Sequart Reprints: Scrublands

This article was originally written for sequart.com in 2006.
**************
It's hard to pin down Joe Daly's influences and hence what sort of comic Scrublands is. The book notes his strong influence by American underground artists like R.Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, S.Clay Wilson and others. While that's certainly the case, there's something entirely else going on in this book as well.

First of all, no matter how weird his stories get, there's a relaxed quality to them very much unlike the hyperactive and/or neurotic American underground artists. Second, while sex and drugs are pretty constant themes in his work, one gets the sense that he's not writing about them in order to shock. Instead, it's all very matter-of-fact--the sex, the drugs, the weirdness all seem to be a part of daily life. Breaking taboos for their own sake isn't really part of his agenda. Third, his background in animation has a big impact on the visual side of his presentation. He has a powerful command over his use of colors, making it a crucial part of the art. There's a simplicity in his style that makes it a lot easier for the eye to take in than a lot of hyperdetailed underground artists (Wilson's work in particular hurts my eyes). At the same time, his compositional choices and character design give the reader a lot of interesting things to look at.

The centerpiece of the book is "Prebaby", a lushly-illustrated and richly-colored trip detailing a blob-like fetal creature floating along a wild environment, eventually winding up impregnating a woman. It's a wordless tale that speaks to Daly's imagination, as this creature has to rely on the attentions of its environment in order to move, and encounters monsters, spirits and crews of tiny men (sperm?) who wind up rescuing it and setting it along its ultimate path of birth. The storytelling is assured as we amble from image to image, with many clearly seeming entirely extemporaneous. While this story is very much unlike anything else in the book on the surface, the underlying matter-of-factness surrounding its oddness puts it in very much in the same category as the more standard narratives and observations in the book.

Sex and drugs are more than just facts of life--they're things to be embraced in all their goopy weirdness. The visceral nature of sex in particular is a theme that's repeated throughout the book. One of my favorite bits in the book is "Aqua Boy". It starts off as yet another exploration of a warped landscape, this time underwater. Aqua Boy is a dead ringer for Tintin, going on a magical adventure. He's rescued from a predicament by his father, only to have the mundane but tragic intrude: he's told by his father that he's divorcing his mother, and "you're going to go away and live with your mother in a smaller 'less cool' aqua craft". Of course, later on, a ghost fish tells Aqua Boy that he's gotten his pubes, and would now be able to breathe underwater. When Aqua Boy thanks him for the information, the fish thanks him for hallucinating him into existence! Once again, the dryness of the humor set against the unexpectedly weird elements creates an atmosphere where the reader has no idea what's coming next.

The element that sets Scrublands apart is the way that Daly's Cape Town becomes a background character of sorts. From a sardonic "appreciation" of a beach community to Daly and his alter egos walking around a sun-beaten city to a freak-ridden series of encounters in a supermarket, Cape Town is a visceral, vibrant, sweaty and gritty presence. Of course, these stories are slightly eccentric slices of life compared to "Art Lover" or "Wallchild". The latter stories feature his frequently-used comedy duo of Kobosh & Steve. Kobosh wears an elaborate headdress and almost looks like a superhero, while Steve is the de facto straight man. "Art Lover" features Steve creating a work of art that looks like a cross between a breast and an ass that's being judged by his teacher; when the teacher comes across Kobosh having sex with it in public, he gives Steve an A+! "Wallchild" is very matter of fact: Kobosh is sitting on his couch and watches the wall give birth. He and Steve develop milk-engorged breasts so as to nurse the Wallchild. The end. That one-page strip personifies the straight-faced and unapologetic weirdness that Daly does so well.

What I like most about Daly is his sense of playfulness. While the whole book is funny, there aren't a lot of gags per se. Stories like "Prebaby" instead have a sense of absurdity that make them a lot of fun to read, while not losing any of their readability. Stories about micro-fauna living on Bruce Springsteen's head make complete sense in the context of the rest of the book. Alienation is a constant running sub-theme of the book, but it's muted by the fact that its characters embrace the constant weirdness of the world. The end result is a collection of strips that feels familiar to an alt-comics reader, yet doesn't quite fit into an established niche.

The Fine Print: Dungeon Quest Book Three

At nearly 250 pages, the third volume of Joe Daly's Dungeon Quest is about twice the length of either of the first two volumes. This loving tribute and send-up of quest-based games that explore particular environments devotes a lot of its time to stoner humor as well as elaborately-staged fight sequences. Daly is equally adept at portraying long, drawn-out arguments and debates between his characters and allowing his characters to silently inhabit and traverse a space for pages at a time. The humor is frequently scatological, even as there are long metaphysical discussions of the stoner variety. In this volume, Daly provides a ton of mythological backstory as well, even providing several text pages of something called "The Romish Book Of The Dead", a source guide about a key ethnic group that existed after the fall of Atlantis. While there's a lot of information that's dumped in this book, Daly doesn't skimp on the jokes or the fights.

 

Once Daly commits to a bit, he goes all the way, as when the fighter/thief character Steve is determined to get a particular bag of weed from a vending machine in a temple. He manages to distend and distort his entire body to do so, unlocking a weird new stretching power along the way. From there, there's a long sequence of the characters getting stoned and arriving at various revelations/absurd observations. Daly doesn't stop there. After Steve goes unconscious from the potency of the pot, he later wakes up and recounts his weed-induced vision of feeling his body and discovering he had a second penis that he had to carry around. Like everything else in this series, this bit of nonsense is treated seriously, but the characters never fail to take the piss out of each other when they do something weird. For example, when hulking brute Lash Penis defeats a vicious dog creature by yanking on his penis and punching his balls (in a truly strange sequence), Millennium Boy calls him out on it, with Lash sheepishly saying "Uh....no." The interplay between those is usually my favorite part of the book. In another scene both scatological and practical, Lash puts a "bullet" filled with small supplies into an unconscious Steve's anus. When he notices that the anus practically sucks it up on its own, Millennium Boy proceeds to theorize that barometric pressure had something to do with it. A baffled Lash, upon hearing MB talk about different amounts of air in one's hands, yells "NO! How can you hold the air in your hands?".  MB simply says "Let's just say his ass sucked it in", and Lash triumphantly yells "YEAH! It sucked it in!"  Lash may be incredibly stupid, but that doesn't mean that the things Millennium Boy pontificates about make any sense.

By this point, these characters seem entirely divorced from the modern city-dwelling folk we met in the first volume and have been totally subsumed in this weird forest world of womraxes and brigands. The bandits they meet are armed with weird weapons like a gas grenade gun rather than actual guns, and their "big boss" is a steam golem. Adding to the weirdness is the introduction of Lou, a "little forest-man", who helps the party only when Lash agrees to give him a hand-job that spans three highly-detailed pages. Upon ejaculating, his seed creates a sapling that will one day bear fruit that will create more little men of the forest. This is typical Daly: every joke and weird moment has a mythological resonance. Lou is a hilarious addition to the proceedings, as he frequently humps Lash's leg and the back of his head even as he dispenses sage advice about how to proceed in the forest and rescue the distaff member of their party, Nerdgirl, from the bandits that ambush them and take their stuff. The final action sequence, where a nude party battles the bandits, is both ridiculous and exciting. Daly clearly takes the action scenes seriously, as he meticulously shows every detail of the fight, how enemies are vanquished, killing blows, etc. It's the sense of detail of a gamer, really, where we want to see those details. However, the action and detail in the book never obscure the fact that this is primarily a humor book, and he never lets too many pages go by without either a gag or a funny argument or a weird vision of some kind.

The simplicity of his character design is the key to the book's visual success. Once again, Lash is the best character because of the tiny facial features on a huge body--frequently it's just 2 dots for eyes, a squiggle for a nose and a line for a mouth. At the same time, Daly has a rock-solid understanding of anatomy and musculature in particular. There's a wonderful crispness to his line that mixes the clear-line style of Herge' with a slightly thicker line weight and greater willingness to use blacks to create atmosphere. It's a style that's simultaneously dense but clear, allowing the reader to take in a lot of detail quickly and admire the craftsmanship at work without distracting too much from the flow of the story. By this point, the reader will know if this is their cup of tea; anyone who enjoys alt-comics takes on fantasy and/or stoner humor will find this a sheer delight. I'd say the sheer level of craftsmanship and the way Daly shifts storytelling modes so quickly would at least interest other readers, especially those who enjoy deadpan absurdism, since that's the core of Daly's sense of humor. For the continuing fan of this series, Daly continues to raise the stakes in each volume and adds richness and depth for those who are looking for more detail. Above all else, he does for the reader what he does with his party: he keeps things moving even when his characters are navel-gazing.

New Post: Tomb of Horrors: Dungeon Quest, Volume 2

Joe Daly's comics are an unequivocal delight. The second volume of his role playing/video game send-up and tribute, Dungeon Quest, is a visual feast from beginning to end. Of course, this feast may be mere junk food, but his sheer commitment to the adventurous reality that his characters encounter makes the reader care about the most ridiculous of scenarios. This volume is actually far more straightforward as an adventure story than the first volume. It's much less meta, for one thing; a new reader would have no clue that the story began when main hero Millennium Boy blows off his homework in search of adventure in his suburb. By the time we reach the forest depicted in volume 2, it's as though he and his party have entered a completely different world.


Dungeon Quest is visually exciting for two reasons. First, Daly lavishes a tremendous amount of attention and detail on action, backgrounds and setting. The forest is densely hatched and cross-hatched, the vegetation is given loving detail, the monsters are vividly drawn and in constant motion. Second, the characters themselves are drawn in a cartoony style that draws the eye to them immediately. Their faces in particular couldn't be any simpler: dots for eyes, a line for a mouth, and a squiggle for a nose. That simplicity leaves lots of white space in the area of the characters' faces, naturally drawing in the eye to focus in on them. That one technique makes every fight easy to follow, no matter how dense the action.


While there's less of the languid, stoner sort of humor in this volume, that's not to say that there's not a lot of laughs to be found. Daly likes to employ a matter of fact and visceral crudeness in his stories, from a message capsule flying out of one character's anus during a fight to basic bathroom humor presaging a clash with giant spiders. In-between combat, Daly has his characters engage in information-processing in the form of stoner/slacker humor. The party gets stoned one night while contemplating their adventures, hoping that they will get even better weed and more elaborate pipes in the future. After another fight, one character gets high on cocaine and starts bullying another party member, until Millennium Boy talks him down. The dialogue is incongruous with the deadly seriousness of the fights themselves yet fits in nicely with the world Daly has created. At heart, every adventurer in a RPG is a bored person who's looking to explore their world.


World-building and exploration of a space is at the core of Dungeon Quest. In an excellent and revealing interview with Tom Spurgeon, Daly reveals the debt he owes to Fort Thunder cartoonists like Mat Brinkman and Brian Ralph. Books like Climbing Out and Teratoid Heights feature simple characters with simple motivations who explore spaces and deal with the creatures they find. By fusing this idea more deliberately with the video game aesthetic that's also a driving force behind this comic, Daly creates an experience that mimics the experience of driving a character or characters through their world, down to the acquisition and cataloging of objects as well as "leveling up" after a major fight. While the characters are experiencing the rush of exploring ancient ruins and completing quests, there's also the sense that they are experiencing and commenting on this experience the way a video game player might. While the encounters and fights are serious, Daly infuses the whole comic with a sense of absurdism, from the nature of one of their quests (to assemble an Atlantean resonator guitar), to the silly name of the objects they pick up. That interview notes that Daly wants each volume to have its own distinct feel, with some being devoted to fights and others indulging in more humor (and one would guess, meta-humor). It's clear that this volume is one that was all about fights, and there are indications that the next volume will be more talky. While there are a number of alt-comics fantasy series being published these days (with Trondheim & Sfar's Dungeon the best), Daly's fusion of underground comics sensibilities with the blunt directness of the video game playing experience is unique and leaves the reader wanting more.

Dudes Abide: The Red Monkey Double Happiness Book

Rob reviews THE RED MONKEY DOUBLE HAPPINESS BOOK, Joe Daly's collection of two stories from Fantagraphics.

I greatly enjoyed the psychedelic storytelling of Joe Daly in SCRUBLANDS, his first collection of comics from Fantagraphics. His work reminded me a bit of early Steve Lafler in the easy way he combined gags, action and long stream-of-consciousness ramblings, as well as Herge's Tintin in terms of the line and flow of action. There was a sense of improvisation on the page combined with strong structural underpinnings, which made the stories amiable instead of incoherent. The greatest virtue of his stories was the way he so strongly established a sense of place: the beach community of Cape Town, South Africa. With THE RED MONKEY DOUBLE HAPPINESS BOOK, Daly maintains some of the psychedelic trappings of his earlier stories but puts them within a framework of stoner noir (ala the film PINEAPPLE EXPRESS) buddy story, only with BIG LEBOWSKI-style absurdity.

However, the book can't really be reduced to familiar genre markers all that easily, and that firm, eccentric sense of place is the biggest reason why it works. Daly begins the first story, "The Leaking Cello Case", as a leisurely slice-of-life story and slowly turns it into a mystery. He's in no hurry to get from point A to point B, giving the reader all sorts of details about the titular character and his life in Cape Town. Those details come both in terms of anecdotes and visuals, with some great drawings of buildings built into the hills, mountains in the background and the beach beckoning. One gets a simultaneous sense of the buzz of activity around the beach and a certain languidness of pace. It's instantly accessible and recognizable to most any reader, providing an atypical backdrop for a mystery tale. One might critique Daly for choosing a more conservative brand of storytelling by dipping into some familiar genre wells (especially when one compares it to his earlier work), but I suspect that slightly loopy but conventional narratives fit his talent and interests best.

The secret weapon here is Daly's rich use of color. Given his very clear line, and a disinterest in spotting blacks or crosshatching, it's that color that adds depth and weight to the characters and their environments. That clear line also lets Daly draw slightly-ridiculous looking characters without the strip losing some of its verisimilitude. It's that mix of familiar stoner life with increasingly-weird peril that makes both aspects of the story more compelling than they otherwise might be on their own. That sort of deadpan stoner humor also nicely sets up the escalatingly crazy action sequences of the book. When the Red Monkey winds up tangling with a vicious Mexican drug dealer who is pushing hallucinogenic toad secretions, it all makes perfect sense. When a search in dried-up marshlands leads to a showdown with a corrupt developer with a pet gibbon and a microwave death ray, the relaxed reactions of the comic's principals lead the reader along in the same manner.

I preferred the shorter "Leaking Cello Case" to "John Wesley Harding", mostly because the former had a looser, even improvised quality to it. JWH more-or-less began with the main characters saying "let's have an adventure", which was a less relaxed and organic way to construct the story. The story certainly went in unexpected directions and had a truly deranged ending, but going over the top is less important to the success of Daly's comics than is maintaining that sense of not being in a hurry to get anywhere. Still, he fills the story with enough random digressions and observations so as not to feel like a total departure from what he does best.

Along the way, Daly offers commentary on ecology, philosophy and global capitalism. For him, these are topics that very much fall into the "act locally" category, as he worries about the ways in which his beach community and its ecosystem will be warped and destroyed by these larger outside forces. Of course, Daly puts such musings on an even par with more mundane and silly observations as well, so as to make things a bit more palatable for the reader. This is a comic in the tradition of a Gilbert Shelton, only less self-conscious about gags and more willing to let the reader work through an absurd situation without feeling the need to spoon-feed every joke. Its delights are simple and modest and its ambitions limited, yet THE RED MONKEY DOUBLE HAPPINESS BOOK lingers after reading. Daly has created a home of sorts not only for his characters, but his readers as well--a construct that is at once comfortable, familiar and evokes years worth of stories both familiar and anticipated.