The Primal Ooze, Clark Dimond, and the Kitchen Sink

by Terry Bisson

Comics are funny.

Livelier than poetry, prettier than MTV, stronger than dirt, more intimate than movies (because we can read them under the covers), more accessible than books (because we can read them when we can barely read)--more accessible in fact than any medium but rock and roll, which they resemble both in their faults and virtues--comics are the very mud of literature: the primal literary ooze from which generation after generation of readers has crawled, proto-legs clacking, into the light.

Comics are Mesofuckinzoic; they occupy that uncoveted but honorable place in our literature that was occupied for the Greeks by Fable, for the Romantics by Fairy Tale, for the Victorians by Doggerel. They are perpetually, proudly and forever, kids' stuff.

Comics are novels that never grew up. And long after we ourselves are grown, we keep the favorite comics of our youth stacked in that room in our hearts that we keep unchanged, like a kid's room after he's gone to college; the room nobody is allowed to clean, much less rearrange.

But in spite of our best efforts (and no one is more conservative than kids) comics do change; and so for every generation, it is a different comic or group of comics that awakens this fierce protective sentiment. Every generation has a different-smelling mud on its shoes. For some it is the old DC gang; for some the early 1960s Marvel superheros; for others Little Lulu, or Uncle Scrooge, or even Captain Marvel.

For me (and many others) it was the short-lived, deeply demented, somewhat subversive EC horror comics of the early 1950s.

Comics started out as superhero stuff, during the Depression, and returned after World War II with still more superheroes. I tried them too early, when I could barely read. It was rich, thick, but bitter fare, like espresso. Even today, Superman and Wonder Woman are like Kipling to me--exotic, mysterious, redolent of a lost age, and a little too grown-up to be fun.

But that was all right, because by the time I had could really read, comics were breaking new ground. Literally; with grave-diggers' spades. Tales from the Crypt, Vault of Horror, etc. had rotting corpses that walked, bells rung by bloody pulps, and butchers that sliced and wrapped rude customers. All the stuff kids love and grown-ups hate.

Is it any wonder that the old ECs were banned by 1954? They even had Congressional hearings about it. It wasn't just the pulp and the plasma. The grown-ups had the uneasy feeling that there was something else going on, that an unAmerican and chaotic vision lurked under the gore. And they were right. The ECs were part of a whole developing zeitgeist that included Ernie Kovacs and Mad Magazine, and went on to include Bob Dylan and the Weather Underground. The grown-ups were right to feel threatened, for the ECs were a tiny beginning of a rip in the social fabric that to tear wider and wider, to the secret delight of more and more kids.

So the ECs were banned; they were canned; they were booted and coded and tipper-gored right out of our hot little hands. America (after getting its ass kicked in Korea) would have only righteous violence, and hold the blood. Biffs and boffs replaced the glurphs and skralonkks and butcher shop sounds. No guts please.

For me it was the death of comics. Somehow in banning the blood, they had banned the story as well. Now instead of tiny, tight, admittedly cliche-ridden tales, we had epic endless adventures. Instead of plot twists we had muscle and mission. I bailed out into the grown-up (well, sort of) world of science fiction, which led to--but that's another story.

Cut to the sixties. I hadn't read a comic in ten years. I was in New York hacking away at romance magazines, soft core porn, westerns, astrology sheets, faux-tabloids ("Wolf Baby Born to Vampire Teen"), and the like, while wasting my mornings on a novel about my adventures in underpulp to be called Eats Corpse for Rare Coin. Never finished it (thank God).

And I was broke. I wasn't living on peanuts, I was living on shells. Luckily, I had a friend named Clark Dimond, who (as befits a man christened with a name like a pseudonym) was a high priest of low pulp (a few years later, he was to write--anonymously!--the NO-FRILLS MYSTERY which the New York Times called "a classic of the genre"). Clark, who ran in comic circles (so to speak) knew Archie Goodwin, who was editing a revival of the EC-type comic, designed to bypass the Comics Code by being larger (8 1/2 X 11, or magazine format), more expensive, and black and white--all of which, presumably, would turn off kids; and all of which, of course, didn't.

Clark and I started started scripting for Creepy and Eerie, the forerunner of today's "illustrated novels," turning in six to twelve page tales at $12 a page, which we split. We would come up with a story on the subway after work, and block it out over pizza, writing it out like a screenplay (Long shot of the car; on the hood, where the ornament should have been, the severed head); then polish up the dialogue ("No! You're one of them! Aaargh!") over a sixpack and a joint while the moon rose over the rooftop water tanks of lower Manhattan.

It was my first by-line. What a thrill it was to see our names in tiny type, smaller than the back of a bus ticket, usually misspelled! We were a team, like Rodgers and Hart, like Woodward and Bernstein, like Lennon and McCartney. We took, and failed, the Marvel test, but that didn't faze us. Marvel had a whole different concept: the art came first, and the dialogue was added later, which went against our instincts. Creepy and Eerie (Warren magazines) suited us better.

Then good times overtook us. Clark went to work cranking out men's adventure mags, while I got a job as a packager for a Long Island firm that did imitations of established magazines. Remember CRACKED, which was to MAD as The Monkees were to the Beatles? That was us. TRUE INTIMATE CONFESSIONS was all mine. So was YOUR INTIMATE HOROSCOPE. But the one that I enjoyed most, and the one that earned me a footnote in comic history* was a shameless CREEPY and EERIE knock-off we called WEB OF HORROR.

It was a pretty good little book for its short run. Not because I was a great editor (though I wasn't half bad) but because I happened onto a fertile new field of talent, and could call on new artists like Jeff Jones, Bernie Wrightson, Mike Kaluta, Ralph Reese and Bruce Jones; not to mention old timers such as Frank Brunner and Syd Shores, and new writers like Len Wein.
We only did two issues. Number One had a Jeff Jones cover. Number Two had a Wrightson cover. Ralph Reese was doing the third, which never came out.

The problem was, it was 1969. If you don't remember the year, look it up, and you will understand why I left my plow in the furrow, so to speak, called in sick one morning, and ran off to a commune in Colorado to build geodesic domes. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Everybody was doing it. As a matter of fact, Clark's still out there, playing electric banjo in the shadow of Sheep Mountain. Me, I'm back in New York, writing for a living.

All of which brings us, in a roundabout fashion, to Kitchen Sink Press, one of the few "underground" comic publishers to make it all the way from the 1960s into the fin-de-siecle home-stretch. Their latest offering is a nifty little mini-series called Flesh Crawlers.

Not a very imaginative title. Not a very imaginative story, unless you've spent the past sixty-five years under a culvert, and the idea of shape-shifting BEMs invading Earth is new to you.

And yet--why do I like this comic so much? Because it reminds me, shamelessly and shiningly, of the Good Old Days, before comics became lowered to stupid superhero tricks, or so elevated that the storytelling got lost in the special effects. Originality is not, after all, what we ask of the primal ooze. What we want is taste, smell, substance; and Flesh Crawlers delivers what my hero R.A. Lafferty would call "the high old authentic stuff."

FLESH CRAWLERS comes from the writer-artist team of Richard Rainey and Michael Dubisch. It is a 32 page black-and-white that will run in three issues, published bi-monthly, starting this August (1993). The story begins with a man and woman on their way to a born-again Christian retreat in upstate New York, where she hopes he will quit drinking. They have a "strange encounter" at a rest area apparently used by flying saucers as well as cars; a second encounter takes place when the man sneaks into the woods to pop a can of beer and meets up with his superbly sexy "old girl friend."

Or ... is she? (Or as Dylan once said ... Honey, do you have to ask?)

The series looks promising. Rainey and Dubisch have set up a web of sub-plots involving the local cops and a bored lolita teen, a faith healer surprised at his own success, and a top-secret para-military task force of alien-hunters disguised as long-haul truckers.

The art is the opposite of slick; if it's a little stiff at times, it's always cinematic, and it never loses hold of the story. It grows on you, sort of like kudzu. It's sometimes banal (the aliens, unfortunately); occasionally brilliant (the born-agains, who are truly alien creatures); and always dense enough to be interesting. For instance, all the car doors have insides. I like that.

Kitchen Sink says the series is for all ages, which bothered me at first, until I realized they meant the demented of all ages.

So check out FLESH CRAWLERS. It's guaranteed to take you back to the good old days. When comics were comics and pizza was a quarter a slice. And flesh crawled.

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