TCJ #309

Publishers over the first 30 years of comic books were a colorful lot, at best merchants, but mostly, almost exclusively, rogues and scoundrels and morons aesthetic nullities, for the most part. If they published any genuine art, or anything even approaching it, it was purely by accident and through the efforts of beleaguered editors who won a few battles but always lost the wars. The publishers may as well have hung out signs on their doors, read ing, “No Art Allowed.” The only two exceptions to this rule were Bill Gaines (EC Comics) and Archer St. John (St. John Comics), who valiantly tried to maintain artistic standards amidst the dross-peddling.

Dissident cartoonists started creating under ground comix in the ’60s, and underground comix needed underground comix publishers, so it came to be. Print Mint (1965), Rip-Off Press (1969), Last Gasp (1970) and Kitchen Sink (1970) were the ma jor publishers of underground comix. This was the first time in the history of comics when a group of cartoonists, who propelled what could be called a “movement,” thought of themselves as artists and not as craftsmen or newspapermen at best or hacks at worst. These publishers were the first comics publishers who didn’t pander to the tastes of ado lescents, didn’t impose a top-down semi-literate editorial edict on work-for-hire writers and artists, and for whom money-grubbing wasn’t the highest priority. The driving force of comix publishers was probably more cultural and political than aesthetic, but comics’ artistry was still a principal part.

In the late ’70s and ’80s, new publishers, in cluding self-publishers, emerged that took this principle a step further, viewing comics primari ly as an art form rather than a cultural force and finetuning their editorial priorities accordingly. The most artistically aspirational publishers in the next wave include (but aren’t limited to) NBM and Fantagraphics (1976), WarP Graphics and Aardvark Vanaheim (1977), Raw Books (1978), and Renegade Press (1984). (Other publishers began in this period, such as Eclipse Comics (1978), Pacific Comics (1981) and First Comics (1983): historically significant but artistically negligible. And underground pub lishers continued to put out comics, most notably,

OVERLEAF: Makkinoso’s Annie Koyama portrait.

LEFT: Annie Koyama with her books, 2018.

RIGHT: From Diane Noomin’s “I’d Rather Be Doing Something Else: The Didi Glitz Story” (1978) in Lemme Outa Here, an anthology comic edited by Noomin and published by Print Mint.

Last Gasp’s Weirdo, Print Mint’s Arcade (their last gasp), Rip Off’s Freak Brothers, and Kitchen’s more diversified line. That was it, as far as putting out truly challenging or groundbreaking comics from the mid-’70s to the mid-’80s. The next wave of what were then called alternative publishers began with Drawn & Quarterly (1989) and includes the

Henriette valium

Andy Brown, Conundrum Publisher

Recently, a scraggly young man came to my table at the Montreal Comic Art Festival table and asked if I spoke French. “Not really.” I said. “You are so punk rock!” he responded. I assumed he said this because Quebec had recently passed a law which basically made English illegal. When I asked him what he meant, he instead referred to the fact that I published Henriette Valium.

Valium’s name was definitely in the air all week end. It was the last day to see his career-spanning retrospective, “Habuimus papam We Had a Pope” in the East End, so people were running off to catch it. The gallery wrote the following to accompany the show: “To travel in [Valium’s] universe is to plunge into an infinite and hallucinatory vortex of dark humor and total freedom. This unclassi fiable work spans more than four decades of dai ly obsessive-compulsiveness, existential storms and zones of turbulence. Locked up for long hours alone, he finds himself in symbiosis with his art, in permanent experimentation: silkscreens, obscene collages, portraits, micro-editions of his tapes, self-published comics, small films and music togeth er with anxiety-provoking and aggressive paintings to tear out the eyeballs.”

Henriette Valium (real name Patrick Henley) died Sept. 1, 2021, his ashes appropriately displayed in a silk-screen ink can for his huge memorial service, attended by a large showing of the Montreal comics community. He was 62. His comics and art graced al most every anthology and underground publication over the past 40 years. Francophone artists revered him but he was virtually unknown in English. In the mid-’90s, I was living in Montreal with cartoonist Billy Mavreas. He kept bringing home crazy comics with names like Guillotine, Mr. Swiz, Fish Piss, Image Gun, Mille Putois, 106U and more. One artist stood out: his expansive technical chops made it seem like

OPPOSITE: valium in his studio in 2016. Photograph by Claude Michaud, from the Henriette valium Archives.

he was on another planet. That artist was Henriette Valium. As Mavreas says, “The work itself scared and exhilarated us. It’s funny and wicked. Lesser talents can play with taboo but Valium owned it, challeng ing his readers with their own dark fantasies.” Many years later, Mavreas informed me Valium had a new book that had taken him seven years to complete and no one would publish it. Would Conundrum Press be interested? Yes! It was my honor to finally publish his magnum opus The Palace of Champions, which won the Doug Wright Award. When he accepted, in his ink-spattered rags, he thanked me: “The only one with the balls to publish me!” I can’t think of a proud er moment in my 25-year career.

The pages printed here, with permission from his family, were on his work table when he died. He started his book Defeko slightly after turning 60. (“Defeko, the brown shadow: wherever he goes, he leaves his mark!”). He was planning to get the work done in 10 years. There are two versions of the au tobiographical introductory page. One is in realistic in form (overleaf left), and the other more abstract (overleaf right).

Valium’s process is instantly apparent, as well as his drawing chops: which version he would have chosen for the final book is unknown. As an obvious perfectionist, it is debatable whether he would want this “sketchbook” work published at all, although it is pretty obvious how clean these uninked pencils are, and hopefully the quality of the work speaks for itself. The idea is to get his work out in the (English) world, to get Valium recognized for the master artist he was. Z

Huge Planets Making Their Turns

Inés Estrada Interviewed

by John Porcellino

Cartoonist Inés Estrada was born in Mexico City, in 1990. Over the past 12 years, she’s emerged as one of the most vibrant and idiosyncratic voices in comics. Inspired by Mexico’s punk/DIY underground, she has self-published numerous comics and zines. These include two crucial collections of her work Ojitos Borrosos (2012) and Impatience (2016) under her Gatosaurio imprint, which also functions as an online distributor for other Mexican cartoon ists and artists. Additionally, she has co-edited the comics anthology Gang Bang Bong and the book Fanzinología Mexicana 1985–2015, an overview of 30 years of Mexican zine culture. In 2019, Fantagraphics collected her self-published series, Alienation, which immediately found acclaim as one of comics’ most pointed and imaginative critiques of our contemporary condi tion. The book served as an aesthetic distillation of Estrada’s recurrent themes: Technology, personal autonomy and connection, sexuality, the human vs animal worlds and a kind of simultaneous fascination with and distrust of the digitization of human life. Timely stuff.

Shortly before the release of Alienation, Estrada suffered a life-altering psychotic break that result ed in serious injury and set her on a long road to emotional, physical and spiritual recovery. She’s continued to create comics and zines, adapting her approach, technique and subject matter in response to her new reality.

In this interview, we talk about growing up as a Mexican comics reader, finding her voice and path as an artist and the connections and disconnec tions between the Mexican and U.S. comics scenes. We discuss her various creative obsessions, her psychotic break, making a living from art and the role of DIY culture in the digital age, among many other topics. Estrada is a well-read and intelligent free-thinker, unafraid to critique the Sacred Cows of comics, art, tech and capitalism. It was a delight speaking with her.

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JOHN PORCELLINO: When did you start to feel like you had an interest in comics or art or writing or any of those things?

INÉS ESTRADA : I actually don’t remember when I wasn’t interested in them. I feel like I’ve always been obsessed with cartoons. Something about the charac ters and drawings, it’s always been really appealing to me. Since I remember, I’ve always wanted to be a car toonist. I grew up reading Woody Woodpecker comics that they make here in Mexico. He would always go to get tacos or stuff like that [laughter]. Those were always the storylines…

Were these comics that were made specifically for Mexican readers? Or were they comics that they adapted?

No, they were made here! They’re from an editing house called Vid. I think they bought the licenses and they were made here and drawn here. They were offi cial but they did look kind of bootleg.

So, as long as you can remember, you’ve been interested in that stuff …

When I was 4 or 6 years old, when I started learning how to read, I would go with my mom to the market and she would buy the newspaper and I would pick