#plus. That comic made many people that believes in art crimes really really mad

[cartoonsinthemorning]

I, for one, adored your tarashade comic ..... ❤️

Thank you so much! 💗

[mondofunnybooks]

The thing is, come 2006, funnybooks just weren't very Funny.

Not intentionally, anyway.

Of those of us who once read Dave Sim's opinion piece in Hero Illustrated that suggested all ongoing superhero comics are best read as some kind of Rodney Dangerfield routine, then comics were doing their outright best to be utterly hilarious.

Infinite Crisis attempted to fix the Continuity as if the history of Fights N Tights were some kind of sacred text that required updating in case serious questions were asked on how Batman could possibly be fighting crime if his book debuted during World War 2 because that would put him in his 70s! Superboy-Prime also debuted in that series, apparently meant as an Evil Mary Sue by DC Editors rather miffed at this invention called 'The Internet', which would allow readers to voice their thoughts on comics they'd paid for. We regard Superboy-Prime as our spirit animal.

Civil War was a Very Serious Effort to marry the themes of military abusing power in an attempt to detain terrorist suspects by having Iron Man throw people who wouldn't reveal their secret identity to the world into another dimension. This would be followed a couple of years later with an analogy for Guantanamo Bay and the new distrust for Muslims brought about by the events of the 9-11 strikes. (mainly featuring green aliens from space pretending to be Jarvis The Butler. And possibly Ant-Man. We forget. )

Oh, Elektra turned out to be a Skrull as well, so that was good, but sadly Marvel wouldn't go as far as to say that literally every appearance of Elektra that wasn't written by Frank Miller was actually Skullektra.

Meanwhile, Marvel punished retailers the world over for a plot point being revealed on a comic news website by not sending their main purchaser preview copies anymore. Because what every comic retailer dreads is being denied the opportunity to order more Marvel stock.

So, yes, an absolute plethora of material worth parodying and humbugging to go mad over, panic trumping a desire to be sick and crazy over the whole madhouse.

It's just that weren't many voices left to actually do the lampooning. MAD Magazine had long been defanged by it's sale to Warner Brothers decades previously, all the good writers on our beloved Twisted Toyfare Theatre had been snapped up to work on Robot Chicken, Amazing Heroes had been cancelled, Gary Groth had been less of a editorial voice on The Comics Journal for a while by that point and Harvey Kurtzman had passed away a long time ago.

I mean, there was Wizard, but they'd been shown to back off whenever advertisers had issues with their soft touch so weren't really worth mentioning in the first place unless you considered mocking comics from the 70's for not conforming to the norms of a 90's audience the very cutting edge of comedy commentary.

So imagine this writer's surprise to see a magazine advertised in possibly Comic Book Artist (Now Comic Book Creator, a magazine published by Two Morrows Press and readers are advised to get as many back issues of it as possibly. Learn how the late, lamented, iconic and possibly best comic shop in London, otherwise known as Comic Showcase, was probably responsible for League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen being published!) called 'Comic Book Nerd'.

Comic Book Nerd appeared not to be mucking around. Preview art offered educated attacks on modern comics anatomy, the hilarity of the notion of the superstar comics artist, the soulless pandering of publishers to flippers desperate to try and find an investment in recently published titles, the pomposity and pretension of the highbrow small press comics scene...

We'd not seen such an articulate and educated assault on the hand that feeds it since the last time Evan Dorkin published an issue of Dork! and obviously we were instantly in love. As with anything worth reading, we ordered extra copies in assuming that the readership were more than capable of the self awareness needed to laugh at itself and would take the book in the humour intended.

Suffice to say, we may have overestimated our audience. It's worth noting we have enemies who have never forgiven us for finding the issue of Legion Of Super-Heroes where small aliens in beanie hats kill Sun Boy by barbecuing him on a spit and then eating him to death one of the funniest comics ever published. We live in fear of having our flight ring revoked by Arm Fall-Off Boy* at any minute.

Having been blown away by Pete's ability to change style based on the assignment rather than forcing every brief to fit into one over practised, over swiped and under referenced aesthetic like 95% of comic artists, we looked on further into his works and discovered the gorgeous 'Morbid', published by Dark Horse but good luck finding the damn things, a love-letter to both horror movies and EC Comics in a knowing but funny writing style married with fumetti plus lots of very silly special effects. Very much recommended to fans of things like 'The Goon', 'MST3K' or anyone who thinks Vampira was way cooler than Wonder Woman could ever be.

Here at MONDO FunnyBooks we don't really do hero worship and fear at the sight of celebrities anymore. Especially in comics because we've seen most of them throwing up in a pub toilet but even we were slightly frightened when sending a friend request to the Powerful Pete Von Sholly. We stuttered the timid words 'Hello Sir your comic was dead good can we be friends please?' and somehow we ended up learning about his most recent project: LOVECRAFT ILLUSTRATED which is currently on Kickstarter with only a few days to go. We'll turn over the description to him. (Text taken from his Kickstarter page.)

'In 2014 Ramsey Campbell introduced me to Pete Crowther of PS Publishing and I proposed a DREAM-QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH book with my illustrations sprinkled throughout- He liked it, we did it and then he suggested we do ALL Lovecraft that way in a series of books under his PulpS imprint. I have collected all the art form those along with many sketches and single pieces that are Lovecraft-centric into Pete Von Sholly’s Lovecraft Illustrated. Here is some background about me and HPL.  

Context is everything, so in order to say something about me and Lovecraft I need to lay some out: One fateful late 60's afternoon I was sitting in study hall (tenth grade, age 16 or so and supremely bored) looking through the Modern Library omnibus volume entitled "Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural". The final two stories in the book (as if they saved the best for last) were by somebody called H.P. Lovecraft; they were “The Rats in the Walls” and “The Dunwich Horror”.

The name Lovecraft was vaguely familiar.There were glancing mentions in Famous Monsters and paperbacks with his name on them in those pages but there were no Lovecraft movies yet so I had no idea what to expect. I read “The Rats in the Walls” first. it was a fairly short story but I experienced a delightful jolt unlike anything that I could get from all that I was familiar with.

There were horrors aplenty; hordes of ravenous rats, hideous nightmares, ancient underground grottoes leading off into infinite subterranean darkness and pocked with giant pits full of sawed and chewed bones of humans and things not altogther human and finally a man who went mad and tumbled down the evolutionary scale to embrace his ancestral cannibalistic form of nourishment... but, and maybe best of all, many hints of things just beyond the reach of the light- including something called "Nyarlathotep"... Hints which were even more exciting and pleasing than the overt horrors.

“The Dunwich Horror” was next and it was all over when I finished that one. I had been introduced to the Necronomicon, Arkham with its Miskatonic Library, Yog-Sothoth and so many key Lovecraftian entities and conceptions which were new to me. And it excited my imagination- and made me want to draw what I was imagining.'

For those interested, The Kickstarter is the link. See Ya in the Funnypages, Mondo Maniacs!:

*We have lied about many things in our lives but we could not make up Arm Fall-Off Boy on our best day ever.  Look him up if you don't believe us!

https://www.kickstarter.com/…/pete-von-shollys-…/description