Ten Good Reasons to Read Yourself Raw (and one reason why you shouldn’t)

by Peter Campbell 18-Oct-10

A comprehensive overview of all the contributions to RAW would seem endless, and would probably make your brain melt, so instead Peter Campbell offers, in no particular order, the ten things that made RAW so groundbreaking and essential.

So how did we get here?

By here, I mean the journey over the last twenty years where the perception of comics has changed from the point where they were routinely made the objects of denigration (“comic-book characterisation” being a common criticism) to their current status where they have infiltrated the mainstream, are regularly reviewed in the broadsheets, and no book shop can be without its graphic novel section.

You may point the finger here at Watchmen, or The Dark Knight, or Ghost World, or Palestine, or Jimmy Corrigan, and you’d be right to, because these were all major steps on the way to mainstream acceptance. Maus aside, RAW magazine gets less credit for the revolution that’s occurred, which is unfortunate because the influence of its ideas galvanised the comics arena in ways both large and small.

RAW began as the brainchild of Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly. The idea was to gather together like-minded comics artists, creating a high-end showcase for the very best comics art had to offer, while acknowledging its yellow pulp origins. It was comics with a sense of history.

That in itself was something fairly novel. Comic books have long had continuity, of course, but it’s tended to be continuity of character and location. Marvel built an entire empire from that concept, with its interlocking characters and crossovers and detailed reference to events gone before.

RAW’s approach was somewhat different. It demanded the reader had some recognition of the form and history of the comics medium. It’s impossible to fully appreciate many of the stories published without being aware that they carry echoes from other publications, other artists, other times. Yes, it’s possible to read and enjoy Jooste Swarte’s contributions without being familiar with the work of Herge or George McManus, but their subversive atmosphere is so much more enjoyable if you are.

That’s a very High Art concept. Mix that with comics’ wilfully Low Art origins, and you have something quite powerful and rebellious in your hands. The taglines on later editions would push forward this idea: high culture for lowbrows; required reading for the post literate; the graphix magazine that overestimates the taste of the American public.

Spiegelman had attempted something similar in the 1970s, with Arcade magazine. It appeared in the underground movement’s twilight years, assembling a cast of contributors few other comics could rival at the time: Robert Crumb, Justin Green, Spain, Kim Deitch, S. Clay Wilson. It wasn’t a financial success and went largely unnoticed. Many of the same artists would reappear in the pages of RAW, along with a younger but like-minded contingent of contributors.

When RAW first appeared it seemed like an enormous influx of talent had appeared out of nowhere. There were artists from the continent, their names sometimes familiar but their work previously unseen in the US. There were artists almost but not quite from the underground movement. There were artists wheeled in from the outsider art movement. There were artists that were, quite frankly, so far removed from anything seen before that their work was as much about the shock of the new as any inherent ability on display.

Looking back, from a perspective of nearly thirty years later, it’s surprising how few people were regularly involved in the magazine’s creation. In all, there were perhaps a dozen regular contributors, even though, at the time, every issue seemed into introduce a wealth of new and exciting talent. The style and subject matter of each artist was diverse, but possessed an underlying unity that lay in the perspective and awareness with which they produced their work.

A comprehensive overview of all the contributions to RAW would seem endless, and would probably make your brain melt (or it would make my brain melt anyway). Here, in no particular order, the ten things that made RAW so groundbreaking and essential, according to my particular prejudices at least:

One – It sought a new audience

RAW started off a low-circulation publication, with the early issues in particular having a very limited print run. It took a small-press sensibility (right down to the printing press, located in Spiegelman and Mouly’s apartment), but set ridiculously high standards for itself, and eventually penetrated the mainstream.

You can argue this was really a legacy of punk, and new wave, of all the bands and fans that started up doing their own little fanzines and making their own records, bypassing the mainstream companies altogether.

If it worked for music, why not for comics? There was certainly something of that sensibility around at that time. This was the era when self-publishing became a possibility because distribution channels that previously didn’t exist became available, and a core community of knowledgeable, literate fans existed in high enough numbers to support these publications.

RAW tapped into that particular era’s zeitgeist, but did so more publicly, and with more ambition than many of the others. In the process it became the masthead for every disaffected comic artist around the world. This was partially smart marketing, and partially dumb luck, as this was also the era when the first comics aren’t just for kids wave appeared.

Comics up to this point had relied on traditional newsstand distribution, but if you look at the rapidly dwindling circulation figures of the mainstream publications from the seventies through to the eighties, you can see this was no longer a terribly effective way of reaching an audience. There are two ways of reacting to this. One is to retreat, and to rely on a core following, and the other is to break out to a wholly new audience.

RAW did both. It sold to comics books shops (the core audience) but also to art stores. It aimed at the counterculture and the downtown art movement that was interested in something edgy and experimental. The Graphix Magazine for Damned Intellectuals, it called itself. No mention of comics, you’ll notice. The use of the word graphix, like the earlier use of comix, attempted to bypass those prejudices.

So you have an audience: but it’s a limited audience. The next step, the obvious step, is to break out into the mainstream. Which RAW proceeded to do, signing up a distribution deal with Penguin books. By this point, its circulation exceeded 40,000, which, for a literate, experimental publication, is pretty extraordinary. Remember that this was the 1980s, and graphic novels hadn’t infiltrated the mainstream in the way they have now.

So this is the first part of RAW’s legacy: a recognition that the comics landscape was changing and, with that recognition, helping to change it further. Further perhaps than Speigelman and Mouly could ever have imagined.

Two – A cutting sense of design

From the outset, RAW looked different. It was produced in oversize format, and was beautifully printed on high-quality paper. It wouldn’t fit in with the rest of the comics being released, on a physical level if nothing else. There was no way it would slide into the revolving display racks that traditionally held comic books.

The credit for this must fall to Francoise Mouly. In later years she would be the art editor for the New Yorker, but you can see the results of her skills here. RAW looked bold, slightly punkish, more than a little arty, and quite unlike the other comics available at the time.

This appealed to people’s elitist sensibilities. It made you feel you were part of this small, cult concern, even as the circulation grew and the comic started receiving coverage in hip, truly mass-market publications.

The impact was as much about the comic as artefact as the actual contents. It promoted the idea of the unique, the collectable, and it did so within the constraints of a mass-medium publication. Every fanboy (and girl) knows at least a little about the collecting compulsion, and RAW cleverly pandered to these impulses.

And in actuality it was a unique object. It had die-cut covers and inserts containing mini comics or trading cards or flexidisks. It printed different stories on different colours of paper, or different grades of paper. This reached some sort of apogee with the issue in which each cover was carefully hand-torn, with the torn corner neatly taped to the interior table of contents.

At the time, that sort of attention to detail was unique – certainly in the comics world – but now it’s become commonplace. The meticulous production values afforded to each issue of McSweeny’s magazine can be traced back to the ideas generated by RAW, and you can see the same process at work in Chris Ware’s work, and elsewhere.

A more unexpected development is the emergence of the small companies that have taken the do-it-yourself ethos, and the attitude to publishing unique objects, and have built small, thriving industries from them. There’s a huge array of publishers producing limited-edition silkscreen comics that capitalise on the fact that they’re uncommercial and unique. And, accordingly, they’re more expensive, just as RAW was, in its time, an expensive comic to buy.

You might argue this is a retrograde step for the comic industry’s mass-market ethos, but in actuality it’s a blurring of the worlds between fine and commercial art, which is one of the things RAW was all about.

Which leads us nicely onto…

Three – Art Spiegelman

MAUS has been critiqued to death, and deservedly so. The odd thing is that in many ways it’s an atypical work. A large portion of Spiegelman’s comics are about experimenting with form as much as content.

You can see that particular ethos at work in the early issues of RAW in particular, not only in Spiegelman’s own contributions, but in the work he chose to publish. And the blurring of lines between High and Low art were very much on his mind.

It’s a mini-comic in the very first issue of RAW that best summarises this unspoken manifesto.

‘Two Fisted Painters Action Adventures’ is both hommage and parody, a tricky comic-within-a-comic that plays around with narrative and form. The title’s a steal from EC’s Two Fisted Tales, and it’s immediately followed by a quote from Robert Rauschenberg. Right from the outset it’s announcing its intentions.

The storyline’s a nonsensical satire of pulp imaginings: a hack, alcoholic, chain-smoking writer feverishly hammers away at a manual typewriter, seeking inspiration for the latest issue of Two Fisted Painters. After an initial failed attempt at a storyline, he hits on the idea of a alien who is stealing colour so that he can become a famous artist on his own planet (on which colour doesn’t exist). The alien is defeated when it’s stabbed in the back with a pen branded by a conceptual artist who specialises in murdering painters. The writer abandons his story in disgust but the alien returns to ghost-write the final, missing, section before absconding with the typewriter, which it has fallen in love with.

So far, so banal. And deliberately banal, at that. Looking at it in more detail though, you can find a whole host of references and steals from both high and low art.

Taking it from the top (or the front, if you prefer)

The cover’s a Jack Kirby pastiche with lurid colours. The artist punches an alien with trademark Jack Kirby fist. A bound and gagged woman hangs from a meat hook. She’s mirrored by another figure in red, similarly bound, painted on a canvas.

The story begins with a Robert Rauschenberg quote “When I have not zee red, I use zee blue.” Rauschenberg straddled the period between abstract expressionism and pop art, (the “action” of the title). His paintings were divided into different colour periods (black, white, red), much in the same way that you have Picasso’s blue and rose paintings.

Immediately below this, there are four symmetrical panels, beginning with a painter staring at his paintings. This section is in black and white and the line used recalls the heavy lines comics artists used to have to use back in the days of pulp paper and crude printing techniques.

Subsequent panels depict the artist’s paintings, but they’re in different washes of grey. To the left of each panel is a colour: black, blue, red, yellow. This recalls not only the four colours used as the constituent elements in printing comics (“four-colour comics”) but also the colour periods in Rauschenberg’s paintings.

Enter our hero, the hack writer. These panels are still all in grey. He’s battling for inspiration with the deadline for Two Fisted Painters. There’s a couple of reference points here: the writer used to work for Topps bubblegum (as Spiegelman did), but the chain-smoking, heavy drinking writer also recalls the hard boiled writers of the thirties and forties, which is also recalled in the narrative captions used.

The sound effects for the typewriter (and colour is the key for imagination in this story) are in red. They act as a transition to the scene in the bottom panel, showing a painter painting a still life, along with his model, who is holding a jar of wine, in Hellenistic pose. Strangely, he’s painting the still life, but not the woman posing. This scene’s in colour. It’s drawn with the same thick lines that depicted the artist’s first appearance, but the colours used to fill the lines recall both Matisse and the traditional block colouring in comic books.

Inspiration’s lacking. “Did you ever consider…macramé?” suggests his model, looking at the identikit still-lives. The suggestion’s that traditional painting’s a dead-end. Flip back to the hack writer who decides to have the artist commit suicide by swallowing a tube of paint, but then changes his mind (“good, but too short”)

Cue a change of direction. Enter a performance artist whose speciality is murdering artists. The panel in which he appears is a direct reference to Marshall Rogers’ sterling run in Detective Comics, the panel border folding inwards in the same shape as Batman’s cloak, while the idea of performance art killing off traditional painting has long been debated in art circles.

Flip back to the writer. “Yes more original!” he exclaims, typing feverishly. And it’s significant that original here = pulp. What’s long been considered trashy becomes a source of inspiration and energy.

“The colour drained from his face” reads the typed narrative.

This is followed by a series of identical panels down the left hand side of the page that recall the silkscreens of Andy Warhol, each identical, but with different colour variations. This also signals the entrance of an alien who proceeds to drain colour from all of the characters. The alien’s head is the same shape as the writer’s typewriter.

Colour leeches from the characters. Suzette, the nude model, runs down a staircase (referencing Duchamp), the colour slipping from her as she does so.

As the colour is stolen from the characters, so similarly inspiration starts leaving the writer. The alien departs, and they chase after it, following the bleached trail it leaves through the streets.

It’s revealed that the alien is from a planet with no colour. The alien’s depicted standing in front of a colour chart, and is drawn with dots and lines – bringing attention both to form, and again recalling the stippled dots in comics, and in Lichtenstein’s pop art. The alien’s also an artist.

On learning this, the performance artist leaps over and stabs him in the back with an oversized pen. “Killing a painter from outer space – that ought to get me a Guggenheim.”

Here comes the conclusion. The characters smash the jars of colour the alien has siphoned, while their actions are mirrored by the writer, who throws away his typewriter, before falling into a drunken sleep. Significantly, the colour splashes out into the imaginary narrative into the writer’s world

As he sleeps, the typewriter starts typing by itself, bringing about the ending of the storyline, in typically cynical fashion. The alien fades in, revealing that it’s doing the typing. An artistic creation has taken on independent form.

Finally, the alien absconds with the typewriter which he has fallen in love with, and taking it away to his planet with them. This section’s accompanied by a series of captions that recall the purple clichés of romance comics.

On one level, this is all pretty silly. It’s jokey, and self-referential. At the same time it can be read both as a critique and homage of pulp, and comics, and painting and conceptual art. The story, entertaining though it is, isn’t really the point. It’s about the different directions comics can move in, and about playing around with narrative structures.

It’s pretty astonishing, really.

Four – There’s life outside of the USA

Comics aren’t only a U.S. concern.

It’s obvious now, but the wealth and diversity of comics that existed outside of the U.S wasn’t nearly so evident at the time. Tintin and Asterix were a staple of any bookshop, but to find any work beyond that you had to rely on Heavy Metal magazine, and that tended to feature not-terribly-well-translated science fiction and fantasy stories.

RAW introduced work from like-minded artists in Europe and further afield, and although they shared a common sensibility, they differed widely in their styles and themes. This was where you could find Joost Swarte and Lorenzo Mattotti and Loustal and Marti and Mariscal and an entire range of artists whose comics had seldom if ever been seen in English translation before.

Picking through this wealth of material is difficult, but here are two personal favourites.

‘Mister Wilcox, Mister Conrad’ introduced the work of Jose Munoz and Carlos Sampayo to the English speaking world. It’s hard now to overestimate the impact this strip had at the time, and how different it seemed to the work we were used to seeing. The storyline is simple, and even a little worn: a professional assassin meets and befriends his intended victim. They’re both lonely, isolated men, and the friendship is genuine. They exchange gifts, and spend a great deal of time in each other’s company. At the end the assassin ends up killing his friend anyway, because that’s his job.

What’s different is the atmosphere generated by the art and script. This is a sleazy, decadent world that’s hewn out of black, with figures that seem to melt under the weight of their despair. You can see some precedents, primarily in the work of Alberto Breccia, but after that you need to look out of the comics sphere, at the likes of the work of George Grosz, and the German expressionists.

There isn’t much love in Munoz and Sampayo’s world. Everything’s slurred and brutal, from the inhabitants of the bar in which they meet, to the two central characters who – despite the friendship they form – are rich and powerful, and entirely ruthless. They buy expensive fripperies – rare stamps, luxury cars. They beat up a drunk, they hire prostitutes. The only morality on display is the morality of the assassin, who feels obliged to carry out his work, despite the bond that he and his intended victim have formed.

It’s not, admittedly, a barrel of laughs. There’s a dank and unremitting sense of disgust and despair throughout, captured perfectly by the art that features bit characters whose features slur like candle wax. You wouldn’t want to live in that world, but it’s a fascinating place to visit.

From the moment of this story’s appearance, copyists began to emerge – notoriously, Keith Giffen, but it’s also impossible to imagine Frank Miller’s Sin City existing in its current form without the precedent set by Munoz and Sampayo. The irony being that relatively little of their work has appeared in translation since then.

Francis Masse is another artist whose work has been translated too seldom. His immensely detailed artwork often appears to have been created by etching, through that may just be a clever illusion. It’s also very verbose, surreal and blackly funny.

‘A Race of Racers’, which appeared in RAW 4, describes a world in which its narrator (large-nosed, wearing a bowler hat, suit and trenchcoat, like most of the world’s inhabitants) races around and around the planet ceaselessly. When, one day he’s forced to stop, he discovers the ground has disappeared, and another world is mirrored beneath his feet. Buildings are reflected by other buildings, people by other people, but the mirror images are not identical. In fact, the people underfoot imagine they are being supported by those above, just as those above imagine they are being supported by the people underfoot. Avarice abounds, and arguments ensue. A war breaks out between those above and those below, and the whole mirrored world turns against itself, leaving a solitary newspaper boy to wander alone, with only a crudely drawn hand-puppet to speak to.

Like all of Masse’s work, it’s thought-provoking and quirky. Although the storyline’s slight, it throws up all sort of interesting philosophical questions, but does so in a blackly amusing fashion. It reminds me of the cruel, playful qualities you’d find in Alice in Wonderland or, more pertinently perhaps, Alfred Jarry. And the artwork that accompanies these absurdities is magnificent: detailed cross-hatching, precisely-drawn architecture, grotesque figures that bring to mind Magritte and the Yellow Kid yet remain unmistakably Masse’s own.

Of all of RAW’s legacies, the introduction of non-US artists is the one that has taken longest to reach fruition. It’s difficult to understand why. Perhaps the artists themselves, superstars in their own countries, didn’t feel any need to crack the US market. Maybe the work itself was too far removed from American tastes. Maybe it was because the US publishing industry formed its own little act of colonialism, appropriating the most talented and commercial of artists and writers for their own publications.

Things are gradually changing though, and you can see an increasing number of European creators in translation, albeit primarily via the smaller, more adventurous publishers. There have been a few genuine breakout successes but you suspect there’s much more similar work to be discovered, as with Yoshiharu Tsuge, whose delicate, subtle work appeared in RAW’s pages towards the end its run, but which has yet to be translated in any sizeable quantity.

Five – the resurrection of the underground spirit

RAW grew out of Arcade, which in turn grew out of the underground movement. At this point most underground comics were going through their death-throes, the energy and vitality that first provided inspiration having lost its momentum, which left a selection of uninspired, rather puerile publications. The shock factors of sex, death and drugs can only go so far.

Although the comics themselves were dying, the artists who had populated their pages were still produced work, though it was often a faint echo of the anarchic spirit that had launched their careers.

Arcade relied heavily on underground artists, but they were used more sparingly in RAW. This may have been a conscious decision, a device to draw a demarcation line between RAW and the underground movement, seen at that point as being a little passé, and certainly more than a little tired. Those that did appear were among the finest examples you’ll see from the underground movement’s main players. It was as though, in the pages of RAW, they found themselves reinvigorated.

Take Robert Crumb’s ‘Jelly Roll Morton’s Voodoo Curse’, for example.

Crumb had been a staple of Arcade, but his own Weirdo magazine, begun around the same period as RAW, had taken up much of his time and energy. This may explain his comparative absence in RAW’s pages. This contribution’s a killer piece though, prime mid-period Crumb, with its storyline mixing jazz, voodoo, obsession, and wry deprecation.

Crumb always had artistic ability and vision, but the extent of his abilities was sometimes hidden behind the shock factor of his early comics. This story is very much of a piece with his eighties output. It’s perhaps more mainstream, more controlled, and certainly had none of the vapidity characterising his art during the low period of the 1970s. Or maybe it’s just that he reserved his more kitsch obsessions for the pages of Weirdo.

Whatever the reasons, you can see the fruits here. Crumb’s draughtsmanship has been praised, justly, with his ‘A Short History of America’ becoming an iconic description of the development of America’s landscape. But here you can see his real strength is in his depiction of characters. There is very little in this story that is long shot – virtually everything is in close up, or mid-frame, allowing us to concentrate on the character’s expressions, matched by the captions containing the narrator’s voiceover.

These people are a long way from the deliberately offensive caricatures of his early work – you look at them and there is real depth of expression and ambiguity of emotion in their features. And the storyline is classic Crumb too, the biographical tale of Jelly Roll Morton, a record producer and musician, grappling with the attempt to free himself from the possible curse cast upon him.

It’s perhaps unfair to single out Crumb for attention. You could equally make a case for Kim Deitch’s nostalgic, subversive tales, or Justin Green’s autobiographical works. As a whole the underground artists appeared reinvigorated by the company they kept in RAW’s pages, spurred on perhaps by competitive impulses. They also provided a pointer as to where many of the newer artists represented had originally found their inspiration.

It may be overstating the case to say RAW saved the underground movement, but it certainly gave it impetus and a new sense of the sort of directions it could explore in the future.

Pascal Doury’s ‘Paul’

Six – The dividing line between gallery art and comics is thinner than you might imagine

You can argue it began with Roy Lichtenstein’s paintings but it’s a two-way-process. You can take a panel from a comic and make it a painting, but you can also take the artists who traditionally found themselves on the walls in an art gallery and introduce them into the comics medium.

Around the time RAW appeared, this is what the Bazooka school of artists were in the process of doing. They combined post-punk cut up graphics, dadist theory and a love of popular culture, and the results – gaudy, a little flashy, a little disturbing – were popular in the hipper fashion/music magazines of the 1980s, and well as in deathly trendy art galleries. Their paintings and illustrations also appeared in RAW, one page contributions that weren’t comics, but which acknowledged the styles and techniques of the comics medium.

The artist who received the most exposure was Pascal Doury. Not coincidentally, he was also the artist whose work was displayed in a form most similar to traditional comics narrative.

Pascal Doury is the comic medium’s best-kept secret. This is for a number of reasons: his work appeared in very small circulation French publications. It’s often explicit. And he’s dead.

The most substantial exposure for his work was in pages of RAW. The first major piece printed, ‘Theodore Death’s Head’, was censored – carefully blanked out areas where all the genitalia should be. Readers could send off for a series of stickers to carefully paste into the censored areas. By the time ‘Paul’, the second Doury contribution, was published, Penguin had taken over the distribution, and this time the work was left uncut.

‘Paul’ tells the story of a young schoolboy, his experiences at school, and at home. It’s designed like a child’s picture book – one large picture, and then a caption beneath it.

It’s unclear whether Doury had produced a series of related drawings which the captions were then created to fit, or whether it was designed as a unified whole, but it’s a moot point. The end result works beautifully.

Doury’s drawings and paintings resemble those from a children’s picture book that has somehow managed to ingest a terrifyingly large amount of hallucinatory ergot. The characters recall candy skull death’s head toys or a morphed and terrified Mr Potato Head figures. They occupy a landscape that’s constructed around toys and building blocks and modes of transport (planes, cars, buses). It’s a landscape that’s constructed around a child’s eye view – it’s full of wonder but also extremely threatening.

The panels are crammed full of detail, and hyperactive. The drawings may be pen and ink, but they resemble finely-detailed etchings. Guns shoot, penises ejaculate, there is an abundance of speed lines, there are sharp, deadly objects that cut and pierce – knives, chisels, drills. Everything is in a state of constant, frantic worry. And virtually every character sports a large and prominent erection – even the female characters.

“Paul must eat or be eaten” reads one caption. And it’s true – this is the relationship the characters have with the space they occupy.

“Paul prefers his mummy to the love of a girl” reads another caption, while the panel above shows his mother savagely slashing at his throat with a large carving knife.

What Doury introduced to the comics world was a highly sophisticated primitivism. He’s probably more a painter than comics artist, and it’s a painterly perspective he brings to his work. It’s difficult to isolate the emotions that his work elicits, because the tone of the work is so ambiguous. It’s threatening, yet playful. It’s disturbing, yet amusing. It’s intense, yet it’s punctuated by moments of quiet loneliness. It’s high art with low art origins, and you look at it and it brings to mind children’s books, underground comics, outsider art, and it’s all and none of these things.

Doury was an enormous influence on Gary Panter, and consequently an indirect influence on an entire generation of artists. There’s a whole movement of “baby art” artists that’s he’s directly inspired as well – all this primarily through the two stories RAW showcased. Someone really ought to give his work the chance of a wider audience. For the moment though, be thankful that it’s available at all (and even more thankful that ‘Paul’ is available in the more affordable Penguin editions).

Babe by Boody Rogers