“The only thing challenging about it, and the only thing marvelous about it, is that it’s a popular form…It’s so popular that it doesn’t have artistic respect”
-Bernard Krigstein
“Andy sat down to talk one day
He said decide what you want
Do you want to expand your parameters
Or play museums like some dilettante”
-Lou Reed and John Cale, “Work”
With thanks to generations of niche fandom arguing its validity, the medium of comics is in the midst of a decades-long embrace by popular culture and the academy alike. On the educational front, there are opportunities to study cartooning and its concerns at every price point. For the scholarly-minded, there are MFA programs and post-graduate certificates that elucidate both the practical and theoretical. In the piecemeal price range, there is a cottage industry of consultant editorial services, wherein burgeoning cartoonists pay guru-like figures with wildly varying bona fides to bolster their skill sets by way of critique. Academic and cultural representation notwithstanding, cartooning, as ever, offers precious little renumeration in the best of times, making it little more than a hobby to the majority of its practitioners, despite what they may say to the contrary.
While the passionate fervor espoused by some cartoonists for making comics may seem new, it only feels that way. Between talking “craft” and “mark-making” online, consuming streams and podcasts, and making the scene at shows and expos, a person could ostensibly cobble together a whole personality by simply placing themselves in the vicinity of comics talk. Many do just that!
Self-important artistes have been known to gripe that a dearth of experience in the ink-stained gutters of comic production should nullify the opinion of anyone offering critique, formal or otherwise. While there can be no comics criticism without comics, it should first be noted that engaging criticism is the reason that comics enjoy their current cultural position and, second, criticism has long been an incubator for itinerant talent. The comics industry is and always has been built on the freely-given market research and freely-offered labor of fandom.
The reach and accessibility offered by social media has given way to an industry of passionately produced content that runs parallel to the industries it promotes. In this context, the term “criticism” may be doing some heavy lifting. When people who talk about this stuff become beholden to publicists, on whom they must rely for continued access, the content made for mainstream audiences amounts to plot recapitulation or, worse, consumer advice. A bad Rotten Tomatoes score can stifle or even tank an opening weekend, but comics criticism has not yet risen to that level of respectability. Still, in certain circles, a blurb can go a long way.
Comics are big business. Like any big business, Comics embody myriad contradictions, hypocrisies, and injustices. On the end of the spectrum that hews closest to “pop culture,” comics is foremost an incubator and testing ground for intellectual properties. While the barriers to entry may seem steep to the uninitiated, comics still offer a shorter distance between artists and audience than just about any other art form. It’s a rare medium, indeed, that can grant a creator the opportunity to provide content, context, and immediacy in one go.
In comics, the means of production and skill requirements are readily available and easily accessible. This is especially true in the realm of self-publishing. Artists willing to sacrifice the reach and editorial assistance that comes with traditional publishing gain a degree of creative freedom seldom seen in other media. Moreover, the now reliable schedule of expos like SPX, TCAF, Short Run and Cartoon Crossroads Columbus, among others, provide a consistent venue for artists to interface with a potential audience, even if they are stepping onto a crowded field. For those who can’t or won’t hit the road, BigCartel and Gumroad have made it easier than ever. Slick user-interfaces can mask the crankish stink of the self-publishing endeavor, but they also mute some of its shaggy-dog charm. Whether online or in person, in this arena, the marketing and presentation of books is an art unto itself.
Any reader who has strolled the aisles of a small press expo or zine fair can speak to the wildly disparate levels of quality bought by ten dollars. One might find a tightly-constructed treatise or a nervous breakdown put to paper. As an industry unto itself, self-publishing is no less given to gimmicks and groupthink. That Riso-printing or saddle-stitching might be what puts your book over.
Success is relative and an industry built on narrow profit margins doesn’t allow for much of it. A commercial, populist art form like comics invites exciting possibilities, but also unreasonable expectations. Making comics is more a compulsion than a career path. Save for a few outliers, it’s true that most workers involved in a comic’s production won’t taste the spoils of their labor. It’s also true that the annals of comics history are littered with artists and writers who found their truest expression putting their ideas to print. But singular pursuit of comics’ shallow rewards left many visionaries of the medium unwilling or unable to do anything else and the list of casualties continues to grow.
The aptly-titled Pure Evil by Matt Seneca distills these concerns into boozy noir set against the backdrop of postwar Northern California. Self-published under his Very Fine Comix label, this slim and unassuming one-shot, ushers readers to an era when the American comics industry was in a state of youthful ascendance and the art form was both overambitious in its reach and undervalued in its reception. Sounds familiar.
Pure Evil is remarkable in that it succeeds in both form and context. It clears the (admittedly low) bar associated with self-publishing, but also stands confidently next to the best offerings of both the adjacent small-press and larger, better-resourced endeavors. And although Pure Evil is a self-contained offering, it exists in conversation with much of Seneca’s body of work to date, as well as a century of comics history, speaking to Seneca’s eye as both a critic and cartoonist.
Seneca’s story opens on the death of protagonist Dean Strobe’s father, John Strobe, a cartoonist-turned-publisher who found a measure of success in the burgeoning industry. Enough, at least, to put together a modest studio concern. Dean receives the news of his father’s death with stoicism, remarking with some interest that the illness that took his father’s life took his penis as well.
In short order, Dean also receives word that his father’s last big project, a contract to reprint and repackage Razz Berries, a strip John assisted on early in his career, has come to fruition. Dean decides to risk it all on the reprints, firing the entire staff in an effort to focus his resources and capital to the utmost, elevating it from a mere publishing project to a full-fledged caper. Mary, the officious, capable, and, of course, beautiful, Gal Friday is the only one who survives the purge. These opening pages demonstrate a deft sense of economy that will sustain throughout, accruing enough momentum in the character-building climb to send the pair careening handily through the dips and twists that await.
Seneca fleshes out his characters in thoughtful flourishes. Often foregoing subtlety, whatever artfulness may be lost at the expense of his directness bolsters the story and the characters’ places in it. It is not Dean’s ambition, but his sense of inferiority and self-loathing that drive him, qualities projected through the lens of a streetwise affect. Strategies and tactics that appear to Dean as the paths of least resistance would be rejected by a better-adjusted character- he hates himself, but he seems to hate most everyone else even more. The brusque delivery of the staff cuts earns a beating from his labor force and a shiner to remind him of it, but Dean examines the unsightly bruise with approval, remarking how good it makes him look.
Mary is Dean’s opposite number. Framed as a professional peer, she is everything Dean is not. Mary is well-liked, talented, and, above all, serves a purpose among her cohort. Seneca introduces her amid a dizzying flurry of activity, which she executes with artful efficiency. “Yep,” she replies to the throng of artists surrounding her, inundating her with urgent requests. Seneca depicts this speech balloon as a tidy huff of wind that evokes both effort and ease, perhaps my favorite detail in the whole book.
Mary greases the tracks and keeps the operation running smoothly, lettering, inking, coloring, and attending to the needs of the models and photographers shooting pornography in the shared space. In this setting, Mary is the master of her universe, yet she replies with sarcasm to the notion of producing her own work. In a few pages, Seneca introduces her judgmental immigrant mother as an unspoken explanation of her response. Mary forecloses long-term opportunities out of a practical requirement to meet short-term needs. Survival trumps ambition. The existential ennui that colors Dean’s affect is a luxury Mary cannot afford. When Mary tries to explain her upcoming work trip to her mother, with whom she shares a small home, she does not get far before being called a whore. “A ‘work trip’? With that that office full of pimps? They need a good time girl,” she scolds.
Dean does little to dissuade Mary of that notion when the pair attend a business dinner at the stately home of Rose Ann Brink—the widow of his father’s old boss, the cartoonist behind Razz Berries—to retrieve a trove of original pages, the raw materials of their work. The business meeting becomes an exhibition of the niceties upholding the social order of the day: upon their introduction Mary wastes no time lying to the widow about her ethnicity, claiming Spanish ancestry over her true Mexican heritage, neither Dean nor Mary refute the hostess’s assumption that the two are newlyweds.
The Brinks and their lawyer, Mr. Foster, bring their own awkwardness to the exchange, as daughter Gloria fawns over Dean and the hulking lawyer contorts his massive frame to a tiny formal dining chair. The hosts’ formal attire and the garish table setting overlooking the lake put the class disparities of the two parties in stark relief. Still, the event is as much Grey Gardens as it is Great Gatsby. Despite a superficial display of the trappings of wealth, one gets the impression that the Brink family needs a win as much as Dean, if only to restore the clan to some former glory. Upon the pair’s departure, in one of many nods to Dean’s fragile masculinity, he dismisses Junior Brink, silent for the duration of the event, as "a real fudge-packer". “You liked his sister, though,” Mary retorts.
The pair set up shop in Dean’s childhood home in rural Northern California. An attestation to the seeming abundance bought by a middle-class existence, Dean explains that his father built up the spacious, well-appointed dwelling in pieces, commissioning additions as his finances would permit right up until his death. Dean expresses his admiration for his father’s courage to strike out on his own and what he perceives as the spoils of his father’s business acumen. “He quit assisting Brink so he could be the boss,” Dean says. “He useta say it’s simple math. You get more labor value than you pay for…or you don’t. Common cause doesn’t exist.”
Working together at the house, Dean and Mary do find common cause, however briefly. In a charming back-and-forth showcasing Seneca’s passion for craft, Mary demonstrates the extent to which she has mastered the printing process with a technical explanation of how best to fake the richness of old printing methods on new equipment, and Dean conjures a scheme to print materials in a larger format by using a method typically reserved for skin magazines. They also find common ground in their disdain for the parental obligations and expectations that dog each of them. In a telling exchange, Mary shares that she goes by an anglicized version of her real name, Maria. Dean matches her in his revelation that his last name, Strobe, is really Strzobysz.
Dean is only a few steps ahead of Maria in the American class game and he knows it, but, through business ownership, Dean’s father paid wages of whiteness that no amount of hard work could buy. While that counts for something in the social order, you’re only as good as your last success. For all his impulsiveness, Dean is at least aware of the speed at which that kind of social capital is spent, hence his rush to secure a favorable class position with a big, bold move. In the fledgling comic book industry on which Dean hopes to make his mark, the only thing thinner than the paper is the profit margin, but with low expectations come low standards for what constitutes success. In Dean’s estimation, as long as he can keep a little money in his pocket and someone- anyone- below him, he is a tycoon-in-waiting and nobody can say otherwise. Were he born a century later, he would fit in perfectly among the Venture Capitalists that now people the same Nor-Cal where this story takes place.
More of Dean’s seamy secrets come to light as the pair draw closer to their goal. He demonstrates that his father’s instruction was not limited to sharing hoary chestnuts on how to best run the family business. His lessons on achieving dominance were imparted to his son on a deeper level. As tensions mount, Maria and Dean transition from cartoonists to pornographers with remarkable ease, illustrating the low standing of both the artists and their milieu.
Notions of race, class, and legacy are the themes looming largest in Pure Evil. In exploring them, Seneca finds a through line to his own previous work. As in Tomahawk, Seneca’s read on Son of Tomahawk (“The Forgotten Masterpiece of American Comics”), these aspects— manifested as intergenerational dissonance and post-war malaise—are the engine that propels the story. “Being a story of family, Son of Tomahawk is also about inheritance,” Seneca writes. “The older generation’s responsibility for the world handed down to their children, those children’s acceptance or rebuke of it, and the way this reaction is received in turn.” The older generation has passed the torch by the time the Seneca’s story finds Dean. While he speaks of his father’s instruction with deference throughout Pure Evil, don’t forget that Dean’s initial reaction to his father’s death is that “his cock fell off!”
With the resources handed to him, fail-son Dean spends the duration of the story trying to follow in his father’s footsteps, not out of admiration, but a sense of necessity. In an attempt to outrun the totalizing impotence he witnessed, Dean moves with a reckless abandon and a heavier footfall than his father ever dared; either a testament to newfound confidence in the light beyond his father’s shadow or a lack thereof without his father’s guidance and resources. Dean elects to accept his father’s world, along with all of its attendant responsibilities, concerns, and cynicism.
Officially, the book is not Matt Seneca’s debut work. He’s been making comics for around a decade. He’s been writing and talking about them for even longer as a critic, published in these pages and others, and on the mic with TCJ editors past and present on the long-running podcast Comic Books are Burning In Hell. While Pure Evil is not a debut, per se, it has the electric crackle of one in that it offers such a thorough encapsulation of Seneca’s concerns, especially those of recent years.
Pure Evil is the rare work that is so in keeping with the artist’s trajectory that it makes everything before it feel like an audition, but so tonally out of step with what came before it that the reader must reconsider their understanding of both the creator and subject matter. Essentially, Pure Evil posits the conception and artistry of comics as a trade by industry workers and the disposability and underestimation of the form by publishers, illuminating the tension between these competing interests in the production of comics. Seneca offers a sober view into the life-cycle of ostensibly unremarkable comics production; from the bullpen where they are conceptualized to the factory floor where they are printed (alongside runs of pornography) to the moldering attic closets, where they languish until some enterprising soul can conceive of a way to squeeze another few cents out of them.
If that sounds stuffy or wonkish, know that Seneca’s whole argument is filtered through the lens of taut storytelling. If it sounds grim, know that it’s more than grim. It’s pitch black and riddled with broken, duplicitous, selfish and self-effacing characters.
As if to recommend that the mysterious ways in which people betray each other (and themselves) are knowable with the proper dose of suspicion, Seneca is literal in his telling and rigid in his layouts, placing the majority of his panels in neat, tight rows. In other hands, such inflexibility might seem stifling. Indeed, the small detailed panels often crowd the page, especially given Seneca’s lack of shorthand, but that results in mostly adding to the sense of looming doom and claustrophobic desperation.
Like any cartoonist worth their salt, Seneca only makes this rule to break it later. He first does so with sparseness to evoke Dean’s pathetic loneliness when caught running afoul of the unwritten code of cartoonists not to ink pencils without permission. Later, he does the opposite in a sequence that omits panel progression for a staccato of elbow-to-elbow violence. Horror and Sci-fi material are often presented with a nod to EC, but crime stories were also a staple of the publisher. While Pure Evil cries out from territories shared by those EC greed parables in a similarly manic register, Seneca imports details and flourishes that could only be informed by the longer view of a critical eye. Seneca’s experience as a critic adds a dimension of richness to it. Pure Evil stands out among other contemporary self-published offerings as a complete vision, from beginning to middle to end. Every aspect is laden with subtle (and not-so-subtle) commentary. Appearing on the cover, for example, is a glib subtitle: “Chronicle of Disintegration.” Below the corner pricing of “40 pages for $7.95” is “Useless Waste.” Both of these nihilistic bromides are proven out after a fashion, either in the telling or the execution.
In the book’s indicia, Seneca issues a telling rundown of Pure Evil’s influences and inspirations, expressing gratitude to comics forebears Floyd Gottfredson, Doug Wright, and Frank King, each of whom can be found, somehow, in Seneca’s buoyant line. Along with a dialog credit to Sam Fuller’s 1961 film Underworld, USA, Seneca attributes the one-page strip on the back cover as an adaptation of The Far Cry, a novel by the prolific pulp author Fredric Brown in which protagonist George Weaver undertakes an alcohol-fueled investigation of an unsolved murder in the deserts of New Mexico.
Self-published comics tend toward reflexiveness. Labor notwithstanding, they are often brisk in the reading with a focus on capturing or distilling aesthetic and tonal qualities. The goal is to access an emotional current. When artists don’t thread the needle, though, these works read as portfolio fodder, proofs-of-concept for something bigger and more ambitious and ostensibly more lucrative.
A less flattering synonym for self-publishing is “Vanity Press.” The term evokes naïveté and, perhaps, a lack of self-awareness. Given unfettered resources, any work of art will range from the self-indulgent to the sublime, regardless of who is doing the publishing. But the elusive and unnameable qualities that make something work cannot be faked. Pure Evil bears all the markings of an amateur endeavor, but only just. You can’t have pulp without some splinters, after all. What Pure Evil lacks in production value, Seneca recuperates with abundant and unwavering attention to the story’s themes.
The Fredric Brown strip adorning Pure Evil’s back cover is a puzzling addition in that the rest of the book is focused so completely on Seneca’s own storytelling. It ties the package together, though, and may even point to Seneca’s deeper motivations. Any reference to Fredric Brown would be in keeping with the tone and concerns of Pure Evil, of course. But the strip’s inclusion allows the story to breach the containment so often implicit to self-published work, situating Pure Evil in conversation with everything that came before it. In this way, Seneca advances an argument that runs through his criticism, namely that, despite their newly respectable status, comics are elevated in the reading, not the packaging or the marketing. Seneca makes a case for the unassuming over the ambitious in Pure Evil’s staid, inauspicious presentation. He is not writing for the bookshelf, but the back issue bin, where comics can take their rightful place as righteous trash.
In a 2018 article, Six Books from One Failed Bookstore, Seneca samples an array of offerings from Berkeley’s Mad Monk Center for Anachronistic Media, a used record and bookstore in its waning days, about to close up shop for good. In a welcome and obfuscating spin on the tired capsule review format, Seneca explains why each book was not worth his time, “Why It’s a Dog,” going on to explain why he bought it anyway. For this illuminating exercise, he draws on his experience as a reader, as a critic, and as a retailer, opining on titles like longbox mainstay Marvel Fanfare, a collection of French cartoonist Claire Bretecher’s Agrippina (in French), and Judge Dredd: Block Mania, a confusingly-collected import of a classic 2000AD story by a slew of the artists and writers that know the character best. Seneca further elaborates on this conceit by sharing his favorite images from each book. Stripped of their place within arguably bad comic books, the images assume a new degree of weight and portent and the effort of the artists, of everyone involved in their publication is laid bare. "Not every book that doesn't sell is a stinker, as the history of excellent but shuttered publishers from Catalan to Picturebox attests,” Seneca writes. Not to be too effusive and universal in his praise, he reminds readers that:
plenty of books, including a few I've looked at here, simply aren't good enough to sell, getting by for however long they do on impulse purchase, accidents of taste, misidentification. And so they pass from unsatisfied customer to unsatisfying used bookstore and back again until they're too dog-eared and yellowed to be resold, and finally take up residence in the round file that's been their true home all along.
In such an aesthetic medium as comics, generous, skilled readers can recover something from lopsided offerings, but precious little deserves such treatment, often not even that work that constitutes the best of what a creator has to offer.
In surveying his career to date, Seneca has achieved depth by way of breadth. His disparate and intermittent body of work is an argument for a more lighthearted approach, eschewing careerist ambitions in favor of running down an esoteric and nuanced curiosity. Seneca seems to have internalized the lessons taught over the decades by comics’ frustrated proletariat. As Jack Kirby famously advised James Romberger, “Comics will break your heart.” While the medium is a good one, rife with possibility, it has yet to be decoupled from the unrealistic commercial requirements that keep it running. As such, it will continue to embarrass and even kill anyone dumb enough to try to make a living at it.
NOTE: In the interest of full disclosure, the editors acknowledge the relationship between Matt Seneca and the co-editor of TCJ, Chris Mautner, as two of the four co-hosts of the comics review podcast, Comic Books Are Burning In Hell. Sound off on your favorite episode in the comments. -ed.
The post Where Comics Can Take Their Rightful Place as Righteous Trash: A Look at Matt Seneca’s Pure Evil appeared first on The Comics Journal.
Hello, my name is Jack Sparrow. I'm a 50 year old self-employed Pirate from the Caribbean.
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