The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 71: The Score #4, 1990

And so The Score comes to an end. I have to admit, once Philip Sand's vocation was revealed in the book, I knew exactly what the mysterious "score" was going to be, but its importance was well-masked. (That's an in-joke for anyone who's read the series......ah, just me then). This is definitely a series I'll go back to, but I think it's also one that needs to be read graphic-novelly rather than serially. There's a certain pace to the story that I think necessitates its being consumed in one sitting. Part of this, for sure, is Mark Badger's art, which is just gorgeous. The constant fluidity and dynamism of his composition is a huge part of the flow of the narrative. Jones' writing is pretty solid too, and I'm curious to see if that carries over into any of his mainstream work. I find that you'll occasionally find a writer who is really good on the personal projects, but just phones it in on the work for hire. It's a pity, but I think a truth that can be applied widely over pretty much any field. I'm thinking here of James Robinson and his work on Starman, as compared to, unfortunately, just about everything else I've read by him. Bart chatted with me once about Art Spiegelman, and how he's basically a mediocre cartoonist who had one big hit. I think this happens far more often in comics than we like to imagine, but the pool of creators who get wide exposure is so small that instead of casting the net for the next brilliant work farther afield, the industry tries to replicate what is really just a one-hit wonder. If that makes any sense.

But I'll let you know how Jones turns out, should I happen to read any of his other stuff in the next little while. I'll be researching Badger a bit more too, as I'd like to see what he does in different media.

So, moving on....perhaps back to Kirby's 2001. I feel like I need to finish that series, and his Machine Man stuff is coming up relatively soon. The limited series by Barry Windsor-Smith was one of the first comics I bought at my local general store back in the dark ages.

See you tomorrow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 70: The Score #3, 1990

I'll admit, I read the back cover of this issue before I read the issue itself. I needed a "The Story So Far.." This is not necessarily because the story isn't coherent or anything. It's just, in the midst of exam writing, the things I read/watch/listen to for pleasure don't get retained. Or only slight retained, anyway.

That said, I enjoyed this issue more than the previous two. I'm not sure if it's because I got the lowdown from the back cover, or just because the story really seems to be kicking into gear. I'm not very familiar with film composition theory, but maybe it's the third act where things have to start getting intense. Actually, that's probably true of many creative endeavours. The third side of Pink Floyd's "The Wall" ("Hey You" to "Comfortably Numb") is brimming with intensity. Whatever that means.

Here's an interesting thing about this comic, and one that's going to reveal a bit more about me than I usually divulge. There's a couple of characters in this series whose names are really familiar to me. First is the character of Sally Crane, a handler of Philip Sand, the main character, whose shadowy agenda comes clear in this issue. "Sally Crane" is also the name of Suprema's alter-ego in Alan Moore's amazing run on Supreme. Moore's work came a few  years after The Score, so I don't know if he may have read the series and liked the name.

Here's the sort of embarrassing part.

There's another character in the comic, a prostitute, named Tawny Stone. This is the same name as an amateur porn star from the early 2000s, of whom I was, and am,....um.....aware, I suppose. Again, the series came out a good 10 years or so before she made her debut, so whether or not the series had any bearing on that is hard to say.

The point being, it's odd to me that this series, which I've had for a really long time and never read, has characters whose names are familiar to me, and that was written long before the venues of that familiarity were extant. Which leaves me with a strange feeling that I quite like. Somewhere in The Invisibles, Edith says that an elderly magician's life is one long string of coincidence. Perhaps this is something like what it feels like.

See you tomorrow. Perhaps we'll forego Moon Knight and conclude The Score.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 68: The Score #2, 1989

Back to our regularly-scheduled program. So to speak.

The Score number two continues to build a cool sort of retro-future noir vibe, and Philip Sand's amnesia, and the myriad people who claim to know him and what was done to him, are weaving an interesting web.

It's a big web. And I'm not entirely sure I'm seeing the whole thing properly, but I'm trusting to the storytellers that things will wrap in a satisfactory sort of way.

I've been reading DeMatteis and Barr's Brooklyn Dreams of late, which came out of Paradox Press, Piranha's successor imprint. It's a thoroughly postmodern book, very much of the ilk of Shea and Wilson, or Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo. The Score, coming from an earlier attempt at a literary comic publisher, oozes low modernity, the kind of thing you'd see in detective novels of the 30s and 40s, the pulps and such. There are arguments made that Herriman's Krazy Kat is our (meaning comics scholars') modernist text, but I think that because the medium is relatively young, we're experiencing a lot of these historic literary periods simultaneously. That bears a bit more thought than I have for a Sunday night, but I'll keep it in my head.

An issue featuring Moon Knight tomorrow. The contrasts are striking, but are definitely keeping things interesting.

The 40 Years of Comics Project: Day 64 - The Score #1, 1989

Moving on back to my recent predilection for Piranha Press productions for a bit. I've had this series kicking about in the collection for a while now, but just never got around to reading it. There's this subtle difference between reading a regular, 22-page comics story and reading a prestige-format publication (this particular one being 48 pages long). I think that perhaps it's a psychological thing. The prestige format was always intended to house a "special" story, one that, both size-wise and thematically, broke from the boundaries of the regular monthly comic. When I pick on up, it feels like I'm making a different kind of reading commitment. The first prestige album I ever read was the first issue of The Dark Knight Returns, which is 100% outside the bounds of regular comics, and really does take a different kind of reading commitment. So perhaps that's coloured my experience of them.

Anyway, The Score is set near-future (though, considering it was written in the late 80s, it's probably set some time in our past), in Hollywood, and follows an amnesic man staggering through the segregated and crime-riddled streets of Lower Hollywood. Inevitably he falls in with the stereotypical "crooks with a heart of gold" (or so we're led to believe), and becomes involved in a plot to bring down an even worse criminal. Oh, and part way through we find out that the man with amnesia used to be a rich rock star. So, really, it's not the most original story. We can all assume that this man, Philip, will learn some great moral lesson about the division of class, he'll fall for the kind-hearted hooker who rescues him early in the story. The Score is a tried and tested narrative in the annals of American literature (though the only one that's coming to mind right now is the Goldie Hawn movie Overboard). The important thing to note, though, is that this is not necessarily a mark in the negative column. There are certain stories that we tell and retell because the messages that they carry continue to be important ones. Further, when we can see that these stories, or versions of them, stretch back into our literature, it becomes apparent that the stories are dealing with concerns that, culturally, we might always have had, and that we are still struggling to address through the vehicle of our fiction. It's one of the reasons I've dedicated my life to its study.

Narrative aside, Mark Badger's artwork is pretty badass. He claims Kirby as an influence, and there's a few shots that just scream the King's name, but the stylized paintings push Badger into a realm of his own. There's a gorgeous small panel of a woman giving a man a blowjob (which I'll not repost here...you never know who's reading), and it's really quite beautiful. So again, the story's an old one, but in Badger's visual conception of it, we have a new take on an old tale. The neo-twenties future style of New Hollywood contrasted with the contemporary ghetto look of Lower Hollywood, the lush, painted colours as our focal character moves through what basically amounts to a child porn factory, all are given a disconcertingly soft and warm character by Badger's art. It's almost as if we're looking at a world through the lens of a man with amnesia....

The Score is a four-part series, all of which I own, so I'll be doing this series for the next few days. I think four issues is short enough that I won't run out of things to say about it, or feel locked into it. I really am going to have to figure out what to do about longer series. See you tomorrow.

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.

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.