Tag Archives: Fantagraphics

Lizard Zen

Hermetic Library fellow T Polyphilus reviews Lizard Zen by Vaughn Bodē, Marc Arsenault, and Mark Bodē, from Fantagraphics.

Vaughn Bodē Marc Arsenault Mark Bodē Lizard Zen from Fantagraphics

This volume of Vaughn Bodē comix is pretty purely miscellany, featuring the plotless five-page “Lizard Zen” as its centerpiece. Bodē was a pioneer of underground comix, and as editor Marc Arsenault notes, Bodē’s work (coming to a too-early end in 1975) has been an enduring influence on the entire medium of art graffiti.

The presence of human titties and lizard peckers is strictly for yucks here; there’s nothing arousing about them. The art is vigorous while the stories tend toward the futilitarian absurd. I couldn’t make heads or tails out of the gobbledigook-scripted “Gline.” I felt like many of the topical references passed me by, especially in the Douglas Recording advertisements. But the science fiction parable “The Rudolf” was quite chilling in light of our 2014 “lone wolf” mass shootings.

All in all, this isn’t the cream of Bodē’s work, but it is representative and highly varied. [via]

The Cartoon Utopia

The Cartoon Utopia [also] by Ron Regé, Jr [also] is a graphic novel in which “beings from the future attempt to raise the consciousness of those in the present.”

Ron Rege's Cartoon Utopia from Fantagraphics

 

“In The Cartoon Utopia, ‘Utopians’ of the future world are attempting to send messages through consciousness, outside of the constricts of time as we understand it. They live in a world of advanced collective consciousness and want to help us understand how to achieve what they have accomplished. They get together to perform this task in a way that evolved out of our current system of consuming information and entertainment. In other words, the opposite of television. Instead, these messages appear in the form of art, music and storytelling.” [via]