Obscurity of the Day: Comic Book Guy's Book of Pop Culture

Sometimes you end up working on a project that none of your fans ever mention to you, no one seems to know it exists, you never see it in shops, no one brings it to be signed at a convention -- a project that's even more obscure than the obscure stuff you usually do. 

Some of these projects are understandably obscure -- they're less deep cuts and more like barely noticed scrapes. Early comics in fanzines or indy anthologies, a cover for a VHS tape of metal videos, gag panels in a Penthouse Magazine spin-off, an illustration for a label's compilation CD handed out at a music festival. 

But some of these projects actually sold better or were in front of a lot more eyeballs than a lot of comics you're "known" for. It always seems to come as a surprise to most  fans of ours that we worked on television shows like Yo Gabba Gabba! and Batman Beyond (actually, it surprises me, too). The audiences for the magazines we did work for rarely seemed to cross over (except for Disney Adventures, Mad to a degree, Nick Mag to a lesser degree). 

One of my favorite "obscure" gigs was as a contributing writer for a book called Comic Book Guy's Book of Pop Culture. It was part of a series called The Simpson's Library of Wisdom, little (but packed) gift books centered around specific Simpsons characters and their signature tropes. They were published by Harper, but put together by the folks at Bongo Comics (R.I.P.). Sarah and I had done a number of jobs for Bongo, and when the CBG book was gearing up then-editor in chief Bill Morrison called me up to see if I would contribute to it. I remember it coming along at a time when I needed a job to kick in, so I was definitely up for it. Pop culture. Comic books. Fandom. Wheelhouse!

I think they sent me a list of topics, and I think I suggested others. I ended up writing a decent chunk of the book, about 50 pages or more. I tried to shove in as much material as possible given the size of the pages. I covered comic shops, fake soundtracks, wrestling shows, comic cons, baseball card shows, t-shirts, cosplay, gaming, collectibles, all the expected stuff the character was into (and awful about). 

There were some comics, but mostly illustrated lists and essays, guides to different conventions and gatherings, and similar approaches. Most of my material came from the same hellspring that The Eltingville Club crawled out of -- being a fan, being a professional, going to cons, being a jerk, and working in comic shops:

Many of these gags were based on real life. The sock kid is a memory I wish I could forget. It was August. He was sweaty. Really.  Sweaty. I touched the money. I wanted to die.

I went through my Eltingville file for anything I could use to get the job done faster. I was able to adapt a few story notes and crib a few jokes, but it didn't help me as much as I'd initially hoped. The book was list-heavy, so, you basically had to make a lot of reference-heavy stuff, try to differentiate the jokes so they don't seem repetitive, and try not to be too generic so a "gaming joke" wouldn't necessarily work as a "convention joke". But because you were turning in completed sections so they could be drawn and designed, sometimes it became a blur. How many Klingon jokes have I done? How many hobbits? Or were those jawas? 

Lists. I'm pretty sure we all got cut down, it was hard to know when to stop. When you were out of decent bits, I guess!

I always had to work the loneliness angle. Wonder why? Maybe I'll ask my therapist.

I am not too embarrassed to admit I laughed when I read the Harlan Ellison entry above. That's not bad. Multiple bits, decent word choices, good voice and tone on CBG, a fairly deep cut pop culture reference, and two jerks ribbed. One of them fictional.

Looking at the above image, I remembered what was, for me, the hardest part of the job -- writing those introductions to the articles. I hated those. I usually wrote them last and avoided them for as long as I could. Once I found a way in -- or got desperate enough to just lay some kind of sentences down to clean up -- they were usually not too bad. But getting the words to start off with, the basic direction to go in, with this kind of thing it's too much like advertisement writing. I feel very awkward when I have to write material that sells you on something or has to put on a  happy or jokey voice -- a set-up, a solicitation, a blurb. I'm pretty sure this is a major reason I couldn't get much writing work at MAD. I didn't have that  MAD style of writing in me, that comes off as kind of glib elbow-in-the-ribs and anonymous once editorial worked through it. I don't know if I could identify an Arnie Kogen article from a Dick DeBartolo or a Frank Jacobs or a Desmond Devlin, without the credits. That's probably on me, I gravitated to the cartoonists like Don Martin, Al Jaffee, Sergio Aragones, Antonio Prohias, et al, and never really could parse the actual writers unless it was a song (maybe?). I wrote only one article for MAD -- for a free SDCC edition (illustrated by Ty Templeton) -- and it seemed like those two pages had been rewritten more than the 22-minute TV scripts we've done. I hardly recognized some of the captions, and one panel was completely changed -- even though they laid out the original gag they wanted for it.

If I remember correctly, back in the day Kyle Baker supposedly stopped working for MAD because of all the notes and revisions to his art. When I started drawing for them, I was nervous as hell about this happening with my work, because I of course saw myself as second-rate compared to Kyle,  the usual gang, and of course, the old guard. But I have to say, my roughs rarely came back to me with notes, what notes there were made sense and were simple and direct (make that bigger, exaggerate that, lose that detail) , and once I had drawn something in ink, that was that. It went very smoothly. 

But writing -- I just hit the wall almost every time. That one article was heavily reworked, I sold one single page comic which I also drew, I sold one semi-regular photo feature ("Monkeys Are Always Funny -- most of my ideas were rejected, like a monkey or ape being at the Kennedy assassination, which, yeah, okay, I understand the objection) and none of my gag panels, strip ideas or article ideas got anywhere. I remember pitching a gag about heroin addicts and the editor got really testy with me, saying "that's not funny, I had a friend who died from an overdose.". Two months later MAD ran an bit making a joke about the victims of mob hits, not just other mobsters but family members and whoever (I think they were all buried under a highway in the gag). I just thought that was interesting. 

Still, despite my usual anxieties, for some reason I didn't take the rejections hard. And I got more rejections from MAD than any other place I'd ever worked, comics, animation, magazines. Them babies was tough, but there was no animosity or insult. Everything I tossed their way ended up as clay pigeons, up, up and no way. I used some of the gags in Dork, and was happy enough doing the art assignments.

In a way, writing for the Comic Book Guy's Book of Pop Culture felt more like writing  MAD-style than the time I wrote for MAD. Churning out ideas, jokes, references, goofing on stuff, nothing R-rated. I really enjoyed the job. It's a nifty little book. I don't think I've signed more than two copies in my life. 

And there's your Obscurity of the Day!

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