Author: larsmagne23

Words Without Pictures (1990) edited by Stephen Niles.

What’s this then? A book book? A book book book?

It’s co-published with Arcane Books, which is Steve Niles.

*phew* Comics! Matt Feazell does the introduction appropriately enough with a wordless single page strip.

But then we’re on to the main portion.

This is basically a short story collection from some well-known and some not so well known people who usually do comic books. It’s a 170 page book, and the first seventy pages are written by Alan Moore, so it’s not hard to guess at the impetus for the book.

I think this is the only thing Eclipse published in this format, so that’s kinda interesting.

I mean, if you’re interested in that kind of thing. If not, not? I guess?

I haven’t read any of Moore’s prose works before, but it’s pretty much like you’d imagine. Lots and lots of adjectives and adverbs and phrases like “spectrally perfumed corridors”. That makes sense, I’m sure.

Or you could write “She lit the lamp.” That’s another way to write that.

Just saying.

John Bolton contributes caricatures of the authors, so here’s Neil Gaiman with huge sunglasses.

It’s a relief reading straightforward prose after the over-cooked Moore mess. It starts off amusingly enough (above some scallywag is explaining what the collective noun is for somebody who works in a bank), but then things turn horrific. It’s a slow burner of a story, and it’s quite successful.

So I guess this is a horror anthology and not an anthology of general literature, which I had assumed?

Gaiman does an afterword to his story, and is the only one who does.

Jon J Muth writes four poems.

Some of Bolton’s portraits are weirder than others. I guess these are meant to be funny, but since I don’t know how she looks in real life, it’s kinda obscure. But it’s nice. It’s more Sienkiewiczian than Boltonish.

Mark Evanier’s story stands out… but not in a good way. It reeks of professionalism. It uses one (1) metaphor, and sticks to it like a nail on Pinhead. I wonder if this was a pitch for a quirky TV special or something. The characters are TV deep.

Let’s see if I can find any reviews for this book…

Here’s one from Goodreads:

What an odd, compelling book! The stories are magnificent, there isn’t a bad story among them. The stories have themes around sadness, grief, fear, change, love, and sex. I really enjoyed this book! Interesting that the first story, by Alan Moore, was the only one that didn’t fully keep my interest, and I had the same experience with The Watchmen.

And here’s one from Amazon:

The best and longest story, and one that is worth the price of admission all on its own, is by Alan Moore. It is a vey strange and exotic story about a young woman in the orient undergoing a process that will put her more deeply in touch with her unconscious mind in order to turn her into a sort of Shaman. This story should appeal to fans of Moore’s Promethea.

Can’t find any substantial reviews, though.

Lost Continent (1990) #1-6 by Akihiro Yamada.

The last and perhaps least of the Japanese comics published by Eclipse (in collaboration with Studio Proteus), we here have a quite peculiar publishing strategy: While this is in the normal early-90s format for these things (squarebound, 56 pages a pop), there’s very little on the cover that screams “this is Japanese, dude”. It basically looks like a European comic with a cheesy American logo on top.

When you open it, it’s clear that it’s Japanese, but it’s not done in the cluttered overload style that’s the most commercially successful one. Instead we’ve got what looks like photos that’s been through a very high-contrast Xerox machine and some Japanese guys that look kinda European.

The two female characters look very Japanese, though… and totally indistinguishable from each other, which is typical.

The lack of backgrounds in most panels is just plain bizarre. Perhaps Yamada is one of those year Japanese comics artists working within the children’s comics business that doesn’t have a stable of assistants to do most of the drawing?

That certainly would explain pages like the above.

After staring at some of these drawings, which basically don’t look like anything a human would draw…

Sobel! It’s the Sobel image transform! So Yamada is taking his photo reference (which he has a lot of, I suspect), running it through an SGI workstation (those were around at the time, if I remember correctly), and then tracing the results by hand.

It’s certainly a… look…

I knew my university course in image algorithms would be useful one day.

Anyway, with that mystery solved, I paid some more attention to the plot. The book is a very quick read, but it’s pretty exciting at the start. We’re presented with a bunch of mysterious happenings, and then there’s action, and lots of people are having a conspiracy, and everything’s going great…

… and then Our Hero finds a diary that explains everything, and any excitement disappears completely.

Not only that, but we also get a scene where the evil bad guys explain how evil they are to each other in details. *sigh*

So back to the art: The one female face Yamada knows how to draw is very appealing.

He has a lot more fun with his male characters. He’ll drop into this sort of rendering at random.

And then suddenly… MONSTERS! Body horror!

And then it’s gone again and he’s tracing photo reference again. It’s kinda confusing, art wise.

Hey, that’s a great one!

One thing that Yamada’s photo reference helps with is his depiction of these black men. Japanese mainstream comics are usually horrifically racist, but Yamada’s depiction of them, even as naked savages *gasp* is a lot less caricatured than you’d expect. Even if they get no lines to speak.

Oh, I forgot to mention the plot, but you’ve read and seen the exact same thing a million times before, so there’s no need. I’ll just tell you: A lost country (with dinosaurs) under the North Pole. You know how these things go, and that’s exactly how this goes.

I hadn’t heard of Yamada before, but he’s apparently a very successful illustrator now, which I can totally understand.

This series hasn’t been reprinted, as far as I can tell.

Rock Bottom Trading Cards (1990) by Peggy Gordon and Bill Sienkiewicz.

I’m not doing all of the “trading” card sets Eclipse published, just the ones that strike me as possibly interesting. After writing about three of their more political card collections, I thought that this was going to be a non-political funny one.

I mean, they’re billed as being written by a writer at Comedy Channel, and while Sienkiewicz had done several of the current events cards, I thought it might be fun to see him take on some pop culture people.

But… nope. These cards mostly stick to political figures, and natter on about… I don’t know, but it’s not funny.

MORE FUN ME

So I can see where Gordon’s going with this little skit, for instance. The republicans doing a version of A Christmas Carol subtitled On Your Knees, Pig certainly has potential, but…

Oh! Just imagine Arnold Schwarzenegger doing Hamlet!

When Gordon moves from current events into pop culture, her targets are so painfully obvious and so close to what they did that it all kinda falls flat, doesn’t it? I mean, making fun of Madonna for being too undressed is… I don’t know. Boring? Is that the right word? I think it is.

So the attraction here is virtually all Sienkiewicz’ artwork, and it’s pretty good, even if he doesn’t really get the likeness of the people he portray. Above’s some miscreant called Donald Trump…

… who was apparently some aging autocrat that we’ll probably never hear of again.

We learn here that Sienkiewicz was doing a graphic novel called Five Glories. When googling for “bill sienkiewicz” “five glories” I get 0 (zero) results, so I’m guessing that never happened?

And we get an overview of what shows that you can watch on the Comedy Channel.

Life in Northwest Nowhere (1990) by Mervin Gilbert.

Heh. I apparently bought this on sale during the 90s, and it’s been reduced first to half price, and then half price again. So not a brisk seller at that comics store.

I think this is the final of the three unlikely books that Eclipse did the distribution for all of a sudden. They’d co-published books before (most notably the Acme books) and had some kind of relationship with Ken Pierce Books, but the three books Eclipse distributed in 1990 are all somewhat odd choices: There’s Gin & Comix, which was a New York Raw-like anthology, Moderne Man, which is a collection of environmentally conscious newspaper strips, and then there’s this one, which is a collection of comics published during the 70s and 80s for the Mendocino Review and similar venues.

Bruce Levene, the editor of that publication, provides an introduction.

And Marvin Gilbert (aka Marvinius) describes his art technique, which I really appreciate. He’s using duotone paper, which has two different hatches embedded in it, which is brought out by using two special fluids. One paints with this fluid, and the hatches appear on the paper like magic.

So you can get very a painterly, organic feel to it, while there’s still a mechanical component. Gilbert’s art style is very much of its time, of course, with exaggerated facial features and postures, but it’s a style I find quite attractive.

Sometimes they blow up certain panels in an exaggerated fashion, which is perhaps… not the right choice? Because the hatching then is gigantic and that looks odd, too.

Hm… I just realised that Gilbert’s artwork takes quite a bit from Will Eisner. It’s got that organic looseness to it, even if Gilbert doesn’t do the filmatic angles and stuff.

This collection is like 90% single page funny stuff. As punchlines go, they’re in the “gentle humour” tradition, mostly. It’s a very amiable read: We follow Gilbert’s stand-in character through his hippyish life with his wife and children, and the children grow up into teenagers over the years. I’m not sure we ever learn anything profound, but it’s a combination of slice of life with gag writing that’s very appealing.

But the sheer relentlessness of the one-page format makes it a slightly exhausting read. I found myself wishing that he’d just expand these stories up. I’d love to read some ten-page stories tackling a meatier storyline from time to time.

And while I find the artwork very appealing, both his lack of variation in facial features (especially with all the bearded men) and his lack of consistency in rendering doesn’t help with his storytelling. I was wondering whether those were different bearded men for a second, especially since Claire up there suddenly drops his name into the conversation.

The artwork is mostly reproduced very crisply, from what I assume are from the original art of from the original negatives. But at about the halfway point in the collection, we get a number of strips that look degraded and faded. Shot from printed copies of the newspaper they appeared in?

And then… he gets a divorce…

… and both the stories and the artwork fall apart, basically. It’s like all the fun and effort went out of both, and we get some very basic pages that, frankly, are a bit of a chore to get through.

We also get a section of illustrations he’s done for the Mendocino Review, and they’re fabulous.

His attempt at editorial cartoons are perhaps… er… not.

But then as a bonus, we get a handful of pages done in 1989, presumably specially for this collection, and his art style (if not the themes of his stories) revert to the 70s. So he still had it in him.

Googling Mervinius/Marvin Gilbert now doesn’t reveal a whole lot. This collection has never been reprinted, and his other work apparently hasn’t, either.

The only review I found of it is this truly moronic one:

The strip’s earliest days are 1975. Gilbert’s cartooning began as the work of an earnest amateur, his sketchy people loose, wobbly creations covered in randomly applied ben-day overlays and occasionally squashed into panel borders by word balloons filled to capacity. Over a decade and 150 pages later it hadn’t improved in any appreciable fashion.

What? Amateur? Ben-day overlays? Some people have 1) no taste and 2) no ability to read.

Moderne Man Comics (1990) #1 by B. von Alten.

Remember that mysterious Gin and Comix book that Eclipse distributed?

This is another one of those: Eclipse isn’t mentioned anywhere in the book, but it was part of Eclipse’s push to distribute books published by others, so let’s do it anyway in this blog series. (And it’s “1990” since I’m pretty sure Eclipse distributed it in that year: It was announced in the April issue of The Comics Journal.)

So these are gloriously unfunny strips about how everything’s going to hell and how everybody sucks (except “non-chemical” farmers). These aren’t so much failed jokes as if you’ve entered a strange realm where humour exists only as a strange myth.

Von Alten gets his facts from Earth First! etc.

So there’s strip of strip of things along the lines above. I mean, it’s probably not less funny than modern Garfield, but…

Another recurring theme is how people buy cheap, shoddy goods. Like, er, ha ha? But again, I’m not sure whether von Alten really meant these to be funny, so pointing out that they’re not funny isn’t really much of a criticism.

I found the more absurd strips work better. It’s not Zippy, but it’s… something…

And that’s the best strip in the book.

But there’s more! There’s also some strips that just plainly propagandise for better farming, which is nice, I guess.

Von Alten’s artwork owes a lot to early-70s underground comics. It’s got that round, slightly balloon-like look that was so popular with the hippies back then. And von Alten uses that style effectively: His strips are clear and kinda attractive in their stiltedness.

And there’s straightforward instructional strips. I’m totally going to build that house.

No, it’s not. While we’re probably not that far way politically, that makes things even worse.

This book has never been reprinted, and trying to find out anything about B. von Alten is impossible. Hm… Oh! His real name is Bruce Walthers von Alten and he published a few comics through Kitchen Sink in the early 70s. He had pages in Projunior, which was an R. Crumb book, I think.

Clive Barker Illustrator (1990), Clive Barker Illustrator II (1993) by Clive Barker, Fred Burke et al.

Eclipse continues their Clive Barker publishing strategy after Tapping the Vein and a portfolio or two.

Barker arrived at Eclipse via Steve Niles, who had gotten the rights to do comics adaptations of the Books of Blood short stories, and he’s the editor of the first volume of these art books.

Steven Bissette does the introduction and we’re told that the artworks stares back… at US!

Feel the stare!

Anyway, both volumes start off with a colour section.

The first volume’s colour section doesn’t say a peep about where these works are from, but I… think… that’s the cover of one of the Books of Blood er books?

That’s basically my main reservation about the first volume: We aren’t told anything about where these drawings and paintings originated, or even when they’re from. But the reproductions are very good: The ink drawings have a very stark and assertive presence on the pages.

I’m… guessing that’s an older work? There’s basically two very different styles; one uses very thin lines… from mechanical pens?

While the other is very ink-and-brush.

Oh, yeah, the text. It’s mostly one long Barker interview, but Burke fills in gamely with many an observation about the artwork. Unfortunately, none of his observations about these works are accompanied by the stuff he’s referring to. None of them. It’s just incredibly sloppy editing and design work on Eclipse’s part.

Ah! It’s like my complaints reverberated back into the past and made the second volume better from a reference point of view: Here all the works are clearly marked, not just with a date, but they also say what media each work was done in. Nice.

And by the time the second volume was released, Barker had an art showing that was apparently a huge success.

Some people poo-pooed the “Illustrator” bit in the title of these books, apparently.

Design-wise… the second book is a lot more cluttered. I’m guessing it was done in InDesign or some other desktop publishing thing. It has all the hallmarks of a non-professional designer slapping things onto the screen.

But it’s still nice. I mean, I’m not really a Barker fan. I loved reading Books of Blood in the 80s, and I thought Hellraiser was really scary, but I lost track of him after… Weaveworld? Which was a good book, but… Hm… What was the reason I stopped reading him, anyway? I think I found him getting a bit prosy.

And the text part of the second volume is Barker talking and talking and talking. Burke uses almost none of the space for his own reflections: It’s basically just an interview this time over, and I have to say that I just didn’t find Barker’s musings on art (he doesn’t like paintings of apples and conceptual artists are stupid (I’m summarising, but I don’t think I’m being unfair)) are jejune.

My own musings about Eclipse comics are endlessly fascinating, I’m sure you’ll agree. I’m sure, I said!

I”M SURE!

Steed and Mrs. Peel (1990) #1-3 by Grant Morrison and Ian Gibson et al.

Another adaptation finds it way to Eclipse via Brits Acme, but this is the final Acme copro-duction, I think. But this one is written by Grant Morrison, so there should be a chance of goofing on genre, at least?

But Gibson’s artwork is just really uninspiring. I’ve never seen the Avengers TV series that this comic is based on, but I’m guessing it’s a James Bond knock-off, so we get a normal toilet-that’s-really-an-elevator joke. But if you didn’t know that that’s the standard gag, would you have been able to tell that that’s what’s happening here?

Gibson’s just not very good at guiding the reader’s eye: On this panel, the bottom “panel” seems to demand to be read before the inset above to the right, but that’s the wrong reading order.

He’s also quite inconsistent with his faces: All the women look identical, and you have to look for clues for their identities by remembering who’s got minutely longer hair than the other. The men have very different faces… but they change from panel to panel, so that’s really no better.

Each of these 48 page squarebound issues feature two 22-ish page chapters, which makes me wonder whether this originally has been serialised in an anthology somewhere, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. It’s still a weird approach, but perhaps Morrison wanted to emulate TV episode structure.

Look how exciting it is when somebody shoots an… arrow? that’s an arrow? at our heroes. *sigh*

Gibson veers into French children’s comics territory with several of his characters, and they are completely incongruous with the rest of the… er… or perhaps not. Everything is a mess, really, so…

In the second issue, the latter half of the issue starts a new story… but the main storyline continues in the next issue. (And so does the new story.) That’s a weird choice.

The final issue is badly printed: All the linework seems to have “shadows”, giving it all a smudged, unpleasant look.

Oh, yeah, I didn’t mention the story at all, did I?

No. It’s total codswallop. I can vaguely see what Morrison may be going after: A zanier version of James Bond with huge, expensive set pieces and a fairy-tale-like twist, but it’s just tedious.

Boom comics re-serialised this a decade ago, but forgot to tell anybody it was a reprint. They also released a collected edition.

Others liked the book more than I did:

There’s a lot to like here. Steed & Mrs. Peel is hardly the strongest work in Morrison’s back catalogue, and it’s not an overlooked treasure by an measure. However, it is good fun – and there’s an obvious affection for the source material from both Morrison and Gibson, who have great fun playing up the absurdity and the hilarity of The Avengers. Steed rides a public toilet to work, while Peel flies a Union kite in the breeze. The story even features a none-too-subtle shout-out to Diana Rigg in the opening pages, as one gamer complains, “Them dice is rigged!”

Artist Ian Gibson has great fun with the material. His compositions are lovely and fluid, with his full-page splashes being something to behold. His approach is akin to that of a cartoonist, doing an excellent job creating likenesses of Diana Rigg or Patrick Macnee.

M (1990) #1-4 by Jon J Muth.

Eclipse had hit upon a new winning formula: Fully-painted “prestige format” squarebound 48 page comics adaptations of famous stuff: The Hobbit, the Clive Barker Books, James Bond… So why not the Fritz Lang version of Thea von Harbou’s M? It’s public domain, even, so Eclipse didn’t even have to pay for the rights.

That’s what I assumed, but I think I’m somewhat wrong in my cynicism:

Because this has all the hallmarks of being a passion project: Reading this, I get a strong feeling that this adaptation was initiated by Muth, and not by Eclipse.

Jon J Muth was, at the time, a “name” artist who had mostly worked at Marvel Comics, and is perhaps most fondly remembered for his collaboration with J. M. DeMatteis. Muth hadn’t previously published anything through Eclipse, but given the subject matter and where Eclipse was at at the time, it makes sense.

There’s even a flexi assembled by Muth combining Lang whistling and an orchestra playing the Grieg leitmotif from the film.

I’m listening to it now (and the Steve Niles assemblage on the back), and it’s… It’s not bad. A bit hokey, perhaps.

However… passion project or not… Muth’s approach to this seems to be to take photos and then… treating them? Somehow? Or has he just painted over pictures? When he goes all washed-out here it looks rather nice. Like one of the paintings from Edvard Munch’s sickly period. But way, way stiffer.

The decision to keep everything grey/sepia, with just the slightest hint of colours on some pages, can’t have been designed for optimal commercial success. But I guess it might perhaps give it more of a respectability in a bookstore context… if it ever got collected.

Because reading this, it’s mostly like looking at Italian fumetti. The angles in these panels aren’t anything that any person would ever draw by themselves given any choice: They look like badly framed snaps somehow painterised.

Brian Bolten contextualises M and Fritz Lang.

Aha! On the credits page we get a “field recording advisor” and “studio recording engineer”… “2nd unit photographer”… And they feel the need to state that the work is based on photos (duh) but that no photographs are reproduced here. So I’m guessing that my reaction to this was common enough.

But how did Muth do this, then? Painted over the photos on semi-transparent paper? A very lightboxy lightbox? It doesn’t say.

It’s mostly a pretty quick read, but Muth throws in the odd page where the characters explain everything. I don’t actually recall much from seeing M some years back, but perhaps the film had choppy, uneven pacing, too. I kinda doubt it.

And I can’t recall at all that the film dropped “interesting” factoids here and there.

Hey! That’s a pretty good imitation of the iconic shot from the Lang film.

The actor’s no Peter Lorre, though.

Whatever you may feel about the artwork, Muth somehow manages to drain the scenes of all the drama and excitement. The middle section, where the villains chase Lorre, I mean that other guy here, is just a seemingly endless back and forth without any development.

The actors Muth faithfully paints over (or whatever he’s doing) are just downright awful. They ham it up the best they can, I guess, but … they can’t.

Abrams somehow decided to publish a collected hardback edition in 2008, and Bill Randall had this to say about it in The Comics Journal 294:

Unfortunately, Muth’s style distracts from the story. The detail in his paintings overwhelms the panel-to-panel flow. Worse, the intrusive typeset captions and word balloons make M a sterile hybrid, not unlike the comics version of a mule. Reading it offers little pleasure. I can’t imagine imitating it. Other artists, like Sienkiewicz and Dave McKean, have shown more fruitfully how to integrate painting with the idioms of comics. Muth’s M seems an artistic cul-de-sac.

The Complete Alec (1990) by Eddie Campbell.

Ah, this winged its way into Eclipse’s hands via the Acme connection. I remember buying this book in the early 90s, but I had already bought (and read to bits) two of the three British Alec collections that had been released in the early 80s.

I remember what a revelation these comics were. I was in my early teens, and had read all a lot of the underground to new wave artists, and was particularly taken with Aline Kominsky and the people that followed in her (and Justin Green’s, I later learned) footsteps. Dori Seda, Krystine Kryttre… that whole Weirdo generation.

It was a mode of autobiographic storytelling that, while wonderful, was something completely different than what Campbell was doing. Reading Kominsky was like having a wonderfully entertaining person ranting at you and telling you the most outrageous stories about themselves. Campbell is more literary, and doesn’t really focus that much on himself. You can read one page from Dori Seda and you know her intimately, immediately. I’m not sure I know Campbell at all after re-reading, for what I’m sure is the tenth time, this 130 page collection.

Campbell is such and awe-inspiring storyteller. While these are stories about his friends and him (in that order, really), he’s not really that interested in getting to the point (or any point), and instead things kinda dissolve and you never really get all the details to these stories straight. Campbell is oblique and withholds: Everything to maintain the romantic, wistful mood of this reality.

I always thought that there would be an avalanche of new artists that looked at Campbell’s work and would immediately start writing in this mode. But the generation that followed (Julie Doucet, Joe Matt, Chester Brown, etc) seemed to take nothing from Campbell and instead followed on directly from the 70s undergrounds in their obsessions.

But I think that’s changed now, finally. I think I can detect traces of Campbell’s techniques and moods in the current generation of comics artists.

These stories were created over an almost ten year period, so it’s amazing how consistent they are, and what an emotional arc they describe. The artwork does change a bit during the duration, though. I’m particularly taken with his heaviest letratone period, where he must have been sitting and cutting tone for days on end to get his effects…

He sticks to the nine panel per page format throughout the series, which is also pretty unusual. Especially for that time: Such formal tics would get more pronounced later (after Alan Moore had popularised them).

(I think the sequence above is the most harrowing emotional one in the book, and the one that hit hardest as a, what?, 14 year old. Don’t ruin jokes!)

But one thing we have to ask ourselves: Is Campbell to blame for Housewives of Atlanta? Above he tells how he used to snap photos of the people around him to use in his comics, and after a while they forgot to pose. Did somebody read these comics and then start shooting that Kardashian TV show!?

Probably not. But it’s typical how something first appears in the margins of culture before being appropriated as entertainment some years later. The avant garde is the R&D dept. of Hollywood.

The name of this collection is “The Complete Alec”, and it seemed pretty final, as it ends with him leaving for Australia. However, a couple of decades later, the Alec collection would be released with at least four times as many pages. But he stopped calling his stand-in character “Alec”, though.

Let’s see whether I can find any contemporary reviews to see whether everybody else was as enthused as I was…

Oh, here’s an interview with Campbell after this collection was released from the Comics Journal #145:

YANG: It ts funny, because in that Journal interview with Alan Moore, he says the same thing, that you thrive on trying to make ordinary life interesting.

CAMPBELL: I’m not trying to make ordinary life interesting: it is interesting. It’s exciting, unbelievably exciting. I was on my bike the other day and I overshot my turn-off and I found myself away down by the river and there were these trees growing out Of the river. It was so crazy and beautiful I couldn’t believe it. There were trees growing out of the river, and it was murky and it was dark and there was this terrible tropical rain going on. And it wasn’t like mangrove trees, it was straight trees growing out of the river. I think the river was overflooded. But I thought, Gee, isn’t that amazing. And I wasn’t even coming from the pub — I was on my way to it.

That’s just perfect.

But here’s Rich Kreiner in the Comics Journal #140:

Campbell possesses a raconteur’s intuitive understanding of what makes for an engaging story and how it can unfold to advantage. He displays a fondness for and a fidelity to dialect and the quirks of conversation. He also demonstrates a blithe, unfailing, and seemingly effortless ability to make panels intrinsically interesting in their composition. Last but never least are the elements of humor that Campbell plainly feels makes the whole affair — life, drinking, cartooning — worth pursuing. Alec’s life is a warmer, richer, funnier. and more vibrant “slice” than much of our own… more an overflowing “mug” of life.

Gin and Comix (1990) #1 edited by Philippe Lardy and José Ortega.

Now, this is a weird one. Eclipse listed this book in one of their “on the stands” columns, so I bought it, naturally. The listing said that it was a collection of student works from the School of Visual Arts.

And the indicia seems to agree with that. I mean, it doesn’t mention that this is studentey work, but it does mention the SVA.

But there’s no mention of Eclipse Comics at all. Did Eclipse just distribute it? Just list it on the “on the stands” column to be nice? I can find no trace on the interwebs about Eclipse being involved with this book at all, so perhaps they weren’t?

Anyway, I’ve got the book now, so let’s just read it. If this offends your Eclipse-only sensibilities, avert your eyes now!

This books is the exact format of the first series of Raw Magazine: It’s almost-tabloid size, is on thick, white paper and is saddle-stitched. It’s almost all comics, but there’s a few photo pieces, and one text piece.

Most of the artists are completely unknown to me, which gives credence to the “student” bit. It’s also quite punk, so that points to the SVA.

Some of the pieces are really good! Not just from a design perspective, but has emotional impact, like this page from co-editor Ortega.

The best bit here are the pages by Jerry Moriarty. He was a teacher at the SVA, I think, and I can’t recall seeing these pieces before. There’s four of these huge two-page spreads and they’re all totes spiffy.

The other co-editor, Philippe Lardy does an 11 page story that’s extremely stylish.

And here’s a name I know! David Sandlin does the centrepiece, complete with a stitched-in booklet, just like Raw Magazine.

This one folds out into a panorama, though. Trey cool.

Apart from the students and teachers at the SVA, and the editors themselves, there’s a few pieces that seem to be translated imports from Europe, like this thing by Jan Smet…

And the longest piece in the book, a great strip by Mokeït, who’s French. It, and perhaps the Jerry Moriarty pages, are probably the only ones that would have been accepted into Raw Magazine. While many of the pieces are good reads and look nice, they don’t feel that… urgent? Yeah, perhaps that’s the right word.

I’ve been googling some more, and this just doesn’t seem to be a well-known book. Did it have very limited distribution? I don’t know. And I still don’t know what the Eclipse connection is, but it was nice to get a break from the usual Eclipse fare, anyway.