And Ed Subitzky had the millions-of-tiny-boxes strips, the ones anatomizing and playing with comics as an art form.
Oh, his comics were obsessed with sex, too - that was, I think, the ground rule of National Lampoon, that relations between the sexes must always be assumed to be from the point of view of a white teenage boy from about 1956, clueless and frustrated and obsessed in all of the obvious stereotypical ways, and that sex was the major theme most of the time. It felt fresh at the time, even liberating (more so if you were a white teenage boy, even if it wasn't 1956 anymore), but it gets very heavy-handed and dull in retrospect, as the reader looks back and wonders if any of these horny boys ever tried talking to the women they were obsessed with.
Subitzky, I think, comes out of that mess better than a lot of the written NatLamp material, because his style was to ring changes on the obvious ideas and to subvert expectations. So many of his comics come across as "assume this point of view - which is endemic here - and what comes next?"
Poor Helpless Comics! seems to be essentially the complete Subitsky, all of the comics he made - or at least the ones he thinks are worth reprinting - from a roughly forty year career. There's a list of original publications near the end - I've mentioned many times that all collections should have that - which ranges from 1972 through 2013, plus some undated American Bystander pieces that could potentially have been even later than that. The book itself came out last year, fifty years after Subitzky's first cartoons.
It's presented mostly in chronological order, with a few pieces moved around for better flow or dramatic effect. There are a few single panels, and some semi-conventional work, but the bulk of it are those weird, carefully-constructed Subitzky conglomerations of tiny boxes, full of neurotic scribbles - often just heads; Subitzky drew more comics of headshots than anyone else alive - surrounded by their intrusive thoughts, their endless monologues, and occasional read-in-this-direction Subitzky instructions.
They're very wordy comics, with minimal drawing. Subitzky's sketchy, simple art style, all single-width pen lines, is perfect for that - it's almost clip-art in its simplicity and repetition, the same few faces over and over again as the words work through all of the possible variations.
I do have to admit the the comics less obsessed with sex tend to be stronger; "you have big tits!" and "I want to fuck that girl!" are not the strongest punchlines, though NatLamp editors did love them inordinately much for almost two decades. And most of the classic NatLamp-era material is about sex on some level; it got into everything.
But Poor Helpless Comics! also includes comics Subitzky made later and for other markets, showing his neurotic little people could be neurotic about traffic and business and all of the other things as well - in ways that come across as less dated, though, I have to admit, not usually as formally exciting and impressive.
There's also a few text pieces Subitzky wrote for NatLamp wedged in the middle here. I find text features tend to break up the flow of reading a book of comics - you read pages of art at one pace, and pages of text at a much, much slower pace - but this is basically The Complete Subitzky, so I can't begrudge their inclusion. (They are '70s NatLamp pieces, with all that implies, but are not as cringe-inducing as I feared they would be.)
Subitzky is a unique talent in comics, a formalist who's also inherently a gag cartoonist, a realist who cartooned about sex most of the time. It is great to get so much of his work together between two covers; this is the definitive edition of his work - it even includes an interview of Subitzky conducted by Mark Newgarden that gets into his career, life, and creative inspirations.
If you have any interest at all in tiny little boxes of comics people obsessed with sex - and why wouldn't you? - this is the book you need.
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