Aliens: Mondo Pest was originally serialized in Dark Horse Comics (hereafter to be shortened to DHC) the 1992-1994 full color anthology meant to effectively silo off the licensed properties from flagship anthology Dark Horse Presents (popularly known as DHP). Previous to that, your Aliens or Predator comic serials would by necessity sit with fully creator-owned properties like Concrete or Bacchus, creating a frisson from the juxtaposition that defined early Dark Horse Comics (the company) releases—a charming sort of "I've got a barn, let's put on a show" energy defined them from the very beginning and up to this point. But as the harsh comics industry landscape 90's began, the need for line-go-up style growth meant more licensed properties and attempts at home-grown superhero universes.
So, Dark Horse Comics (the anthology) was born. This is a time when DHP was particularly fertile though—the first Sin City serial, Bacchus, Paleolove, Madwoman Of The Sacred Heart, An Accidental Death, and Hellboy: The Wolves of Saint August all ran in DHP during this period, among other things—so I for one am glad they had the more corporate venue of DHC to off-gas Comics Greatest World tie-ins and Robocop serials.
Eventually, the licensed comics would return to DHP and you'd have to endure Buffy tie-ins next to creator owned comics, but by that point the creator owned comics were less personal as well. DHP's content kind of reached a grim homogeny of "product" in those last couple years—for every NEVERMEN there was IP slop and self-dealing problematic editors pushing their attempts at superheroes into the mix.
DHC only lasted two years, and Dark Horse Presents managed to hobble into the year 2000, so apparently the market wasn't clambering for the type of material that DHC was focused on. That isn't to say that there was nothing of value published under that banner—far from it, many excellent creators did work there. Case in point, Aliens: Mondo Pest was originally a serial that ran in issues 22-24. It was well enough regarded that they then repackaged it to feed the hunger for Aliens comics in 1995.
Written and drawn by two animation industry stalwarts who weren't big names at the time but would go on to much success in their field—Gilroy is a co-author of the Clone Wars series and Del Carmen wrote and co-directed the hit Pixar film Inside Out, among many other credits of note. But at the time they were jobbers working on stuff like Where's Waldo and 2 Stupid Dogs and who shared credits on Batman: The Animated Series. Mondo Pest has an economy of story that suggests TV experience. It gets in, gets out and signposts everything that you need to know with visual storytelling and the occasional bit of chicken fat.
Mondo Pest (the character) is a LOBO-type—big shoulder pads, cigar chomping and backwards baseball cap all working like neon signposts to communicate a shorthand about the type of story you're reading. It's a bit of 90's comics fluff, but effectively told. The real reason to pick it up is to soak in Del Carmen's art and panel to panel storytelling. Pest himself may be an exercise in stereotype, but the other characters are all appealingly and smartly designed. His inks appear to be built mostly from luxurious brushstrokes but will occasionally scrawl into a sparser pen stroke. Hollingsworth's colors are effective but like most comics in this early 90s era of computer coloring, there's an almost oppressive level of saturation here...ironically causing me to wish they'd commissioned the comic for DHP, where it would have run in glorious black and white.
Sammy Harkham, Interviewed by Zack Soto & Mike Dawson
This chat originally appeared as Episode 45 of the podcast Process Party. We spoke to Sammy just as he was about to release the sixth issue of his ongoing series Crickets, in which he’d been serializing the story “Blood Of The Virgin,” which has since been collected into a graphic novel. Transcription by RJ Casey
Sammy Harkham: It’s so nice not to have to deal with one other thing that doesn’t make you any money. It’s like—let our comics be the thing that we invest all our energy into. I don’t even mean that in a negative way. We have limited time. You know, in our lives. And it’s like we’re going to spend it on the projects that are so essential. It’s the not making money, right? I mean, they aren’t making us our living. Doing a page of comics will always outrank any other thing I possibly could be doing, for no money. You know what I mean? Crickets is eight pages from being done.
Zack Soto: So is that another Blood of the Virgin?
Harkham: Yeah.
Soto: Nice. I love that you’re chipping away at this thing.
Harkham: I can’t believe that I’ve become one of those fucking guys. I can’t believe it.
Soto: You’re a graphic novelist, Sammy Harkham.
Harkham: Dude! I never thought I’d be… I would look at people and be like, “That guy spent 10 years on that thing.” What the fuck?
Soto: Well, it’s only been like five years or something, right?
Harkham: [Loud sigh] First issue came out in… OK, if I keep it at its shortest, the first issue came out in 2011. Yes. So five years. That’s fine. So I think the readers are OK.
Soto: Yeah. And is this the final chapter?
Harkham: No. Two more. Two more, two years.
Soto: I’m actually really interested in the setting that you’ve got it in. The ’70s, sort of. Is this sort of based on the Roger Corman thing?
Harkham: You mean the movie milieu? Or the visual milieu?
Soto: Mainly the movie milieu.
Harkham: This is the thing, Corman was always kind of a high-end player in that world. Right? So when you start reading Video Watchdog and Cinefex, or whatever, that’s the stuff you come to like, “Oh yeah, yeah.” Like the Coffy movies. AIP. But then, if you dig deeper… If you start watching a lot of Something Weird Video releases. Do you know that company?
Soto: Yeah.
Harkham: What you start seeing is that there’re these companies that existed that were really bottom of the barrel, but the people who ran them, that’s the thing I always found most fascinating. The movie would be a scuzzy movie based on the Zodiac Killer or the Manson killings, which weren’t that old at the time, right? But they’d be this scuzzy, disgusting—they would change them and add like porn to them so that they could play at different theaters. These are really bottom-of-the-barrel movies. And then the people making them, you read about them, and it’d be like, “Oh yeah, he was like a financier or a lawyer in Beverly Hills.” Like so weird! And that to me was always the interesting thing. There’s no connection between the work itself and the people who made the work.
Soto: Right. They’re just like people who wanted in on the business or whatever.
Harkham: No, they just took an opportunity. On the producer-level, yes. They’re just like... The one I like—the most charming version of this—is even earlier. You know that movie Eegah about the caveman? It’s Richard Kiel, the guy who played Jaws in James Bond. He plays a caveman that is discovered near Palm Springs.
Soto: Oh my god.
Harkham: And the movie title is E-E-G-A-H. Like “Arrrrgh!” [Laughter] Right? That’s a movie that’s like, next to Ed Wood, it’s in Clowes’s generation and Jaime’s generation. Like that’s their what the early ’80s stuff is for us. That’s what that is for them. That stuff is like so charming they love it, you know? That movie was made by a guy who wanted his son to be like the next Justin Beiber of 1967. So it’s endless scenes of his son with a huge pompadour playing a guitar. It’s cut with this caveman guy.
Harkham: And that whole world, it’s folk art. You know what I mean? It’s people just making shit, you know? It’s the equivalent now of like people making fan films on YouTube, basically. A lot of this stuff, you’ve got to think like, back then if you could make a movie and finish it, if you could finish the movie, that was the hard part. Like if it had something to sell it, like literally one scene of something, you could find theaters that would carry it. I mean, John Waters grew up on that stuff and that’s why his movies—he was smart enough to see through it and see what was good about it. And he’s like, “I’m making a movie with Divine and she’s going to eat shit and I’m going to have a guy open his sphincter.” He’s the first guy to champion that stuff, you know? So I thought that world was such a good corollary to comics, honestly. There’s a lot of—especially back in the ’70s—my lead character was in that first generation of guys that want to make garbage. You know?
Soto: Like he enjoyed the garbage and wants to be part of the garbage.
Harkham: Yes. And that’s a whole other subculture that you can look up. Monster kids. They call themselves monster kids. They’re the kids like in the ’50s who watched the Universal horror movies when they were like seven or eight years old on reruns late at night on TV. There was a horror host in every city, and they’d watch these old movies.
Joe Dante, and De Palma, and Scorsese, and Spielberg, all these dudes, they were the first generation of filmmakers who were fucking psyched about making a gangster movie or a science fiction thing, or whatever it was. Any other person, like any other movie you watch in the ’50s that’s a science fiction movie, or a horror movie, those guys are at the bottom of their careers and they’re embarrassed, you know?
I thought that was interesting too, because those guys, they’re like… I don’t like a lot of stuff that’s coming out now in that world, at all. It’s an interesting thing that there was a time in America where people could recite poetry. They could. They could just recite poetry. I was reading a Steinbeck novel and, at one point, a homeless guy recited poetry and this other one finishes the poem. And you’re like, “What the fuck?” [Laughter] This is so weird. That was America in 1950. America now is like people just talking about The Avengers, you know? So, in many ways, I think of like, those directors, those guys, they’re like the guys who invented the atomic bomb, you know what I mean? [Laughs]
Soto: Like it’s all down hill from there, kind of?
Harkham: Yeah. They start this thing where they love this stuff and who knew it would just become Star Wars. Six years from Seymour, you have George Lucas. My character Seymour. It’s interesting on that level for me too, you know?
Soto: In comics, there’s like the Roy Thomases and the Kurt Busieks or whatever.
Harkham: Exactly. [Laughs]
Soto: Who love the garbage.
Harkham: Roy Thomas always speaks a good game when you read interviews with him, but then you watch something like Fire and Ice, or you read any of those books, and you’re like, “Uggggh.”
Soto: Yeah.
Harkham: I’m dying. I’m dying.
Harkham: There was no youth culture until 1950. Literally as soon as that happens and stuff starts getting catered to kids, those guys grow up and they just want to make more stuff for kids. It all just becomes a thing and now all culture, even the New Yorker is writing essays about Game of Thrones or whatever. And not the book. [Laughs] The Game of Thrones TV show. You know what I mean? You go wider, and go, “Let’s step outside the culture,” and the whole “What happened to America?”
And then you start thinking about America and start reading about America. You think of Whitman and think of Kerouac, you know? All those Beat writers in the ’50s, and they’re vision of what it was and what freedom meant and what America meant. How that got totally twisted just by becoming popularized and becoming a fashion thing by the late ’60s. So like, in many ways, Blood of the Virgin is like the end of America. Like that’s the end. We’re already in the decline. It’s over.
Soto: The decline seems really relevant right now.
Harkham: All the research I’ve been doing for this strip is trying to figure out like politically where were they in 1971. Nixon is still president. How did Nixon become president? Nixon became president the same way Donald Trump became president. There were eight years of a very progressive Democrat. Maybe six months after Lyndon Johnson made it federal law that you couldn’t have segregation in schools, there were the Watts riots. So yeah, it’s weird. Doing the comic now, I’m like, “Oh my god.” I absolutely have the right space to make this very political and it would speak to now just by the nature of it. It’s all lined up. By 1971, that’s the thing, is that Americans were… That’s when you realize what’s going on in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, is that Hunter S. Thompson was going like, “We were doing it. We were making this huge change in America.” And then it was like, “Fuck it! Fuck it!” They just pushed back against the progressive agenda and so he’s like, “I’m just going to get stoned. Fuck it.” You become a nihilist, you know?
Soto: I definitely sympathize with that at the moment.
Harkham: [Laughs] Yeah, right.
[INTERVIEW BREAK]
Harkham: Initially I didn’t want to serialize [Blood Of The Virgin] because I find it so difficult to talk about work when I’m working on it. So part of not talking about it, is to save the energy. You know, we’ve all done that thing of like, “Oh man, I’m so excited about this story I’m going to work on.” And then you talk to a friend about it, which kills it. Like it’s dead in the water. You know, you learn that in your early 20s hopefully. Not to really talk about work. For a long time, I didn’t want to serialize it because I didn’t want to talk about it. But then it just becomes obvious that if I didn’t serialize it, I’d disappear from comics. And that’s insane when I’m reading about comics everyday and I’m thinking about comics everyday. I want to be part of the conversation, you know?
Soto: Yeah. You also have a title that, you know, happily you resurrected. Crickets started off as sort of explicitly like an Eightball, one-man-band kind of thing. You had Black Death, which was ongoing, but it sort of clearly seemed more like improvisational almost. Sort of slighter compared to Blood of the Virgin. There were a lot more stories and now it is a vehicle for this story and maybe you fit some stuff on the inside covers.
Harkham: Look, ideally an issue of Crickets would have one main thing, one short thing… One ongoing big thing, like a piece of Blood of the Virgin, a good short story that was like four-to-eight pages, one or two short, short strips. That’s a perfect issue. But the way this goes, is that everything ends up going into Blood of the Virgin. And it’s also very difficult to contain it to 48 pages and I don’t want to make an issue more than 48 pages. It’s just so long, you know?
So it’s become just The Blood of the Virgin thing for now, but I’m hoping—it would be really nice if the last chapter of Blood of the Virgin ran with the next chapter of Black Death” which hasn’t run in 10 years. Or something new. You know what I mean? It would be cool to be like, “This is another issue.” Just rolling, like this thing’s done and we’re just going, you know?
Mike Dawson: I think you said yourself that you don’t even fully have it scripted out. Is that right?
Harkham: I don’t script it out. I mean, with this story, unlike most things that I work on, the basic plot outline—the big beats—all came to me at once. The whole arc of it and the whole shape of it. I didn’t even really write it down or anything. I just know the order. Some of those scenes and ideas will sit in my mind for years and I think, “Oh, that will be like a five-page sequence and this thing will be a page.” What ends up happening is that you cannibalize a lot of stuff, so by the time you get to that scene, the whole rhythm is completely off from what you imagined you thought you were going to do.
Harkham: Because you’re really just feeling your way through it and some scenes end up being much longer and some scenes end up being much shorter. But it’s better because it’s sort of living and breathing. It can evolve and change, while still sticking to that basic plot structure. I wouldn’t say it’s changed a lot, but I can definitely infuse more into the characters and into the world. That’s what I mean by it can grow with me. Instead of having all these sort of set ideas or script. I’m against having a script, you know? You can write something that’s so great on paper, but that’s a different medium. That’s a written word on a piece of paper. That’s not a comic. A script should just sort of be a collection of all of your notes and ideas, sort of organized in some form. It’s important to look at the page as a page and the more you draw comics, the more—you guys know this—the more you do it, the more you can actually physically see… Like looking at the page, is this joke good? Does this angle work? Is this moment happening? You know, that’s one of the great joys of comics is that you can really see the finished thing in front of you as you’re doing it. It’s almost like if you could shoot a movie while you edit it and did sound design. A script gets in the way of that, I think.
Harkham: As I was finishing the last issue, I was doing a page a day. I had to stop myself from doing a page a day.
Dawson: Why would you stop yourself? Did you feel like you were rushing?
Harkham: I think it’s too fast. I don’t want to start rushing it. Just because I can pencil and ink a page in five hours doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s a good thing.
Soto: Right, right. So you can sit with it.
Harkham: Yeah, just for the day. Just pencil it and if you’re done after two hours, then awesome. Go do something else for a while.
Soto: You just work one page at a time? You don’t do batches?
Harkham: I usually work on a scene. I won’t pencil a whole scene, but I’ll thumbnail in a notebook or on typing paper. I’ll thumbnail the basic thing. “OK, this is about four pages.” Then I’ll just start. Even going from thumbnails to bristol board, it will change. It can often change within that, you know?
Soto: Yeah.
Harkham: But I always feel like I’m working in chunks, depending on how long the scene is.
Soto: I really feel like the scene-to-scene transitions... Obviously the book is about movies. You’re obsessed with movies in your real life and a lot of this stuff is based on real people, or at least a real “scene” in the ’70s or whatever. Blood of the Virgin really does have that cinema feel to it, with the cuts...
Harkham: I don’t know. People say that. People say that, but I don’t know if I see it. I think of like Jaime Hernandez and his crazy transitions. Gilbert does two-panel scenes and jumps forward and back in time. In two-panel increments, you know? So I don’t know. Other people have said that, but I’m just not sure what that means really. I definitely don’t want it to feel like a movie.
Soto: No. I was sort of wary of saying that.
Harkham: It’s fine. I’m not passing judgments.
Soto: “It’s comics” [Laughter]
Harkham: I’m not passing judgments.
Soto: When I’m reading Blood of the Virgin—I read it again today just to get back into it…
Harkham: You read the whole thing?
Soto: Yeah, I read the whole thing.
Harkham: Oh my god.
Soto: Just to get back in the headspace. I was really impressed. You’re not doing anything un-linear. You’re not jumping around in time or anything like that, but there are narrative… Not shortcuts. It’s like you’re cutting out the fat.
Harkham: That’s the thing. You do realize at a certain point if you’re writing long enough, that the difference between the good story—whether it’s a movie, or a book, or a comic—isn’t that there’s just one good scene, or two good scenes. It’s that everything is the choice bit, you know? So if there’s material that you’re not excited to do and it’s only you going, “Oh, I need to include this thing” purely just for exposition, then fuck it. At a certain point, you realize fuck it. You don’t need that shit. Just fold the exposition into… Add it as another piece into an already existing idea and that will make that scene better. That way your comic, ideally, is just made of your best bits. Not just like, “Oh, he clearly wanted to draw the head-melt part and all this other shit is super boring.” You know what I mean? [Dawson Laughs]
Harkham: That was kind of a big revelation when I did that first issue because I had more scenes planned that were in-between what is currently there, but I didn’t have it in me. Comics is so much work. I spend… Especially back then when it would take like 20 to 25 hours to do a page. 30 hours to do a page. Man, to draw a scene just because I needed some sort of piece of exposition thrown out there is a ridiculous reason to do a page. Now, maybe if it feels like “cutty,” then maybe that’s just because I’m trying to condense. This fucking thing just keeps on getting longer and longer. And it’s telling. Not that the story keeps getting longer, it’s just that trying to just tell the story that I have in my head… This thing was supposed to be a three-pager initially. [Laughter]
Dawson: Really? How many more issues will there be? How many chapters?
Harkham: Two more. Two more. I’m really hoping they don’t go beyond that. The challenge is going to be to tell all this material in 48 pages. This next chapter that I have, there’s a lot. Don’t cut corners. It’s a nice challenge. I love really dense one-pagers, you know? To me, a great cartooning challenge is to go, “You have one page. Make it fit.” How to fit all this stuff in there. It’s not a thing about being lazy or trying to make it just a way out for yourself. I think that is the best version.
If every page of your comic is just full of material, that’s great. In the last issue, it opens up and becomes six panels a page as the main character leaves that party with the girl and stuff. I was like, “Oh, I’ve earned it now.” I’ve earned having six panels per page after all these really dense sequences. Just to have two people stare at each other on the hood of the car, you know? Stuff like that hopefully is more effective after coming after all this really dense, layered stuff, you know? It’s all intuitive. I just try to think what do I want as a reader, you know? And what I hope to contribute to this conversation of making comics and loving this stupid medium. Wanting to make something really good. You’re trying to make something really, really good, so, that’s it. I don’t know.
Soto: I have a bit of a question about… I don’t want this to sound like a back-handed thing, or whatever. The wife character…
Harkham: Uh-huh.
Soto: She’s like a real good character, right? But maybe it’s because Seymour’s so oblivious, but she never quite edges into having much of a voice in the book. How much of that can you talk about?
Harkham: Well…
Soto: She’s having her own story, right?
Harkham: Here’s a piece of news, I guess, for anyone who likes the story. Here’s a scoop. [Laughter] The next issue is focused solely on her. And I’ve been, for the last two years, wanting to get there. But I’ve had to just wait. It contributes to the overall story. It’s not just to shift perspectives necessarily. I think the overall themes that are talked about so far can still be… That’s one of the cool things in fiction is that you can do something that feels completely separate from what you’ve already done, but it adds another component to it, you know? I’m insecure about it. Like when I give the issue to friends, I’m always like [sighs] this is such a sausage party.
Soto: So far, Mike and I were talking about the theme of the book, and obviously it’s about how selfish you have to be to be an artist. So far it’s about men and how fucking hopeless they are. I really feel a lot when I read the book so far. It reminds me of me in my 20s or early 30s when I was just so far up my own ass. I mean not that I’m not completely… [Laughter]
Harkham: But now you’re aware that you’re up your own ass.
Soto: Exactly. [Laughter] I actually found some online journal stuff that’s private, and I was reading it. It’s from 10 years ago and I’m like, :What an asshole,” you know? But it actually made me think of that when I was reading it today. I was like, “Oh, wow.” You know? Anyway, it really struck me that she’s a great character, but...
Harkham: She barely gets any room.
Soto: Exactly.
Harkham: I haven’t had an… Every time I’ve had an opportunity to do anything with her, I try to make the most of it, you know? I try to hint at more with the little bit that she’s there. But yeah, the next issue is really going to be all about her, you know? Most of it. And I’m excited to get into it.
Soto: It will be exciting.
Harkham: Yeah, I know. I’m excited. And I do think it will add a lot to the book. Not that it will create… I don’t mean that in sense in the sense of a new perspective on how to look at scenes.
Harkham: It’s like totally she’s living her own life because she’s away.
Soto: Yeah.
Harkham: I’m excited.
Dawson: Was that always the plan, or was that a realization?
Harkham: You know, it wasn’t always the plan. But I mean, you know, I started drawing this strip 10 years ago. It wasn’t there 10 years ago. But maybe it was there seven years ago. [Laughs]
Soto: Yeah.
Harkham: It’s been there awhile.
Soto: When did the first issue come out?
Harkham: The first issue came out in 2011. The beginning of 2011 or end of 2010. But it took me two years… Look, I started drawing it and made the kid 10 months old because I’ve got a kid and he’s 10 months old. And that will help me because I can draw him. [Laughter] That went out the window very quickly, obviously, because now he’s 10 and a half. And that baby’s still a year old. So it’s always been there for a while. The thing that’s interesting to me is that I knew I wanted to do it, but then there’s that part of me that’s read about writing. Like the rules of writing dramatic fiction. And you’re like, “Why? What are you doing? What’s the point of it?” Because I don’t know the themes. I was just like this is the title and this feels right.
Harkham: This element feels right. And it’s totally just following a feeling. All these elements, I don’t know what they mean, but they feel good and I’m going to build this thing. Then the idea of doing a chapter that would be of a different character on another continent. It’s exciting and I got excited, but then the rational part of my brain goes, “Wait a minute. What are you doing? How does that work? How does that fit?” At a certain point, I said forget it. I don’t care. I have to do it. If it feels right, I have to trust the intuition. If something feels necessary, I should go with it and it will sort itself out. And then in the meantime, you know, I have sort of figured it out because now I understand the book more. A lot of things that are intuitive I now understand. The same way when you look at a story that you’ve drawn years later and go, “Oh, wow, this is clearly about my relationship with this person.” Or it’s clearly about my feelings, you know what I mean? So that happens if you work on a long story. Like, I now know as I’m wrapping… I’m going to be on this thing for another year, the goal now is to not hit any of those themes on the head because now I do know what it’s about, for me. You know? So the trick is not to tie it up too neat and tidy, you know?
Harkham: The big revelation to me came once I realized that I spent 10 years working on Blood of the Virgin—it’s not going to be Maus. It’s not going to be Jimmy Corrigan. There’s a very good chance it will come out and sell like an issue of Crickets. Crickets sells really well for an alternative comic. I make money on it. But it may not be some sort of massive hit, you know? So I have to have to enjoy the process of making it. I have to feel good about what I’m doing everyday. And part of that is about the process. You start thinking about your daily life and how you’re living. You’ve been talking about trying to switch up your schedule, you know?
Soto: Yeah.
Harkham: You were trying to do like mornings. Tim Hensley does that. But for me, I moved last year. So a lot of it was setting up a proper studio space and not having any books in the room that I didn’t feel gave me a good energy. And that now carries through to everything in the room. And it started to carry through to my commute to work, you know? It became all about like finding this zone where I feel good, you know? And where I’m in the moment. Then you start going, “I guess that’s life.: When you get older, you’re just trying to peel back the onion. As you get older, just trying to peel back the onion of finding the right way, you know? So, so much of that is wanting to enjoy making comics. You want to enjoy just being in the moment. You’re not concerned about what the life of this thing is beyond just right this minute.
Harkham: What you want to do, is just… My mornings are very important. Kevin Huizenga talks about this thing where if you do your work and get it done—your two or three hours… Two hours, literally, if you’re in the zone, even an hour penciling, you can get so much done if you’re already in the zone with a strip.
An hour is a huge amount of time. If you do your work, the rest of the day you’re floating. Not only that, but you look at other people who are frustrated, and you’re like, “What are you stressed out about? It’s a beautiful day.” You feel so good if you can just do your work and get it over with, you know? And then if you’re in the zone, then you just carry that through. Maybe you come back to it at night and tweak your work or look at it. That’s not that different from most fiction writers, I think. They try to do two or three hours in the morning.
Harkham: Alexander Mackendrick was a filmmaker who started out as a cartoonist and he talks about when you’re trying to write a scene and you hit writer’s block, he’s like the best thing to do is just don’t do it. Get up and go have lunch, or go ice-skating, or go bowling, or get drunk. He’s like the mind—and I find this to be true—is that you’re going to work in the morning and you’re going to go to your day job. It’s even better if you’re not actively thinking about your work. Your mind is doing it. Your mind is working. It is thinking about it. There’s so many…
I remember for the last issue of Crickets, I knew I wanted it to start with some sort of nightmarish dream, but I couldn’t come up with what that would be. So I was thinking about all these cheese ball quote, unquote “nightmares” that he could have. I was just like, “Forget it. Forget it.” Then over the course of two months, I had this perfect dream, you know? It was handed to me like, “There you go.” You keep thinking your car’s in drive and you keep going in reverse into a fucking black chasm, you know? [Laughter] I totally believe that the subconscious is working. Cormac McCarthy talks about this a lot. Our active minds, our conscious minds, does some of it, but so much is happening that we’re unaware of, you know? I mean it’s useful for writing characters, but it’s also useful to know that even if you’re not actively thinking about your strip, your brain is doing the work.
Harkham: Every… [Laughs] Every decision in your life should lead to you making better work and feeling calm and healthy.
In the early days of last year, I was inspired by some twitter mutuals to post my comics reading in the new year and kept it up from Jan 1 2022 till just about the bitter end. Something about it really helped keep me invigorated by the medium even in some pretty bleak times, so I’m going to keep it going this year, but here at Longboxd instead of on twitter, which I’m trying to spend less time at. Before I can do that though, I want to archive the 2022 entries in a spot that’s more permanent/less twitter-iffic, so here we go—pretty much every comic I read in 2022! (As transcribed from here)
Part 4: 84-101 (of 387)
(I can “only” post 30 images at a time here, so that’ll dictate the length of these catch-up posts)
84) X-Force #11 - Not great, pretty nonsensical—you don’t even get the dubious pleasures of Rob L’s art from this era, it’s just some dude aping him.
85) ROM #67 - However, Ditko inked by P. Craig Russell is delightful!
86) Detective Comics: The Neighborhood tpb
87) The Grande Odalesque - Very nice cartooning and coloring elevates what is essentially a dumb, fun, trifle.
88) HELLBOY: Buster Oakley Gets His Wish - Kevin Nowlan pencils inks colors and letters 😍
89) MARVEL SUPER HEROES Featuring The Incredible Hulk #91 - This coulda been 4 whole issues. I really like the Trimpe/Grainger art—has an almost cut paper quality to the brushwork, like a Nikki McClure illo
90) Jungle Action Featuring The Black Panther #16 - Wonky primal 70s superhero comics. As beautiful as it is wildly verbose, thanks to artist Billy Graham and colorist Glynis Wein.
91) Star Wars Annual #1 - This pre-Empire SW comic reads like a Heavy Metal backup (both in terms of the incest quotient and the Moebius influence)
92) Conan #152 - Buscema & Chan
93) Swords Of Texas #1 - well, it’s no SCOUT😏
94) The Thing #5 - hat on a hat
95) X-Men #9 - Some people are apparently hating this run, but I a simple man who loves hijinx (and Nimrod)
96) Nice House On The Lake #7 -
97) Step By Bloody Step #1 - Green Knight by Joe Mad & Moebius, chock full of great drawings.
98) One-Star Squadron #4 - I legit lol’d at that panel.
99) Human Target #5 - This didn't sit well on first read.
100) Love & Rockets #11 - talk about twists and turns!
101) 7174 Annual 2022 - I will be honest, I stopped reading the words about halfway through, but I’m always stoked to get a new one of Wood’s vibes-first comics and graphic design packages.
Join host Zack Soto—cartoonist, editor and bin crawler—for In This Issue… a podcast about formative comics reading experiences, with a focus on the single issue format. Every episode finds Zack and a special guest doing a close reading of a comic book (IE not a graphic novel!) and havin’ a lively chat about it.
THE ISSUE:
Teenagers From Mars #1 By Rick Spears and Rob G
Published 2001 by Rick Spears and Rob G
THE GUEST: Dave Baker
It’s a New Year, and a new In This Issue…! Dave Baker (Halloween Boy, Everyone Is Tulip) joins us to talk about the turn of the 21st century and one of his biggest influences from that time: Teenagers From Mars #1, by Rick Spears and Rob G. Tune in next time for another close read with In This Issue…
What?! A new pod??! Yep! Join host Zack Soto—cartoonist, editor and bin crawler—for In This Issue... a podcast about formative comics readin
In the early days of last year, I was inspired by some twitter mutuals to post my comics reading in the new year and kept it up from Jan 1 2022 till just about the bitter end. Something about it really helped keep me invigorated by the medium even in some pretty bleak times, so I’m going to keep it going this year, but here at Longboxd instead of on twitter, which I’m trying to spend less time at. Before I can do that though, I want to archive the 2022 entries in a spot that’s more permanent/less twitter-iffic, so here we go—pretty much every comic I read in 2022! (As transcribed from here)
Part 4: 60-83 (of 387)
(I can “only” post 30 images at a time here, so that’ll dictate the length of these catch-up posts)
60) Avengers Forever #2
61) Avengers Forever #3 - Kangtown, USA
62) Moon Knight #7 - the way Moench writes the multiple personality stuff Is so camp
63) Moon Knight #8 - Frank Giacola on early Bill Sienkiewicz kinda feels like Ken Landgraf, I dig it.
64) The Silver Coin Vol. 1 - “Not since the days of Pat Moriarty’s BIG MOUTH have we seen…” 🤪 This was a fun inversion of the power dynamics of the “art showcase anthology” being driven by the artist-as-auteur rather than the other way around.
65) X-Men #7 - Duggan is really working hard to make a case for Cyclops and I’m starting to feel it just a bit.
66) Human Target #4 - What I was initially buying for the art has served me up a lot of nice JLI moments.
67) Grrrl Scouts Stone Ghost # 3 - probably the funniest thing I've seen in a while is some poor soul complaining that Mahfood's art doesn't look as good as it did in the Clerks Special.
68) She Hulk #1 - I would like more big 2 comics to realize that "some random person shows up" is not a good cliffhanger.
69) Monkey Prince #1 - haha, okay now THAT is a cliffhanger!
70) Super Sentai Himitsu Sentai Gorenger - I wish I could make comics this pure, brainless, and good.
71) Aposimz vol 7 - More oddly compelling, elliptical, atmospheric, sketchy wasteland and tunnel comics broken up by biopunk tokusatu battles
72) Aposimz vol 8 - Interesting thing in this & the last volume is how the art has actually gotten more solid, maybe for speed, w/Nihei finding a new balance between his normal style and the super airy drawings of the first few volumes. (personally I like it better when it's less solid but 🤷🏽♂️)
73) Batman and Robin and Howard - A very fun, breezy bedtime read with my son. (He quickly asked about the existence of a follow up book as we finished, so hopefully there’s more) A large part of the book’s charm is the positive examples of social communication between kids that don’t immediately get along.
74) 2000AD Prog 387 (1984) - I got a short stack of newsprint 2000ADs. Look at this beautiful shit. I know “the best Kev O’Neill is his b/w work” but anytime he breaks out the dyes and markers I am so on board.
Inside cover, love the newspaper photo style on the Tharg illo. Cool Cam Kennedy and Ortiz pages. Wagner/Grant and Ron Smith (who does lovely work here) truly doing the work to make sure people know that the Judges are the bad guys.
75) The X-Cellent #1 - Not exactly sure how I felt about this but it’s got enough of that old juice that I thought about picking up the next one (but didn't).
76) The Thing #4
77) One-Star Squadron #3 - Giffen & DeMatteis’ How To Get Ahead In Advertising wasn’t on my bingo card but here we are.
78) Dead Dog's Bite #1 - Stylish, but this kinda felt like if they’d roped Adrian Tomine into one of the waves of Vertigo comebacks that didn’t work.
79) Future State: Gotham #10
80) The Jam: Super Cool Color Injected Turbo Adventure From Hell #2 - A thin POD book of *mostly* new BEM, I'll take it however. Forever missing his ink on paper era, but I guess that's long gone—& “A Secret Bowman” looks about as good as anything he's done since going digital.(prints a little dark) The extra material is variable but fun enough.
81) X-Men #8 - MODOK makes sense as an X-Men foil. I like the soapy stuff with Synch.
In the early days of last year, I was inspired by some twitter mutuals to post my comics reading in the new year and kept it up from Jan 1 2022 till just about the bitter end. Something about it really helped keep me invigorated by the medium even in some pretty bleak times, so I’m going to keep it going this year, but here at Longboxd instead of on twitter, which I'm trying to spend less time at. Before I can do that though, I want to archive the 2022 entries in a spot that’s more permanent/less twitter-iffic, so here we go—pretty much every comic I read in 2022! (As transcribed from here)
Part 3: 39-59 (of 387)
(I can "only" post 30 images at a time here, so that’ll dictate the length of these catch-up posts)
39) New Teen Titans Annual #3 - this BLEW my 8 year old mind.
40) One-Star Squadron #2
41) Grrrl Scouts Stone Ghost #2
42) Avengers #99 - Starting to think I’m maybe just not a Roy Thomas guy.
43 Avengers #100 - Okay actually this one works pretty well! Raid on Olympus, all hands on deck, Hulk gets the best lines.
44) Giant-Size Marvel Triple Action #2 - one of the best ways to read comics reprints is a slapped together chunky floppy that’s just barely older than you and totally falling apart. Dig that Romita Doc Strange on the cover!
45) Goiter Comics #6 - Tales of woe and existential dread, told as you like it (ie with definite 90s/early aughts alt comics vibes)
46) Tales of Evil #2 - Grotty little 70s antho. Essentially nonexistent stories with artwork from Jack Sparling (aiight) Jerry Grandenetti (interesting) and Tom Sutton (slickest).
These Grandenetti pages are neat—feels like there’s some Kreigstein/Master Race homaging going on here, but his bouncy line work and appealing forms remind me more of something like Jucika.
47) The Good Asian Vol. 1
48) Twisted Tales # 4 - Another Bruce Jones joint with art from John Bolton, Don Lomax, and Jones himself on art.
49) Twisted Tales #1 - More tales of horny horror from Bruce Jones, Richard Corben, Alfredo Alcala, Brett Blevins, & Tim Conrad
50) Defenders #5 - I will admit to kinda being like 🧐 with any of the explanations of the twist (bc quantum physics or whatever) but (a) I had figured it out regardless, & (b) it's all so beautifully done.
51) Eternals #9
52) The Thing #3 - Walter Mosely writing Thing comics with a delightfully non-committal connection to continuity. Tom Reilly is stepping way up on this series, and Bellaire continues to prove she’s on another level w/color.
53) The Savage Dragon #261 - This one feels kinda like running a CHAMPIONS game in the time of covid, as we find out multiple members of my beloved Freak Force are anti-vaxxers.😂
54) Venom #4
55) Jonna vol 2
56) Future State Gotham #9
57) Moon Knight #5 (1980)
58) The Many Deaths Of Laila Starr #1
59) Avengers Forever #1 - (far far) wordier than I remember (and the art files on Hoopla look like ass?). I’m gonna keep going because I have been wanting to re-read, but this one might need to be on paper.
In the early days of last year, I was inspired by some twitter mutuals to post my comics reading in the new year and kept it up from Jan 1 2022 till just about the bitter end. Something about it really helped keep me invigorated by the medium even in some pretty bleak times, so I’m going to keep it going this year, but here at Longboxd instead of on twitter, which I'm trying to spend less time at. Before I can do that though, I want to archive the 2022 entries in a spot that’s more permanent/less twitter-iffic, so here we go—pretty much every comic I read in 2022! (As transcribed from here)
Part 2: 22-38 (of 387)
(I can "only" post 30 images at a time here, so that’ll dictate the length of these catch-up posts)
22) Silver Star #1 by Jack Kirby & Mike Royer - Kirby’s Blubber? Very Beto vibes—very Lynchian, held together by spit and nonsense.
23) Shattered Earth #1 - The best story in this anthology has a horny dog that gets cucked by a wandering wasteland hippie.
24) Sun Runners #2
25) Shade, The Changing Man #50
26) True Lives Of The Fabulous Killjoys: NATIONAL ANTHEM - Narratively, it’s firmly in the "halcyon days of vertigo" mold, and that’s cool, but between Romero and Bellaire this is one of the more stunning art showcases I’ve seen in a while. God-tier coloring, IMO!
27) The Terminator #1 (1990) - Chris Warner tha gawd with nice chunky inks from Paul Guinan, and a script by DH genre MVP John Arcudi that swings between terse and pleasantly purple. This and the Predator series the year before (also drawn by Warner) set the mold for decades of movie tie-in books.
28 & 29) Blood n’ Guts #1 & 2 - These are very bad comics by a weird, probably bad dude who's weird & not always bad comics I grew up with. Not much to them (this is from one of Blair's big firehose-of-comics periods) other than a *great* logo I assume was made by Dave Cooper.
30) Alien Worlds #7 - I loved this series as a kid—it's mostly an art showcase (Corben, Morrow, Anderson & Perez in this issue!) but Bruce Jones' short stories are trashy scifi paperback anthology style fun, routinely see-sawing btwn kind of hokey & total bleak nihilism, often on the same page. one story, theoretically concerned w/recreating The Thing inside an implied sketch of a Wally Wood/EC planet setting, mostly actually focuses on infidelity leading to murder (a common Jones trope). In the end everyone dies after the revelation that their parkas are hungry aliens.
31) Eclipse Monthly #2 by various
32) Sensation Comics #6 - This is the pure, uncut shit.
33) Head Lopper #15
34) Marvel Team-Up #101 - Robot hippies and Peter Parker favorably compares the trauma of Nighthawk killing his girlfriend in a drunk driving incident to Uncle Ben’s death.
35) The Swamp Thing: Becoming TPB
36) Head Lopper #16
37) Skull, The Slayer #1 - Sorta standard Th’unda etc white adventure guy thrown into a prehistoric setting to fight dinosaurs kinda thing, (the twist being that this guy? He’s a real piece of shit!) but Steve Gan does impressive work, and Marv Wolfman’s colors are surprisingly effective.
38) The Man-Thing #8 - I haven’t read many of these. Pacing is slow if not deliberate, vampy gothic vibes. With Ploog’s squishy art, it kinda reads like a Golden Age Underground.
In the early days of last year, I was inspired by some twitter mutuals to post my comics reading in the new year and kept it up from Jan 1 2022 till just about the bitter end. Something about it really helped keep me invigorated by the medium even in some pretty bleak times, so I’m going to keep it going this year, but here at Longboxd instead of on twitter, which I'm trying to spend less time at. Before I can do that though, I want to archive the 2022 entries in a spot that’s more permanent/less twitter-iffic, so here we go—pretty much every comic I read in 2022! (As transcribed from here)
Part 1: 1-21 (of 387)
(I can "only" post 30 images at a time here, so that’ll dictate the length of these catch-up posts)
1) Timeless #1 - I mean, Lol at that final page reveal but this was a fun comic. I like Kang stories and this is good Kang.
2) Service Industry by T Edward Bak
3) Human Target #2
4) Grrrl Scouts Stone Ghost #1
5) Krania #1 by Brian McCray - “I will unmake you” - I sorta wish this was hornier?
6) God Bless The Machine by Connor McCann - A messy dystopian exploration of tech and social media etc that trucks along efficiently, wraps up nicely. Definitely some JTHM energy in the drawings that is chunkily satisfying.
7) Reckless: Friend Of The Devil - A fun read, but didn’t work for me as well as the first. Less "badass/men’s adventure magazine moments" than in vol one, maybe.
8) Cult Of The Ibis by Daria Tessler - Like Tove Jansson designed the "oh fuck I’m losing it" nightlife montage from your favorite noir movie.
9) Firepower #18
10) Future State: Gotham #7
11) Future State: Gotham #8
12) Rust Belt Review #3 - Very solid anthology that seems firmly targeted at the more "literary" side of alt-comics (though of course there are some rowdy exceptions). 2-3 cartoonists clearly influenced by Sammy H, lots of humanity in the stories.
13) Tuki vol 1 - It's nice to have a new Jeff Smith comic to enjoy—he's great at this (this being funny/intense/heartfelt adventure comics), it's easy to sorta forget just *how good* until a new book comes out. Glad it's in B/W too.
14) Crisis #53 - The late 80s/early 90s was the best time for big format anthology magazines, great for just flipping through. Random issue of CRISIS has Sean Phillips doing his best McKean/Fregredo, & Steve Whittaker’s colors(!) on these Munoz SINNER pages are interesting (but print muddy).
15) Crisis #54 - This one has a Paul Grist/Mark Millar prison comic.
16) Avengers #98 - They don’t make ‘em like they used to (kind of bad, chaotic, and hard to read)
17) Nightwing: Leaping into the light TPB
18) X-Men #6
19) Human Target #3
20) Boy Maximortal #3 by Rick Veitch - Veitch found a new life in POD publishing in a way that feels like it’s a spiritual sibling to those Ditko/Snyder joints, & we are richer for it. These are uncut Metaphysical Boomer Cape Comics & I love them unreservedly (also the indicia warmed this slow cartoonist’s heart)
In a fit of restlessness, I went around and pulled all/most of my mainline marvel/dc collections from the various creator-centric locations they were in my library. consolidating everything that isn’t super oversized (so not counting artist editions) or things that aren’t really in this category for one reason or another (like New Gods, Losers, omac etc all have their own shelf, Ironwolf is in the Mignola section but Dr.Strange/Dr. Doom is here, DP7 didn’t make the marvel shelf, etc). A decent amount of stuff that I culled for Frankenstein's Comic Swap and am keeping those boxes ready for the next show.
I probably missed a few things but it’s kind of interesting/reassuring that I still have a whole big-ass library of books that are outside of this target area…but somehow, looking at it I also find myself wanting to get more Epic collections 🙃
Moving all my comics musings over here going forward, as the Ink Logging had it's last real post in 2019, and it's better to just let that be what it is! I plan to continue my comics logging/reading list over here instead of on Twitter, because while logging things there kept me invigorated (and revitalized my delusions of blogging) I'm trying to spend less time there in the future. I had tried to move these vague ideas over to IG under this same name but it's not really a great platform for posting comics images to (bc of the limitations of the default square or whatever).
So, tumblr. Again! We shall see. Expect a big post or two on the 2022 reading list before I get going on 2023.
