Katzenjammer Komiks

(Herbert really wants to leave this page just as it was formed back in 99. Why? For the most pathetic of reasons. Since those pre-millennial days, Terry Zwigoff, highly-praised below for Crumb, has gone on to make Ghost World, for which he is being highly praised by prominent members of the auriferous Horde. Then Jimmy Corrigan (AKA The Acme Novelty Library) got shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize. Herbert thinks this proves that he is 'ahead' of his time. Feeling sick, or just numbed out by the preening idiocy?)

'What do I love about comics? I was a child in Dundee, home of The Beano, The Dandy, The Topper, Commando Books ('Gott in Himmel! Aaargh!!'), Bunty, Jackie (ah, the prepubescent, near-transvestite joy of reading a girl's comic). My grandmother worked in a newsagent as well as in a mill, and brought home all these and more. The paper ages rapidly, smelling different after a week. The stories took on that smell in the memory: slightly rotting, slightly cotton.

The two sisters who lived next door to my other gran had an old Dandy annual from the fifties, coverless and bashed, that I got to read on the rare occasions I went through to their flat. This was like looking down a well of childhood. One time we went to visit my Uncle Bobby and Aunty Sarah when they lived in a tenement up by the Glassite Kirk (it's octagonal), and I was given a heap of Green Lantern and Justice League comics. I was maybe sevenish, and heavily into Greek and Norse mythology, so all this went straight into that zone.

The walk-in cupboard by my adolescent bedroom was full of Astounding Stories. The spare room in my first adult house was full of my deliquescent Beano collection. When I was lolling around ugly squats in dehydrated hallucinatory conditions there was always a copy of Zippy somewhere to ask me if I was having fun yet? The transition from tenement child to krautrock teen to slacked-out postgrad to hi/lo/lite culture-bending entity was made with the assistance of many artists, writers, inkers, letterers and colourists.'

Or as Jim puts it:

'Like Neptune, Frank enjoys the riches of the deep. His world works and rewards him vigorously, and Frank learns nothing, ever. Why should he? In his world there is no pattern, no law; only the incessant conversational cross-currents of nature and abstraction. Frank is innocent but not noble. What he is really looking for is a good scare. He has learned, and learned well, that the blow never falls. Frank has many bodies, all identical.'

(Text by Jim Woodring, from a set of 12 cards outlining the dramatis personae of Frank's world.)

Robert Crumb

http://www.netjunk.com/users/snoid/links.htm Here's all your necessary links in one easy site. Be sure to send someone a Crumbazoid.

http://www.crumbcomics.com What can one say but 'Whoa Nellie!'

http://www.spe.sony.com/classics/crumb Devoted to the extraordinary Terry Zwigoff documovie Crumb, which is like a cross between David Lynch and Breaking the Waves. South Bank Show it ain't.

Others

http://www.hedweb.com/alistair/comixund.html Bring on the obligatory thoughtful person, to prove all this is 'interleckshual'. Honest.

http://www.fantagraphics.com/ This is the place for all your paranoiac comestibles. Try the following cartoon trinity: Peter Bagge, Daniel Clowes, Kim Deitch. The first two of these have now been featured in the Guardian (cf Golden Horde complaint elsewhere), but Deitch, with his ageing movie stars and hallucinated cat, is still to be consumed. Saddest laugh you'll ever have? Try the Acme Novelty Library, a painstakingly beautiful construction.

http://www.diamondcomics.com/previous/editorial/readinglamp/eightball.html Unsure about that Mr Clowes fellow? He has been reviewed here, though that is unlikely to prepare you in any real sense for Ghost World. I'm not quite sure what the word 'real' could mean in this context.

Care to obsess some more?