The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1530: The Last One #6, December 1993

Myrwann's story ends in the only way it could, really. Last weekend my brother was visiting. He's a professor of Classics at U Winnipeg. We were talking about myth, and he used the phrase "iterations of myth," or the tellings of tales as separate from the tales themselves, if such a thing can even be. Really, myths are only important in their telling - to whom they are being told, and when.

I saw Avengers: Endgame today. As with other iterations of myth, it told a story that speaks to us about who we are today, and how we deal with the adversity of today, using symbols we understand. It's not a new story. It's pulling on a millennia-long tradition of stories that have been teaching us since we were story-telling beings. Stories that will keep being told.

And that's where Myrwann ends, of course. This mythical being, this divine entity, could only really end by embarking upon an new beginning, a new iteration of their life amongst the humans.

"~dead at last."

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1529: The Last One #5, November 1993

I realized today that I've been looking at this series from the wrong perspective. Or from the expected perspective, and I shouldn't have been. The series is, after all, called The Last One. The propensity of a series like this, in which human characters are gathered around this kind of ethereal character, the stories tend to be about the humans, rather than about the being themself. Neil Gaiman's The Sandman was performing this par excellence at the very same time that DeMatteis and Sweetman's series was running.

The end of today's issue made me realized that we're not really supposed to be paying too, too much attention to the people around Myrwann, to to the Last One themself. It's the story of what happens when a creature like this spends too much time around humans, experiences too many of their stories, and becomes corrupted and weighted down by them. As Myrwann experiences more, they become larger and larger, taking on corporeally the spiritual weight they also take on.

I'm making it a point to see about tracking down various minis that came out of Vertigo at this point. I have a whole bunch of them that I think I may pull out and read. Pretty much everything I've read from the publisher from the early 90s is absolute gold.

"And then I heard it, from high atop the Great Hill."

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1528: The Last One #4, October 1993

The characters in the comic literally spend most of it talking about exactly what I was talking about yesterday: how do we apply human standards to the non-human?

Which is great, because I'm tired and don't feel like writing today. I started training for a new job this week at the Glenbow Museum, and while the hours aren't long, it's been some time since I've been out to work every single day.

Myrwann's housemates muse on their host's origins and the things they thought upon meeting the Last One. I honestly have no idea where the story's going, but I think Myrwann themself has realized that the divine and the mortal shouldn't spend quite this much quality time together.

There is one thing that occurs to me: the other characters only ever refer to Myrwann as "he" or "she," depending on how they perceive their host. They/them simply hadn't come into common use at the time. I love seeing how language changes.

"I mean...how do we know he's really helping us?"

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1527: The Last One #3, September 1993

Although an angel, Myrwann isn't perfect, a result, perhaps, of spending millennia around humans. Much of this comic is about an alien entity interacting with we mere mortals, and the inevitable mistranslations, something that I've often thought about in terms of religion and our understanding of ostensibly divine beings.

Myrwann wants to save everyone they take in. That's undeniable - but what we might concern ourselves with is what "saving" someone means to a divine/alien being. This issue gives us a story of an angel wanting so much to save a human that they keep her alive even when death would be a mercy. Is it possible that an immortal being simply cannot fathom the idea that the release, or relinquishing, of life is something that a human might choose?

We humans go to great lengths to deal with our existential terror of nonexistence. Some go so far as to create vast mythical cosmologies and benevolent all-knowing beings, simply to assuage the personality's paralyzing inability to grasp that, one day, it won't be. Me? I'm agnostically optimistic, perhaps? It seems highly unlikely to me that there is an afterlife, but I'm also wise enough to recognize that the Universe is infinite and varied in ways that I don't have the sense or reasoning capabilities to imagine. If there is an afterlife, it's nothing like anything that anyone has ever imagined, ever. It's literally unimaginable.

It'll be interesting to one day find out, either way.

"So why did I remain there, in a nameless French village on the verge of extinction?"

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1526: The Last One #2, August 1993

Things don't go well in today's issue.

See, that's the other thing about this very awesome wave of big gay comics that came out of Vertigo: they're very unhappy. Early Vertigo horror was often less about fear than it was about despair. The Vertigo creators were often exploring the depths to which one could plummet and still be recognizably human.

I'm concerned, in today's case, that the one doing the plummeting is, ostensibly, an angel.

Dan Sweetman is fucking chameleonic in this issue. He instantly teleports from 90's Beautiful Stories-esque line work to something resembling a 30s film storyboard look and back again, with insane and wonderful panel layouts that only slightly confuse sometimes, though I suspect that's the point.

I think I may have said this way back when I read some of the Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children issues, but I'm amazed that Sweetman and Louapre's work hasn't garnered more attention.

Hmmmm....

"And, no, it didn't come from Atlantis. It came from Lemuria."

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1525: The Last One #1, July 1993

At this past weekend's Calgary Fan Expo, I hosted a panel on Queerness in Comics. One of the things we discussed was the wonderful explosion of queer comics that occurred in the early 90s, spearheaded, I'd argue, by the fabulous Vertigo Comics and their sainted editor Karen Berger. Last year at Pride I gave a talk about queer comics, and Milligan and Fegredo's The Enigma was a part of that presentation, also published by Vertigo. Today's comic is no exception, as Mr. DeMatteis and Mr. Sweetman tell a story of a bi-gender angel, the last of their kind left on Earth.

I've had this comic for a long, long time. After my brief hiatus from comics in the late 80s and early 90s, I started reading them again in '96, and rediscovered in my parents' basement my old comic collection. In there was the amazing, terrifying, Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children, all illustrated by today's artist. Once the collecting bug really hit me, I decided to track down all of Louapre and Sweetman's comic work, together or with other creators. The Last One was one of the first ones I found, ironically. But, somehow, until about 2 years ago, I only had the first issue. I remember having the others, or a few of them at least, but when I recently went back to look at my Vertigo titles, this issue was the only representative.

This reminds me that before I had exhaustively catalogued my collection, it went through numerous shifts. There was a point when I worked at a used book store, and the owner allowed me to trade in comics two-for-one. So I'd grab whatever I no longer wanted (?!) and trade it in for other stuff. This must have been about 1997, and I hadn't quite become the voracious collector that I am now. I can't for the life of me remember what I traded in, though when I left that job and started my own store, I actually bought most of my old employer's comics, so there's a good chance I still have all the comics I traded in, and the ones I got.

I'd forgotten about that. It seems Walter Benjamin was right about libraries after all.

"Don't worry. I won't throw you down the stairs. That's not what you need."

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 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.