By PAUL GRAVETT, PETER STANBURY (Aurum Press; 2008)
First of all, that title is misleading. The term “Incredibly Strange” doesn’t really do justice to the 61 comics profiled in this book (also published as HOLY SH*T! THE WORLD’S WEIRDEST COMIC BOOKS), it being a widely used synonym for cult media that was popularized by the Jonathan Ross hosted series THE INCREDIBLY STRANGE FILM SHOW (appropriately, Ross has a blurb on this book’s front cover). “Off-beat” or “obscure” would have been more ideal terms, as those are the types of comics covered herein (note the absence of anything by Grant Morrison or Alejandro Jodorowsky, whose comics truly are incredibly strange).
The term “Incredibly Strange” doesn’t really do justice to the 61 comics profiled in this book.
Paul Gravett, a self-proclaimed “comics brainiac,” is the author of quite a few books and articles on comic books, and clearly knows the subject inside and out. Thus it’s a bit disappointing that the write-ups he and co-author Peter Stanbury provide are so brief. There could have been a great deal more written about, for instance, the Malaysian DANTE’S INFERNO pastiche NERAKA (which was but one entry in a long line of Asian Hell comics), and the Jack Chick religious comic THE CRUSADERS NO. 3, which gets but a single line of background info (“After 40 years Jack Chick’s “soul winning” tracts continue to sell in their millions worldwide”).
Yet ultimately the book accomplishes its mission. The comics it profiles are for the most part fascinating obscurities that run the gamut from social engineering tracts (such as the 1952 publication HOW TO SHOOT and 1958’s DRIVING LIKE A PRO) to underground provocations (which include the 1973 one-shot that gives this book its title and 2004’s Jim Goad scripted TRUCKER FAGS IN DENIAL). Christian propaganda is another popular subject, covered in titles like CHAPLAINS AT WAR, THE GOSPEL BLIMP and HANSI, THE GIRL WHO LOVED THE SWASTIKA.
Then there are unclassifiable oddities like LONGSHOT COMICS (whose writer/illustrator Shane Simmons elected to “draw his entire cast so far away that they look like black dots in the far distance”), AMPUTEE LOVE (an “empowering erotic manual”) and GODZILLA VS. BARKLEY (as in Charles Barkley). Also, the authors aren’t above including single issues of comic series that as a whole don’t seem to interest them (such as issue six, a “creepy cold war allegory about communism,” of the short lived early-sixties series BRAIN BOY).
Of course the book could have gone on for much longer than its 128 pages. Conspicuously absent are cult essentials like THE LEGION OF CHARLIES (which imagines an early-1970s America overtaken by Charles Manson followers) and RAIN (the world’s first and only pro-Buddhist, African mysticism-infused, Nazi-tinged crime saga), but what’s here is satisfying enough.