The anthology entitled Blab! Volume 1, from Dark Horse, is a melange of madness; a heavy helping of happy and the hippy-dippy. Bed, Bohemian, and beyond. And that’s a good thing for comic fans.
From the front cover showing a female figure with a torso made of candy (??) and carrying twin ray guns while emerging from a cave to the reprints of old comic book ads, to the ’something completely different’ feel, this is one wild and crazy book. And it’s won a Harvey Award.
As far as contents, it’s strongly comic-book-creator-biography and well handled in that regard. Take, if you will, the example of Noah Van Sciver’s depiction of Crime Does Not Pay editor Robert Wood. A tragic tale, to be sure, steeped in flop sweat and despair, illustrated in a ‘Robert-Crumbesque’ line style, accompanied by murky mauve and brown colour.
And the illustrated story of author-illustrator Beatrix Potter, then the account of comic creators Seigel and Shuster and their lightning strike with fame and then the downside. And then cat cartoons, muchly so.
Oh, there are pages and pages of depictions of “Enge-Ena”, or the African Gabon ape, through the comics, pulps, and movie posters.
Wait, there is the reprinting of scads of stuff: from the Freethinkers’ Pictorial Text-Book describing the Abuses of a Union of Church and State, to old jungle stories in comic books too. Wait, there is more!
The hard gin-drinking days of F. Scott Fitzgerald! Stories of aliens!
It is an odd and rather curiously curated collection of clippings, comics, and cause and effect, this book. It shall appeal in the strongest sense to those who search incessantly for the new and thrilling, sufficiently evidenced as it is in this book that the past has had plenty of oddness.
Therein you now have my comments, and further suppositions in short, briefly stated for all to review themselves and perhaps to ponder upon, openly in discussion, or privately in one’s study.
Dark Horse, Blab #1, $19.99 for 112 pages of content, 16+
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