The world according to Robert Williams: a rapture of sinister Salomes, offal-stinking oafs, and hot-rodding homunculi charged with a jolt of bad drugs and profound prurience and rendered with exquisite intricacy. Things as Kim Deitch sees them: a cartoonish Saturday serial from animation’s golden age starring a pencil-pushing nebbish who downs copious hooch while he paints celluloid and combats visions of the crazy cat who haunts him as bugaboo and Muse. Bob Fingerman’s new comic book Gotham: a multi-ethnic Brooklyn where a cartoonist ekes out an existence drawing piece-meal pictograms for a porno rag and waxing philosophic about Gen X’s exigencies when he isn’t going down on his bi-sexual girlfriend. Tony Millionaire’s bender-bent world view: a sunny, sinister burg flanked by high seas and tall ships, reptilian Napoleons, and rapacious redcoats, and home to a suicidal, dipsomaniac crow and his nose-picking primate pal.
At a glance, these four pen-and-ink microcosms would seem to hang in separate orbits. But a closer look at new books from two of underground comics’ pioneers and two of its younger guns reveals commonalities that extend beyond shared gleeful affinities for sex, drugs, alcohol, physical and psychic violence, depression, hallucination, and scatology. Their work shares sources of inspiration and influence, a self-consciousness about the cartooning Muse, and a thoughtful, if warped, take on the world outside the drawing board.
Although he’s known these days primarily as the painter of expansive, expensive canvasses that teem with whorls of imagery both photorealistic and surreal, Robert Williams cut his teeth in the mid ’60s with Ed " Big Daddy " Roth, guru of the SoCal customized-hot-rod subculture. In Hysteria in Remission, Fantagraphics (whose 1999 Malicious Resplendence was a handsome overview of Williams’s unsettling paintings) has wrangled stacks of ad pages from magazines like Rod & Custom bedecked with Williams’s T-shirt designs: hypertensive, tongue-flapping gremlins in Kaiser helmets jockeying tricked-out funnycars, and screaming ’60s shibboleths like " Mustangs Eat Chevy’s for Dinner " and " Rat Fink. "
Williams’s flowering came as a charter member of the legendary Zap Comix collective (with, of course, fellow fetishist of the female form Robert Crumb). Conjuring mind-bending strips for racy chapbooks like Zap, Zam, and Yama Yama, he was able to let slip his lecherous obsessions and perfect his trippy precision. Hysteria collects every one of his startling comic strips, many of which haven’t been seen for a quarter-century.
Spanning the heady ’60s through the coked-up ’80s (when once, in a hilarious rebuke to the ugliness of crude punk ’zines, he dumbed down his style to a mocking, shitty primitivism), the strips are breathtaking. Frazzled freak-outs, obsessively embellished and dripping with detail, Williams’s dense, dynamic pages pulse with frenetic, inky energy. His painstaking technique contrasts with the depravity of his recurring themes: predatory Beelzebubs and spread-legged Jezebels, yawning, hair-specked orifices and dripping phalluses. Spliffs bulge and syringes quiver as a mess of motion lines competes for attention with a lexicon of artfully drawn dirty words. Who said the drugs don’t work?
But though his subjects may be debauched, Williams’s craftsmanship is never debased. It’s clear that for all his pranks and calculated button pushing (misogyny and fascist imagery are rampant), he feels a deep solicitude for his art. The cover of one comic says it all: " When you buy a Coochy Cooty comic you’re not getting just a silly-ass funnybook . . . but YOUR SHARE IN A DREAM! "
SCRIBBLING SINCE THE ’60s, Kim Deitch is another architect of the genre. But unlike Williams, who enjoys long waiting lists for his pricy paintings, cult favorite Deitch has been relegated to the margins. Boulevard of Broken Dreams — a funny-scary meditation on the torturous act of creation and the mental hell that flames up when one’s achievements are co-opted and forgotten — may or may not be read as his response to his status. Either way, it’s a bold visual statement that showcases Deitch’s skewed sensibility and his knack for complex narrative — and finally gives him the substantive showcase he deserves.
Our heroes are Al and Ted Mishkin, two brothers churning out cartoon shorts from their small Westchester studio in the early 1930s. They’re like real-life brothers Roy and Walt Disney: the former handles the business, the latter is the creative force. But the world of Disney, though it’s never mentioned except through thinly veiled allusions, is the Mishkins’ enemy. Day and night, Ted is tormented by visions of his own creation, a devilish cartoon cat named Waldo. As Ted caves in to studio execs’ pressure to make Waldo’s star turns more Mickey Mouse, the feline’s demonic protestations drive him to abject alcoholism.
If Deitch (whose father was an animator for UPA) delights in dissing the Disney behemoth, he also gives credit where it’s due. In tribute to Winsor McKay, whose 1914 " Gertie the Dinosaur " was a crucial early short, he’s named one of Ted’s mentors Windsor Newton; Windsor wows vaudeville crowds with a moving drawing called " Milton the Mastodon. " Deitch’s work is eye-catching precisely because of this reverence for the past. He eschews the spidery sprawl favored by so many of his acid-fried compeers, instead using the pop-visual vocabulary of the era — roller coasters and rocket ships, grinning moons and cigar-chomping chimps — to evoke the psychotic swirling miasma of Ted’s booze-fueled hallucinations. His synapse-popping scenes are that much more discomforting for those images’ ostensible harmlessness.
As pure draftsmanship, Deitch’s throwback style, marked by scads of heavy cross-hatching, is less thrilling than Williams’s coldly clinical exactitude. His real strength is as a storyteller. Boulevard’s tortuous, layered narrative — ping-ponging between the automats of the ’30s and the malls of the ’90s, with reality bleeding into hallucination, hallucination spilling onto the screen, and the screen mirroring the world outside — makes the sad story of Ted’s decline much more than a picture book.
BOB FINGERMAN’S Beg the Question, which overhauls a collection of his Minimum Wage comic strips and weaves them into a continuous narrative, also explores themes of creative frustration, but it opens its lens to offer a glimpse of the disaffected hipster urbanite in his natural setting. Rob, Fingerman’s semi-autobiographical protagonist, is also a cartoonist. Like Ted Mishkin, he’s frustrated by the way financial imperatives cause his art to suffer — just as Robert Williams subsisted by scribbling smut for Felch and Snatch, Rob survives, reluctantly, penciling porno for Pork.
But he doesn’t feel too bad. Because when he’s not drawing " chicks with big mams getting plowed left, right, and center, " Rob’s doing the same with his ex-lesbian girlfriend, Sylvia. He’s scrawny, she’s zaftig, and Fingerman doesn’t shy from using his textured shades of gray (an improvement from Minimum Wage’s stark black and white) to show them in the act.
Unlike some of Williams’s salacious sexpots, though, these images never seem gratuitous. That’s thanks to Fingerman’s adroit character development, which he achieves through nuanced facial expressions, subtle gestures, and, especially, the funny-’cos-its true dialogue that fills his copious speech balloons. Rob and Sylvia love each other. It’s no small feat to convey that in words and pictures, but Fingerman’s skill is such that even though Sylvia looks, in intro writer Jerry Stahl’s words, " like a pretty Ernest Borgnine, " the reader kind of falls in love with her too. Gen-X ennui has, of course, been done to death. But Fingerman’s honest depiction of a cast of regular twentysomethings with the same hang-ups and insecurities his readers feel gives his panels an affecting authenticity.
TONY MILLIONAIRE’S Maakies is a different story entirely. In The House at Maakies Corner, the second Fantagraphics compendium of the popular weekly, Millionaire’s strips are bound in a 5x12-inch book that preserves the size in which they’re drawn — all the better to let you drink in his exquisite line-drawings, his off-kilter visual sense, and a gallows humor that makes suicide and alcoholism look funnier than ever.
A Gloucester native, Mass College of Art grad, and sometime Phoenix illustrator, Millionaire is a superb technician. His eye for detail is as impeccable as Williams’s, and he excels at realizing a whimsical working world — all elegantly rendered schooner ships and cresting waves, stylized steam locomotives and biplanes.
But these pages are populated by a cast of anthropomorphic animals who enact scenarios that are often as subtly disturbing as they are laugh-out-loud funny. Like Deitch, Millionaire has an affinity for old-time æsthetics — and the antiquated, politically incorrect world view they can entail. His smooth, delicate line (he too is in thrall to Winsor McKay’s beautiful draftsmanship) gives life to a gallimaufry of characters lifted from the iconography of a bygone era: pith-helmeted jungle explorers, Model-T-driving honest Injuns, and bristle-moustached Brits.
The stars of this show are Uncle Gabby, an ape fond of apothegms like " being drunk is the best feeling in my poor world, " and Drinky Crow, a saucer-eyed fowl whose constant state of insobriety (limned, of course, with X-eyes and delirious bubbles) is punctuated by bouts of brain-spattering suicide ( " a metaphor for just saying, fuck everything, " Millionaire has explained). If Samuel Beckett could draw, it would look like this.
And just as the characters Ted Mishkin and Rob Hoffman get frustrated, at times the real-life Millionaire’s inkwell dries up. Even then, he makes hay. On one slow week he had Drinky Crow and Uncle Gabby present a recipe for a bratwurst banana split. Once he invited readers to get Drinky or Gabby tattoos and mail in the pictures, which would run in lieu of a drawn strip. The response required two weeks’ worth of installments.
That says something. When a man etches a blotto, gun-toting crow into his flesh, that man is either very drunk or else identifies with what the crow has to say. If the latter is true, then Millionaire, like his forebears, is fulfilling the mandate of contemporary art: using images to communicate a resonant vision of a chaotic and absurd world.
