The Roots of My Hair. Lou Lubie. Helvetiq. 2026. 220pp. $24.95.
This graphic novel grabbed my attention right from the start, provoking questions and alternatively answering them in a steady and impressive back and forth rhythm. Lou Lubie delves deeply into the subject of hair as someone fully committed and passionate to the task. I know hair is part of my identity. I’ve changed it up over the years, from super short to super long, only answering to myself. This I relate well with Lubie who has gone on a particularly challenging journey from as far back as she can remember, having to confront her own mother’s obsession with keeping her daughter’s naturally curly hair at bay. This is a story, among other things, about Lubie’s right to her own body, specifically her hair.
Just like my writing a review of a graphic novel takes work, building it up bit by bit, willing it into existence, so I am humbled by all the thoughtful details that go into this book, all seeming to effortlessly fit into place. Ah, now this is a work of integrity: honest, focused and purposeful. There is definitely no one definitive way to create a graphic novel. That’s the beauty of the art form which includes everything from the most raw and experimental to the highly polished. This work is in a more traditional graphic novel format with an educational component to it. This book has been acknowledged in Europe and won awards there. Now, available in English for the first time, it makes its way across the pond.
Our story follows Rose, the author’s alter ego, a mixed-race young woman, split between identifying as white or Black. Her family is from a remote area known as Réunion Island, located in the Indian Ocean, east of Madagascar. It was a French colony from 1642 until 1946. By the time her parents are born in the 1960s, and into the present, the region reverberates from its colonialist past, that established deeply entrenched social, racial and economic hierarchies. Rose grew up to aspire to the sleek flowing hair of the white minority, who were at the top of the social strata. Kinky hair was looked down upon as coming from the Black community, at the bottom of the strata. Rose’s mother struggles with the brainwashing of what had been accepted as social norms. Rose, herself, while ever defiant, must also face her own struggles to overcome a misguided, and outright racist, mindset once she tries to find her place at a liberal arts college in Paris. The fairy tale fantasy of a princess with flowing hair is very alluring and hard to fight off.
Throughout the book, Lubie provides various passages that inform the reader on pertinent information related to the unfolding narrative. It is accomplished very deftly, in a natural way that keeps to the flow and tone of the work. It begins gradually, with a casual analysis of Rose’s family’s hair types. Then we move along to a more formal look at hair types. Next thing you know, we’re covering genealogy, biology and history.
Lou Lubie has a very clean and lean drawing style that is direct and impactful. Lubie has something specific to say, avoids detours, and pursues a clear consistent path. Her mission is to remain focused and follow her story’s own specificity. The goal is to follow a young woman’s journey, from childhood to adulthood, as she must process what it means to be a fully realized person, sometimes having to be at odds with the majority. Lubie’s Rose is a fighter, up for a fight, even when success seems out of reach. In the end, it was never out of reach at all. What a satisfying and hard won touch of insight!
Lou Lubie has created a very inspiring work! It’s great to find a graphic novel that delivers on so many levels. Lubie even provides endnotes at the back of the book, something that more graphic novelists should consider. Again, there’s no right or wrong way to tackle a graphic novel. Some books are more spot on than others and this one is high on my list. It will be on yours too.
The Machine is Broken. Jared Sarnie. Fieldmouse Press. 2026. 30pp. $13.95. (release date: May 26, 2026) Available for pre-order at Fieldmouse and Asterism)
How to tackle a sensitive subject? Sometimes, you just have to dive in, honey. That’s the approach that Jared Sarnie has taken with his debut graphic novel about suicide. Sarnie appears to have come out of nowhere with this provocative work. Let’s dive in.
Our focus is a young woman named Lux. She has decided to kill herself. She goes to Zurich which is supposed to have the world’s first fully legal “suicide pod.” Who knew? Lux is bringing along her mom and, rather begrudgingly, her sister. Even if you’re familiar with how suicide has been treated in various media, recently and even throughout the ages, it retains its own particular sense of shock. How successful a work ends up being depends, in large part, on how you work with that sense of shock. We aren’t actually cheering, Lux on, are we? Sarnie leans hard on the provocative throwing in every dark comedy trope he can get his hands on in this over-the-top narrative that careens around in a very free-wheeling, sometimes confusing, sometimes glib, conversational style. The work goes in and out, this way and that way, sometimes comics, sometimes pop art, sometimes an ad promoting itself as the author’s debut graphic novel. At one point, Sarnie states that Alison Bechdel would be rolling in her grave only to then state that, no, Alison Bechdel is certainly not dead. So, quite a fun house effect.
No doubt, this is packed with energy and often has a special quality to it, offering interesting bits and visual treats. What inspired Sarnie to create his first graphic novel about a young woman seeking to end her life would be an interesting question. Often, the question reverts back as to what makes any creator believe they are the person to tell such a story. It’s a very significant question and one that anyone in crisis can make note of. Take this dark comedy for what it is, no more, no less. And then this begs the question: What exactly is this dark comedy? Well, as I suggest: it’s something packed with energy offering some interesting bits and visual treats. It’s an ambitious undertaking and perhaps thirty pages is a good start. Sarnie needs to ask himself why he chose to undertake this work in the first place and then go from there.
Sarnie presents the reader with a portrait of today’s troubled youth as he sees it with Lux as a stand-in. She is dealing with conflicting emotions, and she finds solace a little too often in fast food, especially McDonald’s. But life keeps letting her down. She can’t even rely on some soft serve ice cream from McD’s because, drum roll please, the machine in broken. And then she kisses a girl and that seems to help.
So, sure, I want to see more in the future from Sarnie and I hope my criticism proves constructive. Overall, Sarnie is on the right track and where things fall short is just part of the process. Making really good comics is not a sprint but a marathon. I don’t think anyone wants to leave the bar set at simply checking off boxes to whatever the zeitgeist seems to demand. That way of thinking will never create anything of lasting value.
Big shout out to Emil Ferris!
And, as for cartoonists rolling in their graves, who aren’t really dead, I’ve gotta say, big shout out to Emil Ferris as Sarnie clearly is feelin’ an influence there. And that’s okay, no doubt. I think Sarnie is having a good time as he basically is pushing this and that button, seeing how everything works in the world of comics. Yes, Jared Sarnie, there’s a lot you can do with this amazing comics medium. I look forward to seeing more.
HELP! by Ethan Llewellyn and Francis Todd. 2025. Self-Published. 32pp. £10.00.
Sometimes the obvious choice alludes you. I kept thinking I would probably like this comic and, once I dived into some Instagram posts, I was hooked. Ethan Llewellyn and Francis Todd have created something genuinely fun. They go through a distillation process–not just a simple smash and grab. It’s not cool, or highly ironic, to basically trace over someone else’s work and these guys don’t do that. The creative team of Llewellyn and Todd are honest lads who are equally inspired by the legacy of comix and enjoy creating their own inventive and original work.
From “Nice Tits” by Ethan Llewellyn.
If you haven’t already, I encourage you to check out their work on Instagram, for starters. That’s their creative laboratory where stuff has a chance to brew and take hold. The book they have available collects a certain batch of what they’ve been up to on social media and other places. I believe getting a copy of HELP! is a great way to not only support rising talent but an excellent way to keep these guys on your radar. Their latest stuff indicates that they keep getting better and are in it for the long haul. Once a set of characters and whatnot has gotten a chance to settle in, it just keeps moving forward. That’s what’s happening here: the gags get sharper, the art gets sharper and we’re all happy.
From “Skid the Cat” by Ethan Llewellyn.
UK cartoonists Ethan Llewellyn (creator of NAFF) and Francis Todd (Caribou) are the talents behind this anthology showcase drawing inspiration from 80s-2000s North American alternative comics and the UK scene. This comic debuted at London’s prestigious Gosh! Comics late last year. It alternates between Llewellyn channeling Daniel Clowes and Todd channeling Jesse Moynihan. This is a more vulgar version of Clowes; and a more subdued version of Moynihan. You have stuff like Llewyn’s ongoing gag about his alter ego attempting to befriend a heroin junkie. And you’ve got dreamy stuff from Todd about creatures from distant lands and other esoteric content. If I’m in an impatient mood, I could say that I feel like these two lads are creating bits that are more in a developmental stage than being outright compelling. But the funny thing about these sort of anthologies is that they’re true workhorses ready to take a beating, waiting for the reader to reconsider.
From “Clean Slate” by Todd Francis.
I think of all the pieces in this book, I was mostly intrigued with Llewllyn’s “Skid the Cat!” for its audacity and leaning hard into a vulgar itch he needed to scratch. Its very uninhibited approach is notable with its sense of danger and chaos. I also must admit that I enjoyed Todd’s “Clean Slate” about the mysterious outsider who must prove himself to a village within a castle.
What Llewllyn and Todd bring to the table is not only a lot of enthusiasm but a lot of honest hard-working talent. I think this debut issue is a terrific start. These lads are going places. I can see they have the confidence and persistence to keep getting better and keep moving forward. These guys will move mountains, I’m sure of it. This book is easily well worth the price of admission. Buy HELP! now before everyone else.
So Buttons #15. w. Jonathan Baylis. various artists. Alchemy Comics. 36pp. $10.
And so the saga continues. We’re up to Issue 15 in the life and times of one Jonathan Baylis: stories, anecdotes and observations he writes and then various talented comics artists illustrate. As was the case with the great comics trailblazer Harvey Pekar, who was known for relentlessly recounting all aspects of his life, drilling down to all manner of minutiae, so Baylis gives readers his take on things.
The stylings of Jonathan Baylis and Danny Hellman.
These comics are a nice snackable size, a nod to one of the go-to mini-comic formats, the folded copier paper size of 8.5 x 5.5. You can easily travel with it and maybe read it on the train, a bus station or airport. I had it with me in my bag so I sat down at a fairly nice waystation on my journey. I had remembered enjoying a quaint spot at the airport food court and chose to eat my food at an expansive space owned by another restaurant chain. I was not shooed away. Maybe it was because I ordered a beer from them. Or maybe they noticed I was reading So Buttons and knew to leave me alone.
The stylings of Jonathan Baylis and Kari Christian Krumpholz.
The waitress made the right choice to allow me to proceed unhindered. In fact, I was honored. I couldn’t help but notice other people would attempt to do just as I did, bring food from one fine establishment and sit down and use the long luxurious table from another establishment. The waitress would swoop down and reprimand these folks: “This is a restaurant. I’m sorry but you can’t eat here.” Perhaps, if these fine folk had been given a chance to order something, all would have been forgiven. Perhaps if these fine folk were reading So Buttons, like I was, they would have been given a friendly nod and welcomed. Alas, I was favored; they were not.
The stylings of Jonathan Baylis and Bhanu Pratap.
Well, I’ve gotta say that Baylis is groovin’ on what he’s doin’. Based upon my reading his last issue and what he says about his own writing process, involving lively free association and leaping from one subject to another, I think Harvey Pekar would be amused and proud. Put ‘er there friend, you’re a gritty authentic son of a gun.
The stylings of Jonathan Baylis and Noah Van Sciver.
One hightlight that is particularly spot on is the pairing of Baylis with noted humorist and cartoonist Noah Van Sciver. Given the subject of family dynamics, especially dissecting one’s father, this amounts to a dream team combination.
The stylings of Jonathan Baylis and Nathan Gelgud.
Another highlight that’s really on the money is the paring of Baylis with cinephile -activist-cartoonist Nathan Gelgud. The idea here is that film is too precious and vital to only be shared among a select few. Indeed. Power to the People!
Sid the Cat #3. ed. Andrew Greenstone. Sid the Cat. $15.99.
Andrew Greenstone is a great cartoonist, known for his work on The Nib, with a quirky distinctive style. For those who keep up with indie comics, you may have seen his work in the comics anthology, Rust Belt Review. And, if you’re really all in, maybe you’ve been keeping up with his work on Sid the Cat. This will appeal to anyone who loves indie comics and music as it is a rock ‘n’ roll magazine that Andrew oversees for the Los Angeles-based music promoter, Sid the Cat. Andrew, as editor, brings in various other cartoonists as well as contributes his own work. It’s a fun keepsake: a mix of prose, photographs and features mostly adapting local music shows into comics.
Encapsulating a moment and an era.
Among the features in the third and latest issue, are comics reports on a couple of shows on the same night at two different venues. Andrew covers Mike Viola at Gold Diggers and creative director Ysabel Riina (with art by Katrine Karimpour) covers boygenius at The Smell. I really enjoyed how Andrew captures details and provides insights. It’s top-notch music journalism through words and pictures. It really delivers on that impulse many of us have to document in some way a special scene, a way of perfectly encapsulating a moment and an era–while not relying on a smartphone.
Tapping into all the details.
Ysabel Riina and Katrine Karimpour follow Andrew’s piece with their take on boygenius at the Smell. Another wonderful piece that captures those subtle details of a gathering of youth, and the young-at-heart, mesmerized by great music. It’s a challenge to take any event and try to do justice to what is happening onstage and on the floor. I think it’s a testament to the power of comics that it’s being put to use in such a practical, and even poetic, way. Really good music journalism has a long tradition of being artful and literary so it makes perfect sense to have music and comics journalism meld together as often as possible. No doubt, Sid the Cat magazine is an intoxicating melding of music and comics journalism.
Along with the music coverage, Andrew offers up other treats like the adventures of Pizza Vampire, with inks by Mars Gearhart. In this episode, our hero learns to live backwards in time. It proves to be a nice counterbalance to the music reportage, something offbeat and weird that underscores the off-kilter vibe. So, I hope this gives you a satisfactory taste of what you’ll find in this magazine. Overall, I think this is a valuable piece of pop culture ephemera that fans of comics and music will cherish. There used to be more of this kind of stuff out there. Just think of the heyday of alt-weekly newspapers. Or the comics page in Pulse!, the magazine for Tower Records. This is going back over twenty years ago. How time flies. So, definitely enjoy Sid the Cat magazine while it’s around, alive and kicking!
Cookies and Herb. Matt MacFarland. Fieldmouse Press. 2025. 72pp. $15.
Thank goodness for the wise and gentle elders in our lives. If not for their patience and guidance, we’d be all the lesser for it. Matt MacFarland beautifully depicts these special human connections in his comics–and not in a typically sentimental way but in his own distinctively direct and honest approach.
I first discovered MacFarland’s comics in 2016 with his on-going noir series, Dark Pants, about a pair of cursed pants that make their way from one owner to the next. Read my review here. This new title, in comparison, is like night and day while also neatly fitting into the MacFarland universe. All of his characters, whether in a dark comedy or in childhood auto-bio, share a similar vulnerability.
MacFarland’s sweet spot of inquiry is exploring the human condition in its most tender moments. He has already proven himself quite capable with, Dark Pants, his one-person anthology series. He’s moved on to a tongue-in-cheek exploration of married life in Scenes From a Marriage and other assorted short form comics. He recently did a hilarious comic featuring a very sensitive and vulnerable Big Foot for Volume 6 of the Rust Belt Review anthology.
MacFarland looks back at his childhood and coming-of-age in this new book. He begins his story with him as an alienated little boy in the early 1980s. Little Matt finds solace in his regular visits to his next-door neighbor, Herb, a retiree who seems to have an endless supply of cookies on hand. The drawing style is fun and simple and could easily fit within a children’s book format. Ah, but then things do get dark. A few pages in, little Matt is given the news that his mom is expecting and he will soon have a little brother. While this would be potentially exciting news, Matt finds it rather threatening. No sentimental journey here. In fact, Matt’s conflicted feelings come to a head when, given a chance to hold his baby brother, he drops him.
There’s an impressive steady pace to this comic that seamlessly follows Matt from childhood all the way to a young man out of college and onward into middle age. There are some delightful visual treats along the way too. I especially like how MacFarland depicts Matt’s disoriented POV as he’s opening his eyes from sleep with eye-shaped panels gradually opening. Another nice touch is after Matt’s famous tricycle crash, the one that gives him his nickname of “Crash.” In the panel right after the disaster, characters are depicted upside down as per Matt’s POV. Through it all, the reader is treated to a very immersive and empathetic experience. Matt, the boy, young man and adult, evolve and gain the wisdom that often feels comes too late and yet also seems to arrive in the only way it could possibly have arrived.
When you’re a young artist, with more ideals than money, your day job a prime indicator (barista, bookseller, movie usher), you know what you’re in for: your life is full of like-minded souls; and, heck, maybe you’ll get caught up in some clumsy attempts at overthrowing capitalism. That’s the vibe to Reel Politik, the hilarious comic strip by Nathan Gelgud, about a ragtag group of employees hanging on by their fingernails at a local indie movie theater. You can catch up with the latest post on Gelgud’s Instagram and you can enjoy a new collection published by Drawn & Quarterly.
Gelgud’s comics about movies, and the arts in general, appear in The New York Times, The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. This new book of his Reel Politik comic strip gives you a handy and fun way to jump right into it all. You’re getting a special view of the whole moviegoer scene from someone who’s tracked it from various vantage points: projectionist, video store clerk, movie critic and, of course, as a cartoonist.
When you’re young, just starting out, you’ve got a whole plethora of defense mechanisms. The go-to shield for all manner of artists, from poseurs to die-hard bohemians, is to take on the role of an expert. Sometimes this works out really well, especially if you’ve actually read the book or viewed the movie you’re pontificating about–or maybe you’ve at least listened to a podcast on the subject at hand? Ah, standards have plummeted under the guise of being mired in privilege. Anyway, Gelgud provides delicious portraits of various cinema/activist purists among his characters such as Sandra, who believes a pure cinema experience includes going to a movie theater without knowing what film you’re about to view. This is not just a quirky philosophy for her but something she imposes upon her innocent customers.
A really good comic strip takes on a life of its own and is open to various interpretations. Gelgud, in the tradition of great cartoonists, is a keen social observer, ready to poke fun at the culture-at-large and its critics. A case in point is well into the narrative, once the movie employees have taken over and freed cinema of its capitalist shackles. Sandra is rejoicing over how cinema is now free and For The People. No one is enslaved to the strictures of the past–the hierarchy imposed by the Criterion Collection. Someone points out a man who has been put in a cage. Sandra shrugs and admits some people are less equal than others. The man in the cage is serving time for having scratched a copy of a beloved classic film! We’ve been brainwashed by a consumer culture but we’ve also been brainwashed by a slogan-heavy activist class.
Well, the politics in Reel Politik never gets too heavy. If you can’t take a joke, then maybe you’re part of the problem, no? Overall, this is a comic strip full of whimsical humor, biting satire and guided by a true love for a couple of often misunderstood art forms: cinema and comics!
Unbeknownst to me, a sister-brother creative team, comic artists Maria and Peter Hoey, have been dipping into a kind of Surrealism (by their own account) in their Coin-Op series. This short-book-length issue recalls immediately the themes of loneliness in modern life, dramatized in the work of Chris Ware and among others, the Canadian artist who calls himself Seth. Their comic panels exude cold, the coldness of a vanished era of popular culture.
From Coin-Op #10: Wet Cement.
I do not think that Ware, who has done a lot with the Superman mythos— more or less merging it with absent-parenthood—or Seth have ventured far into the realm of Surreailsm. But this is an issue deserving more discussion in the Hoeys’ work and Surrealist history-at-large.
Dadaists famously put scraps of daily life into new patterns, opening up the art world in new ways. Surrealists, distancing themselves from their precursors (with some personnel overlap), placed the dream and the unconscious at the center or their own vision of art and the possibilities that it raised for changing society dramatically…and for living differently as part of the change.
The opening chapter of Surrealism famously ended by 1941 or so, when Fascism spread world war and the Popular Front, very much supported by Communists, took over the job of fighting behind the lines. Surrealism no longer seemed so new or so interesting. And then again, a slew of Hollywood films, some of the best of them written by Communists, developed the themes of what French critics (some of them former Surrealists) would hail as film noir.
From Coin-Op #10: Wet Cement.
Noir made vivid sense in the post-war world, especially post-war America, where the idealism of wartime seemed to drain out and be replaced by cynicism, materialist individualism, and corruption. Detective and crime novels published earlier, those of Daniell Hammet in particular, offered a hard-boiled look that invited film adaptation (Hammet himself was teaching at the Jefferson School, a veritable red academy, after mustered out of the Service). Non-political and even right-wing writers and directors reached the same artistic solutions to the alienation of modern life. Even It’s a Wonderful Life (1947), the Christmas classic, could be seen as noir with a happy ending and the banker-swindler of the town as the concentration of everything wrong and corrupt in the wake of Fascism’s defeat.
Decades pass, Surrealist paintings win top honors at global art shows while the revolutionary vision seems ever more obscure, held in literal form by individuals and small groups mostly unrecognized. A new wave of interest, around 1960, is mostly concerned with form and not content, although it serves as a venue for gay and lesbian artists to emerge with their own visions alongside Pop and other influences of the day, shaped in part by the emerging Counter Culture.
The occasional Surrealist writer had been among the enthusiasts of animation, jazz, blues, and comics since the early 1950s. With Franklin Rosemont at the center of the Surrealist group, and revival in Chicago during the middle 1960s, the interest in popular culture and black culture (at the veritable center of Blues culture) emerged anew and with vigor.
Rosemont devoted himself, in critical/celebratory essays, to the likes of Chester Gould (Dick Tracy), Bill Holman (Smokey Stover), Basil Wolverton (Powerhouse Pepper) and, above all, Carl Barks (Donald Duck and family) among other comics artists, and to the great animation creators in Hollywood, above all, Tex Avery. It is intriguing that no avowed Surrealist in Rosemont’s circle or elsewhere actually became a comic artist, even as a wide circle of “Underground Comix” notables could, for instance, take part in a Surrealist theme, the one-shot Mondo Snarfo (1978) comes to mind. There, R. Crumb, Bill Griffith, Art Spiegelman and others, including comic publisher-editor-artist Denis Kitchen, here tried their hand at Surrealist ideas and images detached from anything like a formal Surrealist allegiance.
The Hoeys, arguably, have made the connection in Wet Cement. Not with the radical politics and dream-like claims of Surrealists, as such, but with the noir sensibility of the disconnections to reality. Their work, if made as individual comic panels transferred to studio art, could fit comfortably in the Surrealism exhibits that have re-emerged since the 2024 centennial of the founding of the movement in Paris.
From Coin-Op #10: Wet Cement.
It is difficult to make much narrative sense of the Hoeys’ saga of brainwave transmissions (something more and more believable) of secret authorities with sleep walkers’ dreams recorded. Not much more so with a loose plot about an imprisoned lover freed by a techno-marvel, following an insight mysteriously received in a movie theater. And so what.
From Karl Marx Bolan.
An earlier comic in their series, Karl Marx Bolan, has dead Rock ’n Roll stars Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent magically saving a protagonist from an otherwise deadly car crash, prompting the young Bolan into a musical career that overturns the global order and makes him the PM of the United Kingdom! At last, the abysmal Labour Party is overthrown the right way, with left-wing hero Jeremy Corbyn sure to be close at hand.
The Hoeys’ Coin-Op Comics Anthology, 1997-2017 (Top Shelf, 2018) is regrettably out of print, most regrettably because some adventures in prose throw light on their other work. Their repeated treatment of jazz musicians, including the Paris music scene between the Wars, the site of experiments and exiles, is revelatory. Two Hollywood legends, Orson Welles and Nicholas Ray, are also treated with sensitivity, if determinedly avoiding the high days of the Hollywood Left and the consequent Blacklist that shaped and reshaped cinema, from Golden Age to Noir.
In Perpetuity by Maria Hoey and Peter Hoey, 2024.
The Shadower, from Top Shelf Productions, March, 2026.
For classic Surrealists, the plot is overrated anyway. The purposeful flatness of the art, the sense of the unbelievable becoming ordinary works effectively to send the reader into a kind of dreamscape. Just where the artists wish.
A close look at Snafu suggests what is behind the behindess of popular culture in its pulp-industry glory days, just before professors discovered the paperback market for their prospective (or imagined) best-sellers. A dozen versions of Seventeen or other magazines for adolescent girl-readers; more dozens for the home-bound household drudge, mostly short fiction; Hollywood glamour mags by the dozens; Men’s Magazines with adventures and salacious fiction of semi-nude women, alongside lion-hunting and such-like manly fantasies. Not to mention Hot Rod specials, Wrestling specials, big-selling Sci-Fi magazines with wonderfully crazy covers. All this miles below the respectable (and then still numerous) slicks like the Saturday Evening Post.
MAD #6, 1953.
Mad Comics (1952-55), notoriously the brain child of Harvey Kurtzman, drawn by a handful of the greatest satirical artists of the age and best known for skewering the morals and manners of modern culture was also….a huge hit. So huge that it evoked, as its more hugely popular successor Mad Magazine would evoke, a not-so-small army of imitators. The best of them by a long stretch was Panic (1953-55), using many of the same artists but without the avant-garde “feel” expressed, for instance, in the April, 1955 Mad Comics satire of art history including abstract expressionism, seen through the imagined artistic life of Willie Elder, Kurtzman’s most intimate collaborator. Nobody else would even think to go that deep, although when I asked Kurtzman about this most striking and unusual feature, he responded “it is amazing what you can do if you have pages to fill.” He was joking, I think. Maybe.
PANIC #1, 1954.
Kurtzman, resigning from Mad when his insistence that he own 51% ownership was turned down, famously tried to duplicate his success in Trump, Humbug and the final shot, Help! Simply to name all the other Mad knockoffs during the 1950s-70s would be impossible, but they definitely include Eh!, Snafu, Frenzy, Cracked, Thimk, Loco,Frantic, Grump, Drool and Crazy. Cracked outlasted the rest by winning reader loyalty as a serviceable if second-rate Mad. Sick!, more literary pulp than comic, stands out as a kind of avant-garde response, an imitation Lenny Bruce on the page, easily adopted from the lesser stand-up comics of the day.
Kurtzman, when I pressed him for precursors of Mad Comics, suggested that the college humor magazines, especially in their post-war phase where censorship and political restraint wavered, had offered a model of sorts for what he wanted to do with something new. He and his artists would take on the world. The GI Bill generation that launched campus cinema clubs to see European art films and sometimes protested racial discrimination wanted something more than a handshake from the society that sent them to war. Through the 1950s and a bit further, college magazines continued to appear with issues banned for their sarcastic political commentary as well as overly sexualized prose and cartoons.
SNAFU #3, 1956.
Snafu, like nearly all of the other Mad imitators, had no such ambition, although repeated, not-very-humorous references to violence may indirectly reflect wartime memories and unintentionally express PTSD. “The Funniest Magazine in the World” (an overly ambitious claim, to say the least) lasted two years in the middle 1950s, the normal run for a Mad Comics imitator. And it had several veterans of Kurtzman’s project, mainly artist John Severin and his sister Marie, a letterer who could obviously go beyond her domain to produce parody photo manipulations.
HELP! #12, 1960.
The expansive introduction by Michael J. Vassallo may itself be worth the price of the book to scholars. Both meticulous and incisive, at least when the fannish generosity of appreciation does not get in the way, it tells us what we need to know. We learn that businessman-publisher Martin Goodman, known earlier for the formative Timely Comics, is in charge here, if doubtless preoccupied by the wider scope of his empire. For a while, Stan Lee clocked in as an executive employee and continued in the boom years to reign over dozens of titles with a small army of underpaid contributors. Jim Warren would publish Kurtzman’s Help!. Andkill it for the crime of low revenue.
Goodman, familiar with many of the comic artists and writers who had seen military service—most of them in non-combat roles as educator/editors, identified with the sentiments of the Warner Brothers famed 1946 animated feature, “Private Snafu.” Famously, the phrase “situation normal, all fucked up” was a familiar expression of ordinary soldiers none too fond of the Brass that lorded over them, especially because the overlording so often got in the way of whatever really needed to be done. This movie cartoon had been created by some of the animation greats, including Chuck Jones, Fritz Freeling, Bob Clampett and Frank Tashlin, “voiced” by Mel Blanc, and for millions of GIs, offered a much-needed laugh and some mental solace.
SNAFU #2, 1956.
Then, seven years later, came Mad. As popular among young adults as kids, its readership included plenty of GIs, many of them already familiar with Kurtzman’s bravely realistic, arguably antiwar war comics. It was apparently Stan Lee, still hardly a name outside of the comics industry, who came up with a knockoff of Mad for the growing Goodman empire.
RIOT #1, 1954.
Snafu closely followed teen and funny-animal humor of the same company, published under titles like Millie the Model, Patsy and Her Pals, The Monkey and the Bear, Girls Life, Homer and the Happy Ghost and My Girl Pearl. Among them, Wild, Crazy Comics and Riot all imitated Mad, but none with the energy or success of Snafu. A comics art veteran, Joe Maneely, was chosen along with John Severin to carry the serious artistic weight, issue after issue, with Mad veteran Russ Heath among others on the side.
SNAFU #1, 1955.
Vassallo comments that the humor writing in the comic aspires to be at Mad level, but “unfortuntely, Lee is no Kurtzman,” and “sometimes very funny, but frequently juvenile” (p.xx). This is an understatement of considerable weight. The cover of the volume—a young woman in panty girdle and bra, seen from the back but clearly holding onto a subway loop, with an all male cast in the foreground reading Snafu rather than looking at her— already suggests juvenile humor of boys turning toward sexual interests a little nervously, as funny or strange. Very very Snafu.
THIMK #3, 1958.
The art, numerous steps downward from the EC standard, looks rushed, the gags pretty obvious. Albeit sometimes contemporary: “Good News for Men Over 40…Who are Frequently Tired and Worn Out. You’re Draft Exempt!” A Korean War joke or a memory of WWII? Sometimes the jokes are a bit worse, as in “TV Programs This Week”: “Evelyn runs away from reform school because [her] boy friend is always smacking her with the palm of his hand. She finally finds true love with Jack Gonng, prize-fighter, who hits her only with a closed fist.” (p.15, November 1954.)
WILD #1, 1954.
On the last page of the introduction, Vassallo asks why these highly ephemeral efforts failed and were, so to speak, never heard from again. He reiterates that Mad really was the original, attracting the best artists with the best editors and production, while Snafu and others in the Goodman barn could never, by their nature, be more than imitations.
SNAFU Issues 1-3.
There is much to be said for this interpretation. Yet, as Vassallo insists, the seriously talented Severin obviously labored under rushed conditions and tight deadlines, turning out visual gags. We wince at the Burlesque Show jokes, the “Squaw” gags with pretend-Indians and the assorted gender jokes that would not survive “Me Too” complaints of a later day. Snafu does a lot better, arguably hits a high point, with one repeat feature, well-drawn imitations of famous cartoon artists’ work, from the Saturday Evening Post to the New Yorker, not to mention 1000 Jokes and other low-class pulps that would disappear from the news stands before 1970 or so. The various artists who created these pages obviously did their homework.
Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang, #188, 1934.
Seen from another standpoint, the repetitive sex-joke format of Snafu issues may seem further from Little Annie Fanny (Kurtzman and Elder, later on in Playboy) and closer to the tradition of Captain Billy’s Whizbang of the 1920s-30s. Updated to suburban life and its consumer pleasures with built-in frustrations, it loses the old sex-crazed undergraduates—often male and female alike—of the campus and the sailors, not to mention the naughty talking parrot of the college landlady. Snafu offers, one might say, a last look backward on another time and another world of comic art.
BUNK #1, 1956.
With two issues of Snafu under his belt, Goodman launched Bunk!, made up almost entirely of retouched photos and gag commentaries, as if the butt of the joke is actually Confidential, just then a new hit in the exploitation trade. Then comes Riot, soon dumped and then revisited in short order, itself spun off to monster-satire features like Melvin the Monster. Still other, seemingly endless spinoffs follow until Atlas itself implodes. The lead artists of these efforts evidently go on, but not, I think, to greener pastures. Some made it to advertising, a long-wished goal of comic book artists, at first barred or limited by their Jewishness, and then less so. By then, the golden age of printed satire is over. At least, according to this critic.
Tales of Paranoia. R. Crumb. Fantagraphics. 2025. 36pp. $5.99.
A lot of the public has caught up with cartoonist-provocateur R. Crumb. More people than ever are ready to do some of their own provoking. But don’t count the master out. Fantagraphics is releasing, Tales of Paranoia, Crumb’s first new comic book in 23 years. A show featuring original pages from the book is on view (and for sale) at David Zwirner gallery in Los Angeles thru December 20, 2025. The leading cartoonist of the Sixties underground, one of the greatest ever, Crumb’s influence cannot be overstated. Whenever you see the work of a comics artist that features an alter ego stand-in for the creator, commenting and complaining about life’s foibles, you can thank R. Crumb. He single-handedly invented the one-person comics anthology with the launch of Zap Comix in 1967, a progenitor to the whole “autobio comics” genre that was to evolve into the “alternative comics” scene into the 21st century. Following the Crumb tradition of a Larry David-like anti-hero are countless cartoonists, including such notables as Julie Doucet, Gabrielle Bell, Julia Wertz and Noah Van Sciver. With this in mind, it is no small feat to have R. Crumb yet again hold his own—and at the age of 81!
Everything you could expect in a R. Crumb comic book can be found in this new book. I have read Tales of Paranoia a number of times and I am thoroughly impressed with how well it all holds together, one story blending into the next, not an easy thing to do well with a collection of short works. I’m delighted right away to see that distinctive, and consistent, lively drawing line. Crumb is a sui generis cartoonist: a one-of-a-kind artist who is highly accessible; sort of inviting other cartoonists to join in but most likely leaving them creating lesser replicas of his work. For the reader, Crumb is casually inviting you into his world: creating an illusion that you have entered an inner sanctum, whether it is the human condition, the national psyche or what may or may not be his own mind.
Reading every crumb of Crumb.
It is important to process every crumb of Crumb. He has written and rewritten, formatted and reformatted, to the point that he’s amassed layers of meaning, leaving room for argument and counterargument and further interpretation. Like any artist, he has absorbed the current zeitgeist and reflects it back to the reader. This leaves me wondering about his current batch of rants and riffs, as much expressions of his beliefs as a satire of how we collectively express ourselves: begin with the outrage and go from there, just like one podcaster emulates another podcaster, ad infinitum. Or, if you wish to take a longer view, it’s all about finding a way to tell the most compelling story, going back to the first stories ever told.
Crumb’s hobby horse of choice in this book is the potentially nefarious background attached to the Covid-19 vaccine and the cottage industry that has grown around it. This is not the only subject that Crumb sinks his teeth into but it is definitely at the top and provides a structure for further “ranting.” As any good storyteller knows, it’s all in the pacing. Like a good conversationalist, Crumb eases into this or that fact, gently but firmly citing his sources. Crumb makes his case for Big Pharma’s track record of corruption and encourages the reader to do their own research. Crumb finds nuggets of wisdom from a wide range of books and publications that he dutifully cites. He also includes such controversial figures as Joe Rogan and RFK Jr. which gives me pause. That said, Crumb insists you don’t have to like or agree with them but be open to what is coming from their corners. I conclude, if it is information resonating with the public, then it takes on a value, at the very least, for doing that.
We have gone from a tradition of “serious people” in high office and places of authority (John Kerry, Robert Reich, Hillary Clinton) to this current Trumpian transgressive period of unqualified “unserious people” in places of power (Kash Patel, Kristi Noem, RFK Jr.). Midway through the book, the comic “Deep State Woman,” points out that even a “highly qualified” person isn’t always your best bet. Here, Crumb can ease up on his “paranoid” character and simply focus on presenting a compelling portrait of a dangerous career bureaucrat.
With a nod to the mind-boggling complexity of all the world’s machinations, Crumb, more than once, looks upward and pleads for some words of encouragement from a higher power. Crumb depicts himself asking for some clarification from God and receiving the bare minimum for his efforts. All we can do is try. It’s nice to see that Crumb hasn’t given up.
