u e two in full color! #25: Alec Stevens. Aside from painting t h e cover for t h e premiere issue, Stevens has a d a p t e d L o v e c r a f t (#1), W i l d e (#2), a n d D i n e s e n (#4). Twenty-five more? H o w a b o u t short pieces by Chester Brown (#3), D a n C l o w e s (#7), N o r m a n D o g (#2, 5 ) , Phil Elliott (#2), D r e w F r i e d m a n (#1), M i c h a e l T. G i l b e r t ( # 1 0 ) , J u s t i n G r e e n (#1), Gilbert H e r n a n d e z (# 2's cover), Daryl H u t c h i n s o n (#6), M a r k M a r e k (#2), M a r k Martin (#2), P a u l O l l s w a n g ( # 7 , 10), J o o s t S w a r t e (#7), Alex Toth (#2), C a r o l Tyler (#9), S k i p W i l l i a m s o n (#2), a n d J i m W o o d r i n g ( # 3 a n d the cover to #10)and reprints f r o m J a c k C o l e ( # 5 , 10) a n d R u s s J o h n s o n (#5)and strips from Lindsay Arnold, Michael D o u g a n , William Clark, Mary Fleener, Kenny Be, Brian J a m e s Riedel, a n d Douglas Michael. A n d that's not even counting t h e text p i e c e s f r o m D j u n a Barnes, Kay Boyle, Gustave Flaubert, John H o m e Burns, C a r s o n M c C u l l e r s , R . A . Lafferty, and Hermann Hesse.
#11: Craig M a y n a r d . " M i n o r M e m o r i e s a n d t h e A r t of A d o l e s c e n c e " a p p e a r e d i n # 7 , 8, a n d 10. #12: Mitch M a n z e r . P C ' s first epic serial: Rory Randall in " T r e a s u r e of t h e Lost E m p i r e " (#1-7). A g o o f y g e m . #13: William Messner-Loebs. A n early story from t h e creator of Journey. #14 & 15: J o s e Munoz & Carlos Sampayo. A 20page Alack Sinnerl story in # 4 c o n ' f i r m e d e v e r y o n e ' s mm mm d a r k e s t s u s p i c i o n s a b o u t life i n t h e b i g city. #16: Harvey Pekar t e a m e d with G a r y K w a p i s z f o r a n American Splendor p i e c e i n # 9 . #17: J o e Sacco. Before his s a t i r i c a l s o l o t i t l e Yahoo, h e struck twice: in # 2 a n d #5.
U T S ?
OKAY, T H E N . . .
#8: Rick Geary W e previewed his "Victorian M u r d e r s " in #3, a n d h e is also to b e f o u n d every issue a s Gustave Flaubert's illustrator. # 9 : L.J. Kopf The m a n from t h e Edge c o n tributed shorts to # 4 , 6, 7, a s e r i e s of g a g s i n # 5 , a n d a cover (#7).
#18: Richard Sala. Another RAW graduate! T h i s prolific artist contributed to #1, 2 , 4 , 7, a n d 8. #19: Dori S e d a . Before her u n timely death, Dori brightened u p t h e first t w o i s s u e s . #20: Mahendra Singh. T h e c r e a t o r o f Mr. Pyridine s t u n n e d us in #4.
O k a y , I ' m c o n v i n c e d ! P l e a s e s e n d m e t h e f o l l o w i n g i s s u e s of
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FANTAGRAPHICS BOOKs, 1800 Bridgegate St., Suite 101, Westlake Village, California 91361
All art respective creators
Thought-provoking a n d literate, these three n e wgraphic novels stimulate as well as entertain. Bilal's T h e T o w n That D i d n ' t Exist is a docufantasy questioning the quality of life i n U t o p i a : D o w e really want o u r d r e a m s fulfilled? Manara's Giuseppe Bergman discovers that T h e Great A d v e n t u r e is a n illusion, but is r e d e e m e d b y his courage, h u m o r
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a n d imagination. I n s t e a d of g i v i n g u p ,
B e r g m a n faces himself. Loustal a n dParingaux, b l e n d i n g Hockney a n d Hemingway, capture misfits a n d outcasts i n L o v e Shots o f an A m e r i c a of movie myth a n d literary legend.
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FROM Catalan communications

4 3 East 1 9 t h S t r e e t N e w Y o r k N Y 1 0 0 0 3 (212) 2 5 4 - 4 9 9 6
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BilaJ & Christin

The Town That Didn't Exist
Full C o l o r S o f t c o v e r ISBN 0-87416-051-0 $11.95
Milo M a r i a n a The Great Adventure

(HP &
Giuseppe Bergman) ft.
120 p . B / W S o f t c o v e r ISBN 0-87416-063-4 $12.95
Loustal & Paringaux L o v e Shots
F u l l C o l o r S o f t c o v e r ISBN 0-87416-059-6 $11.95
...richly colored... lush... impressive... admirable collection...)) Publishers Weekly

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Philistine in Yuppie Land

THE UNSEEN CRUMB

Y &WO PI ! flU BUT ; .*s>- T E SOME

JAIME, GILBERT AND MARIO HERNANDEZ

HARLAN ELLISON RUNS AMOK

PIONEER PILLAGES AND PLUNDERS T H E PAST

PEKAR AND REALISM

T H E CASE O F T H E ARGENTINE EXILES

Front cover by Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez.

THE MAGAZINE OF NEWS & CRITICISM

A S S O C I A T E E D I T O R S : R. FIORE, DALE LUCIANO, RICK

C O N T R I B U T I N G W R I T E R S : MIKE BARRIER, C C BECK, ROBERT

PHOTOGRAPHY: PROOFREADING: T Y P E S E T T I N G : LINDA GORELL, ARLENE EASTER, MARK

RUTH EGBERT, CAROL KOVINICK-HERNANDEZ

A D V E R T I S I N G : KIM THOMPSON P R O M O T I O N : THOM POWERS M A S C O T : GRETCHEN MEYER

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THE COMICS JOURNAL #126. January 1989

NINTH m NEBULA &

D.C. S U P E R M A N * LIST: FREE' MARVEL CATALOG:

Harlan Ellison's Flamboyant Philistinism for the '80s

"...all of the mainstream comics are bland, useless garbage."

Ellison t h i n k s t h i s silly h a c k w o r k i s " a mainstream examination of machismo... and t h e brutalization of w o m e n . "

THE COMICS JOURNAL #126. January 1989

Mooras's Watchmen is " a s intricate a s P r o u s t . "

1809 West Markham Ave. Durham, 2 D u r h a m , NC N C 27705 (919) 286-1076

BOARD As good as: Better Than:

Rimbaud Baudelaire Dashiel Hammett Marcel Proust Louis Auchincloss

4 Pounds of Manga The Fish Police

The Comics Marvel DC

Do-Right Andy Warhol Roy Lichtenstein

THE COMICS JOURNAL #126. January 1989

THE COMICS JOURNAL #126, January 1989

Three creators w h o weren't adult e n o u g h to m a k e Ellison's Honor Roll: Art Spiegel m a n , H a r v e y P e k a r , a n d R. C r u m b .

THE COMICS JOURNAL #126. January 1989

HARVEY KURTZMAN FRANCOISE MOULY

STAN LEE FRANK MILLER DAN O'NEILL HARVEY PEKAR

VICTOR M O S C O S O GILBERT SHELTON

THE COMICS JOURNAL #126, January 1989

THERE'S NOTHING WORSE THAN HAVING AN ITCH YOU CAN'T SCRATCH. .

1988 Peter Kuper

PLANET #1. s p e c i a l nuclear issue, with work by

S e n d order to: F a n t a g r a p h i c s B o o k s , 1 8 0 0 B r i d g e g a t e S t r e e t # 1 0 1 . Westlake Village, C A 91361.

DEAN HOTTER B i l l SIENKIEWICZ NEIL CAIMAN DAVE MCKEAN

ALAN MOORE STEVE PARKHODSE

ALAN MOORE GARRY LEACH

15 ALLN EW STORI E S BY 25 TOP TALENTS!

DC to Print, Distribute Comico

THE COMICS JOURNAL #126. January 1989

THE COMICS JOURNAL #126. January 1989

$ 8 2 . 5 Million T a k e o v e r Effective January 1

Revlon Chairman Buys

COMIX 4-U, INC.

THE COMICS JOURNAL #126. January 1989

Retail Policies D e b a t e d at Dallas Con

/ &JT V W A TD OV O U DO fOCi S t V W e B O C VW H C just toptwjed one op ^ax teachers TO DEATH?"

THE COMICS JOURNAL #126. January 1989

THE COMICS JOURNAL #126. January 1989

Syndicates Offer Standard C o a l i t i o n R e f o r m s Sunday Funnies Sections

National Tax Laws

THE COMICS JOURNAL #126. January 1989

Illinois Store Busted in 1987