Kontemplating Komix: I Feel Sick (1999–2000)

I will not be unconvinced that the title is an
End of Evangelion reference.

When we were talking about The Good Old Days some years back, my hometown friend Dave said: "Johnny the Homicidal Maniac was our Catcher in the Rye." The observation was too on-point not to get permanently stuck in my memory. Dave certainly has his moments.

Jhonen Vasquez's seminal indie comic (which ran for seven issues between 1995 and 1997) and its spin-off, Squee! (four issues, 1997–98) were a fucking revelation for kids like Dave and me—socially askew goth bois with a morbid sense of humor, and who maybe thought a little too highly of ourselves. Johnny not only made us laugh ourselves hoarse and inspired us to imitate Vasquez's idiosyncratic art style in our classroom doodles, but reaffirmed us in our belief (one not uncommon in teenagers who wore fishnet sleeves and painted their fingernails black) that virtually everyone in the world was stupid and horrible, and if we were fucked up, it was because we were surrounded by mean-spirited and obtuse assholes from wall-to-wall.

When I was a sophomore in high school, I had every Johnny and Squee! poster on my bedroom wall. My wardrobe contained no fewer than four different T-shirts with Vasquez's characters on them, and I quickly wore them out and kept wearing them anyway. I ordered the Bad Art Collection from the Slave Labor Graphics catalogue and actually read it—multiple times. I sent Vasquez a long email and saved his reply on my hard drive. (I remember it involved Final Fantasy VII.) Yes, I was obsessed. Vasquez has that effect on people; he's like David Foster Wallace for young moth goths. I meant for that to read "mall goths," but I'm going to let the typo stand.

Kontemplating Komix: Empowered (2007– )

Oh jeez. We're doing Empowered? Okay. Let's talk about Empowered.

Empowered is...

No, damn it. No. Let's not start like this.

The Mall & The Sprawl & The Automobile

Victor Gruen, from The Heart of Our Cities: The Urban
Crisis, Diagnosis and Cure (1964)

Forgot to mention that the good people at Sublation Magazine posted an essay of mine.

Kontemplating Komix: The Maxx (1993–98)

I'm really and truly at a loss as to where to start with this one. Sam Kieth's cult comic is a rabbit hole if ever there was one.

Sam Kieth? Who's Sam Kieth? Well, he co-created Sandman with Neil Gaiman. True story. Look at the illustration credits for the book's first five issues. He voluntarily left the book because he didn't think his work was a good fit—and, frankly, he was right. But the fact stands that Kieth was responsible for Morpheus' visual design. He also did some work for Marvel, turning in some absolutely baller art for the Wolverine stories in Marvel Comics Presents, and did some Detective Comics covers for DC. So when he launched The Maxx in 1993, Kieth wasn't exactly an unknown in the industry.

We also need to acknowledge the contribution of William Messner-Loebs, whose previous credits included popular authorial runs on Wonder Woman and The Flash. Loebs acted more or less as The Maxx's co-writer and Kieth's editor for more than half the book's run.

Let's begin with the cover.

We're at our local comic shop in 1993. We pick The Maxx #1 off the wall. We're conscious of the man behind the counter and feel his gimlet eye on us. As soon as we look at the interior pages, he's going to tell us that his store isn't a library and tell us to buy it or put it back. 

Let's say that we also notice issues #3 and #4 shelved next to it. Maybe they'll gives us a clearer idea as to what The Maxx is about.

Let's say we decide to start at the beginning and pick up issue #1. What sort of comic book do we suppose we're taking home?

The mummery of "You Cannot Walk Here"

The music I want to hear changes with the season, and during the fall and winter months I crave industrial. Since the clocks were set an hour back in November, I've been listening to a lot of Wumpscut in my little alcove in the office. I've enjoyed listening to KMFDM's Nihil all the way through at least once a week. Give me Skinny Puppy, give me SPK and Frontline Assembly and Leæther Strip.

Sometime in early February I started on a Birmingham 6 binge. Maybe we could say they spent their all-too-short career playing second fiddle to KMFDM, but I love them all the same. I kept their 1995 album Assassinate (a mixed-up stateside version of 1994's Mindhallucination) in heavy rotation throughout high school, but it wasn't until the days of file sharing that I came upon their epic sophomore effort Error of Judgement (featuring Front 242's Jean-Luc De Meyer).

A week or two I caught myself singing along to to Error of Judgement's fifth track, "You Cannot Walk Here." And why not? It's a jam. But listening the lyrics coming out of one's own mouth can be jarring, perhaps to the extent that some neurotic mutant might wish to issue an apologia for the track and his enjoyment of it.

Decisions, Update

I appreciated people weighing in on the Substack question, although I still haven't come to a decision.

Blogger is a zombie platform. Few people use it anymore, and Google retires existing features more often than it implements new ones. Substack is fresh, and it has a scene. Maybe I'm kidding myself, but it seems like Substack would be an opportunity to join in and contribute to The Conversation instead of talking to myself here.

Two things give me pause:

(1) I'm a bit of a packrat. I don't like the idea of tossing out over a decade's worth of Content. Although—maybe this would be a good opportunity to sift through it all, pick out anything that's truly worth preserving, and dispose of the dross.

(2) This is a Blog. My intention was never to Build a Personal Brand or focus exclusively on Topic X or Theme Y, but to just spout off whatever was on my mind during a given day or week or month. I feel like if I switched to writing a Substack newsletter, I'd have to make it about something. I might even end up pressuring myself to go topical, which I've never, ever been good at (except maybe when I was making comics about video games years and years ago). Then again, restricting myself to subjects situated within certain parameters could improve my output. Who knows?

I'm not ruling anything out yet, but I should probably make myself choose whether to fish or cut bait sooner than later.

Kontemplating Komix: Shade, The Changing Man (1990–96)

This has been something I've meant to do for a long time. The images I collected for a Shade, The Changing Man writeup are in a folder that's almost three years old. There just never seemed to be a good time to go ahead and make it happen. Lately I've gotten it into my head that there are a couple of other underappreciated comic books that I'd like to write about, so I figure I might as well do a little series, starting with Shade.

Shade, The Changing Man is the seminal comic serial of author Peter Milligan, who might be better known for his work on mainstream superhero titles like Detective Comics,* X-Force, X-Men, and Justice League Dark. It launched in 1990 and concluded in 1996 after seventy issues.

*As a matter of fact, it was Milligan who came up with the idea of the bat-demon Barbatos, and he was a co-creator of Azrael, the guy who briefly replaced Bruce Wayne as Batman after the Knightfall storyline.

I can't speak to how popular Shade was in its own time, but it's telling that as recently as 2014, the trade paperback collections only went up to issue #25. (Having been introduced to the series through an impulse purchase of the first volume at a bookstore, I can't tell you how crazy this made me.) I can't remember what year it was that I checked again, but it couldn't have been more than a half a decade ago that I browsed the DC Universe digital catalogue and found that it excluded issues #51–70. 

Compared to 1990s Vertigo hits like Sandman, Preacher, and Doom Patrol, Shade, The Changing Man has been mostly forgotten. I won't venture to guess why that might be—its pervasive weirdness and the unremitting flakiness of its protagonist could have something to do with it—but whatever the reason, Shade's status as an eclipsed also-ran is a damned shame. It's easily as good as any of its Vertigo contemporaries, if not better.