Best place to start with Kaz is Underworld, and the sublime Sidetrack City - both from Fantagraphics. This is a review of his early work, Buzzbomb.

(coming soon: scans, reviews of his more recent work)

Buzzbomb.

Fantagraphics, 1987.
Availability: OOP, but check Bookfinder. Original price $10.
Book information: 14.5″ x 11″, very big stapled pamphlet, with glossy cover and heavy, rough, white uncoated paper. 44pp.

[Vamp Dance]

This is Kaz’s first book, an anthology of early short strips that documents his early progress as an artist, a period that was dominated by experimentalism. There’s a real thrill to reading a well-done experimental comic, a comic that might be more based on formal play and visual look than narrative. What makes Kaz’s experimental comics so much more impressive is that while they’re breaking all the formal rules, many of them are at the same time laugh-out-loud funny, in a very 1930’s screwball comedy, Looney Toons sort of way.

Ten features of this book are one-page stand-alone features (except two two-pagers). Many of these are formally experimental, but they also succeed as hilarious comics. They are also beautiful in a unique way. Kaz’s early work seems to have been influenced by classic Fleisher animation or Kim Deitch’s early work in that the landscapes are busy with action. Every object on the page seems to strive towards that perfect cartoon-ness achieved by Segar and Bushmiller — but with an 80’s, New York spin. Rather than dancing farm animals in a pastoral landscape, we have equally cheery rabid dogs on a street covered in broken glass.

Standouts include “Zombies on Broadway,” a beautifully structured and hilarious “dark screwball” story involving a mobster, a zombie with a stomachache, a blind pharmacist, a panhandler, and a bottle of rat poison. “Big Broadcast of 1936″ isn’t humor at all, rather it is a deeply touching emotional story that achieves beauty by not showing an important part of the story, the wife running out on the protagonist; rather than showing her in flight, the narrative captions follow her down the stairs. It works amazingly well.

About the final strip in the book, “The Tot,” Kaz said, “With that work, I was moving away from comics as pure design and I was trying to tell a tale. I found that people remembered characters and stories more than they remembered style.” “The Tot” is Kaz’s first great dark opus (his second was the greatly improved “Sidetrack City.”)

Then there are the five “Vamp Dance” pages that function as concentrated doses of Kaz’s experimentalism. The best Vamp Dances are the plainly drawn ones that use the page in a weird but hilarious way. In one, Blue Monday chokes on his own word balloon and dies; when it is pulled out of his mouth, two other characters hold it above his head in the last panel. It says, “This is the happiest day of my life!” One of my favorite comics tricks of all time, that I used in a presentation about comics, is the Vamp Dance on page 25.

The straight design experiments are on the covers, centerfold (”Savage man, stupid jerk!”), and a two-page strip “Voodoo.” Kaz is right about these, they’re a lot of fun to look at but ultimately meaningless.

The remainder of the book is taken up by “Tot” stories. Tot is a nuclear-mutated baby with a huge head and a mischievous spirit. He is kind of a precursor of the post-atomic kids in Sidetrack City. In one of the stories here, we meet the Little Bastard for the first time. All of these episodes are humorous in a similar vein as the others in this book except for “The Tot” at the end. This is a nine-page dark epic — really. Murder, mystery, and gorgeous art and storytelling. Kaz says: With that work, I was moving away from comics as pure design and I was trying to tell a tale. I found that people remembered characters and stories more than they remembered style.”

The stories here can be seen as the precursors to Kaz’s peak of achievement in Sidetrack City, or they can be seen as a bunch of great, funny, beautiful, haunting comics by one of the best comics artists in the world — either way, they are worthy of your reading and investigating…

Related Links:
Gregory Cwiklik, The Toxic Humor Of Kaz - awesome look at all of Kaz’s work, great article!
John Kelly, TCJ Interview - the world would be a better place indeed if more artists would put their complete TCJ interviews on their web sites!