The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 60: Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children volume 6, 1989

For my 2-month anniversary, I present "Happy Birthday to Hell," which I think might be one of my all-time favourite short stories. Ever.

The nice thing about this particular issue of BSFUC is that rather than an illustrated story, this one reads far more like a comic. The text is all in hand-writing, ostensibly Satan's (he likes to be called "Wally"), so not only do the words and the images combine, but the actual form of the text adds a layer. I suppose this is kind of common now with digital lettering giving every character their own distinctive voice, but back in the day such things were not common.

The story is a lovely little tale about Satan's fall from Heaven, and his understanding of how things really are between him and God. I'm honestly loathe to say much more, because I really, really love this story, and I think everyone should read it. The final sentence of the piece is going to eventually be tattooed on my left arm. They're words I've lived by for most of my life now. I'm going to quote the whole last page here, so if you're going to track this one down, or you have it and just haven't read it yet, I urge you to stop reading.

For those who've stayed, this never fails to move me:

"Now when things get out of hand, I take off for the furthest reaches of the smoldering wastelands, that blackened stretch the sinners still haven't found. Out here, the stars ache with just as much quiet desperation as in Heaven, pulsing silently overhead as I search the horizon. For this is a place of fallen angels and benevolent misfits. They plummet from above, the bile of Paradise, twirling like spastic saints who've lost the equilibrium of grace. They crash at my feet and break. They are vulnerable and confused, not yet aware that they are damned. I gather them in, fix their hair, straighten their robes, and try to make them feel comfortably at home. Because in Heaven or in Hell, or in any lonely place that's been forgotten inbetween, the only thing that seems to matter is feeling wanted, like you belong."

Since the day I first read that last sentence to today, that's how I try to live my life.

Back to 2001: A Space Odyssey tomorrow, though I just picked up some super-beat up old comics at a flea market, and I think the newest of them is from 1960. A whole bunch of cool old 50s stuff, so that might find its way into my daily readings. Especially if Kirby continues to tell the same story over and over again.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 43: Etc #1, 1989

As I mentioned while re-organizing my collection, I became (or re-became) aware of Etc through an ad in the back of an issue of Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children. I don't remember at this point exactly what the ad said that intrigued me, but when I came across the first issue while re-organizing my comics, I pulled it out to give it a go.

I was wary at the very beginning. The prologue of the piece seemed to me to be some really sloppy comics writing. The caption boxes told a story and the pictures illustrated that story, but the two were simply relaying exactly the same information, rather than playing off one another to build a story. I'm not at all familiar with Tim Conrad's writing, but this beginning did not bode well.

But thank goodness I got past the prologue and into the story proper. Set an unspecified distance into the future, we are introduced to this environment through a confusing mix of reports about the events of the prologue. And it's an appropriate way of introducing the world. I suffered a bit of culture shock until I was able to assimilate the way that information (not actually that far off of the way our contemporary information is filtered) was conveyed and understood in this world. I almost feel like this story could be taking place somewhere in the world of Ellis and Robertson's Transmetropolitan, at least from the way the setting is described in this first issue.

Davis's art is ethereal and strange. Everything is suffused with a glow, as if we're seeing the whole story through a mist, except the occasional official investigator, who is drawn in thin ink lines. There's a commentary there, I'm sure, but I'll see if it's continued through the rest of the series. Which, as I only own issue 1, will have to be tracked down. I had really hoped this wouldn't happen.

I continue to be impressed by Pirhana Press's output. I think the only one of their publications I haven't enjoyed that much was one of Marc Hempel's Gregory books. But I'm sure I'll go back and give them another shot. I suppose that part of the appreciation of these titles is reading them in context. They were coming out at a time when artists like Todd McFarlane and Jim Lee were beginning to dominate mainstream comics, and the boom and then bust of the 90s was just around the corner. Yet here was a small corner of the mainstream, more an indie imprint with major publisher push behind it, turning out some bizarre and innovative pieces of graphic fiction. If you're drifting about looking for something new and weird to read, you could do much worse than picking up something published by Pirhana Press.

See you tomorrow.

Live-Post: Reorganizing my comic collection, Sunday, April 5, 2015 @ 17:01

I was going to do this last night but I ran out of steam. Yeah, I know I should be using something like Twitter, but as I've said before, my Web Fu is poor. Gimme time.

I am re-organizing  my collection. I've gone through my active collection and pulled things that I don't foresee the immediate need of in the next year or two. They're going to be filed in the Storage collection.

So I decided I'd provide a running commentary. Strap in, it's likely to be really, really boring.

Problem one: I had a stack of dollar bin comics sitting on my coffee table that I hadn't read. I wasn't sure if I should keep them out and read them, since there's a good chance it'll be years before I come across them again, or if I should just file them. I chose the latter. They're in good company by way of comics I haven't read yet.

Problem two: Jeff Lemire's Trillium. Slated to be filed, I glimpsed it as I was alphabetizing the stuff to put away, and I remember how goddamned good it was. Look for that series to show up some time in the near future.

Problem three: I'm lacking in Storage collection space. I'd managed to leave 1-3 inches at the ends of about half of my longboxes, in order that I could flip through the boxes when I needed to. The rest of the boxes are jammed, so I'm creatively conjuring up space out of nothing. Which sounds easy, but is actually hard. Physics be damned!

Problem three point five: As I'm creating this space, I find things I want to read RIGHT NOW! Just discovered the first issue of Tim Conrad and Michael Davis' Etc. I found an ad for it in the back of one of the Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children, and it sounds nuts and fascinating. Watch for that one coming up too.

Ween are currently blasting from the speakers. "Fat Lenny" from their album GodWeenSatan: The Oneness. One of the greatest rock albums of all time.

Okay. Back to work. See ya in about 15 minutes.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 36: Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children volume 3, 1989

"Olga Schtump was a tap dancer, and not happy about it in the least." It's a lovely beginning to the "Diary of a Depressed Tap Dancer," though I'd have to say that's the high point of the story. Not to say it's a bad one, but, in contrast to the previous two stories, this one's a bit lacking. Key to this project it recognizing that, even if a comic is ostensibly part of a series I like, or written by people I really admire, not everything I read is going to be stellar.

There's a couple of things that stood out to me about this particular issue that made it a little less enjoyable than its predecessors. First, though the story is called a "Diary," it's actually told in the 3rd person. I know it's a little thing, but this kind of bugged me. Even had there been some indication that Olga talked about herself in the 3rd person, this would have cleared up my nitpicking, but there was nothing. I know, I know. Gotta let these things go sometimes. A larger problem I had was the lack of interaction between words and pictures in this issue. I've noted that in the previous two issues, we have the sort of interaction between these storytelling devices that is indicative of comics, but in this issue there was a decided dearth comics language. The pictures seemed merely (and that's not to say that they are in any way "mere" pictures) to illustrate the action of the words, more like a picture book than a comic. This is a problem for comics that are laid out this way. There's a Grant Morrison Batman that does this, and is more properly an illustrated prose story published in the comics pamphlet than a comic book proper. Whatever, of course, a "comic book proper" might be.

According to my database, I procured this issue relatively recently, which means I've probably never read it, or have read it only once. Perhaps a little bit of my reticence toward it comes from it not having the kind of nostalgic quality that infuses some of the BSFUC that I've had for almost 30 years. I'll have to factor that nostalgia idea into subsequent reviews.

So, there's that. I don't have much more to say about this issue. Tomorrow will be a slight detour as I do a reading of a comic based on my first ever READER SUGGESTION! Which is pretty cool. Taking this detour makes me wonder, though, if perhaps the BSFUC aren't the kind of series that can be read in such rapid succession. Louapre uses a lot of similar rhetorical devices in his prose that I could imagine might start to sound repetitive without the ostensible monthly publishing schedule. I'll have to keep this in mind, and perhaps spread the beauty out over the course of a few months, rather than weeks. Anyway, a detour into 1980s science fiction comics tomorrow. Stay tuned!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 35: Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children volume 2, 1989

Clyde and Margueritte Deadjohnson are average suburbanites with one important difference: they're dead. But that doesn't stop them from enjoying all the mundane adventures in which the average suburbanite indulges.

This was the first of the BSFUC that I ever read, passed along to me by my dear friend Joel at the tender age of 15. As I mentioned in my post about Morrison's Animal Man, it was around this time that I started to understand that the stories one could read in comics weren't solely relegated to children's comedy (Archie, Richie Rich) and superheroes. Once again, Louapre and Sweetman present a comic in a non-traditional manner. I'm starting to think of these stories as comics in that each double-page spread is one panel. Perhaps I'll scan one of the issues one of these days and see what it looks like set out in a more traditional manner. Because I have time for these things, right?

Piranha Press is a bit of an oddity. And I mean that in the nicest sense possible. As the site says, it's a response to a growing interest in alternative comics, and, coupled with DC's publication of "adult" superhero books (you know, those famous ones that no one will shut up about), I think Piranha demonstrates the movement of the medium, specifically in the mainstream, into a more inclusive space. The stories published in Piranha's catalogue are, categorically, not for kids. It's only one of a number of experiments that mainstream publishers were carrying out at this time. Marvel/Epic's "Shadowline Saga" books (whose characters seem to be on the verge of a resurgence in the upcoming "Secret Wars" series), which took superheroes and put them into dark and complex contemporary stories, happened around the same time that Piranha was publishing Marc Hempel's Gregory series and BSFUC. These experiments, of course, crystalized a few years later in DC's Vertigo imprint, for which Louapre and Sweetman did a couple of pieces, but Piranha, to me at least, is a little more out on the edge of things. The utter weirdness of the Beautiful Stories, or Douglas Michael's The Elvis Mandible, which I'll get to eventually, are never really repeated in the more horror and fantasy-based "grown-up" comics of the Vertigo imprint. Which is probably why Piranha survived, albeit briefly, into Vertigo's nascence.

Something odd occurred to me while I was re-reading this issue. One of the destinations of the Deadjohnsons is "Ant World," a Disneyland-esque theme park based around the behaviours of ants. This section of the story reminded me of the Ant and Bee books I used to read as a child, specifically the Ant and Bee Go Shopping book. I'll have to see if it's still kicking about at my Mum and Dad's place next time I'm back home.

I recently tried to get my hands on the issues of this series that I'm missing, with only partial success. With most of the earlier issues, these are re-reads for the umpteenth time, but the later issues I've never read before, so I'm excited to see what weirdness Louapre and Sweetman have in store for me.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 34: Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children volume 1, 1989

"It was me, Bingo, Foo Foo, and Joey Punchinello from the start. Foo Foo stole the keys to the Dart while Bingo grabbed Addy the Freaklady and some of our best pups. I got the booze out the ringmaster's trailer when he was watching the big-top burn..."

So begins "A Cotton Candy Autopsy," a brutal cross-country road trip about four clowns and a two-headed lady.

Really, I could just leave it at that, and that would be enough. But I won't, because Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children is the comic you should be going out and tracking down right now. Written by Dave Louapre and illustrated by Dan Sweetman, each month features a bizarre short story from the far edge of madness. In fact, if I'm to be perfectly honest, this story is probably the most normal of the ones I recollect. Next issue features the Deadjohnsons, a normal, everyday family who just happen to be dead. And volume 6 (I think) is the story "Happy Birthday to Hell," in which the fall and the story of Hell are retold by Wally, who really hates that name Lucifer that everyone has saddled him with.

These are wonderful, disturbing, angry, beautiful stories about strange people in strange situations that somehow tell us something about being human. And in this, they resemble the best of contemporary fiction, of the sort you might find in McSweeney's, or a fourth year university English class. Louapre teases out some amazing images, and uses words like a blind man might paint, which is a good thing. Sweetman's art morphs and changes from issue to issue, but always retains some quality that renders it recognizable as being by the same person. It might be madness.

BSFUC (because the full title is a mouthful) also pushes us to consider the boundaries of what we can consider a comic. The stories are not told panel by panel in a sequential way, but more resemble picture books, words accompanied by illustrations. A cursory examination might make one think that the series is a comic solely by virtue of its format. That is, until one realizes that it's only in the last few pages that there are any linguistic markers of Addy having two heads ("...Addy sort of holds him close and rocks back and forth real slow, whispering in both his ears."), but we've known all along because of Sweetman's illustrations. The words and the pictures, though somewhat more separate than in a traditional comic (whatever that may be), still function in tandem, still require the presence of one another for the story to maintain coherence.

Since it's set up more like a story than a comic, I tried reading this one to Tara. We enjoy reading aloud to one another (more me to her than vice versa, admittedly), and this seemed a choice opportunity. Until we got to the bit about the bikers beating up Foo Foo, and Tara asked me if this was a happy story, and I reminded her that the series title was Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children, and they were, in no uncertain terms, not nice stories. I think I'll be reading them silently to myself for the next few weeks.

See you tomorrow. I'll talk a bit about Pirhana Press, DC's proto-Vertigo experiment.