My father used to seethe with anger whenever we would get stuck in traffic. We lived in Garden Grove, California, near the 22 freeway and the 5 and the 405 and the 55 and the 57 and the 91, part of the sprawl of strip malls and pavement that stretches 90 or so mostly uninterrupted miles from Callabasas in the the North, through LA proper, and down south to San Clemente. We were just a couple miles south of Disneyland and Angel Stadium. There was always plenty of opportunity to seethe in traffic.

One day we were at a standstill in a bumper-to-bumper jam on, as I recall, the 5 South somewhere in Santa Ana. My dad seethed about “fucking California,” “too much traffic, too many fucking people,” and “all this fucking smog.” Probably thinking about a recent episode of Three’s Company (I truly loved that show, although I was young enough when it aired that I didn’t understand all of the double entendres), I stared out the window aimlessly.

We had been stuck behind a medium sized delivery truck for some time. It was very dirty, and after a few minutes it caught my attention that on the sliding door at the rear of the truck someone had used their fingers to write something. The top of the door was the dirtiest part, so it was easy to read the first two words:

I

LOVE

The bottom half of the door looked like there had been an attempt to wipe it clean, or maybe wind had blown off the dirt on that part. There was less dirt there and although I could tell there was another part of the message, it was hard to make out the third word. It definitely started with a “T.”

“‘I — Love — T…. Ti….’ What the heck? What does that say?!”

It took some minutes of staring at that truck, but I finally did figure out the rest of the letters that were written there. Still, it wasn’t a word I recognized. I tried to recall if I had ever seen it used in a sentence before but came up with nothing. I started saying the word phonetically in my head; as far as I could tell, it would have been pronounced “TIE-TEASE,” but that wasn’t helping at all. Finally, unable to figure it out on my own, I asked my dad. “He probably knows what ‘TIE-TEASE’ are,” I thought.

“Hey dad?”

“Yeah,” he grunted.

“What are ‘TIE-TEASE’?”

His shoulders tensed and he loudly snapped, “Don’t worry about that! You don’t need to be asking about that kind of stuff!!”

He changed lanes. I was mystified at why this question seemed to make him so angry. Why did he get mad at me? I didn’t even know what “TIE-TEASE” were, I was just reading what I saw. I was too mad, at that moment, to wonder about “TIE-TEASE” anymore, and I soon forgot about it altogether.

A number of years later I sat by myself one day recalling incidents in the past, when my thoughts drifted to being stuck behind the truck on the freeway with my dad.

“Oh!!” I thought, wide-eyed.

“Titties!! It was supposed to say ‘Titties’! It wasn’t’TIE-TEASE’ — it was “I Love Titties,’ except some dummy spelled it ‘T-I-T-I-E-S’!!!”

“But,” I thought, “I guess I’m the dummy after all. Took me 15 years to figure it out.”

“Anyway, yeah. Me too, man. Me too.”

I have a good laugh with my dad every once in a while about this incident. When I was growing up, he was very uptight about coarse language (despite delving into the occasional expletive-laden tirade himself, like any dad) and he certainly didn’t want to hear any coming out of his own kids’ mouths.

Foul language from my younger sister or me was not tolerated. Even fart jokes were met with a stern rebuke from Dad — “HAVE SOME CLASS!” We mostly tried to toe the line with the household language policy. However, sometimes we had to just let loose, consequences be damned — like the time Dad was on his hands and knees looking for something underneath the coffee table in the living room. Not only did Dad not make or approve of fart jokes, he never farted anywhere we could hear (or smell) it. Down there that night on his hands and knees, Dad unleashed not just a fart, but THE FART, a blast of foul air of such length and sonorous perfection that I can’t even properly describe it. Think to yourself what the Platonic Ideal of a fart would sound like. Yeah, that’s what my dad — the fart joke repressor who had never busted ass in front of me in 16 years at that point — let loose while fumbling around on his hands and knees. My sister and I sat wide-eyed in shock for a moment, then burst out laughing uncontrollably, imitating the sound and acting like we were choking on poison gas. Dad walked away, grumbling about us having no class, knowing he was defeated.

That fart was indeed a turning point. Dad lightened up on stuff like that a lot as my sister and I got older. We all still get a laugh out of how uptight he used to be at vulgar humor. My sister even made a certificate for him, proclaiming him as the president of a fake organization called “FART - Fathers Against Rude Talk,” which he still proudly hangs on his refrigerator. Even though there are still a few boundaries (he’s still not a big fan of cum & cock & pussy jokes), Dad has come a long way and I’m proud of how he has evolved. Looking back on this stuff now, I can’t really blame Dad for being uptight about vulgar language and such when I was a kid. He probably felt the culture coarsening around him and didn’t want us being corrupted. It was the 1980s, every time he took me to a movie there were giant tits hanging out and people getting shot and every other word was “fuck” (I wasn’t complaining, I loved it!!).

I’m in my 50s now and I have an 11 year old son and, while I am way more liberal on this issue than my dad was, I can see where he was coming from. I don’t worry about nudity so much, it’s just the human body after all (as long as it’s not people fucking, still too young for that!), and cartoonish, unrealistic violence doesn’t concern me too much. Up to a certain point I let him swear at home, too, as long as he knows there is a time and place and he doesn’t use ‘bad words’ at school or around his grandparents. But man, some of the things kids can see these days. Actual murder videos and hardcore pornography available at their fingertips. I want my son to be free, to have fun and laugh at shit and think for himself and question things that don’t make sense to him, but I need to protect his innocence too, and let him just be a kid for as long as possible.

A couple years back my wife and my son and I were in a bookstore and my son asked me, “Dad, what is ‘C-U-M’?” I thought it was really cute that he literally spelled it out when he asked, but I was definitely in a bit of a quandary.

Should I just be open and talk to him like he’s 25? “Well, it’s the stuff that shoots out of your dick 12 seconds after you stick it in a girl and thrust your hips a couple times!” No, that would be a terrible thing to say to a nine year old.

Should I take a harsher approach, just to quickly shut down the conversation? “It’s nothing you need to be asking about, and don’t say that word again!!” No, if I say that he’ll definitely google “CUM” the first chance he gets.

Then it occurred to me. Be simple and straightforward and just leave some information out. “Uh, well…it’s a bodily fluid. You’ll learn more about it when you get older.”

And that was that. My wife told me later that was a “great save.” My son hasn’t asked me about cum again, although I wouldn’t be surprised if he still googled it. I know I would have.

Talk to you soon,

Aric

It’s been roughly five years since I got back into making, collecting, and reading comics. Like many others I’ve talked to and read in that time, I was a lapsed comic book collector / reader, and a combination of YouTube videos during COVID downtime, catching up on the MCU films, and getting older and succumbing to nostalgia lit a fire under my ass, making me remember how much fun comics are and how much I missed them. I’ve read a lot of shitty comics in the five years since, but a lot of really great ones too. What follows is a completely subjective, somewhat random list of five comics (either series, trade paperbacks, or single issues) that stand out to me as the best things I’ve read in the last five years.

Terror Assaulter: OMWOT by Ben Marra.

A wild, depraved, dumb & really smart at the same time, action-packed, hilarious riot of a book. A satire of 80s action films and War-On-Terror era America, from the plot to the dialogue to the art itself this comic is just layer upon layer upon layer upon layer of irony, without trying to be cool. I learned a lot from this book about all the different little things you can add to your comics to make them funnier; might be my favorite thing I’ve read in the last five years.

Prison Pit: The Complete Collection by Johnny Ryan

I’ve been a long-time Johnny Ryan fan, going back to when he was self-publishing Angry Youth Comics, but Prison Pit was released during my long self-exile from comics so I missed the original series. I was ecstatic when Fantagraphics released the entire saga in an affordable paperback and as soon as I got it I sat down and read that bastard in one sitting.

The book is around 700 pages of the “hero,” a blood-drenched miscreant called Cannibal Fuckface, as he wanders through an intergalactic wasteland dispatching a variety of mutants and monsters he crosses paths with in a gloriously vulgar and gory manner.

Another book that taught me a lot, another all-time favorite.

I Hate This Place Vol. 1 by Kyle Starks and Artyom Topilin.

This book collects the first five of a ten issue series. The world-building to start this story is some of the best I have ever read. There was a point 3 or 4 pages in where I had had to stop & reread it, and then thought to myself “wow, so in these few pages the writer and artist have shown me (NOT told me) that the young couple at the center of the tale are about to be embroiled in a bloody story of survival involving criminals, aliens and zombies. Great art and excellent writing go along with the superb world-building. One of those books that reminded me how awesome comics can be.

Kill Or Be Killed by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips.

When I got back into comics I started seeing a lot of praise for the graphic novels by these two. I tried a couple — “Pulp,” “Reckless,” and one or two others — and I enjoyed them. I love a good crime story and these are all really well written and drawn, but I wasn’t blown away….until I read the first TPB of Kill Or Be Killed. After I flew through that first volume I immediately bought the remaining three.

In KOBK, we follow the story of unhappy college student Dylan, creeping towards his thirties and dissatisfied with his life, who attempts suicide after a relationship goes bad. Dylan soon finds that he only survived with the help of a demon who informs him that he must now kill one person a month or be killed himself. Deciding to go along with the demon, Dylan first targets the leader of a pedophile ring before moving on to a series of mobsters and various other Very Bad People.

The writing and art are both superb. KOBK is action-packed, with the tension and violence ratcheting up more and more as the story progresses, and it makes you examine the morality of killing really awful people. If you just want to be entertained KOBK will do the job, but there’s more to think about there as well.

Brother Power The Geek #1 by Joe Simon and Al Bare

This is a pretty random entry on this list; the first of two issues of this very short-lived character (I think he has appeared in maybe ten issues of various DC comics over the course of six decades), first appearing in this book in 1968. I was intrigued by a review I read of this comic, thinking it sounded weird enough that I would really enjoy it. I hunted down a copy of #1 for myself and, you guessed it, I really enjoyed it.

Brother Power was a mannequin that had been left behind in a long abandoned tailor’s shop which was later taken over by a group of hippies. One rainy night the hippies arrive at the shop soaking wet and one of them puts his clothes on the mannequin to avoid shrinking. The mannequin is forgotten about, has some oil spilled on him, and is later struck by lightning, bringing him to life Frankenstein-style. The rest of the book is Brother Power avoiding humanity while simultaneously trying to protect innocent hippies and other bystanders from a fantastically-conceived gang of late 1960s biker stereotypes.

I can’t exactly say Brother Power The Geek is a “well-written” book, but it is written in a kind of stream-of-consciousness manner that I find very fun and entertaining. There’s no real story arc, our hero comes to life and then he stumbles over here and meets some nice people, hides out for a bit, then staggers over there and meets some bad people, and so on. With the context of reading this almost 60 years after its creation, it’s really interesting to see how Simon handled the numerous hippy characters in the book; the hippies are pretty goofily written, but I never sensed any judgement or condescension toward them. Al Bare’s art is really great in this, too. A very weird and fun and memorable comic, right up there with my favorite comics I’ve read in the last five years.

That’s my list, and I’m sticking to it. Do you agree with this list? Do you think I’m some kind of knuckle dragging sub-literate based on what I’ve mentioned here? Add your own list, I’d be very interested to see your favorite comics!

Aric

A Few Honorable Mentions:

Hate Revisited by Peter Bagge; Conan The Barbarian (the new Titan Comics Series) by Jim Zub and various artists; Maple Terrace by Noah Van Sciver; Get Fury by Garth Ennis and Jacen Burrows.

*It may have been six years. I don’t know, I didn’t write the exact date down. It feels like five years, so let’s just go with that.

I was a full-on comic collector nerd as a kid and in my early teenage years, but by the time I graduated high school superhero comics were just not very important to me any longer. At one point, at the age of 19, with no job and no money to pursue my newer passions of drinking beer and buying punk records, I made the decision to sell off my comic book collection. I didn’t get rid of my entire stockpile, though. Among the couple dozen books I held onto then (I still have most of those books today) is Dennis Worden’s STICKBOY #1, published in 1988 by Fantagraphics Books.

Eight issues of STICKBOY were published between 1988 and 2005, chronicling the hilarious misadventures of a sarcastic, philosophically tortured stick figure. Stickboy suffers through the bullshit and indignities of everyday life while keeping his mind on the ‘big picture’ questions — “what is our purpose in life?” and “does god exist, and if so why is he such an asshole?” When I first read STICKBOY #1 I felt like Worden could have been writing directly from my own thoughts and feelings and experiences. Reading it again now before writing this, I found that it still holds up.

In STICKBOY #1 our protagonist does the following:

• Gets fired from a job and suffers through the indignities of a job hunt and job interviews.

• Contemplates suicide while stressing out about his high rent and low wages and trying to find some kind of meaning in his life.

• Gets a job at “Pizza Pete’s” and soon proceeds to dump a pizza over the head of his teenage boss.

• Quits that job and embarks on a vagabond lifestyle at a local park, where he gets in an argument with his own dick, ruminates on the nature of god, and eventually quits his own comic.

• Joins a cult and gets hypnotized by a guru.

• Runs away with a cute girl, only to die in a nuclear war.

• Ends the story by being reborn nine months later (sorry for the spoiler, but come on, this comic was released 36 years ago).

Phwew!! It’s quite an adventure!

Worden’s writing in STICKBOY is highly sarcastic and very very funny. He has a great tendency of ending a segment of the story, or the entire story itself, with a punchline of a last panel that seems to come out of nowhere and is usually at Stickboy’s expense (which is something I have found very influential in my own comic-making). STICKBOY is also a very relatable comic. When his boss at the pizza joint badgers him about showing some pride in his work and Stickboy dumps the pizza over the guy’s head…..well, I fantasized about doing something similar many times during my years working at Little Caesar’s Pizza. I never joined a cult, but I have slept in parks, lived in shithole apartments, and have probably had more than one argument with my own dick. There’s so much in here that I find relatable in terms of thoughts I’ve had and experiences I’ve lived. It’s pretty great when a silly comic book about an angry stick figure can evoke an emotional response that stays with a reader decades later.

I mentioned earlier that I felt STICKBOY #1 holds up 30 plus years after I first read it. One thing for me that noticeably held up when reading this again is Worden’s art. STICKBOY isn’t a title known for the masterful drawing of a Crumb or Clowes, but there are great things in this book. For most of it Worden employs a basic 9 panel grid format with the use of dashes and dots to convey things such as an evening sky or a grungy apartment. Simplified figures and effective panel composition allow for the expression of movement and time passage, and plenty of dialog, without the art being overwhelmed and cluttered with words. It’s a simplified drawing style that may come off to some as crude, but I find it works perfectly for the story being told.

Among the alternative and underground cartoonists who made a name for themselves in the 1980s, Worden is probably one of the least known of the bunch. I think this is a shame and that he is very underrated, but I suppose this is due in large measure to the fact that he wasn’t as prolific a cartoonist as some of the bigger names of the era. Nevertheless I remain a big fan of Worden’s stuff and STICKBOY #1 is among the comic books I would take with me to the proverbial desert island. And, I’m happy to say, I’ve had the opportunity to chat with Worden a little bit on facebook, and he’s a pretty cool guy, too.

Aric Calfee 11/29/24