Four Punk as Fuck Graphic Novels

My immersion into the world of punk rock music was coupled with my love for graphic novels and comics. I started collecting them in junior high, though I would say I have never become a serious collector. That ended up being reserved for books and music, of which, I am probably still a lightweight compared to many others who spend their paychecks at record shops and used book stores. Still, comic books and graphic novels have remained something I am always drawn back into, sort of like the music of punk rock. I go on to become interested in other things, but I always feel the need to read some graphic novels and comics ever year, just as I always feel the need to listen to some punk music.

The comics I liked as a kid were shaped by a tendency I still have today: seeking out the weird and strange. It was for this reason that I never really got into any superhero comics. Some of them were kind of weird. Some of them were kind of strange. Yet they were never weird and strange. The closest thing that came to finding a superhero comic that called to me was Reid Fleming: The Worlds Toughest Milkman. I suppose Tank Girl with her Jet Girl and Sub Girl companions, and mutant kangaroo boyfriend, was kind of superhero, only, not really. More on my fanboy obsession with her below.

Doctor Who isn’t a superhero either, and these days he doesn’t really count much as being weird or different. When I was a teen in the early nineties however, Doctor Who was only the domain of card-carrying nerds, and I qualified. Nerds didn’t have the cache of cool back then. There was no Big Bang Theory TV show celebrating geekedom. Going to the comic book store and watching science fiction was one of the things that put me on the road to get my ass kicked by neighborhood toughs even as my music of choice was heavy metal. Reading books on the bus didn’t help much either.

​I had been a fan of Doctor Who since I was about ten or eleven when I first saw a Peter Davison era serial being run on the Saturday night 10 PM time slot on our local PBS station. The episode was Four to Doomsday, and I was hooked thereafter. It wasn’t the typical thing for an American kid of my era to get hooked on. 

It wasn’t long after that when I started seeing advertisements for Comic Book World, a local comics shop on the local UHF station, which I watched especially on Sunday afternoons for the movie specials for films like John Carpenter’s Christine and They Live. In the Comic Book World commercial an flashed an image of Doctor Who with its logo and I started begging my dad to take me there. He reluctantly gave in, or I just wore him down. My dad was never into comic books at all, and he could have been a prime collector. My grandpa made a living first as a newspaper boy starting at age 14, then he had his own newspaper and magazine stand which he raised his family of five. My dad was the youngest and by the time he was a kid my grandpa’s business was bustling and my dad said he had all kinds of comics and things he also sold, and brought home the remainders, but he was never interested. Perhaps in the same way I was never interested in cars the same way my dad loves those machines.
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The first time he took me to Comic Book World I went straight for the Doctor Who comics. Digging through those boxes would later become familiar to the way I dug for CDs and records. He started taking me to the store every once in awhile as a treat. At one point they got in a Doctor Who role playing game by FASA. My dad spent some of his hard-earned money that he made as a welder fixing industrial machinery on that for me. The guy at the comics shop thought I was a bit young to understand it, and I was, but it stimulated my imagination very much and it wasn’t much longer before I was playing other role-playing games.

Role playing games and comic book shops of course go hand and hand. When I started skateboarding, and getting into the alternative and grunge music I was hearing on the radio, and then punk, I also started finding some comic books that had a real punk edge.

Two titles in particular sent my mind into widening spirals of appreciation, obsession and investigation. Later I found two more series that have kept the passion for inky punk filled pages going. Finding this kind of material was a quest, and when you hit pay dirt on something good you felt really lucky. When I first discovered Tank Girl I felt very lucky indeed.

TANK GIRL

​The year was 1993, and by this time the Riot Grrrl movement that put women and feminism on the stage and at the forefront of a scene that, at least in hardcore, was something of a boys club. To be honest, female fronted punk bands have been and remain favorites. I also like the bands where male and female vocalists share equal time at the mic. Groups like X, Crass, Chumbawamba, and Beat Happening all excelled at this. That tradition has been a standard in the many offshoots from punk and its bastard children. Sonic Youth made it a standard operating procedure, as did groups like Low and Yo La Tengo. Newer post-punk bands like Shopping continue in the spirit.

When I saw the cover of Tank Girl I was immediately smitten, and I went on to start collecting the issues whenever they came out. This is how the comic book stores get you hooked on the medium, and buying other stuff in the meantime. It was the first issue of four in the second series, so I had no idea what was going, but it hardly mattered, because the story itself was seriously fucked up. Tank Girl wakes up in a kind of bedlam or insane asylum called Bell’s End, the Rest Home for the Socially Retarded. What followed was an introduction to a world of pickle and cheese sandwiches, mutant kangaroo boyfriends, and irreverent humor. I kept coming back for more and more. The idea of putting unruly women away in such homes perhaps struck a chord with me, as I had experienced the same happening with people I was very close to, at an institution called Kids Helping Kids. Yet she won’t be held down, and makes her escape to go on an epic road trip, with lots of beer swilled and cigarettes smoked along the way.

The series was created by Alan Martin, writer, and Jamie Hewlett, artist and writer, and remains my all-time favorite comic, for its art, for its humor, its punk attitude, and surreal scifi concepts. Mutant kangaroos are escaping out of mental institutions, what could be better?

Tank Girl wasn’t strong on narrative cohesion, but it made up for that by ever shifting scenarios that grew ever wilder with each block of drawing and humorous dialogue. The art by Jamie Hewlett was the other part of the charm. His imagery went on to have a huge impact in popular music with the band Gorillaz for who he is the illustrator and artist for the characters. I don’t dislike Gorillaz, but to be honest, I just never got into them, despite Hewlett being involved.

A few years after I got into comics, the film came out. It remains a cult classic of a film. Still pretty good when watched again thirty years later, and what can I say, it will always remain a pleasure to see Naomi Watts play the character of Jet Girl. Lori Petty does a pretty good Tank Girl but it is the illustrations I will always see in my mind when I think of her.   

The Tank Girl comics have remained an underground classic hit and remained in print in various editions, along with new series having come out periodically. If you want to check out the classic years your best bet now is to get the Tank Girl Colour Classics. I gave my original set to one of my daughters who had become a fan. Now I am thinking of getting this set again myself so I can reread them yet again.

BAKER STREET: HONOUR AMONG PUNKS & CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT

The Baker Street comics by Guy Davis and Gary Reed were another revelation. The style of drawing was completely different, and all in black and white, whereas Tank Girl had been at least partly in color. This one was all story, all intrigue, grit, and dark gothic rain clouds. The story follows a series of ripper like murders and a group of punks known as the Irregulars who follow around a lady named Harlequin who is a female version of Sherlock Holmes. She used to be a detective, but liked life among the punks instead.

In this version of England war World War II had never taken place and dirigibles float in the sky. An American student named Sharon Ford studying from abroad comes over to stay, and Harlequin offers her a room to let, which irritates her girlfriend. The lesbian relationship is an eye opener for the student, as is the entire world of the punk underground, but not everything is as it seems.

It's a solid mystery story in an of itself, but its British punk realism, complete with heroin use and the first serious depiction of cross-dressing and gender bending I’d ever come across made a deep impression on my impressionable mind.

The first story arc of five issues was combined in the Honour Among Punks trade paperback. Guy Davis continued the story and most of the art in Children of the Night. Both are well worth seeking out. I’m not sure how many times I read those books, but it was a lot. Soon it will be time again. The artwork and lettering are all fantastic.

​The late Gary Reed had a storied career in comics as the publisher of the Caliber Comics imprint and for relaunching Deadworld, among many other achievements. Guy Davis remains well known for his creature designs for Guillermo del Toro, and the illustration work he did for Mike Mignola’s Hellboy spinoff B.R.P.D. and his own later series The Marquis. 

PUNK ROCK AND TRAILER PARKS

I never lost my love of punk rock even as I got older and interested in electronica, industrial, the fleeting freak folk moment, psychedelic folk, and timeless folk music, among other things noise and free improvisation. The vagaries of the avantgarde. Punk remained a touchstone with its DIY ethic and sordid tales. Returning to it is like dipping a cup into a well of clean water on a hot day. Which is part of why I am writing this. Maybe some other people need to take a drink now and then.

But maybe that water isn’t really clear, but murky. Somehow its still refreshing. Mud just means its fortified with minerals. Punk Rock and Trailer Parks by the great Ohioan comic artist and writer Derf was one I read as an adult.

These Derf, or to give his given name Derf Backderf, has come to wider renown among the general public through the film adaptation of his graphic memoir My Friend Dahmer. Derf went to school with Dahmer and befriended the infamous serial killer, because he was one of the odd and weird ones.
Derf grew up in Richfield, Ohio which is halfway between Cleveland and Akron. And while London, New York, LA and San Francisco get a lot of the credit for the birth of punk, Akron, Ohio is as much to blame as the more storied cities. Derf sets that right with his tale of the burgeoning punk scene in Akron that makes Punk Rock & Trailer Parks.

The story works on many levels. As a coming of age story of a kid growing up in a trailer park, as a history of Ohio’s creative acumen, as a paean to the music of the place and time. Derf was in the right place and right time, in the seventies to hear all the great Ohio bands like The Dead Boys and  Rocket from the Tombs, among others. In the story Otto ‘The Baron’ Pizcock meets his destiny when goes from his home in the trailer park to the real-life Akron punk club the Bank. As with many other people whose life was transformed after going to a show, Otto loses all the awkwardness he once hand and finds his power. The power of punk. He meets The Ramones, The Cramps, Stiv Bator, Klaus Nomi, Lester Bangs and The Clash and other luminaries who found their way to Akron.

​It’s also a drunk, stoned, sexed up bit of slice of life. I wonder what happened to Otto when he became an adult. Hopefully he kept the spirit alive. 

LOVE AND ROCKETS

Working at the library has helped me keep up with the desire to read comics and graphic novels. Last year I enjoyed reading Black Hole by Charles Burns for the first time, and I also enjoyed several noir crime comics by Ed Brubaker. Anytime I have seen a Love & Rockets collection at work, I’ve always looked through them and been intrigued, wanting to read them, but somehow, never making the time to do so until late last year and early this year.

Part of the interest was in the name. I wondered if there was a connection to the band Love and Rockets. Apparently there was because the group took their name from the comic. That is a good enough recommendation to read them as any. Apparently there were also other groups that named themselves after the series. Gilbert Hernandez chronicled these in Love and Rockets X graphic novel, but I haven’t read that one yet.

The story of this series is a story of brothers and of a mother who had a love for the medium. The Hernandez brothers, Mario, Jaime and Gilbert came from a family of six and everyone in the house read comics, as their mother was a huge fan. Comics were all over the place in that house and everyone read and talked about them.

Jaime Hernandez notes how in this environment he “wanted to draw comics my whole life.” Love and Rockets started off as a sibling endeavor with Jaimie, Gilbert and Mario all working on the first issue together. They worked on quite a number together after that as well, with Mario eventually falling out of it for the most part, but still contributing occasionally, and Jaimie and Gilbert continuing the intertwined and ongoing stories from the series together and on their own. In true punk spirit the first issue was self-published in 1981. This is another tie in between the world of underground comics and underground music: the DIY ethic. 
The series has gone on for so long, and their were all these different threads which was part of what kept me from jumping in to begin with. But I eventually decided to just grab some and start reading. There is a slice-of-life quality to them that allows for this jumping in wherever you can.

One of the story lines is called Hoppers 13 or Locas, and this one came from the mind of Jaime who brought his love of punk into the mix. It literally follows the Locas or crazy women and a group of primarily chicano characters from their teenage years in the fictional California city of Heurta, based on the Hernandez’s hometown of Oxnard. These kids, are all involved in the punk scene, but it dials in on two lovely and crazy women, Margarita “Maggie” Luisa Chascarrillo and Esperanza “Hopey” Leticia Glass who have an on-again off-again romance and friendship with plenty of drama. For this reason this storyline is also sometimes referred to as the Maggie and Hopey Tales.

On the alternate thread from these is Gilbert’s take on Love and Rockets which contains fantastical explosions of magical realism in the fictional Latin American village of Palomar. This sequence is sometimes called Heartbreak Soup after the first story set in the town.

I started off reading some of the Hoppers 13 stories from the beginning, but now I have jumped to more current story lines that also include the story of teenager Tonta.

​One of the books I read Is This How You See Me Now, is poignant to any of us who have grown up in punk rock and sees Maggie and Hopey going to a reunion show. As they look back on their life in the late seventies and early eighties, and where they are now, in the late 2010s when it was written, they get to see how they have changed, and how they haven’t. Complete with the addition of kids and new partners in their own lives and the lives of their friends, it’s a touching look at why we keep coming back to see our old friends and reconnect over the passions of youth, even as new generations pick up the torch of the punk ethos and continue to carry it onwards.

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