Blab!’s Odd Couple
This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on October 24, 2006 Sign up now!
by Dan Nadel, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 10/24/2006
Blab!, the venerable comics/art anthology edited by Monte Beauchamp, has long been the epicenter of the low-brow art movement, spotlighting artists from Joe Coleman to Tim Biskup. In recent years, Beauchamp began expanding the line with the Picto-Novelette series: handsome hardcover storybooks by some of the finest artists of the movement.
The latest duo of Blab! Picto-Novelettes, Drew Friedman's Old Jewish Comedians and Camille Rose Garcia's The Magic Bottle, are on opposite sides of the Blab! spectrum, covering both the brand’s art-goth side and its antic satirical side. And while both have their upsides in the anthology form, with these books, the satire wins out.
Drew Friedman’s masterful drawings and acutely funny sensibility have been gone for far too long from the book-publishing scene. He's always focused on the forgotten personalities of show business, and this aptly titled tome picks up right where he left off. Old Jewish Comedians is just that: a couple dozen drawings of Jewish comedians in their twilight years as imagined by faithful disciple Friedman. Each remarkable, fully imagined caricature is accompanied by the comedian’s given name: Jerome Levitch for Jerry Lewis; Leonard Hacker for Buddy Hackett, and so on.
These are tributes to lives of comedic invention; men who created mainstream identities for themselves onstage and remained virile and funny even in their old age. Leonard Maltin contributes an affectionate and wise introduction, rounding out a gem of a book that should be shelves of mensches everywhere.
Camille Rose Garcia, another Blab! regular, also plays to her strengths, creating in The Magic Bottle a flowing gothic fable. Employing her trademark sinewy lines and heavily textured and patterned surfaces, Garcia also has a story to tell—a long and wordy story. On top of her intriguing imagery she layers a very heavy-handed parable about capitalism, environmentalism and the collisions between idealism and politics. The world her protagonist, Lulu Blackenshoe, inhabits is decimated by corporations and capitalism, its inhabitants kept docile by drugs. Lulu finds a literal way out with a map in the titular magic bottle. But first she has to make it past the Peppermint Man.
All of this is told in lengthy swatches of clunky text that accompany most of the images. Unfortunately, the story feels rote and its metaphors cliché. Despite the sometimes stunning images, this book is burdened by its concept.
These two are a strange couple: Friedman’s light comic touch is charming and far more effective than Garcia’s morose fable. These Blab! books should be taken one at a time.
