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Fantagraphics’ New 52 (Minus 50)

By | September 21st, 2011
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While you were sleeping (that is to say, reading Grifter), Fantagraphics put out two of the best books of the year last week. What were they? Why were they? When were they? (Last week.) More after the jump.

I’d like to interrupt Multiversity Comics’ 9-to-5 coverage of the New 52 to inform you guys that the comics universe outside DC’s relaunch not only continues to exist, but possibly even thrives. Last week — and this review should have been finished last week, make no mistake — the best new release wasn’t even a DC #1, to the surprise of everyone who has no idea what I’m talking about. In fact, the best new release was two new releases, like some sort of tall man who turns out to be two dogs in an overcoat.

Exhibit A: Prison Pit Book 3, by Johnny Ryan. Johnny Ryan is a regular cartoonist in the pages of Vice, and to give you a taste of how things generally go there, I’ll summarize a recent one. In response to the charges that his new memoir Paying for It takes a utopian view of the conditions sex workers operate in, Chester Brown disguises himself as a working girl to experience how the other side lives. A john then molests, mutilates, and nearly murders him, and in the last panel, with his body broken beyond repair, he gives a cheery thumbs-up and yelps, “Prostitution 4 life!

The above is, I must note, fairly mild compared to Ryan’s signature offensive tactic, the dearly-missed Angry Youth Comix. The world is poorer for fewer pages of Boobs Pooter making jokes about baby boners getting stuck into people’s ears. Anyway, what I meant to say is that Johnny Ryan probably will offend you, and if his work never once causes a twinge of remorse or repulsion for having read it, you are undoubtedly a psychopath and should be put into some kind of prison immediately and without fair trial. That is to say, he is easily one of the four or five most vital and important cartoonists working today.


Prison Pit is like someone making a comic strip out of Mayhem’s Live in Leipzig, played at half speed and double the volume your speakers can safely process. If you’ve never heard that album, then I’ll spell it out for you: this is a brutal fucking comic. For 115 pages or so every year, musclebound freaks beat each other to death, in between pissing, shitting, puking, jizzing, and whatever else bodies are normally capable of — pushed to frankly ridiculous levels. Imagine Mortal Kombat with any semblance or shadow of good taste thoroughly and messily extracted, paced like pro wrestling and dialogued by Sam Fuller and/or the Ramones.

Prison Pit exudes cartoon manliness, to such a ridiculous degree that it can’t be taken seriously — but it pushes so far and so hard that it comes back around to being dead serious in the end. There’s no summary of Books 1 and 2 to be found in Book 3, and honestly, you don’t need one. Here’s what happens: some kind of vampire guy fights a bunch of gross-looking assholes for about 80 pages until he falls into an earthquake, and then a naked guy (named “Cannibal Fuckface”) with the mutant stomach from Total Recall for an arm fights a bunch of monk-looking assholes who merge into a crystalline gestalt warrior until the end of the book. If you’re a quick reader and don’t take time to savor the pictures, you could read all 115 pages in about 10 minutes. You’d be cheating yourself, sure, but no one’s gonna hold you back.

If you stop and savor the gore and grime, though, what Ryan betrays is an assured, even casual mastery of the hardest thing in comics to nail: pacing. Sure, this comic reads like the notebook cover of some fifteen-year-old would-be Columbine case who owns three Manowar shirts and one more with the sleeves cut off. Consider, though, the roughly three-page sequence where one of the monsters goes to take a piss, only to have another character (who he’d eaten) messily explode out of his urethra. Yes, I know, that’s a horrible thing to consider — but seriously, he made three pages of this, and they all work, both individually and together. The cosmic brutality of Ryan’s story is emphasized by his lingering gaze. He doesn’t just draw the big action moments, but the lulls and gaps and silences between them. The pace is non-stop, but that doesn’t mean it can’t slow down. In fact, it’s those slowed-down sections that give the skull-smashing and throat-fisting the impact that they deserve.

Continued below


Exhibit B: Mark Twain’s Autobiography, 1910-2010, by Michael Kupperman. Mr. Twain’s own preface to this latest literary marvel of his: “Greetings, stranger of the future. … ‘What’s that,’ you say? ‘Didn’t you die a hundred years ago, you old coot? I hear your memoirs have just been published, because they had to wait a century after your death,’ blah blah blah and so on. The truth is I never died, but the same old rumors got exaggerated and then a bunch of other stuff happened, so people forgot I was still alive.” The tone is set, and it doesn’t let up for a single page, except for the pages that have pictures on them instead of words.

Minus some sections of outright cartooning, Mark Twain’s Autobiography is an extended text piece broken up into bizarre sections (Chapter 29: “I Tingle America’s Dingle”), with accompanying illustrations by Kupperman. Kupperman is sort of like the prop comic of cartooning, if prop comics were ever funny. His occasionally very detailed, occasionally very sparse drawing style often seems assembled from whatever reference pictures he had to hand, or perhaps just what he felt like drawing that particular day. He then connects the dots by inventing throughlines of dadaist convenience and thoroughly absurd wit. Like Ryan, Kupperman too had a comic — the beautifully titled Tales Designed to Thrizzle. It too is missed, especially by me, since I can never seem to find any fucking copies of the later issues anywhere.

Kupperman’s drawing style in Mark Twain’s Autobiography is much looser and less finely rendered than I’m used to seeing from him — but the pictures get the point across quickly, priming each subsequent page of tomfoolery and hijinx. The images also impart key information vital to the narrative, such as the fact that Mark Twain and Albert Einstein look exactly alike, but for the latter’s Princeton sweater.

Here’s the plot of Mark Twain’s Autobiography: Mark Twain, freed from the shackles of mortality, bums around the Twentieth Century doing whatever the hell he feels like and occasionally having untroubling yet far-fetched adventures. While the sheer zaniness of Twain and Einstein being trapped in the ant kingdom is good for a chuckle, the best parts of the book come when Kupperman just makes things up about real people wholesale, such as claiming that Ike Eisenhower’s first name was actually “Isaac” (and that his wife Mamie was a real hot piece of ass), or the following anecdote about meeting Charles Schulz:

The next day I visited his trailer and he showed me his strip. It was called Li’l Shits and showed a bunch of kids misbehaving and being generally unbearable. They were complete monsters who did nothing but annoy their parents, who were large wind instruments. “It doesn’t look like you like children very much,” I pointed out. “Also, all this swearing….”

Kupperman maintains a straight face throughout this look into the world that might have been, had Mark Twain roamed the earth, immortal and more than a little strange. This poker-faced treatment of juvenile, abstracted humor pays off in strokes both broad and small. The casual ambivalence of phrases like “As usual, he won a Nobel Prize for this once we unshrunk” is far funnier than the nonsense itself. Occasionally things veer off into realms so silly that not even the lackadaisical tone can cover for them, but each chapter is only like two pages anyway so it always snaps back into shape. The only possible complaint is that Kupperman’s comic strips aren’t more numerous. Well, that and that it’s not funny, if you don’t care for any of the jokes.

You could go out now and get both of these books for roughly the same price as an entire week’s worth of DC #1s. (I base that math on guesstimation.) If you had to pick one or the other, frankly, I’d recommend the two Fantagraphics books. You’ll learn more that way — about both Mark Twain and monster cocks. I’ll bet Blue Beetle can’t compete in either.


Patrick Tobin

Patrick Tobin (American) is likely shaming his journalism professors from the University of Glasgow by writing about comic books. Luckily, he's also written about film for The Drouth and The Directory of World Cinema: Great Britain. He can be reached via e-mail right here.

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