The Lost World Of Small Press, Part III: Mysterious minicomics

Minicomics! We love them, and there’s millions of them! I’m back for part three of my ongoing look at The Lost World Of Small Press and the random gems and curiosities from my small press comics collection of the 1990s.

Last time we talked about folks like Matt Feazell and Steve Willis, small press legends who have even achieved a fair bit of ‘fame’ in this little subculture. But there’s a thousand other small press comics out there that maybe only a few people remember or even ever actually read. Let’s take a turn to more mysterious and forgotten comics of the era: 

The thing about all of these ones is that they’re either obscure, or unfinished, or both. They’re comics that caught my attention but the creators just sort of faded from the scene entirely and I have no idea where they are today – you can’t even Google most of these comics. But I still have ‘em and remember them, and well, decades on their creativity is worth remembering, even if only in a blog post. 

Human Unit 12 #1 and #8

What if a clone designed by the government escaped and became well, a kind of hippie? Human Unit 12 was one of the first minicomics I ever “collected,” before it and creator Erik Kaye vanished from the scene, or at least my reckoning of it. These tidy little minis were well produced on slick paper and Kaye’s impressionistic art reminds me some of Bill Sienkiewicz. The design of “Human Unit 12” is particularly innovative – he looks a bit like a Picasso cubist drawing in amongst realistic backgrounds. I really dug HU12 for a while there, which was beautifully drawn yet rambled sort of amiably along without really developing the story too much, as Human Unit wrote poems, worked for Greenpeace and went to parties. The last issue I saw, #8, was a startlingly pornographic sex issue that felt like a mad fever dream, and then, that was it. Like a lot of comics I picked up early in my small press days circa 1990-1993, it just kind of disappeared, unresolved. But while it lasted I dug Human Unit 12’s freedom, and idiosyncratic world. Just starting out to really make my own comics, a book like this reminded me that really, you could create anything. 

The Adventures of Boiled Man #5

On page one it states this “is a completely silly mini-comic, not intended to be taken even a little seriously.” The great thing about the compact minicomic format is that you can do a single gag and make a comic out of it. This issue of Boiled Man by Bryan K. Ward – the only one I ever saw – is nothing but seven pages of a pot and a wok growling and gurgling at each other as a spider crawls down a web in the background. “Amazing Team-Up! Introducing Wok-Man!” the cover blares. It’s daft and goofy, but darn if it the commitment to the “joke” – dadaist as it is – makes me laugh. I don’t know how many adventures of Boiled Man there were, but this one is a true clash of the titans. 

Creature of the Night #1

Unlike some of the more obscure comics here, Creature of the Night was HOT in the small press scene of 1992, by gosh. Publisher and writer Chris Terry burst onto the scene with a captivating little horror tale that made people realise how good small press could look. It boasted extremely high production values for a minicomic of the time – glossy paper, gorgeous Barry Windsor-Smith-esque art by Bob Hobbs, and a catchy dark and violent yarn about Satan worshippers, monsters and evil curses. At the end of #1, our lead character is transformed into a demonic creature and hurtles off into the night swearing revenge.  Yet while Creature made a very big splash in the minicomics scene of the time, Chris Terry never really equalled it. There was another issue or two of Creature after lengthy delays, equally well produced, but the story spun its wheels I thought and never quite got past first gear. Terry soon exited small press entirely a bit abruptly. (Sure, today’s social media is bad, but the squabbling and ‘feuds’ that regularly went through small press in the 1990s in old-fashioned letters and such was as bad as any Facebook group today.) I got an email from Chris Terry once a few years later asking me to promote a band in the newspaper I worked at. And that’s the last I heard of him. I don’t think the Creature of the Night ever showed its face again. 

Mr. Unique #1

This fellow from Florida, Mark Bratton, put out a handful of minicomics which were noteworthy to me because they were so darned weird, like strange backwoods outsider art filtered through Steve Ditko. The story is kind of incomprehensible and the art is, to be charitable, rough, but there’s still this very odd energy to the handful of Bratton comics I own today, with his rough, thick linework almost hacked out of the page and characters alternately sobbing and screaming through the panels. Although it’s littered with misspellings, the story of a clairvoyant’s adventures has this coiled insistence to it that made me keep the battered copy of Mr. Unique #1 for all these years. It feels a bit like a comic that just came out of the void. It’s amateur and raw and sloppy, but you kind of feel like Bratton, whatever happened to him, meant it. And really, that’s kind of what small press comics are all about.