The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1957: Luba's Comics and Stories #4, June 2004

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As someone who prides himself on a wide range of knowledge of comics, Los Bros Hernandez are a fairly prominent gap in my knowledge. I have some Love and Rockets issues and collections, and I've read bits and pieces of their work elsewhere, but haven't really spent a lot of time with the stories for which they're famed. I remember their contribution to the art form being celebrated even when I was quite young and first into comics, though it was always a comic for older readers. But, as I say, I've not filled in the gap. Which may explain why I'm confused about virtually every female character, except the titular one (that's a pun that will be come apparent in a second), has the most enormous breasts I've ever seen. Perhaps further research is required ;D.

The stories were excellent - the art is pretty much beyond reproach. Gilbert Hernandez, today's creator, is lauded, and rightly so. He characters move and breath and react. And the stories, of a young girl attempting to understand a much older world around her, are really funny and touching, particularly the movie she attempts to make in the final story. As I rearrange my comics library for the umpteenth time, I'm hoping to get back to reading come graphic novels and posting about them for the project. I'll have to make sure that some of the Love and Rockets books are at the top of the pile. This stuff's pretty good.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts

If you're interested in the primary North American publisher of Los Bros Hernandez, have a look at Fantagraphics - they publish cool stuff.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1339: Critters #9, February 1987

So Tom Stazer's "Lionheart" is going to have to be tracked down. Fortunately, I find that Critters tends to show up in a lot of bargain bins. I'm not sure why. The quality of the stories is simply excellent.

All of the stories in today's issue are really good, very enjoyable and amusing without devolving into the slapstick we might expect from the more juvenile iterations of this genre. This episode of "Lionheart" reminds me of the more hallucinatory issues of the early Cerebus stories, particularly the ones where he's surfing through a mindscape talking to Suentis Po.

(Uh-oh. Got a sudden inkling to re-read Cerebus.)

I'm also intrigued by Freddy Milton's "Gnuff," so hopefully there'll be a bit more of that in subsequent issues.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1338: Critters #8, January 1987

Forgive me, I'm tired. I'll talk a bit about this and it may sound like rambling. Something about anthropomorphic animals actually makes the stories more realistic?

Here's the thing: very often anthropomorphs are involved in fantastic situations. Even someone like HTD, who just wants to live his life, is enmeshed in the fabric of strangeness and fantasy in the universe. These fantastic situations, were we to see them depicted with relatively realistic looking humans, would be quite ridiculous. Hence superhero comics (obviously said with love). So if a situation is ridiculous to begin with, the insertion of a focal character with whom we can partially identify, but not wholly identify, allows us to suspend our disbelief of the situation more so than would the same situation with human beings.

Yep. Rambling. Good night.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1337: Critters #7, January 1987

Another cool entry into the funny animal genre, offering a Danish strip about Gnuff (an alligator, perhaps?), an unsurprisingly surreal 2-pager from Sam Keith, and a really great Usagi Yojimbo story about a blind outlaw.

I've thought long and hard about the funny animal genre. At one time, Howard the Duck was going to figure into a line of thinking I'd been pursuing, and I became curious about his lineage outside of stuff like Disney or Looney Tunes. I ended up reading some Pogo, and dipping my toes into the more explicit furry adult comics, all in an effort to understand why we anthropomorphize, and why we keep telling stories using animals. I mean, we've been doing it for so, so long.

That, however, is a question, and quest, for another time. I'm going to keep reading through Critters, though, so perhaps an answer, or a suggestion, will present itself.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1280: The Adventures of Mr. Pyridine, January 1989

An alternately masked and then bearded serial killer sails around in his house made of nightmares, inviting you to stroll the hallways with him. But do so at your own peril.

I really love this comic. It's just weird, plainly and gloriously weird, though like all good surrealist pieces, it exudes the possibility of making sense, but glides just out of reach. More plainly, a film version of Mr. Pyridine would have to be directed by David Lynch. It's that kind of comic.

The artist, one Mahendra Singh, still creates but I think this was Mr. Pyridine's solo flight.

A pity, though perhaps the world isn't really ready for more Mr. Pyridine.

Or perhaps he's really inside all of us.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1209: Real Girl #8, July 1995

A quick break from Enigma, and back into the indie comics scene with Real Girl.  Not a bad comic, and actually contains some proper sex, considering the publication calls itself a "sex comic." There's a large excerpt from a graphic novel by Seth Tobocman that was really good, but not quite what I was expecting from today's read. The previous issue of Real Girl was much more short story focussed.

And not much else to say about this one. It was good, but not great.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1204: Small Favors #3, June 2001

As I was thinking on what to say about this comic, I surfed over to a bookseller website and was about to order the recently released collection of the series from Oni Press. Then I thought I should probably see if any of my local stores have it first, but the impulse does help me with what I want to say:

I love this comic.

This is, hands down, one of the best adult comics I've read. It's funny, it's cute, it's erotic, and it's totally, totally about sex being fun.

The set-up is that Nibbil is a tiny Jiminy Cricket-style conscience, sent to prevent Annie from masturbating too much. Instead they fall in love and have lots of really hot gay sex.

Colleen Coover's art is just wonderful. Her command of figure and expression is on display up there on the cover, but the sense of narrative contained within is just astounding. I've read adult comics where I've become bored by the sex scene almost from the first panel. Standard poses, quotes, etc. But Ms. Coover draws one particular encounter out over a fair number of pages, and turns the sex into the narrative that, very often, sex is. It's not all pouty lips and heaving sighs, but also giggles at silly things the other says, or stopping for a drink of water. It's sex as a story, rather than as part of a story, and thus has all the trappings of a story.

Here's the other thing about this comic: how can one possibly resist something that calls itself a "girly porno comic book"? Simply not possible.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1200: Real Girl #4, September 1992

Let's dip back into the underground for a day. For the longest time I've had Real Girl filed in my collection with the adult comics, but, having now read an issue, I'm not sure that's where it belongs. Though quite explicit, the comic is not, as far as I can tell, attempting to arouse its audience. Instead, these are sex stories that are about how sex informs our lives, decisions, and identities. Having said this, many of the stories by female creators are none too kind to men, with good reason of course. The comic is explicitly anti-patriarchal, and very, very angry.

Things get quite experimental too. There's one strip in which the antagonists of the piece are collage creatures made out of pictures of penises. Quite disturbing, actually, but when bearing in mind the narrative detailing with the male gaze and rape culture and abortion protestors, the addition of a disturbing visual definitely enhances the distaste with which we view such attitudes and practices.

Like I said, not your typical sex comic.

The other nice thing about this comic is that it lives up to the tag line on the cover. There's a great variety of gender identities represented in the stories, and this mixture nicely demonstrates the sorts of similarities and differences we experience in navigating sexuality depending on our identities. And really that's what writing and literature is all about. I suggest this to my students right at the start of our classes, that literature allows us to see both the similarities and differences with other human beings, sometimes those long dead. It works the same for gender identity - stories like these allow us to recognize ourselves in others, and also to recognize the things that set us apart.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1184: Lust #5, August 1997

Back to some of the naughtier comics in the collection. More after the jump.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 692: Meat Cake #9, April 1999

This is a very, very strange comic. Edward Gorey, Charles Dickens, they'd have been very entertained by Dame Darcy's work. While I'll admit that I picked this issue up pretty much because there's an Alan Moore story in it (and it's a very cool story), Dame Darcy's own characters won me over. Their adventures in grave robbing and fishing are fantastic. A brief glance at her Wikipedia page is evidence enough that Meat Cake is the product of an artist, someone who has devoted herself to pursuing her artistic inclinations in all the facets she enjoys. I'm thoroughly inspired by this. We labour far too often under the misapprehension that we should choose a thing and be that thing for the rest of our lives. What if, instead, we did the things that we wanted to do?

Onward.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - The Weekly Graphic Novel: Week 32 - That Kind of Girl, 1999

When I had my comic store, I used to contend that if you came in and spent a bit of time talking to me, I could 100% find a comic that you would enjoy. Bear in mind, this was 15 years ago, when there was still a lot, or a lot more, rhetoric around comics not actually being "real" reading.

I still stick to this, but I've further refined my contention such that, if I know a person really well, I'll be able to find a comic of any genre that that person would enjoy. Today's comic, a rather lovely and remarkable erotic story, is just such a work. I read this, and immediately knew that this was just the kind of naughty story that my wife would enjoy. I gave it to her, and I was right.

When I've done weeks of reading erotic comics, I try to distinguish between the erotic and the pornographic. I recently bought a large collection of Eros, Eurotica, and such, enough to fill up a shelf in my library, and there's a wide range of titles that straddle that line, as well as a whole bunch that fall on either side. And I think both have their place, though I have less trouble with the pornographic, which I equate with the exploitative (not necessarily in a denigrating manner, but in a less-exploratory manner than erotica) when presented as comics. Exploitative live action porn always runs the risk of being damaging to those involved if the exploitation is done out of negative emotion rather than positive emotion.

Anyway, Molly Kiely is not exploiting anyone. All the characters in this story have agency, have choice, and exercise that choice to have excellent, excellent sex. Perhaps the difference between erotica and porn is that erotica conveys a greater sense of sex positivity in contrast to porn's exploitation. I'll have to think about this a bit more.

Which won't be hard (pun intended), as I have the aforementioned shelf of dirty comics now! Expect a few more over the coming (again, pun intended) weeks.

Onward!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 511: The Seduction of Mike, 1997

The nice thing about the mass market nature of the comics medium is that we've got a relatively complete archive of the kinds of comics that have been published since their inception back in the mid-thirties. The relatively large publication numbers combined with the voraciousness of the collector's market means that we have a fairly comprehensive idea of the array of comics. And R. Sikoryak is someone who knows that history well. Not only this, but he's also really, really good at mimicking the style of just about every era of comics we've known. With such a knowledge comes, one assumes from the tenor of his comics, healthy doses of both affection and ironic detachment from the genres and titles that he satirizes. Which is the way it ought to be, really. An affection for, even a love for, a particular genre or medium does not mean that one need view the object of affection with rose-tinted glasses (though the colouring of the comics story in the middle of this book is tinted in just that way). Loving something means seeing, accepting, and having an opinion of not only the good, but also the bad. Sikoryak's comics (well, I've read this and Masterpiece Comics) treat each with equal measure, and demonstrate quite plainly his love for the comics medium.

The Mike of the title is a cipher for every comics reader out there, or perhaps for the perfect comics reader that reader response theories suppose. He's also a cipher for the movement of a particular generation of reader, as the introduction attests, that reader who grew up with comics, from inception to psychedelia to Grim 'n' Gritty (TM). Though the reader who managed to make it through all of those eras is a long-lived comics reader indeed. Sikoryak's covers are amazing in this book, capturing both style and feel of each satirized series. The story in the middle is at once Golden Age children's comic and contemporary indie comics critique. And the introduction sets up the premise of the story in an entertaining and useful way. This is just a lovely piece of comics, and if you have any affection for the medium and its history, you'll enjoy it.

Onward.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 359: Critters #1, June 1986

Initially, before writing this, I couldn't, for the life of me, figure out why it is that we anthropomorphize animals. I mean, I understand that we anthropomorphize just about everything - we're a very self-involved species. But usually that's simply a case of naming a car, or giving a voice to the inner workings of our cats' brains. There is, however, this subset of comics, not quite a genre, that replaces human protagonists with humanized animals. Indeed, this is one of the oldest ways of telling stories in comics, at least in the periodically-distributed pamphlets we've come to know and love. But the question of why we do it is much harder to answer.

Stan Sakai's "Usagi Yojimbo" is always lovely to read. One of the most unsettling parts of any "funny animal" book is when the book stops being funny and gets grim, and Sakai's work straddles that line expertly. This straddling hearkens back to tales that, in some ways, explain the propensity to continue writing funny animal comics - myths. It is difficult to find a popularly available Native American myth that does not feature an anthropomorphized animal of some sort. The same goes for Hindu myths, Japanese myths, in fact, most myth cycles except for the Abrahamic faiths. I think the reason for this popularity of animals in kerygmatic stories is that we can layer our own human foibles and personalities over top of these creatures, but we can also layer the more savage and wild aspects of such creatures over ourselves. In some ways, telling funny animal stories is a way of acknowledging that we, too, are animals.

Once we've come around to that perspective, things start to fall into place a little more. In "Birthright," the final story of this piece, the savagery of politics is portrayed through the fall of an animal-run empire. Cutey Bunny, Joshua Quagmire's piece in this comic, combines the uninhibited sexuality of the animal kingdom (in the form of the buxom Bunny herself) with the animalistic (what does that word even mean?) brutality of the Second World War. Sakai's story is the least savage, in that Usagi laughs and jokes with his comrades, but he also viciously slaughters a group of mercenaries. These animals are not just animals, but people, just as people are not just people, but also animals.

So perhaps that's why this genre...style...continues. Our myths tells us tales about the times when the difference between animal and human was not so vast. Our funny animal books remind us that that gap is still small, regardless of what we might like to think of ourselves as a species.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 199: Silky Whip #4, August 1998 (Eros Comix Hentai Week Day 6)

Nearing the end of the road here, and what a strange road it's been. I'll admit, I'm looking forward to returning to the Age of Apocalypse. Perhaps the reason that one doesn't see a lot of attention paid to erotic or pornographic comics is that it's very easy to become desensitized and bored with them. How much sex can one watch? (There's a dangerous question to ask if there ever was one!)

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 198: Super Taboo Extreme #3, February 2001 (Eros Comix Hentai Week Day 5)

A return to the world of Wolf Ogami's Super Taboo in Super Taboo Extreme. Ahead lie strange waters. You've been warned.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 197: Sexhibition #2, November 1995 (Eros Comix Hentai Week Day 4)

One of my favourite series of adult comics if Phil Foglio's Xxxenophile, collected into 6 volumes and filled with science fiction and fantasy stories where people have unrestrained, consensual, completely fun sex. Far too few erotic comics embrace this aspect of play in sexuality. Today's selection, Sexhibition, comes close.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 196: The Sex-Philes #1, December 1998 (Eros Comix Hentai Week Day 3)

Obviously trading on the popularity of the X-Files television series for this series. This one's interesting, perhaps my favourite of the ones I'm reviewing this week.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 195: Super Taboo #12, October 1996 (Eros Comix Hentai Week Day 2)

Continuing our journey into the darker crevices of my collection. Actually, scratch that. There's really no reason I should keep these in the dark. They're expressions of particular human emotions, just like any other story. It's just our Puritanical cultural mores that keep us from admitting that, by and large, we're a horny bunch.

 

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 194: Lust #9, December 1997 (Eros Comix Hentai Week Day 1)

 Let's take a break from "Age of Apocalypse," shall we? One can only take so much alterna-X-Men. We're about to jump into a particularly salacious corner of my comics collection. I'd mentioned in my post on Betty By The Hour that I have a fondness for adult comics, and over the years of collecting them, I've come across a subset that's both strange and titillating. In the late nineties, Fantagraphics published a line of erotic comics under the aegis of Eros Comix, and within that venture was the "Mangerotica" line. This week we're going to have a look at a few examples of this line. Be warned. These are pretty extreme. If you're offended by pornographic or erotic comics, I'd advise you to skip this week. I'm going to try to be as honest about these comics as I have been about all of the others I've read. Probably should include a "Too Much Information" warning. Anyway, after the break, we'll get going.

Live-Post: Sunday Afternoon Comics - Belly Button Comix #1

European comics are so strange.

I try these days to pick up something a bit out of the ordinary when I'm dropping a bunch of cash on comics. Fantagraphics never disappoints as far as "out of the ordinary" goes. Weird biographical comics about a woman living in Paris. There's a lot of ennui and angst, which sometimes feels like a bit of a cliche in comics like this, until I realize that cliches become cliches because they are, for the most part, true. I feel ennui and angst sometimes. I wish I had comics to let it out into.

Last one for today. I've got Empire: Uprising and Annihilator to read, but I'm going to reread the stuff leading up to the new issues first. Also picked up an Atomic Robo graphic novel, a Rick Veitch graphic novel, and the Man-Thing movie prequel.