by Dame D'arcy
(Fantagraphics, $2.95)
EVERETT: You published some of her stuff in your comic, right? You encouraged her to think she was a talented artist, right? Look at this crap: sloppy, lazy, tired, unimaginative, pseudo-'70s female underground art (Doris Seda's stuff, particularly) which looks and reads like it was knocked out in about five minutes--that is, if you can be bothered to read her torturous lettering. And it's ALL YOUR FAULT!
PETE: D'arcy is really funny and talented. My big criticism is that she isn't consistent--a lot of her work is hacked out. She has a million things going on... she performs live in a string band, she has her own public access TV show back in New York... anything that could make no money, she does it. D'arcy's got a real nose for not making money. So you don't like this? People fuck in it! How can you not like that?
EVERETT: Well, that's a great critique....
BLACK HOLE #5
by Charles Burns
(Fantagraphics, $3.95)
EVERETT: Now, I think Charles Burns is an incredible artist. His crosshatching! His deep, deep blacks! His white, white whites! The sweat beads on his characters' foreheads! His chubby little devilish boys! His warped visions of American culture! Without a doubt, Mr. Burns is my favorite artist to've come out of the highbrow Raw school of comic book illustrators.
PETE: So you don't find this ugly?! That cover is grotesque! I feel the same way about the attributes you're giving Charles Burns as I do about Jim Woodring. Ugly subject matter, but rendered with real care.
SCHIZO #1-3
by Ivan Brunetti
(Fantagraphics, $3.95)
EVERETT: In the foreground of the cover to Schizo #2, there's one guy slitting his wrists with a razor blade and another one dead from a heroin OD, while a woman swigs back some poison as she pushes a baby about to blow its brains out. Behind them, there's a whole bunch of people hanging themselves in their rooms, and another whole bunch of people throwing themselves off a building. A billboard screams "Every Day is a Good Day to Die"! Schizo is totally self-obsessed, self-indulgent, unremitting in its gloom and despondency and in its determination to be more self-pitying than anyone else alive... and it's totally addictive. Fucking irritating, but totally addictive.
PETE: Brunetti's whole schtick is "I hate the world, I hate myself, I wish I were dead." He makes the same point on every fucking page--and that point is, he hates the world, he hates everyone in it, but he hates himself the most, and he wishes he was dead. It's all, "What's the use, what's the use?" When I read Schizo, I cannot believe that Brunetti is still alive. He expresses the most repetitively bleak world view I've ever seen or heard of in my life--but every now and then, it's really funny. He has a great bad taste sensibility.
BERLIN #1-4
(Black Eye, $2.50)
JAR OF FOOLS (A PICTURE NOVEL)
by Jason Lutes
(Black Eye, $13.95)
EVERETT: All Jason Lutes' covers are very very stylized--a small detail from the strip is placed stage center, surrounded by a lovely colored background. Nice matte paper, too. (These things matter.) The strip feels very European, very Russian, the way all the characters are so clean-cut, the smallness of the panels, the attention to the smallest detail. Or perhaps it's more like the futuristic revamped English Dan Dare strip of the early '80s, Dare. This you feel is a real labor of love.
PETE: This is carefully drawn, very well done, but--like Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight--it's too self-important. This isn't my kind of stuff at all--I find it very impersonal, very cold. You know he used to be the art director at The Stranger?
EVERETT: Really? Well, it's fucking great, then. Obviously. You just don't like it because it has a European feel. I'm gonna stick up for my Continental homies here. This is much classier than all your American shit, with all your farting into phones (Bob Fingerman) and needles into arms (Ivan Brunetti). All Jason is saying is that comics can be used to document something more important than phone-farts... and there's nothing wrong with that.
PENNY CENTURY #1-3
by Jaime Hernandez
(Fantagraphics, $2.95)
LUBA #1-2
by Gilbert Hernandez
(Fantagraphics, $2.95)
PETER: Ever since Gilbert and Jaime stopped doing Love and Rockets, they keep switching titles. While Gilbert was doing New Love, it was my favorite title, period. It was like a one-man anthology, with all his different stories and styles. He exhibited such an incredible imagination in it. Now he's doing Luba, which is also great, and he's gone right back inside that incredibly complicated world of Palomar where you need a road map to find your way around. But it's still fantastic! And Penny Century is great. Jaime is such an amazing artist....
EVERETT: Going back to my point that artists/musicians never know when they're onto a good thing, wasn't Jaime guilty of that for the longest time? Maggie, Hopey, Daffy, Izzy, et al. were some of the coolest and sexiest cartoon women ever created... but one felt he grew bored with their popularity, and dropped them 'cause it was just too easy. Thank god he's reviving them in Penny Century.
PETE: With the Hernandez brothers, that criticism is probably true. They're like Brian Wilson in that way.
EVERETT: These guys kick my ass. I can't slag them off. They rule supreme.
PETE: Good. I'm glad you like them. Especially as I'm collaborating with one of them on my new comic. Maybe we could plug that now....
