Issue #0 introduces three of Columbia's recurring characters: the hapless, Koko the Clown-like Seymour Sunshine in the opening story "No Tomorrow If I Must Return", and the sibling duo Pim and Francie in "Tar Frogs". Many of the pieces deal with disturbing subject matter such as mutilation, incest, and the occult. The passage in question is quoted briefly in a story from issue #0, itself also titled "The Biologic Show".Įach issue of The Biologic Show contains several short stories and illustrated poems. Burroughs book Exterminator! (in the story "Short Trip Home").
In a 2010 interview, Columbia recalled that the unfinished issue "looked so different that it just didn’t look right, it didn’t look consistent, and it didn’t feel right to keep putting out that same comic book, to try to tell a story where the style is mutating." The series' title is taken from a passage in the William S. " I Was Killing When Killing Wasn't Cool", a color short story with a markedly different art style originally intended for issue #2, appeared instead in the anthology Zero Zero. A third issue (#2) was announced in the pages of other Fantagraphics publications and solicited in Previews but was never published. The first issue, #0, was released in October 1994 by Fantagraphics Books, and a second issue, #1, was released the following January. (Nov.The Biologic Show is a comic book series written and drawn by Al Columbia. But they're also showcases for Columbia's self-frustrating mastery: his absolute command of the idiom of lush, old-fashioned cartooning, and the unshakable eeriness of his visions of horror. The book's spine calls its contents “artifacts and bone fragments,” as if they're what's left for a forensic scientist to identify after a brutal murderer has had his way with them Columbia obsessively returns to images of “bloody bloody killers.” (His cartoon shorthand for destruction is a human tornado with lots of bent arms holding knives at daffy angles.) Many of the pieces are just one or two drawings, as if they've been reduced to the moment when an idyllic piece of entertainment goes hideously awry.
These aren't actually stories about Pim and Francie, a pair of little-kid characters (drawn in a vintage animation style) who are perpetually stumbling into ghastly, wrenchingly violent scenarios: they're mangled fragments of stories, closeups of incomplete comics pages and animation storyboards, stained and crumpled sketches and notes. This, his first book, makes a point of being unfinished and unfinishable. Columbia's legend over the last two decades has as much to do with the work he's destroyed or never finished as with the few spectacular, horrifying pieces that actually have seen publication.
0 kommentar(er)
