Rotting Pulp's a Good Investment

Rotting Pulp's a Good Investment

UTTER TRASH

by

Mike Baron

There are hundreds, of Scrooge-type souls who horde new comics as they come out, counting on inflated dealers’ rates to turn them a nice profit in a year’s time. Twenty cents for a current Swamp Thing will net you a five hundred per cent return in one year.

This is a rotten condition caused by comics’ status as periodicals, which must be routinely removed from the stands ,and trashed. If comics were published as perennials, the amateurism would disappear since comics would truly .have to get by in a somewhat longer-lasting format, Comics are a lowprofit enterprise and they are printed on crummy paper. So the^ tend to rot. Most of them may be trash, artistically speaking,, but it doesn’t help their case to have them circulated as trash at twenty cents a copy. The twenty cent comic will probably die in 1974, but comics will still be printed on the same pulp paper.

One answer to the trash dilemma is the printing of comics in hardbound form. Crown publishers has tried this with two handsome volumes, Superman and Batman, with introductions by old time Supes writer E. Nelson Bridwell. The format is alright, but there’s a problem with tlie material; these anthologies contain mostly pre-seventies stuff, and most of that is pretty awful, kind of crude, like bad comic art today; the Batman adventures are stupid and crassly unbelievable. The only really decent stuff in either of them is the very recent material: the Batman by Neal Adams and Dick Giordano; the Murphy Anderson/ Curt Swan Superman. A handful of representative earlier stories would have sufficed, but the newer efforts, particularly Neal Adams’, are simply more deserving of those protective slabs of hardbound cardboard than all that nostalgic Bob Kane.

New underground titles trickled forth near the end Of 1973. Krupp produced a formidable Spirit reprint, featuring the adventures" of femme fatale P’Gell; Eisner fans take note. Krupp also dished up their long-awaited Bijou , No. 8 with spoofs of all the underground characters by all the underground artists. Jayzey Lynch does the “Fabulous Furry Geek Bros.,” Denis Kitchen does “Hungry Irving Biscuits.” Harvey Kurtzman did the cover in the style of the original Mad, and for some reason, this Bijou comes off less a spoof on the underground than a spoof on old Mad magazines, Skip Williamson’s “Melvin Natural” and Skeeter Grant’s “Wiper,” in particular. The best episodes are R. Crumb’s very apt satire of “Pard ’n’ Nat,’’ (seems Crumb’s particular neurosis fits Jay Lynch’s characters perfectly,) and Justin Green’s hilarious S. Clay Wilson riff with the Checkered Cherub, Green’s manic fears and seamy insanity go perfectly with the craziness of the Hog Ridin’ Fools and their ilk.

Last Gasp managed to squeak out Grirri Wit No. 2, an all-dragon issue, with the usual spectacular full-color Corben artwork and cover. Joxon has a nice opening story about blood-lusting South American Indians. It has plenty of action and fine detail, and ends with a very funny punch line, even though all the careful artwork and plotting don’t jive with it.

* Corben gets into the usual naked* man-against-the-monsters situation. This artist is obsessed with the notion of elemental confrontation; his characters generally confront each other in the buff and the weaponry seldom gets beyond a well-placed foot or an occa~, sional rock. Of course, /the layout is mind-boggling, the detail and color work are superb. Like Will Eisner1, with whom he is allied on the Warren Spirit project, Corben «is the ultimate cinematographer.

Psychedelic art revisited. Abdul Mati Klarwein’s art has appeared on record jackets by Miles Davis, Jackie McLean, and Santana, which makes him a legitimate rock and roll artist. His collected works are available in a Harmony publication, Milk N’ Honey, the densest visual experience you can have for five bucks. Anyone who has seen the covers of Bitches Brew, Liye/Evil Or Santana’s second knows about Klarwein’s surreal attention to detail and heavy use of African symbols. The book also purports to contain 'Klarwein’s personal version of the gospel or at least the great American novel, but since it’s handwritten in Abdul’s own script, which is structurally the opposite of his sophisticated paintings, it is more or less illegible. Unless you are on acid. In which case, the book will supply everything you need for up to 65 hours.

Things to look, forward to this year: the price of all comics will skyrocket... British Barry Smith (Conan the Barbarian)is quitting comic book .art to devote his life to becorning a rock star... Hal Foster retired in 1973, but Prince Valiant will live on when King Features Syndicate publishes two full-color volumes of Val’s best. .. Burne Hogarth is working on another original Tarzan book Similar to his adaptation of Burroughs’ first two books, Tarzan (Watsop-Guptill.)