When BLAB! Means Something

An Interview with Monte Beauchamp

The good news is that due to the erosion of power because votes were finally counted up fairly (not discarded in bulk in specific voting districts), President Bush is now a slender, steadily melting bar of white soap with a dozen dark curlies stuck to it. His power to scare ordinary citizens everywhere (polls showed many people in other nations regarded the U.S. under Bush as the biggest threat to world peace) has been reduced, but, sadly, the red button that can launch thousands of nukes is still within his reach. Cheney is nearby, polishing his hunting rifle and grinning in a very strange way, but at least Rummy is now only a swizzle stick in a weekend-warrior biker bar in Nashville. The architect of White House media scare tactics, Turd Blossum, has imploded with a run of political ads so nasty that he went from being a blooming cesspool flower to a dark hole that absorbs light and bends space and time, absorbing even himself into the ghostly realm of samsara.

So, that’s the good news. The bad news is that Rachael Ray has a Christmas album out. Christmas albums are a frightening idea. They have all the integrity of a focus group. I was in Borders the other day when a large elderly woman in a huge floppy hat bellowed, “Does anyone WORK here? I like the MUPPETS! Where can I find their Christmas album?”

Nearby shoppers scattered like roaches under a suddenly lit halogen lamp and yet, praise Kermit, a kindly employee was very gentle with her and led her over to the rack of CDs full of awful musical treacle.

Sure, the Simpsons have, or had, a Christmas album (I got it as a prize in some joke-gift office Christmas raffle long ago), the Muppets do, and so does Rachael Ray. Does that mean anything? It means that someone at a media conglomerate said, “We can combine two sure-fire sellers: Christmas and Rachael Ray, and hit a very specific and large demographic of people who love perky and baby Jesus rolled into one!”

But what happens when someone with vision and integrity decides to pull together a bunch of artists and present them in some cool format?

BLAB! is the result of one such effort. The name of the magazine makes me think of Rachael Ray chattering like a bobble head on crystal meth, yet the word “blab” also means “to reveal a secret.”

The founder and on-going editor/designer of BLAB! is Monte Beauchamp. He was working in advertising in Chicago in the era of Depeche Mode and the Psychedelic Furs and was going insane with commerce and bosses with hairs curling into their netherlands. His wife (at the time) suggested that he create a comic book to blow off steam. This was years before all those pills that the head docs hand out like M&Ms for depression over war and tax gifts to the rich and other mental maladies suffered by quite a few ordinary people. Back then, the idea was that a little sketching or creative work or even a hobby like building a square-rigger out of match sticks would sooth the troubled soul.

Monte thought about the idea of his own comic book and realized that underground comix were being forgotten, and why not create a zine to remedy the situation with lots of blab about the comix world?

Thus BLAB! was born in the windy city where the blues are second nature. It’s now an award-winning annual publication from Fantagraphics and is packed with cool lowbrow art by artists like Mark Ryden and Shag and Fred Stonehouse and Sue Coe plus found graphics like antique devil postcards and old-time matchbook covers. In fact, those found-art discoveries have led Monte to create some spin-off books like Striking Images, a compendium of old matchbook covers, and The Devil in Design, all about old-time devil images. And there’s New and Used BLAB! too, a book of BLABaliciousness. He’s recently launched these great pictographic story books and there’s much more on the horizon.

I emailed Monte some questions and he wrote some wonderful answers. He’s a great guy, wise, fun, funny, and women used to hand him their phone numbers because he looked so much like William Hurt. These days he’s a one-man lowbrow art empire, spinning out cool stuff of all kinds.

MATT: Where did you grow up?

MONTE: Home was in a town called Moline, which is wedged between two massive bodies of water: The Rock River and the Mighty Mississippi.

MATT: What were your favorite comic books and visual stimulants and movies and TV shows -- your pop culture fixations as a kid from, say, nine or ten to, say, sixteen or twenty?

MONTE: The first things I started out collecting were rocks and fossils. A bit later, my father introduced me to collecting old coins; mainly because he saw I was taking an interest in MAD magazine and he didn’t seem too happy about that. I also was really attracted to the bubble gum cards of the day: series such as Mr. Phoney’s Funnies, You’ll Die Laughing--with cartoony monsters drawn by Jack Davis--and the Mars Attacks cards painted by Norm Saunders. I dug Dr. Seuss real early on and also the New Yorker cartoons of Charles Addams. At summer camp I met a kid who actually collected comic books, and he was the one responsible for turning me on to the concept of collecting entire runs of particular titles. Prior to that, I’d just read a comic here and there, and didn’t care what happened to it after I was finished.

Regarding TV and movies, I remember enjoying The Munsters, The Outer Limits, and The Monkees, and also Bonanza, but I wasn’t super-hooked; like I didn’t have to watch them every week. I spent much of my free time outside, playing ball in the field across from our house and also building tree houses and forts in this huge woods we had nearby. At one point, my friends and I had built five tree houses with bridges that connected them all--it was like a
city in the sky!

MATT: Did you keep a secret stash of comics in the tree house?

MONTE: Never stored comics in the tree house; maybe a few Playboy-girlie type pictures torn from copies of various sleaze magazines we used to find while garbage hunting.

I had a Sting Ray bicycle with high handle bars and used to roll up pics of my favorite Playboy girls and stash them in there. The easy access made bike riding more interesting.
      
MATT: What was your college education and early career like?
 
 MONTE: College wasn’t even on the map when I was in high school; in eleventh grade I almost dropped out. After graduation, I hitch-hiked around the country a bit. Slept in corn fields, hung out in Denver and Boulder, Colorado a bit. Almost moved there but then got a call from back home to do cement construction.

About six months later, I went over to John Deere foundry. A good friend had gone on to college and every time he came home to visit, we’d go out partying, and after three or four pitchers of beer, he’d start blathering that I should be in college pursuing a career in art. It took about a year, but eventually I left the foundry behind and took his advice. Started as a fine arts major and eventually wound up in graphic design.  
 
MATT: You founded the fab BLAB! magazine about twenty years ago. How’d that come about?
 
MONTE: I’d been working in advertising about six years and the whole political structure of that industry became pretty distasteful. The things that people will pull on their fellow compatriots to get ahead was a real eye-opener. My wife at the time suggested I start drawing my own comic book in my spare time to keep my mind off the agency politics. Though I loved to draw, I had no desire to draw a comic book--but then the idea of doing a fanzine about comics flashed in my head. And that in turn gave way to BLAB!

 
MATT: Tell us about why, when, and what the early issues were like and included.
 
MONTE: The first issue was mainly text-oriented and was a collection of memoirs by the counter-culture cartoonists of the sixties “blabbing” about what a BIG influence MAD, Tales from the Crypt, and the rest of the EC comics of the 1950s had on their work. A few of the cartoonists also turned in some EC-inspired illustrations to accompany their memoir. That first BLAB! was self-published in a limited edition of 1500 copies. I didn’t plan a follow-up issue, mainly because the amount of time it took; that, in addition to holding down a full-time art direction job, really began to upset my wife. But that first issue brought in a HUGE amount of fan mail and some very favorable reviews, which I never anticipated. In doing BLAB!, it was never put out to receive any sort of acclaim. It was just to do something the ad people couldn’t tamper with. Yet, all the attention was what inspired me to self-publish a second issue.
 
Dan Clowes had just moved to Chicago, so I pitched him on doing a spin on Wertham’s The Show of Violence, which he dug. Drew Friedman had begun to take the comic world by storm and he climbed on board. J.D. King conducted a great interview with Len Brown, the creator of the early Mars Attacks bubble gum cards put out by Topps; Kim Deitch did a five-page comic strip; there were all sorts of things in that issue.

 
MATT: How has BLAB! changed over the years?
 
MONTE: In many, many ways. Looking back on the last 20 years, you can pinpoint the distinctive changes, but at the time, BLAB! just sort of mutated into what it is today; there was never a grand plan to keep the show on the road, ya know? I’m amazed it’s still here.

I lost $2,200 on No. 2 and figured I better cash in my chips; then Kitchen Sink Press saw it and offered to pick up the publishing chores. By issue seven though that digest-sized format began to grate on my nerves; as a designer, even though the material inside was tremendous, I felt restricted by that tiny format. So I pitched Kitchen Sink Press on a new format, and their editorial board shot it down. I had no desire to do another digest-sized issue, so I just retired from BLAB! without really telling anybody about it.

Four or five months later, when Denis Kitchen called to see when issue eight would be ready for press, I said there wasn’t going to be one. For a moment, there was total silence and when he queried, “How come?” I remember responding, “Because the new format change I suggested had been shot down.”
 
And Denis was real cool about it; right then and there he granted me a new format and to allow color on the interior. He was real good about it, and understood my need as an art director and designer to experiment. And that’s when I started contacting an assortment of illustrators I really admired such as Gary Baseman, Jonathon Rosen, and Peter Hoey, etc. to see if they’d be a part of BLAB!...
  
MATT: What draws you to certain artists and what tends to push you away from others?
 
MONTE: It’s the firefly effect. I’m drawn to work that generates ORIGINAL light. I like imagery by artists who have gone through “rites of passage,” so to speak; people who have done a forensic accounting on their inner selves, and have come to terms with it -- for better or for worse... people that create a visual resonance that vibrates within a society. BLAB! has no use for the corporate “fast-food” art that now permeates ninety per cent of the pages of ninety per cent of the magazines.

 
MATT: We're seeing more and more films being made based on graphic novels, comic books, etc. How well does that crossover work? Any favorites? When it fails, why does it fail? When it succeeds, why does it succeed?
 
MONTE: It depends on who’s directing. Zwigoff did a tremendous job with Ghost World. I liked Peter Jackson and what he did with this latest King Kong. V for Vendetta was another artistic success; I really enjoyed that one. On the other hand you have movies like The Fantastic Four and Daredevil, which are totally embarrassing; artistically they’re flops.

As to why one of this graphic novel films succeeds? Who really knows?  There are many variables, politics, people, and committees involved ... it’s really all just a crap shoot, the luck of the draw.
 
 MATT: You've published books and more. Please tell us about the books.
 
 MONTE: I’ve been fortunate in that arena; really lucky. My first was The Life and Times of R. Crumb, published by St. Martin’s Press. Next was New & Used BLAB! published by Chronicle Books, who also just published my latest book: Striking Images, which is a collection of great matchbook cover designs from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Fantagraphics published The Devil in Design several years back, which is now in its third printing, and they are also the publisher of the BLAB! picto-novelettes. So far, we have six of them out and they're a series inspired by the children’s book format but aimed at a more mature, appreciative crowd than the toddlers. Sheep of Fools by Sue Coe and Judith Brody was our first, and it recently won a Book of the Year Award from PETA. Next came Struwwelpeter by Bob Staake. Walter Minus’ Darling Cheri was third, followed by The Alphabetical Book of Carnality by David Sandlin. Drew Friedman’s Old Jewish Comedians is fifth in the series, and The Magic Bottle by Camille Rose Garcia is our latest. We have more Picto-novelettes scheduled for 2007 and 2008, so stay tuned.

 
 MATT: You've also curated some art shows. How many and where have they been?
 
 MONTE: So far I’ve curated three. Our first was actually a museum show in Lucerne, Switzerland, during the Spring of 2005; that fall we had a BLAB! gallery show at Track 16, Bergamot Station in Los Angeles, which was sponsored by Copro-Nason. This past September 2006, Copro-Nason sponsored another BLAB! show; and they just booked us again for 2007.