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BLAB! #15
edited by Monte Beauchamp
(10”×10,” 120 pages, color and b&w, $19.95; published by
Fantagraphics Books)
Review by Mike Hunter
Another issue of this squarebound, spectacularly gorgeous “art comics” anthology is here. As usual, all is topnotch, from the exquisite printing and comics within to Monte Beauchamp’s art direction. This is almost certainly the “Best Designed Comics Anthology Ever.” And you get remarkable value for your money, too!
Lou Brooks’ front and back covers are eye-catchingly graphic depictions of mirth run amok, replicating the odd yet undeniable beauty of ratty off-register comics printing. Famed graphic designer A.M. Cassandre is given homage in Bob Staake’s “They Got the Steely Dan T-Shirts,” featuring single illos inspired by song lyrics. In “Astrida,” Walter Minus, one of the many returning
BLAB! regulars, has one of his cool-hued Nagel-ish lovelies posing provocatively while her answering-machine message plays. In Spain’s “The Education of an Underground Cartoonist,” the Old Master continues his series of autobiographical strips, providing – in contrast to his robustly radical politics - the most classically conservative comics story renderings in the whole anthology. The nightmarish “Fowl Plague” by Sue Coe and Judith Brody is frighteningly timely, as dire predictions of the pandemic the disease could cause loom in recent headlines. Coe’s powerful work belongs up there with the politically-themed art of greats such as Daumier and Kathe Kollwitz.
Beauchamp himself contributes a study of the once-ubiquitous “Kilroy Was Here” figure, and the prose-only article which regularly appears in
BLAB! is here dedicated to the famed mystery of the Black Dahlia murder, words by Jeffrey Steele, poetic illo by Teresa James. A bizarre Hellscape in muted tones is depicted in a spread as Blanquet does Bosch. In “Dream Machine,” another “politically-themed” story, Peter Kuper follows the American Dream - incarnating in vehicular form - as it turns nightmarish. If you want to see G.W. Bush as Rat Fink, here’s the place! Camille Rose Garcia’s languorous Gothic aesthetic is devoted to hapless “Subterranean Orphans.” Mark Landman continues his computer-cartooned adventures of “Fetal Elvis,” as “Fetal Elvis Gets Drafted!” Matti Hagelberg’s superbly stylized scratchboard art tells the story of deceased former-president Urho Kekkonen, who yearly resurrects (
much the worse for wear), ritualistically makes his way through the city, then succumbs to be buried ‘til next time.
Much within is more “art” than “comics” per se, sequential narrative, characterization, and conventional literary depth neglected in favor of strong imagery. Yet the work’s exceptional throughout. “Cornered” by Owen Smith looks like a melodramatic scene from a 1940s boxing movie, painted with the fleshy physicality of mainstream illustration art of the time. Gary Baseman’s richly rendered “Garden of Unearthly Delights,” as the title implies, is yet another
hommage to the great Hieronymous. Varied stylistic approaches abound, unified only in their excellence.
I could go on and on singing the praises of this latest
BLAB! – I feel shame in neglecting to spotlight the many other treasures within – but would find myself echoing the approach of that hapless filmic suitor of Mae West, who inspired her to say in rejoinder, “Are you making love, or taking inventory?”
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