The Moose in the Closet: The Worst Comic, A Good Comic, Clowes Wants you to Fuck Yourself and Tap Water of Death

In case you all were wondering I just read the worst comic ever made. Worse than Civilian Justice. I’m not going to say what it was, but I will say it just came out and I have faith that anyone who has read it knows exactly what I’m talking about. To the people that made this book, congratulations – you are officially bad for comics.

On the flip side I finally got to read Grant Morrison's We3, keeping with the tradition of being way behind in my reading. It was good. It wasn’t so good as to offset the scarring caused by the worst comic ever made but it was good enough to make me smile. Here’s why I love Grant. Everyone and their momma (including us H&B folk) is trying to make a “Hollywood comic”. It’s where the money is, you know? You look at We3 and you know,as it's written right now, it would never be anything more than a comic. It’s not a movie, it has no elements in it that would resonate with a movie going audience. That book was written strictly for comic fans. And Grant's just like, “Fuck it. This is my story. Fuck it and fuck you.” I admire that. In honor or Grant and We3 I’d like to say to my reader, “Fuck you. Here are my stories. If you don’t like them, fuck a duck.”

I also read the first half of Dan Clowes Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron. That shit is the definition of “Fuck you, here’s my story.” That book is so “fuck you” that even if you like it Dan wants you to go fuck yourself. Thanks to Chris Fabulous for turning me on to Clowes.

Oh yeah, and Matt Dembicki has a new Small Presser up, read it, it’s inspiring. Unlike my article going up tomorrow which promises to crush the weak. Seriously, I have so much trouble coming my way.

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The yearly science fair in elementary school was always a big thing. I haven’t mentioned this yet but in 58s there was a program for fourth, fifth and sixth graders called “G&T” which stood for Gifted & Talented. Whenever I tell this to Robin she flips out, saying how unfair of a label it is. I just tell her she’s jealous because the G&T program she was in stood for “Garbage & Trash”. She then proceeds to withhold sex from me.

But I digress; I was in G&T and for G&T students, Science Fair was like the fucking circus and Christmas all rolled into one. Winner went on to the CITY Science Fair. New York City Science Fair is the balls.

Unfortunately my projects were always sort of lame. The solar system diorama. The colored water and celery. The 9V battery powering a light bulb. All shit you can rip out of a book called “Science for Dummies”.

But one year, G, Ross and I hooked up and actually used our brains and made a science fair project worthy of the city competition…hell, maybe even the state.

The Gowanus Canal was a Red Hook/Carroll Garden resident’s equivalent of a ghost house. You were never supposed to touch the water in the canal because it would instantly eat your skin. It was just bad juju, it smelled like shit and there were so many legends about bank robbers trying to swim across it and dying almost instantly. We decided to take two identical plants and feed one tap water and one water from the Gowanus canal.

The only problem we didn’t consider was, someone had to get the water.

G, Ross and I stood at the bank of the canal for a good twenty minutes arguing over who gets the water. We held a jar and went back and forth until finally Ross gets fed up, grabs the jar and goes to get some canal water.

And falls in.

Not submerged but he slips in up to his waste. It was so scary that I’m pretty sure G and I started crying immediately. Ross gets out, his legs were not melted off, and just starts cursing. He smells like sewage and his pants just looks grimy. We walk home with our jar of canal water, keeping a safe distance from the contaminated bastard.

We get to Ross’ house and feed the plants. I remember Ross’ brother came out and started telling us these racist jokes that weren’t even remotely funny. Such as: What do you call a black smurf? A smigger.

Not funny. It’s not even really a joke.

We also flipped through these R. Crumb comics he had lying around. I remember being intimidated by the voluptuous women that inhabited those books – it was way different than the Spider-Man books I was used to. Well, as in you actually saw nipple and not just implied nipple through bursting spandex.

Anyway, we let our experiment sit for a few weeks, up until the science fair. You see, the strangest thing happened. The Gowanus plant was vibrant. The tap water plant was dead. Now, if we were real scientists, we would have seen that our little discovery was fucking huge. But we wanted to go to the city science fair. And our hypothesis was that the Gowanus plant would die.

So we lied.

And, you know what? We went to the city fair. Our project was all hip because it was focusing on the environment and community health. Of course, the real problem was the fact that our tap-water was potentially killing us but who needs science when you got cash, money, bling.

Labels: mitc

The Worst Comic, A Good Comic, Clowes Wants you to Fuck Yourself and Tap Water of Death

Wednesday, June 22, 2005

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