French Ticklers (1989) #1-3 edited by Randy & Jean-Marc Lofficier

This anthology reprints stuff from the French humour anthology Fluide Glacial, which had previously been done by Renegade Press under the name French Ice. Which makes more sense, but I guess they couldn’t keep that name…

Like the Renegade series, this reprints the magazine-format pages much reduced, and with very large top/bottom margins. Somehow it’s even more unpleasant to read in this iteration, but perhaps my eyes just have gotten even worse over the past year? Because this tends towards the unreadable.

It’s especially bad in series like Carmen Cru (by J. M. Lelong) — it’s so detailed and has so much text that it’s just hard to tell what’s happening when it’s reduced in size like this (and apparently printed with a potato).

(It’s very, very amusing, though, if you manage to actually read it.)

Kador (by Binet) fares a bit better, but… is it really meant to look like this? It looks like there should be grey washes in the backgrounds, but they’re just really splotchy and unsightly.

(But the strip is funny.)

The book also (randomly enough) has a bunch of Moebius stuff… from 1963!!! I’ve never seen any of this before, and it’s a revelation. Moebius was a huge Mad Magazine fan, I guess? I’d never have guessed that this was Moebius by looking at it.

This is Dupuy and Berberian’s first strip, apparently — Henrietta? It’s really sweet, and I’ve never seen it before.

The Sgt. Claus strip (by Gossens) is very high concept: “What if Santa Claus was in the military?” But once you’ve heard the concept, you don’t really need to read the strip, because that’s the joke.

And it’s such a strain to read in this reduced format.

Finally, we have a Franquin Idees Noires page.

So… The issue is chock full, and it’s all good stuff, but it’s still not a good read. I know, I’ve been harping on the format, but it’s just hard to get past that. But in addition, there are so many features in this 24 page book that it’s just hard to get any feel for any of the features. It feels cramped and odd.

Wow… more Moebius from (around) 1963. Amazing. I mean, amazing that the Moebius we know and love drew like this once, and then stopped drawing this way.

Surprising nobody, the book was cancelled due to low sales.

But this is more surprising: Kador takes on Watchmen and/or Dark Knight.

Craig Pleeth writes in Amazing Heroes #174, page 85:

Variety may be the spice of life, but
it’s not the spice of the comics indus-
try. Except around the halls of Kitchen
Sink Press.
The first issue of their new series
French 7icklers contains eight stories
by some of the best creators in French
comics. Presented here are some in-
teresting stories that should be brought
to the attention of any serious comics
aficionado.
The variety of material alone puts
most American creators (and publish-
ers) to shame, as there isn’t one story
that features a long-johned vigilante.
The closest thing to a caper we get is
Santa Claus.
The delicately rendered Carmen
Cru story by Lelong accomplished
more in five pages than a year’s Morth
of anything by Chris Claremont. A
sense of character and timing is effort-
lessly brought home during a greedy
land developer’s play at getting the
notorious bag lady’s land.
The Kador strip by Benet, which
features an incredibly smart dog brid-
with incredibly dumb masters, has
the look and flavor of a strange ani-
mated short. “Henrietta’s Diary”
Dupuy & Berberian brings together a
rather strange story (at least for Amer-
ican comics) coupled with a fantastic
visual telling of the tale.
The most interesting pieces come in
the form of three never-before trans-
lated “Moebius Strips” from the ’60s
by famed creator Jean Giraud. Two of
the stories are done in a Harvey Kurtz-
man-Will Elder-MAD Magazine style,
while the third looks like something
more akin to the sequential art of Will
Eisner.
Though the ideas and artwork
expressed in French Ticklers are more
inspired than your average American
comic, the humor of the var-
ious strips does lose something in the
cross-cultural chasm that exists be-
tween Yanks and Frogs. However, the
obvious skills of the creators shine,
and, most importantly, you don’t have
to shriek and laugh out loud to appre-
ciate the work presented in this book.
Once again Kitchen Sink has spiced
up the comic racks. Let’s hope they
keep French Ticklers coming and
dreaming up books aimed at adults.

This is the one hundred and eleventh post in the Entire Kitchen Sink blog series.

Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy (1989) #1-5 by Ernie Bushmiller

There’s been several books written about Nancy, and I think pretty much everything that needs to be said has been said about the subject, so this’ll be a very quick blog post.

Each volume has an introduction from an artist that talks about the ineffable quality of Nancy, and Bill Griffith does the first one.

These volumes are arranged by theme. With most strips, that would have resulted in a rather stilted reading experience, but each Nancy strip stands very well on its own, and there’s a timeless quality to the strips, so it’s not too jarring to mix strips that were created decades apart.

These books have both Sunday strips (like above)…

… and also daily strips, which are arranged like this, for the most part. Now, I’ve grown up with newspaper strip reprints that are hacked up any which way, but this does look a bit odd. Perhaps mostly because Bushmiller’s line is so consistent that it looks weird then some of the strips are printed much bigger than the rest, resulting in heavier lines.

Nancy’s such an anarchist.

The second volume is called How Sluggo Survives, and they get Jack Survives author Jerry Moriarty to do the introduction. And then he writes a little story, imagining his “Jack” character (based on his father) living next door to Nancy. It’s cool.

So the first book is about food, while the second one is about Sluggo.

Third one is about dreams and schemes…

The fourth one has two themes: Hoboes and beatniks…

… and also artists. Bushmiller ribs modern art, but surprisingly gently.

And the fifth and final volume is about pets.

These books are well put together, and the reproduction is good.

Adam-Troy Castro writes in Amazing Heroes #166, page 64:

By the end of his career, Ernie Bush-
miller had become a prime example
of a stranoe species peculiar to pop
culture, a species that includes aniong
its mernbers Liberace, Tammy Fae
Bakker, and Tiny Tim: people so peur-
ile and yet so inexplicably successful
that their names become nationwide
punchlines. But most people who join
that species do so by appearing on tel-
evision, were by definition they’re try-
ing to call attention to themselves.
Bushmiller did it by writing and draw-
ing a particularly annoying comic strip
called Nancy—an activity which usu-
ally wouldn’t be expected to make any-
body’s name a household word. But
people knew who Bushmiller was.
Comedians were abe to use him in
routines. Saturday Night Live put him
on a list of people dolphins are defi-
nitely more intelligent than. When, a
few years ago, a small magazine I
wrote for at the time published Iny list
of 52 People American Would Like To
See Taken Hostage By Iranians, the
only way I knew anybody had read the
damn thing was the literally dozens of
people who congratulated me on put-
ting Ernie Bushmiller’s name on the
list,
I don’t know what possessed Kit-
chen Sink to publish an anthology of
Ernie Bushmiller’s cartoons dealing
with food. It might have been sheer
perversity: this is admittedly the sort
of idea that causes gikgling fits at three
o•clock in the morning. ()r it might
have been outright meanness: Nancy
relied on an exceedingly small number
of jokes, most of which were repeated
again and again to dimishing effect,
and deliberately showcasing one par-
ticular kind of joke is an extremely ef-
fective way of bringing the strip’s in-
herent redundancy into sharp relief.
For instance: On one page, Nancy
(who, incidentally, resembles a clerk
at the office where I Susan)
asks permission to eat some choco-
lates, and promises her Aunt Fritzi
that she’ll only eat one. She rearranges
about 3() of them into a big spelled-out
“one”, and eats them all. On another
page, she promises her aunt she’ll eat
salad and soup for dinner, and spells
out the words “salad and soup” with
spaghetti. And on a third page she
complains there’s a hair in her soup.
There is. The word hair in alphabet
letters. The joke wasn’t funny the first
time. The third time it makes us won-
der why Aunt Fritzi didn’t just kill the
little brat; with this anthology as her
defense, no jury in the world would
have convicted her.
Recently, an unbelievable number
of otherwise respectable people have
cited Bushmiller as a major influence
on modern an; one, Zippy the Pinhead
artist Bill Griffith, provides this vol-
ume with an introduction that gushes
eloquent about Bushmiller•s spare but
extremely polished drawing style. I
can kind of see his point there. But
nobody ever said Bushmiller couldn’t
draw—only that his comic strip was
painfully stupid.
In any event, if this anthology
proves nothing else, it’s that Nancy
was a prime candidate for bulimia.

But what does he really think of the strip?

Leonard Wong writes in Amazing Heroes #198, page 72:

Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancv seems to be
one of these things that people either
really like or really hate. I used to
think that it was the stupidest comic
strip ever created. But after Bush-
miller died and Jerry Scott took the
strip over, it quickly became apparent
just how good Ernie really was.
While I’m not ready to proclaim
Bushmiller a creative genius, I have
come to appreciate Nancy’s bizarre
charms. Whether he did it intention-
ally or not, Bushmiller’s characters
occupy a surreal little world, where
everybody and everything is drawn in
a tidy, clean-line style, and the same
dumb jokes and situations keep work-
ing over and over and over.
Nancy’s Pets is the fifth volume in
Kitchen Sink’s reprints from the
series. Each Nancy book is centered
around a theme (food, Sluggo, pets,
etc.), which makes more sense than
a chronological reprinting of the
strips, since the series has no real day-
to-day continuity. 9/hile you’d think
that 90 pages of cartoons on the same
topic would be overkill, grouping the
strips this way gives the books focus,
and helps to showcase the series’
quirkiness.
Each Nancy volume begins with a
short essay on Bushmiller and his
work. The essay here, written by
Bushmiller’s neighbor and friend
James CarlsSon, discusses the Bush-
millers’ pets, and reveals that some of
the animal gags used in the series were
based on actual incidents involving
Ernie and his wife. Illustrating the
piece is a photo of the Bushmillers and
their dog, and a few of the family’s
Christmas cards. It’s a nice “behind
the scenes” sort of thing.
As you would probably expect from
the book’s title, the strips in Nancy’s
Pets involve animals—Nancy’s pets
(which include a dog whose spots
keep changing), Sluggo’s pets, and a
large assortment of birds, mice, and
animals at the zoo.
Series editor James Kitchen has
chosen a nice mix of daily and Sunday
strips that are mostly from the ’60’s
and ’70’s, and presents them one
Sunday or four dailies per page. The
care and quality in the presentation of
this material is consistent with the
high standards set by Kitchen Sink in
their other reprint projects.
Bushmiller•s work employs a gentle,
sincere humor, and his love of animals
is very apparent in this book. Like the
previous four Bushmiller collections,
Nancy’s Pets is full of simple and
timeless gags that you can’t help but
get a smile or a chuckle from.

Seems like sentiment had already begun to shift, and perhaps these reprints were what started Bushmiller’s journey into Acclaimed Genius status?

This is the one hundred and tenth post in the Entire Kitchen Sink blog series.

Steven (1989) #1-8 by Doug Allen

I had the first issue of this book as a teenager, and I remember really disliking it. Which is a bit odd, because it’s adjacent to many strings that I really enjoy. Let’s have a look at these books and try to unravel the mystery.

The edition of the first issue I have here is the original, self published one. Kitchen Sink would later reprint this issue and then carry on the series.

The first issue reprints a “best of” selection from 81-85.

There’s a lot of different approaches, but it’s mostly the Steven character whining about something or other.

Krazy Kat reference.

Quite a few of the strips here are about not having an idea for making a strip, which is a common enough trope, but it just feels so… low effort here.

Perhaps I just disliked this strip as a teenager because it sucks? How’s that for insightful analysis.

Two typical examples: A totally hackneyed joke masquerading as Zippy-esque absurdity on top, and on bottom, we have a typical “that Steven guy sure is ornery” punch line free strip. It’s lazy and it’s boring and now I’m dreading reading the rest of the series (which I did not buy at the time, for obvious reasons).

Well, Allen’s line gets fuller and more accomplished, and storylines start to develop, so that’s an improvement.

But I just have zero interest in this, so I started skipping while reading these issues.

In the seventh issue, we get some strips from the 70s, which are more interesting graphically.

And then, finally, the series is over and I don’t have to read more.

I still don’t know why my antipathy towards this series is so strong — it might just be me.

Because the series was popular at the time — it ran for almost two decades, which is a lot for an alternative comic strip.

Tom Spurgeon writes in The Comics Journal #177, page 129:

I stopped reading Doug Allen’S Steven When I
moved from Chicago and was thus no longer able to
follow the adventures of comics’ favorite pre-teen
alcoholic misanthrope for free in a local weekly. I
was kind of glad I got out when I did; the last
plotline I can recall involved the dipsomaniac plant
(“Gimme some sauce, babe.”) doing the “Alice in
Wonderland” growth thing.
Steven #7 makes me wonder what been
missing. A strong collection combining a run of
strips from 1993 and the usual Steven rarities from
long ago, this latest release from Kitchen Sink finds
Allen hitting his stride all over again.
Despite its really rough, over-the-top humor
(One extended sequence involves Steven running
around happily shooting the supporting cast),
Steven owes a lot to classic comedic strips and
movies. The motivations Of the characters are so
pure and simplistic that the outcomes are inevitable;
getting there is all the fun. Steven is such a strong
character, with a bottomless pit of ha-
tred to draw from, that he needs a num-
ber of antagonists to balance him out.
This suits Allen perfectly; he’s a master at creating
character out of variations on annoying behavior:
the pompous Mr. Owl Ph.D., the simpering boob
Woodrow, the self-important Fifi Doodle… Steven
is the kind of strip where everyone who reads it has
a personal favorite.

The Comics Journal #145, page 119:

STEVEN #4
BY DOUG ALLEN
MCHEN SINK PRESS
No obsessive consumer in the history of comic strips
can match Popeyés hamburger-rm»ching Wimpy, but
Steven’s dipsomaniac Cactus plant is closing the gap.
Wheedling non-stop in its peculiar alkie jargon
C •C’mon, Steven, howsabout a little sauce.. the
plant cadges drinks out of friends and Strangers,
responding with shocked disbelief anytime its crav-
ings are thwarted. An ongoing plotline of Steven has
concerned the tussle between the title character and
his co-stars for control Of the strip; no one seems to
notice that the cactus plant stole the strip long ago
— except for Doug Allen, who hands the plant the
cover, relegating a fuming Steven to a small corner
vignette. The funniest comic book of 1991.

See? People like this strip.

Robert Boyd writes in Amazing Heroes #174, page 83:

This is a comic bookcollection of the
comic strip, Steven. Steven was one of
the first alternative weekly strips that
sprang up during the early ’80s. Un-
like Life in Hell and Ernie Pook’s
Comeek, Steven was never wildly
successful. This isn’t an injustice,
though—Steven just isn’t as good as
those strips. Despite this, I’d say that
Steven is well worth reading. In style
and attitude alone, it is far more ad-
venturous than the average comic
book.
Steven will remind you of other
comics. Many of the characters have
a perverse cuddliness in them in the
same way that Rory Hayes’s did. The
crudeness and resolutely anti-social
quality of the strips bring to mind
Mark Beyer. The weird imagination
of some of the strips made me think
of Jim Woodring (especially) the panel
where the man and his frog are mow-
ing the lawn together) Bill Griffith’s
frog strips are recalled, and the draw-
ing style is similar to both Lloyd
Dangle and Michael Dougan.
I prefer all these similar works to
Steven, frankly. Steven can be fun, but
it’s ambitions and intentions seem just
beyond its but not
great.
I will give Doug Allen credit for
coming up with what is, in the context
of the strip, a curiously mild (but
funny) put down: “Go eat paste!”
GRADE: ! ! ! ½

That’s more like it.

This is the one hundred and ninth post in the Entire Kitchen Sink blog series.

Secret of San Saba (1989) by Jack Jackson

This book was originally serialised in Death Rattle, and I read it a couple of months back, so I’m not re-reading it now for this blog post. Let’s just take a quick look…

The cover’s very nice — Bulto (the slug monster is printed with silver metallic ink, which is very appropriate, because it’s a story that involves a lot of silver).

Hm, right.

Anyway, this is drawn in Jaxon’s usual messy but very attractive rendering style. It’s so organic.

The story involves mad priests and aliens and silver and slugs.

I’d have to say that it ultimately doesn’t really add up to much, and the story is pretty wonky. That is, it’s clear that Jaxon’s main interest here is in the history of this area, and not really so much in the supernatural story he’s telling?

Frank Stack writes in The Comics Journal #136, page 50:

Jack Jackson’s The Secret of San
Saba first appeared episodically in
Death Rattle magazine, where it had
the look and feel Of a serialized
adventure-horror story. It was inspired
by the story of the fabulous Lost
Almagre Silver Mine for which James
Bowie was looking five years before
he died at the Alamo in 1836. Jackson
was intrigued, like many other Texas
youths, by the story as it was told so
shrewdly and seductively by J. Frank
Dobie in his book about lost treasures
in the Southwest, Coronado’s Child-
ren. After I read Dobie’s book in high
school I felt like trekking out into the
granite hills to look for this particular
Eldorado. I didn’t ever get off the
highway, but it’s obvious from his
book that Jack Jackson did go to the
place and stomp through the brush.
His drawings evoke the spirit Of that
arid, rugged, beautifully spooky
place. You want to believe in the great
silver mine. Old records document
that the Spanish authorities took silver
fmm Los Almagres any smelted it into
bars at the presidio of San Saba. It
sounds like it had to have been there,
but the hedge is that modern
geologists it isn’t possible. Silver
doesn’t form in limestone or granite.
What a downer! But the area turned
out to be a true Eldorado after all. The
great West Texan oil boom was first
centered around Brownwxxi, Only 25
miles miles north of San Saba.
The collected version of Jackson’s
story expands and develops the
material. In it Jackson demonstrates
a serious historian’s attitude, going far
deeper into the subject than a casual
reader would expect from reading a
few episodes of Death Rattle. It is a
highly entertaining wild and woolly
yarn, full of Indian magic, suspense,
political intrigue, sex orgies, sword-
fights, running battles, savage vio-
lence, and even space ships, aliens,
and supernatural monsters. (It’s their
silver! What do they care about
of historical documents could make it.
And rememtkr frat Jackson is a writer
of historical fiction. For the story he
wanted to write, Jackson got the
history as correct as was needed.

[…]

The alien storyline
might seem inconsistent with the main
story, perhaps even an entirely sepa-
rate idea. I’ve heard the criticism that
the book would be better without it.
I might agree with the criticism, but
I do see what Jackson is trying to do
with this fantastic and illogical sub-
plot. He was doing some creative
gambling, taking chances, and follmv-
ing an idea: that the impossible silver
mine, where geologically there should
be no silver, was brought there by a
great meteorite along With non-human
life forms.

[…]

Jackson’s historical narrative is well
served by his drawing and storytell-
ing talent. I’ve read it a couple of
times already and I keep finding new
pleasures in it.

Robert Boyd writes in Amazing Heroes #173, page 91:

While there are comic set in the
past, there is probably no cartoonist
in the world who brings as much his-
tory with him to his comics as Jack
“Jaxon” Jackson. In addition to get-
ting the known facts straight, I’m rea-
sonably sure that Jackson engages in
original historical research. “Ama-
teur” historians are common in
perhaps because Texas has so much
history; Cabeza de Vaca was the first
Spaniard there in 1541. Subsquently,
there ‘*a.s a nearly continual Euroran
presence.
Despite the fact that Secret of San
Saba is a fictional work, it includes
a lot of factual information about the
history of Spain in Texas. That Jack-
son can weave this information in with
the story of Zulthu, the cosmic slug
from space, is astounding.

[…]

While Jackson’s interest in history
is strong, he doesn’t let it uke wer the
story. There are occasional humorous
anachronisms in the characters’
speech, and there is a weird episode
“in a distant galaxy” at the Institute
for Universal Evil. These aliens are
observing Earth, making plans to uke
were Their speech is like ordinary
Earth-bound corprate or
ic blather. Why are they in
Earth? it has “long-term im-
plications for our fuel crunch.”
Jackson’s art is always appropriate
for his subject matter, and as always,
his lettering is really neat. Most comic
book lettering is boring draftsman’s
lettering, but Jackson’s is clearly his
own invention, and it has a rough-
hewn, hand-carved look that fits in
with San Saba’s frontier subject mat:
ter. (I don’t mean to imply that it’s dif-
ficult to read, though. It isn’t.)
The Secret ofSan Saba is fun stuff,
the kind of thing that H.P. Lovecraft
would have done if he’d been from
Texas, did comics, and had a sense of
humor.

R. Fiore writes in The Comics Journal #137, page 46:

In the early chapters of The Secret of
San Saba, Jack Jackson for the first
time fully succeeds in bringing Texas
history to life. This is both because
Of and in spite of the nonsense about
Bulto the Silver Snail or whatever the
hell it is, a concession to popular taste
that Jackson seems to find a bit em-
barrassing. From the star, the con-
flicts between Indian and Indian and
between Indian and Spaniard are more
interesting to both creator and reader
than the horror subplot, but trying to
fit them into the horror comic mcxie
leads Jackson to truly dramatize his
historical comics, and the first time
they convey the feeling of history un-
folding. Unfortunately, about two-
thirds of the way through he reverts
to what might be called his Texas
History Movies style: the story is car-
ried along by captions, and the panels
either simply illustrate the captions Or
show a character commenting on
them. instance, on page 101: Cap-
tion: “At [garrison commander]
request, the garrison signed
a formal petition against the mis-
Sionaires.” Hnel: Men lining up to
sign the I*tition, Felipe thinking, “I’ll
teach them not to meddle in military
affairs.” Or, also on page 101, panel
four shows the soldiers angrily reject-
ing the priest’s excommunication
order, and panel five shows them
finally submitting to it, but the real
drama is what goes on between those
two panels, which we don’t see. It’s
not that this method can’t be effective
for exposition or transitions, as it is
earlier in the book, and it’s not that
it spoils the book altogether; it just
pushes the reader outside the story and
makes it far less involving.
In the broad sweep Of time it covers
you can see in San Saba the seeds of
the major work Jackson has in him;
perhaps, if he’s ambitious enough, one
that would start in pre-colonial times
and carry on past the Civil War and
into modern Texas history, which I
don’t believe he’s ever dealt with. He
has found the medium and the means;
all he has to do is use them.

This is the one hundred and eighth post in the Entire Kitchen Sink blog series.