Frank M. Young on John Stanley in the Drawn + Quarterly Super-Special!

I just received my contributor's copy yet, and I await the opportunity to spend some quality time with Drawn & Quarterly: 25 Years of Contemporary Cartooning, Comics and Graphic Novels. Four of its nearly 800 pages contain an original essay I wrote on John Stanley.

This is a phone-cam photo of the first two pages of the piece, which I wrote last fall, right before my life-saving move to Portland, Oregon.

The book appears to offer hours of engrossing reading, in interviews, comics, essays and other good stuff.


The book also reprints selections from Tubby and Thirteen Going on Eighteen, to provide the new-to-Stanley reader with a notion of what I'm talking about here.

After all my work on Stanley, it seems ironic to me that this is my first published piece on the man and his work. Truth told, I'm glad to have waited until 2014 to write this. Working on this blog has helped me to shape an understanding of John Stanley's life and work, and I think this essay is as good as anything I could ever write on the topic.

I have had the pleasure of briefly browsing the book, twice, in stores, and if you care about the state of the art of comics (and I'll bet you do!), this book is a sight-unseen must-buy. I'm truly honored to be a part of this epic celebration.

Book Edition of the 1960s John Stanley Bibliography is out!

THIS LINK will take you to the CreateSpace store page for this 112-page full color updated edition of the 1960s John Stanley Bibliography. In a few days, it will be available on Amazon, and I'll append this post to include that link.

This print edition, in an 8 x 10 trade paperback, is full color, and features a special 24-page section of stories written by Stanley and illustrated by his greatest collaborator, Bill Williams.

Any of these three books will make a superb holiday gift for the comics fan in your life. Please consider purchasing one or all of these books. Thank you!

John Stanley's World, Pt. VIII: A Walking Tour of Monsterville

During my recent enforced hiatus, my only reliable entree to the internet was via an iPod. The effect is like watching a fishbowl through the wrong end of a telescope. It's nice--very nice!--to be back to the dimensions of my laptop.

While I couldn't access this machine, I read books and did other things once so common-place, pre-internet. Among these readings was a revisit to the three volumes of Drawn + Quarterly's complete reprinting of John Stanley's 1960s work, Melvin Monster.

I've found Melvin rough going, due to its intense emotional darkness. That darkness serves a purpose, as I've come to realize. It is a constant reminder that we're not in our world anymore. We're visiting a warped, refracted place that has recognizable aspects to us, but which is essentially alien.

Monsterville, the setting of Melvin Monster, is among John Stanley's most compelling fictional worlds. As was the case with too many of his personal projects, the series ended just when Stanley put most of its pieces in place.

We never get a complete sense of what Monsterville is like--as we do with the Northeastern city that the world of Little Lulu occupies. Certain locales are ritually revisited, but we're left with the sense that there is much yet explored or documented. Nine quarterly 36-page comic books are all we have. Much of their action occurs inside one home, or on its immediate premises.

Though they're sometimes just sketched in roughly, much is said via the series' dilapidated urban-suburban settings. They are a grotesque mirror of the world of Little Lulu, Thirteen Going on Eighteen and other Stanley series.

This curious societal shambles--an acute mixture of order and chaos--is the backbone of Melvin Monster. While it borrows from Charles Addams' magazine cartoons, and captures the zeitgeist of the mid-'60s TV monster craze (The Munsters, The Addams Family), the atmosphere of Melvin is more deliberate, logical and haunting. It helps us understand--and ultimately accept--the emotional minefield of this brutal-yet-orderly world.

The basic affect of this world is recognizable--residential streets with houses, sidewalks, lawns, fences and evidence of public utilities. There are apparent businesses, at least one schoolhouse, and outlying, off-limits areas, shrouded by deep woods, that insulate Monsterville from the adjacent world of "human beans."

In early issues of Melvin Monster, we see the "human bean" world quite often. Melvin, our identification figure in these stories, is curious about this more orderly, less chaotic mirror-world, and wants to be a part of it. He is a reluctant member of Monsterville--he's there by birth only, and he doesn't cotton to its prejudices and values.

Yet Monsterville seems patterned on the "human bean" world, and exists as a corruption of that equally chaotic society.

This recalls the awkward-but-fascinating "Tales of the Bizarro World" series which ran in the DC Comics title Adventure Comics in the early 1960s. Sometimes scripted by Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel, the "Bizarro World" stories set an impossible, petrifying standard. Everything "right" had to be wrong, and vice versa.

This abnormal-as-the-norm bias also informs the monster TV sitcoms mentioned above, and tinges Stanley's Monsterville. This comedy of free-wheeling anti-conformism seems apt for anxiety-packed Cold War America. Average Joe and his offspring/spouse could enjoy some harmless chuckles at the addled mirror this school of comedy offered.

While none of these commercial efforts pointedly mocks the conformism of early '60s American life, the intent is still there. By making light of the bizarro-type characters' conformation to bass-ackward rules of disorder, these mass media outlets poke polite holes through the fabric of what we call structured society. (Thank you, Vermont Ferret, for this photograph.)

John Stanley is an outstanding humorist, and a superb storyteller, but he was not Harvey Kurtzman. He does not set out to show that the emperor is buck nekkid. If anything, he's on the side of the sublimely deluded, and loves to wind them up and watch them go.

The main gimmick of Melvin Monster is that Melvin is the only "normal" figure in an abnormal world. He experiences Monsterville as you or I might, were we dropped into it, and expected to thrive. He is aware of his difference, and that he is an outsider. Yet he's not a Quixotic comical figure, like Tubby Tompkins and other signature Stanley characters. He seems to be the voice of reason in this dark wilderness.

Because of his otherness, he is exquisitely sensitive, and a moving target for the hostilities of the "normal" world of Monsterville. From his ill-tempered, risible "Baddy" and passive "Mummy" to the homicidal schoolmarm, Miss McGargoyle, to friends such as the witch-in-training, Little Horror, Melvin's daily life is filled with hostile encounters with supposed friends and family.

He might as well be a closeted gay teenager in 1960s Birmingham, Alabama. Only by pretending to follow the norms of a world he dislikes and fears can Melvin make it through a day in Monsterville.

In one telling sequence, we're shown a scene of domestic distress caused by Melvin's affection for "human bean" ways:

 

The last page of the last issue of Melvin touchingly plays upon this dichotomy:

On this heart-breaking scene of wish fulfillment thwarted, let's begin our visual tour of Monsterville...

The first page of the first story offers significant exterior and interior views of average life in the community of Monsterville:

 
Decay, disorder and visual chaos are established straight away. The landscape of residential Monsterville would alter significantly in later issues, while retaining these key assets.

Here, we see stock Gothic mansions crowded together in an overgrown, foreboding terrain. Inside these homes, if Melvin's abode is typical, are broken windows, cracked plaster, peeling paint or wallpaper and threadbare carpets. These visual clues give us a strong sense of dust, mildew, dampness and grime. This house would probably smell funny, and give allergy sufferers a sneezing attack.

Again, this is on par with contemporary monster-sitcoms, especially The Munsters, which premiered on American TV in the fall of 1964. Given the lag in production time for magazines and comic books, it's very possible that Stanley either saw The Munsters, or had it suggested as a possible springboard for an original comics series.

Like Herman Munster (played with gentle charm by Fred Gwynne), Melvin's "Baddy" has a night job. His vocation smacks more of the "Bizarro World" than the TV sitcom:

This scene, from the second issue of Melvin, offers a rare full view of the house's front yard, and its entryway to the street. As with the "Bizarro World" series, rules dominate the world of Monsterville. Order and disorder fight one another, and typically cancel one another out.

The same basic problem plagues both Melvin Monster and the "Bizarro World" series: there must be some sort of societal order, but how does a community that thrives on anarchy still have rules? These rules are strictly followed--especially in the "Bizarro World," which has its own, often-repeated code:

The logic-implosion of this Code is a detour I'm not willing to take in this essay. Suffice to say that Stanley's Monsterville is a more loose-knit community. Traditions and rules of monster conduct are often recited and referred to, but the stakes for a non-conformist are much lower here.

More street views of suburban Monsterville show evidence of public utilities, and thus societal structure. They have paved sidewalks, fire hydrants, telephone poles and power lines:

No cars, trucks or other engine-based vehicles are seen in Monsterville. Melvin's friend, Little Horror, has a variety of witches' brooms, but I doubt those would merit the civil inclusion of traffic lights, which nonetheless exist in this community:

Monsterville appears to have at least one newspaper, seen here:

Melvin's home has a television. Whether this is local programming, or "human bean" TV, picked up via aerial, is never made clear:

Though yard neglect is the standard here, property lines are denoted by fences and other markers:

 

We only see the more urban side of Monsterville once, in issue 8 of the series:

These settings are sketchy, vague and generic. They are akin to the similar environs of Little Lulu and Thirteen Going on Eighteen:

Stanley cares far less about detailed settings, as a writer-cartoonist, than do his collaborators. Irving Tripp (seen above, in the Lulu sequence) and Bill Williams (below, in an example from Dunc 'n' Loo) who endow the fictive-real worlds of John Stanley with solid, substantial detail:

To Stanley, the characters were the story. Though he does indulge in more atmospheric landscapes in Melvin Monster, he keeps the settings as low-key as possible throughout the series. The one aspect of Monsterville lushly detailed are its tangled, shadowy landscapes and woodlands. Those forlorn scenes of open fields and thickets, dense with overgrowth and neglect, are a haunting visual component of the series.

Stanley's scenes of the woods, in particular, achieve a sense of aching desolation comics wouldn't see again until the publication of Charles Burns' Black Hole:

Stanley had a knack for cartooned landscapes, seen in his 1940s work for Little Lulu and his original series "Peterkin Pottle" and "Jigger and Mooch." This sensibility informs many of the great 1950s stories he both wrote and drew, including the seminal story "The Guest in the Ghost Hotel." You can find this story elsewhere on the blog, or in at least two current reprints.

In the pastoral scenes of Melvin Monster, Stanley flourishes as an expressive cartoonist. The mood of those shaggy fields, and those clusters of trees and thickets, bring this fictive world to life.

Before Stanley abandoned the connection to the world of "human beans," he played with the contrast-complement of these two simultaneous universes, as in this four-page story from issue 3:

Melvin Monster is a blend of familiar John Stanley events and archetypes. A strong interest in horrific themes is evident throughout his career. An overwhelming amount of Little Lulu's improvised fairy tales have horror motifs. The most recurrent of these, Witch Hazel, has a doppelganger in Melvin's Miss McGargoyle.

This choice of subject matter was not unusual for Stanley. Shoved into the forefront of Melvin Monster, macabre elements become the norm, as seen through the eyes of a developing child who struggles to accept or understand them.

Despite the heaviness and harshness of its ritual events, there is a playful, lighter side to Melvin Monster. A key to appreciating this series is that we realize this is not our world. It looks somewhat similar, but it plays by different rules. Black is white and good is bad in Monsterville. Parents would tend to be gruff, abusive and moody; physical violence, bullying and other assorted assaults are the commerce of daily society.

Stanley doesn't make a big deal of any of this. He presents it straightforwardly, without much back-story or build-up. We aren't constantly reminded of the dos and don'ts, as in the "Bizarro World" series. Thus, we must make peace with the Medieval cruelty of Monsterville, and appreciate what good citizens its residents truly are, given their circumstances.

Monsterville is a slice of John Stanley's world that ended far too soon. The glimpses and passing scenes we get, in the nine issues of Melvin Monster, establish it enough that we can fill in the missing pieces--as Stanley surely would have, had the series lasted longer. It is a troubled and troubling world, but one worth our attention.

P.S.: This is a rare example of a John Stanley series that's been recently reprinted in full, via Drawn + Quarterly's lush hardcover three-book set. The reproduction in those volumes is far, far better than the motley scans seen here. If you don't own those three books, please consider buying them. Consider this essay a compliment to those D+Q volumes.

P.P.S.: RIP, Megaupload. The bad guys have won a big one here... The extent of how much this sucks will no doubt grow larger in the next few days. The Internet, as we once knew it, is rapidly changing for the worse...

Jeet Heer responds re D + Q's Melvin Monster book

Jeet Heer offered some thoughts on the editorial thinking behind the new Drawn + Quarterly John Stanley Library books.

He was not involved with the editorial decisions on this series, but he has spoken with some of the individuals who put these books together.

What he has to say makes sense to me. It also clears up any misgivings adult readers might have about these books.

Please read Jeet's words and consider them...

I think the MM book is a great kids book. I have witness[ed] a few families I know who are really enjoying it. [The addition of] a long introduction (in the mode of Walt and Skeezix and other books) would have been a mistake since it would make the series seem archival rather than living kids books.

There's plenty of time to do an archival edition later: right now I think it's more important to get kids reading Stanley again as they did in the 1950s and 1960s. Once there is an audience for his work, then there will be room for a more focused study of the man.

I agree with him: it's important to get these comix back into the hands of kids! Dark Horse's paperback Little Lulu books have sold well and been very much enjoyed by kids. Although Stanley's stories can be enjoyed by adults, as with Barks' work, there is much to be gained by getting this material back into the currency of young readership.

However, it is standard publishing practice to fully credit the creative talent of a book. Therefore, I strongly suggest that John Stanley be credited as ARTIST and WRITER of the comix he created fully, such as MM and Thirteen Going on 18. I hope Drawn + Quarterly will amend the credits for future JSL volumes.

As well, introductory material could be helpful in giving interested adult parents some background on what they're buying for their kids. The kids will just skip past the introduction anyway; there is an interested adult market for these books, and it seems wise, business-wise, to gear them towards as many paying markets as possible.

Let me know your thoughts on this.

UPDATE: Tom Devlin, who commented on this post, has asked that his comments be withdrawn. I found his viewpoints on the editorial vision of the John Stanley Library series of great interest. They are rather invisible in the published volumes, and given the controversy my postings have aroused, I felt that, for once, an explanation was helpful.

I'm going to paraphrase some points Tom made, just to end this dischord--a dischord not intended by me in any way...

The MM books were designed for children--as stated earlier, their goal is to bring John Stanley's comix back into circulation for younger readers. As John Stanley is one of the great American authors of the 20th century, this is a noble goal.

D+Q has tentative plans to produce an Art of John Stanley book someday. I have discussed this project with Tom, and my involvement is likely. I didn't mention it here because (a) it slipped my mind and (b) I don't like to sound off on projects that aren't in the here and now. If this book comes to be, and I am a part of it, I will be happy to work on it. I think such a book is inevitable, despite the lack of solid biographical information available on Stanley.

But Stanley is not the first great author to be written about in the absence of a great deal of biographical knowledge. The themes of his work, and the artistry of his storytelling--and his innovations to the comix format--are a rich topic, and much can be said about them.

The MM books were planned as a three-volume set, each to contain a third of the series' nine-issue run (#10 was a reprint of the first issue). This choice helped keep production costs down, and thus the retail price of the books down.

This is an elaborate book, but it's worth the retail price. As said in my review, amazon.com and other discount internet sites offer excellent deals on the book. Again, I urge you to purchase this volume to support D+Q's ambitious plans to restore John Stanley to print.

OK! Matter closed. Let's move on to new horizons. I look forward to the next volumes in D+Q's Stanley series. I may even review them here. We'll see...

Melvin Monster Vol. 1: The John Stanley Library-- a review

Drawn + Quarterly's "John Stanley Library" has begun with a handsome volume of Melvin Monster. While the book is not all it could be, it still earns my highest accolades. I felt it appropriate to review it for this blog.



This is the first time an easily-available mass market hardcover of John Stanley's cartooning has been published. (Stanley's prior hardcover appearances include a generous berth in Michael Barrier's Smithsonian Book of Comic-Book Comics and the multi-volume, limited-run "Little Lulu Library" of the 1980s.

Within this book are the inner contents of the first three issues of Melvin Monster. This title was a part of John Stanley's renaissance as a "total" cartoonist in the 1960s.

Freed from the constraints of licensed characters, and of other, usually lesser cartoonists to complete his work, Stanley realized an elegant, distinct style of cartoon art. This style had been present in his work from his start in comic books.

By the 1960s, Stanley's sure hand and economical line were at their peak. Wielding an elegant brush-stroke, Stanley wrote, drew and lettered his work with a seeming effortlessness. As with Harvey Kurtzman and Jesse Marsh's work, Stanley's '60s comix make the artform look easy as pie.

This seeming facility belies the hard work that went into each panel. A casual look at the pages of this book reveals a masterful sense of panel composition, of narrative flow, and of the use of typography as a vital storytelling element.

Melvin Monster was John Stanley's entry in the "kooky monster" trend of the early 1960s. Alongside The Addams Family, The Munsters and a multitude of zany monster-themed trading cards, records and other ephemera, Melvin Monster was very much a product of its time--an unerringly commercial concept.

Stanley takes his time in establishing the world of Melvin Monster in these first three issues.

I don't want to burn a lot of daylight discussing the content of these stories, nor provide a sweeping canned overview of their characteristics. I'll come back to this material shortly.

From its start, Melvin Monster displays the growing darkness of John Stanley's vision. Were I a parent, I would have reservations about handing this volume to my kids without a preliminary sit-down discussion. There is intense stuff between this book's hardcovers.

The world of Melvin Monster reminds me of Lynda Barry's devastating novel, Cruddy. Both depict a universe of loosely organized chaos into which children are swept around like dead leaves.

Isolation, abandonment, entrapment, threats to life and limb (quicksand, alligators, falling objects, random acts of violence) and parental neglect are part and parcel of Melvin Monster's daily life.

Pop culture of the 1950s and '60s was quite dark in its matter-of-fact depiction of the downside of human existence. Melvin Monster is not as disturbing as the most extreme artifacts of this era.

If you want to really see something disturbing, try the Highway Safety Council-produced "educational" classroom film, The Child Molester, from 1964, or the 1960s "gore" horror-movies of Herschell Gordon Lewis, which wed Grand Guignol theatrics to the crudest lack of artistry imaginable.

Admittedly, these two examples are farther removed from the mainstream than Dell's comic books of the era. But they capture the darkest of the dark of the 1960s.

Melvin Monster comes off much lighter, in comparison, but has an inescapable, palpable bleakness.

The saving grace is John Stanley's unerring wit and Lubitsch-like comedic timing. Just when the events seem too foreboding, too grim, a comic zinger swoops down, like some benevolent bird of prey, and brightens the balance.

By this time, Stanley was comics' master of verbal patter. He, above all other contemporary comic book creators, got the rhythm of language--how to write it, how to sell it, and how to enforce its intake.

Stanley's language and verbal rhythms perform a masterful lightfooted dance throughout his 1960s work. It's abundant in Melvin Monster. It impresses me that such a dark concept can also be so frequently hilarious.

A genuine edginess distinguishes this work. Nearly half a century has not dulled this edge. If anything, these stories may be more humorous--and distubing--to 2009 readers than they were to their original audience.

About the book itself: designer Seth has done a lovely job on this book. With its foil embossing and teach-yourself-taxidermy color palette, it is also a very typical piece for the designer.

I do wish Seth would let less of his personal style into his design work. While these books--including Fantagraphics' successful hardcover reprints of Charles Schulz's Peanuts--are attractive, they often have nothing to say about the work inside, but everything to say about Seth's highly recognizable sense of graphic design.

Were John Stanley's name not on the front cover, a casual observer might think, "oh, wow; another Seth book. He sure is prolific!"

I do not criticize Seth's graphic design sense. It is well-established and easily recognizable. I think he has plenty of room to let more of the essence of the work inside shine through.

It's as if he feels a responsibility to vigorously sell the book--almost as if the work, itself, might not be strong enough to attract readership.

Upon opening the book, the reader is treated to one handsome spread after another--mood pieces that set the stage for the stories themselves. In light of my earlier comments about Seth's ubiquitous design sense, I must also state that this is the nicest-looking archival comics volume I've seen to date.

The original comics panels are isolated against a reassuring field of vintage newsprint. The effect is attractive, and makes a strong first impression.

The quality of the scans, from vintage comics, is very good. The blacks are strong and well-balanced, and fidelity to the source materials is strongly maintained.

On the flipside, some of the source materials are visibly flawed. The second issue, for example, appears to be sourced from a water-damaged, badly fluted and wrinkled original. The high-rez scanning makes every flaw in these pages vividly evident.

I found myself often distracted from the reading experience by these found eyesores. These original comics are not that rare: surely better sources can be located!

I regret that Stanley's striking cover designs for these issues are not included. Perhaps they were omitted to skirt the legal waters of Dell's possible claim to ownership of this series. Certainly the cover images themselves could be isolated and presented in these books. For one thing, they often bear John Stanley's signature--that rarest of things in his career.

For another, they are outstanding pieces of schematic design. Stanley's covers sold millions of comics--he designed the monthly Little Lulu covers. To omit this artwork and design from future volumes of the Stanley Library would be a crime.

Lastly, I am shocked at the lack of introductory material here. There is nothing that sets up these stories for the reader. It may be that D + Q want these stories to be read on their own merits, without historical context.

They work on their own, as they did in the mid-'60s. But there are remarkable aspects to this work that deserve to be stated--and which would enhance the reading experience.

I am certain that even a casual first-time reader would find the history of interest. It is a story of perseverance and artistic triumph, in a medium not inclined to reward such actions.

Just think: here is a brilliant comix creator who had over two decades' non-stop experience as a writer, artist, designer and creator--but who never signed his work before 1963, with one fluky exception.

This was the same experience Carl Barks suffered, on the other side of the continent, in his 25-year career as the "duck man" of Dell's California branch.

But Barks never developed and produced an original series idea for comix--or for any medium. He arguably rethought Donald Duck, and other Disney characters, and made them over into living, breathing, beautifully real individuals.

Barks certainly had ambitions to create his own comic strip or book from scratch, but the opportunity never happened for him.

John Stanley created at least seven original series for comic books, going back to the late 1940s.

With his all-original '60s work, Stanley reinvented himself as a newly vibrant creator. He no longer hit the ceiling of limitations imposed by licensed characters. He owned his world, from scratch, and could do as he pleased.

Decades of the daily discipline of comix writing gave his work a professional polish that helped cloak the dark themes he increasingly favored. John Stanley could sugar-coat his bitter pills of human truth just enough to get us, the reader, to swallow them.

My experience of reading his work is that its darkness and brutality often occurs to me later, in reflection. In the moment of the act of reading, his winning comedic sensibilities and brilliant narrative pacing occupy my attention.

I admire him for his ability to do two things at once: entertain and create works of emotional gravity. I think this is exactly what any modern-day alternative cartoonist strives to do with his or her work. Here is a man who managed to slip this highly personal vision between the cracks of mass-market publishing.

In closing, I urge you to purchase this book. Your purchase will encourage and support D + Q's ambitions to make a great deal of John Stanley's best work widely available. These are troubled days for book publishing. We can no longer afford the luxury of being idle spectators. This book can currently be had, for a very affordable sum, from amazon.com.

Or, better yet, buy this from your friendly neighborhood independent book store/comix store. This will encourage said seller to re-order this book, and others like it. Your purchase helps to create and sustain a market for non-crap comix in hardcover.

You will be glad this volume, and future John Stanley Library volumes, are on your bookshelf. They reward repeated readings and speak of a potential only rarely -achieved by mainstream media.

from "Melvin Monster" #8, 1967: an, er, yawning chasm...

I think I suddenly 'get' Melvin Monster, one of John Stanley's "auteur" comic book series of the 1960s. I recently picked up a complete run of the title (save #10, which is a reprint of the first issue).

Having read them, my opinion of the series has changed for the better. There is a great deal of inspired writing here. Stanley's bold, simple artwork (at times reminiscent of Dick Briefer's similar but looser work on the humorous Frankenstein comics of the 1940s) is a compliment to his concepts and dialogue.

Still, there are forbidding elements to this series that make it hard for me to embrace it completely.

Melvin Monster's is a grim, harsh world to inhabit. It is, however, consistent and well thought-out.

What bothers me about the series is the cruelty constantly hurled at Melvin, who is, at heart, a sweet and innocent being. Melvin is likable, despite being a goody two-shoes.

I'd love to see Casper, the Friendly Ghost or "playful" Little Audrey face the Spanish Inquisition. They represent the type of squeaky-clean, one-dimensional "goody two-shoes" characters that I can't help but dislike.

Melvin, on the other hand, is merely a non-conformist. He's the only nice guy in a world of monsters. It is a clever switch on the then-popular monster comedy genre, as seen on TV's The Addams Family and The Munsters.

Of course, to "sell" Melvin's niceness, it's necessary to make everyone else a raging, grade-A asshole. How else, logically speaking, would most monsters behave? Remembering that Melvin is the anomaly in this world can make its nastier elements a bit easier to stomach.

Melvin's parents, as I've commented elsewhere, really disturb me. Talk about your co-dependent, mutually abusive couple! It's Psych 101. You have the surly, prone-to-rage dad and the submissive, swimming-in-denial mom. So many American kids who grew up in the 1950s and '60s faced this set of parents. I certainly did, in my own way.

Perhaps John Stanley did, as well. These characters are too knowingly rendered, too forcefully present in these comic book stories. Despite Stanley's sharpness as a writer, the psychological weight of Melvin's 'rents leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Ditto for Cleopatra, the alligator (or crocodile?) whose sole goal is to devour Melvin--a mission forever thwarted, thank goodness.

Anyway, here's "Supermonster," one of the more offbeat stories from an already offbeat series. Savor the mix of macabre themes, dry puns, and life-or-death struggles that distinguishes Melvin Monster in comix history.