A while back, a few years now, I think, I picked up a couple of boxes of cheap comics from Purple Gorilla. As I poured through the boxes from which I was making my selection, I tried to balance between mainstream and indie publishers. I talk about my collection having breadth and depth. For me, the depth is a historical perspective. Though this is not always solely a chronological historical perspective. I have some very old comics, 1947's Giggle Comics #38 being the oldest. For me, this comic is important to the collection for its very age. It's really not a very good comic. Depth is also represented by the key issues in the collection. Something like My Greatest Adventure #80, the first appearance of the Doom Patrol, or the first issue of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, or some of the undergrounds I have in the collection. These are depth - not only are they chronologically significant, in their age, but also in the contribution they have made to the medium. Thus they are both historical to, and impact the history of, the medium.
So breadth is, instead, accumulating as wide a variety of kinds of comics as possible. For this reason I include things like a Panago Pizza flyer that was presented as a comic, or a hand-drawn reproduction of some undergrounds that were adapted to comment on Kafka's Metamorphosis for an undergraduate final project. I found it in the recesses of the Free Exchange book room at U of C when I was the chair of the conference. I unfortunately had to get rid of a lot of clutter in my first term at the job, but that came home with me. It's the same reason I buy comics in their native languages as well. The medium is so diverse, and I'd like to see as much represented in the collection as possible.
Which brings us to this comic. A very small-press (I think this is their only publication), from what I can tell this issue was produced as part of an initiative called "Cartoonists Across America," a tour of comics creators across the US to promote literacy. Each appears to have put together comics and books to promote reading to people across the country. A very cool initiative, one that I may have to research a bit more. The first half of the comic, "The Rubes Revue," is a series of single panel strips that are heavily indebted to Gary Larson's The Far Side. They're very funny, and very well-rendered. The second strip is "Penguin and Pencilguin," a tale of two penguins who want to write the great Antarctican novel, one of whom has a pencil for a beak. I have a comic featuring these two characters in the collection that I think is part of the same literacy initiative.
This was a really good, satisfying comic. Sometimes the smallest of presses offer very large rewards.
More to come...
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