Foolbert Funnies: Histories and Other Fictions by Frank Stack

I'm not well-read in underground comics; they were mostly before my time and I often get the sense that you had to be there. If you weren't dropping out and tuning in, avoiding the draft and trying to make a coed, they're not talking to you.

But I try to dip in, now and then. I think I've mostly hit R. Crumb, as the best-known and most prolific guy in that space, but occasionally something else drops in front of my eyeballs.

So I came to the 2015 collection Foolbert Funnies, by the cartoonist named Frank Stack but who originally worked under the name "Foolbert Sturgeon," with a certain set of expectations and not a whole lot of background.

And I was wrong: this is largely not underground work. Stack was one of the original underground guys, at the University of Texas in the early '60s with Gilbert Shelton, but this book largely collects work from later - everything with dates is from the '80s and afterward - and only the first couple of sections fits in that mode.

Oh, the first half-dozen stories or so are quite underground, including a racist-caricature psychologist (Dr. Feelgood) who analyzes the dreams of the Stack-stand-in of those stories. Most of the early stuff, in fact, has a Stack stand-in, and a lot of it is about dreams, in a blunt '60s sex-and-drugs-and-violence style rather than a '80s wispy portents-and-ideas style.

But the middle of the book is taken up with a clump of very long stories that are mostly retellings or fictionalizations of historical events, including a tedious one about the secrets of Shakespeare, a more exciting speed-run through the major violent events of Caravaggio's life, and a clotted-with-words but mostly OK look at Van Gogh. Then comes the big fight scene: a 30-page, multi-chapter extravaganza in which Achilles and a small squad of Greek soldiers encounter a mounted Amazon scout group during the Trojan War, and fight. For thirty pages. With interludes of backing up to lick their wounds and talk a lot.

Did I mention Stack's comics have a lot of words? They have a lot of words. Lots of '60s psychobabble, lots of not-really-digested adventure-story stuff from an early-Boomer childhood (there are major stories here on both the Lone Ranger and the Phantom, and the cover is from a dream-story in which the Stack-stand-in is Superman, which devolves to the usual naked-in-public stuff), lots of just chatting to no real purpose. The overall affect is one of those gregarious Boomers who just won't shut up and who says "man" way too fucking much.

You might guess that I found this a bit tiring and not entirely to my taste; that's correct. This is post-underground work - you don't get to any of this stuff without starting from where Stack did - but it's far down a gnarled, idiosyncratic path, and not in a direction I was terribly interested in. Stack is an interesting artist who makes a lot of quirky choices - he was a professor of art at the University of Missouri for decades, which probably explains it - but I'm not impressed at all by his stories, by either what he chooses to tell or how he tells them. It doesn't even have that barn-burning nervous underground energy, outside of those first few stories: this is mostly much more measured stuff from a more mature creator, who was a young neurotic Boomer draft-dodger obsessed with cheap pop culture about guys in masks punching each other but somewhat grew up from that and decided to tell long look-at-me stories about historical figures.

My sense is that people who read comics for the art will find a lot to enjoy here. People who are aging Boomers - aging male Boomers; the underground world was always at least mildly misogynistic and entirely organized around male concerns, like everything else in their Boomer lives - may also find things of interest. The rest of us could quite profitably continue to avoid it.