Foxing Reprints #13: Mineshaft #30

For those not in the know, Mineshaft is one of the last great comics and culture zines. It's one of the last bastions for the underground cartoonists of the 60s and 70s , as well as the next generation of the 80s and several young cartoonists in that style as well. Thanks to the friendship between editor/publisher Everett Rand and Robert Crumb, the latter contributes drawings, entries from his dream journals and other ephemera in every issue. This, the 15th anniversary issue, is especially Crumb-heavy. He contributes sketchbook material for both the front and back covers as well as some especially weird (astral projection, flying saucers) dreams from his journal, complete with illustrations. Brilliant young cartoonist Christoph Mueller did an autobio strip about Crumb, his inspiration and mentor. The young crosshatch king's strip is hilarious,  as a letter that Crumb wrote him praising him to the heavens naturally has the effect of paralyzing him at the drawing board. Mueller also selected a number of drawings and strips from Crumb's sketchbook to close ou the issue, and it features Crumb's neuroses at their most focused. Needless to say, Mineshaft is a must for fans of Crumb.

The beauty of Mineshaft, however, is that there are always other surprises. For example, I was stunned to see five pages of new autobio comics from the legendary Justin Green. Green is better than ever, combining his restless intellectual curiosity regarding small details with fighting off his well-documented anxiety and OCD. Following the work of that veteran is a harrowing excerpt from "Dark Ground", a story by younger cartoonist Elizabeth Koenig. Koenig works in Green's tradition (indeed, her figurework and line is similar to Green's, if considerably less polished) and the story of a young runaway thinking back to emotional and physical abuse as a new world beckons to her is compelling. 

Other interesting work includes Mary Fleener's political cartoons for her local newspaper, an amazing Jay Lynch drawing that includes a who's-who of underground characters, and several autobiographical strips from Zippy by Bill Griffith. On the slightly odder front is an illustrated essay by another master craftsman, William Crook, Jr. It's pen and ink drawings of various old sights from Route 66 in Illinois, including a restaurant that had a huge windmill blades and beautiful signs in front of other destinations. His two page drawing of Chicago is a marvel to behold. While some issues of Mineshaft veer harder into alternative cultures of the past and present, this one will be of special interest to comics fans. It acts as a place for cartoonists who don't have an active publishing outlet or who only tend to publish longer works to disseminate their comics for an appreciative audience, one that is eager to see new work rather than simply wax nostalgic about their older comics. 

Sweeping The Underground: Mineshaft #24

Rob reviews issue #24 of the underground grab-bag, MINESHAFT.

It never fails to amaze me just how much editors Everett Rand and Gioia Palmieri are able to pack into every issue of MINESHAFT. The covers alone are often worth the price, and this issue's delightfully bizarre Mary Fleener cover is no exception. She's seen all too infrequently in comics these days, but MINESHAFT has been one of her more regular outlets as of late. Of course, MINESHAFT is about all of the odd and overlooked corners of our culture, from the poems of the Brutalists to photographs from the "Cabinet of Curiosities" (lots and lots of conjoined twin remains) to a bracing feature on the death of newspapers framed by the mastheads of dozens of dead and dying papers. The Brutalist poems fit right into the underground aesthetic of the zine, detailing the day-to-day life of the working class in an unflinching manner. Adelle Stripe's stream-of-consciousness memories about her awakening sexuality were particularly memorable.

The big draws in this issue were assorted odds and ends from legends R.Crumb and Skip Williamson. Williamson contributed some pages from his sketchbook, including a stunning likeness of Harvey Kurtzman. Williamson is clearly an artist that's had a big impact on today's cartoonists, yet he's not as widely discussed as his contemporaries. Crumb contributed the back cover, a five-page letter to Rand that's endlessly fascinating (noting that he voted for Barack Obama--and that this was the first time he had ever voted for president), and several pages from his dream diary. It's clear that Crumb and Rand have a close relationship, and that shows in the intimacy of Crumb's correspondence and the sheer volume of material he's contributed over the years. Rand's tastes and passion for underground comics and culture has acted as a magnet of sorts, as countless veterans of the scene have flocked to contribute.

At the same time, it's not so much about an era as it is about a certain aesthetic for Rand, and so he's given room to younger artists like Ed Piskor (drawing a truly demented story by Sarah Sveda) and Joseph Remnant. Every issue seems to draw in another veteran; this time around, it was David Collier contributing a strip in exchange for a subscription. The ultimate expression of Rand's interests came in the form of a book review about Charles Bukowski, written by Dennis Eichorn and drawn by Pat Moriarity. That's a remarkable convergence, one that resulted in a clever and elegant essay that blended Bukowski's poems, Eichorn's commentary and Moriarity's inventive page design. The Eichorn piece is an example of a tiny story nugget that otherwise would not have had an appropriate home, while the assorted sketches from legendary artists are even rawer examples of this. MINESHAFT isn't truly an anthology, but rather a sampling of undiscovered and unpublished obscurities whose existence is simply a delight for a comics fan.

The Pleasures of Obsession: Mineshaft #22

Rob reviews the newest issue of underground/alternative zine, MINESHAFT #22.

I recently received the most recent issue of MINESHAFT, #22, after reviewing an older issue. MINESHAFT's best attribute is its unabashed enthusiasm and embrace of unusual corners of culture and subcultures. Case in point: a long photo essay about the "Muscle Beach Beauties". It concerns female bodybuilders, acrobats and daredevils who performed on the beaches and boardwalks of California in the 1940s and 1950s. Like many of the pieces in MINESHAFT, this article (delving into the archives of OJ Heller) is revealing of a time and place, illuminating a subculture that was quite unusual for its time. Heller is obsessed with "women of strength", and it was amusing to see an R.Crumb sketch on the back cover, surrounded by photos of girls that Crumb certainly approves of.

As per usual, there are a number of unusual comic strips, stories and completely unexpected material. Mary Fleener's drawings of weirdly-dressed women at the San Diego Comicon was typically hilarious, with the punchline of Fleener being annoyed that she had to sell her comics behind a tented area while so many women were displaying their "wares" so openly. The most stunning highlight of the issue, especially for fans of underground artists, was the wager between Kim Deitch and Jay Lynch. The wager involved them writing the words for a country music song, encouraging MINESHAFT readers to come up with music for it and record it, and the winner would be which cartoonist got the song into a top-50 chart! While the songs they wrote are funny, it's punctuated by an amazing 2-page jam piece, featuring Lynch and Deitch sitting across from each other, with their cartoon creations sitting on their laps.

The excerpt from a longer work by J.R. Helton ("Pat and Corky") is very funny, with the situation the characters find themselves in growing ever more extreme and weird. Paroled prisoners, lots of cocaine, pedophiles, freebasing at parties, overdoses, and much more general weirdness are described in a deadpan, matter-of-fact manner. Jay Kinney contributes a rant against pretty much everything (occasionally veering into "get off my lawn, you kids!" territory), while Aaron Lange wrote an interesting review of Kim Deitch's work that puts it into the context of its time. He asserts that while the 60s were a political and cultural failure in nearly every respect, its cartoonists emerged relatively unscathed and stronger than ever. It's an interesting point, especially since I'd agree that the comics of Crumb, Deitch, Griffith etc. only get better as they get older. Finally, there's a long letter of comment from Crumb, who reveals all sorts of fascinating personal details as he comments on the latest issue, specifics of editor Everett Rand's life and the struggle he knows it takes in keeping a publication like this going. It's clear that MINESHAFT is the passion of Rand and co-editor Gioia Palmieri, and their readers are the beneficiaries of their obsession.

The Imprint of Personality: Comics Comics and Mineshaft

Rob reviews the latest issues of the comics-related publications COMICS COMICS(#4) and MINESHAFT (#23).

COMICS COMICS' mission of examining things not quite on the beaten path means that the reader is exposed to some odd items that they may not have been aware of or even actively avoided. What I like best about COMICS COMICS is the way it reflects the personalities of its three main guiding lights. It's at its best when it's simply an outlet for Tim Hodler, who has become one of the best of all comics critics. He not only fully engages a work on its own terms, he is also able to articulate the nature of that engagement with a great deal of clarity and style. Frank Santoro is considerably less precise in the way he describes what interests him, but his sheer enthusiasm for a particular kind of aesthetic is so powerful that it sweeps the reader along. Ringleader Dan Nadel has an endearingly cranky print persona.

While I cringed when Nadel started to rant about comics needing to be "dirtier", I was delighted that he published his initial material on Woody Gelman, the patron of Topps who gave a lot of work to Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman, among others. Nadel is dead-on when he describes Gelman's hidden but crucial role in comics history, both in terms of his patronage of two giant talents and the actual influence of the products themselves as subversive cultural artifacts. Their nature was entirely disposable, yet they had a sort of cumulative cultural weight. They provided an outlet for jokes, weirdness and imagery that delighted but did not condescend to children. Gelman was that sort of in-between figure that could make this happen; he was a collector with an affinity for underground culture, and he immediately recognized Crumb and Spiegelman as harbingers of a new underground. He was an emissary of a corporation yet had no hesitancy to employ underground artists; indeed, he viewed them as his most valuable contributors. I hope Nadel continues to pursue this study, perhaps in an upcoming issue of COMIC ART.

Hodler took on two of comics' biggest iconoclasts with his reviews in Steve Ditko and Dave Sim. Hodler obviously came in with preconceptions about both artists, yet fairly engaged their most recent works. He praised their innovations in projects that failed to work on other levels. He also heaped scorn on their didacticism, especially when it was built on a foundation of disingenuousness as in Sim's JUDENHASS. Hodler rightly calls Sim on the way he used out-of-context quotes from famous people to build up his historical anti-Semitism claims. Sim needn't have gilded the lily by quoting Mark Twain out of context if he wanted to find such evidence. Hodler's other review, an epic outline of Kentaro Miura's BERSERK, laid out an compelling csse as to why and how the series' ultra-violent, hypersexualized and adolescent qualities in fact had layers of subtext that only paid off as the story revealed itself.

Santoro provides the voice and viewpoint of the artist in COMICS COMICS, and it's a forceful and idiosyncratic one. I loved the way he and Nadel broke down an old Ogden Whitney page; I felt like I had genuinely learned something after studying what they wrote. His introduction to his interview with British artist Shaky Kane is a bit all over the place (much like his writing in general), yet it snaps back to its main, forceful ideas unexpectedly after each digression. More than anything, one can feel the enormously powerful passion Santoro has for comics and the entire breadth and width of its history, embracing artists and comics that are often ignored by fans of alt-comics. The interview itself felt a bit perfunctory in comparison. It was too short to really delve into the artist, but some of the questions asked felt more like particular technical points Santoro wanted to know about to satisfy his own curiousity rather than questions designed to bring clarity to a wider audience.

Joe "Jog" McCulloch's article on Gerald Jablonski's comics was delightful. I'm generally resistant to reviews that focus on how a comic made them feel at a given time of their life, but Jog takes that basic structure and fully engages and breaks down the utterly loopy nature of Jablonski's comics. As always, the comics solicited for this issue were excellent and looked great on the huge (something like 21x17") broadsheet format. I wish all of Dan Zettwoch's comics could be printed in this format, given the crazy amount of detail he includes in his strips. There was another page by an uncredited artist (Ted May?) that also took advantage of the sheer size of the page with a cleverly designed adaptation of Poe's "The Masque Of the Red Death".

Having read a number of issues of MINESHAFT now, what I like best about it is the organic nature of its construction. It started as a place for Everett Rand to publish images of underground art that he owned, and snowballed into a place where a certain generation of comics creators started to submit new work. It's become a depository for fascinating fiction and cultural critiques that don't have a ready home, fascinating presentations of historical cultural detritus worthy of another look, and of course lots of sketches and comics.

This issue was actually more comics-heavy than some recent volumes. Sarah Sveda and Ed Piskor (not an underground artist, but he certainly carries that vibe to his work). Their "Grob Schwank" series, written by Sveda, was absolutely hilarious and disgusting. Piskor's art looked a little like Jack Davis' here as he brought that MAD feel to his exaggerated figures and gestures in a story about a pervert gynecologist. Aaron Lange's "Washington Beach", a sort of send-up of Archie Comics by way of The Hills was both cleverly designed and pleasantly smart-assed. Frank Stack's latest "Dirty Diana" is more of the same over-the-top adventure serial silliness, done in his usual loose, sketchy style. There's even a quick story by Harvey Pekar and Tara Seibel, wherein they talk about why he stays in Cleveland.

As always, MINESHAFT is a treasure trove of sketchbook work. Crumb contributes his usual assortment of odds and ends, while Sophie's sketchbook feels much more at home here than in MOME. Pat Moriarty's totem pole drawings and accompanying article as to why he started making them were intriguing, and it was fun to see a drawing from the new Bill Griffith collection. The highlight of the issue, however, was seeing Kim Deitch's sketchbook progress on his fascinating new comic about Kathryn Whaley. Here, Deitch focuses in on the concept of the phonograph being invented much earlier than Edison, and his delight when he learned that there in fact were voice recordings prior to Edison. Deitch's sketchbook work is actually much more accessible to my eye than his slicker, heavier finished work.

Two other items of special interest here: Bruce Simon excavating the pages of Sexology magazine--published in the 1930s--and Jay Lynch's mind-boggling cover. The former is the sort of cultural mining that MINESHAFT does so well, as the questions (and some answers) reprinted here are hilarious yet indicative of a desperate search for open answers to a topic that few dared discuss publicly. The level of detail and density of gags on Lynch's cover is a strong indicator why he draws so little of his own work these days. Rand doesn't grouse about the way things are, he simply goes about finding what he does like and getting it out there, issue after issue. Any fan of comics with the slightest interest in the underground and post-underground era will wonder where this zine has been all their lives once they finally lay their hands on a copy. The imprint of Rand and partner Gioia Palmieri can be felt surely as the COMICS COMICS trio on their publication. It's felt in what they choose to publish and the artists who likewise reach out to them.