by Kate Kowalski. It can sometimes be challenging to get to the heart of an anthology simply by turning its pages, flitting from vignette to vignette. Blab! has a clear pulse; it’s a love letter to comics as a form and a crash course in the history and evolution of sequential art for passionate die-hards and the vaguely interested alike. The latest edition of this Harvey Award-winning anthology, sired by Blab godfather Monte Beauchamp and published by Dark Horse Comics, collects a wide range of material, from persuasive illustrated pamphlets of the late 1800s to strips featuring forgotten heroes of the Golden Age to modern, digitally-rendered spreads. The common thread through it all is a celebration of comics and its creators.
A notable portion of the featured works is focused on biographical stories of comic makers and other creators. Blab! opens with a strip by noted cartoonist Noah Van Sciver, who delves into the sad life of Louis Wain, the treasured illustrator of quirky cats and an influential figure in psychedelic art, established many decades before the Swinging Sixties.
Van Sciver’s strip is a good primer for what Blab! has in store for the reader; “Louis Wain on the Verge of the Future” is a detailed look at an artist employing the comics medium to its fullest potential. He uses consistent and uniform square paneling to emphasize the unraveling of Wain’s life, and he continues this panel style in another work concerning Bob Wood and Charles Biro, co-creators of the “crime comics” series Crime Does Not Pay in the 1940s. (The former of which, we discover in the strip, would serve time in prison for a crime he committed himself.) Ryan Heshka and Beauchamp present in smooth pastels an account of another disaster-fated comic book duo, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman.
The anthology features more tragic tales about other creators. Sasha Velour’s retro Ben Day-dotted comic about Nosferatu director FW Murnau paints a distressing vignette of the opening night of his classic silent film. Greg Clarke & Monte Beauchamp’s illustrated essay on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s alcohol-driven downward spiral is a fascinating visual treat, albeit a depressing one.
That shouldn’t suggest that most of what Blab! has on offer is downbeat. One illustrated biography has a more uplifting tone, a watercolor rendering of Beatrix Potter’s childhood, life, and career by Giselle Potter that delivers a sweet and childlike depiction of the classic author and her underappreciated investigation and cataloging of mushrooms. The pages are filled with scribbles and cursive notes, lending the piece an intimate feeling of flipping through Ms. Potter’s early nature studies.
In addition to these creator-minded stories, Blab! features a fun ode to typography lovers, a 19th-century treatise on the dangers of organized Christianity, an epically illustrated journalistic account of UFO sightings, and a fantastic and thorough essay on the history of the gorilla in the media. Beauchamp’s “Enge-Ena” tracks the animal’s various appearances in the public eye from the first word-of-mouth myths in Gabon through the success of King Kong and its appearance on the covers of men’s magazines and comics. It’s a tight and enthralling piece of writing accompanied by posters and other pop-culture imagery.
All these strips, with their various focuses and passions, represent Blab! at its best. Monte Beauchamp has pulled creators in from all over the industry (and its exciting peripheries) for decades, and Dark Horse’s new publication is a cause for celebration. From a self-published endeavor to a Harvey Award-winning Kitchen Sink masterwork, from a Fantagraphics darling to the thrilling new anthology available to you now, Blab! is back after years and years away, and better for the wait. It’s an immersive, metatextual experience, an embrace of the comics form and a textured, cohesive, essential historical record.
8.5 out of 10
Blab! is in all good bookstores and comic shops now. For purchasing information, click this.
Dark Horse Comics / $19.99
Edited by Monte Beauchamp.
With contributions from Monte Beauchamp, Noah Van Sciver, Jeffrey Steele, Giselle Potter, Ryan Heshka, Greg Clarke, and more.
Check out this 8-page preview of Blab!, courtesy of Dark Horse Comics:
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