Life Imitates Comics

A real-life Batman villain! Read about Two-Face here.

Dick Tracy Cartoon

When you read the down-and-dirty naturalism and noir in the early Dick Tracy strips, you have to ask yourself how the concept ever came to include a canine detective named Hemlock Holmes.

The Caterer

One of the weirdest books you'll ever read is by my pal, Steve Aylett, and it's titled Lint. (You can order it through the Amazon link below.)

Lint is the "biography" of Jeff Lint, poverty-stricken, mad genius, hack writer, who is basically a cross between Kilgore Trout and Salvador Dali.

One of Lint's fictional creations was a comic-book character dubbed "The Caterer." And now you can read an actual issue of this gonzo masterpiece, thanks to Floating World Comics. A sample is to the right.

You must investigate this saga of one man and his senseless quest for perfect absurdity in a violent world, or risk being rendered null and void!

Cartoon Character Sex

Recall the court decision of a few weeks ago, determining that cartoon depictions of sex by underage characters were child pornography?

Does that mean that there will be retroactive prosecutions against Tijuana Bibles, a comic book tradition that frequently featured popular underage cartoon icons of the day having sex? Or perhaps contemporary scholars will come under fire, such as this site, where scanned samples exist.

The main page is Safe for Work, but of course, not the scans themselves.

Life Imitates Jules Feiffer

Fans of famed comics artist Jules Feiffer will surely recall his good-hearted but light-headed character who spontaneously broke into dance to celebrate or bewail any proposition or concept, however absurd. You can see an example of Feiffer's creation to the far right.

Well, it appears that Feiffer did not create such a character, but merely drew from life. Or perhaps the gal whom you see in mid-air, next to the Feiffer panel, was inspired by Feiffer.

For in this BOSTON GLOBE obituary we learn how "Gabrielle Orcha of Cambridge, a choreographer and playwright," intends to mark her grandmother's passing.

"As a tribute to her grandmother, Orcha has choreographed a dance, commissioned by the Citi Performing Arts Center, that she will perform at the Shubert Theatre in May."

"Dance to Departed Nana." I can't wait.

Who Fools the Foolkiller?

The creative folks at Marvel Comics pride themselves on the fact that their fictional universe closely mirrors the real one--with the addition of superheroes, natch.

For instance, Spider-Man operates in New York City, not some imaginary "Metropolis."

And when the President of the USA is depicted, it's not Lex Luthor, but the real office-holder of the moment.

But the recent issue number four of the miniseries Foolkiller reveals a startling incongruity between the Marvelverse and ours.

Either that, or scripter Gregg Hurwitz and editor Axel Alonso have never ridden in an actual airplane before.

You see in this page the fat victim of the trained assassin enter a lavatory on a commercial flight. We'll give Hurwitz and Alonso props for mentioning that it's a tight fit. Nonetheless, enormous victim and killer somehow squeeze in together, whereupon the lav suddenly enlarges like a Tardis.

And then the killer drowns his victim in the potty.

Airline toilets simply do not feature basins of standing water. They operate with the push of a button and a sparse rinse of famous blue chemicals.

This killing, then, requires a larger suspension of disbelief than the existence of the entire Avengers, and will surely jolt any half-awake reader completely out of the attempt at realism.

That's just weird.

World’s Weirdest Comics

I can heartily recommend this book to any reader interested in oddball comics or strange corners of pop culture in general. The authors are acknowledged comics experts, and they've dug up some very bizarre comics, here shown as cover images only, no interior pages from the offenders. Your life will never be the same, after you've been introduced to, say, All-Negro Comics or Hansi, the Girl Who Loved the Swatstika.

Harvey Comics

I loved reading Harvey Comics as a kid, and into "adulthood." (They're not published anymore, alas.) Their universe was quintessentially wacked and weird. As famed comics scribe Grant Morrison has remarked in an interview, sometimes the willed naivete of Silver Age writers following the Comics Code produced much stranger stuff than any consciously avant-garde writer could.

Take the two page strip to the right for instance, from an old digest-reprint of some Casper stuff. To parse it is to risk madness.

Is Nightmare indeed a mare, ie, female? if not, and even if so, is that the gayest hairdo ever, on horse or human? Why does a forest gnome like to hang out with a ghost horse? Why is playing human cowboys popular among the gnomes? Likewise riding an airplane. And finally, how demented does a ghost horse have to be, to stick planks up its butt and into its chest, and then purr like a cat, all in an effort to emulate a mechanical device so as to placate a gnome?

How I miss Harvey Comics! Thank goodness Dark Horse is reprinting some.....

Follies of the Mad Men #13

[From Fortune for December 1945. Two scans, top and bottom.]

There is nothing spectacularly "weird" about this particular entry in our series, except that the artist is William Steig, the famed illustrator and author responsible, most notably in Hollywood terms, for Shrek. It's curious to see him turning his talents to advertising during his early career, as so many artists who later grew rich and famous once did.

Perhaps the true vestige of weirdness here, though, is the image of the proud boy wearing his Jughead cap. You can learn about the history of the Jughead beanie and how to make such a cap yourself at Juggie's Wikipedia page. Or perhaps you'd want to buy one readymade, either here or here.

But maybe you want to go for the entire Jughead look!

Follies of the Mad Men #12

Yes, I want my beer to be endorsed by a drunken chipmunk who's been taking fashion lessons from Andy Capp.

Amazingly, despite this appalling choice of spokes-mammal, Stegmaier Beer remains in business to this day, as you can see if you follow the link.

Any reader ever tasted a "Steg"?

All original content in posts is Copyright © 2008 by the author of the post, either Alex Boese ("Alex"), Paul Di Filippo ("Paul"), or Chuck Shepherd ("Chuck"). All rights reserved. The banner illustration at the top of this page is Copyright © 2008 by Rick Altergott.