CZAR CHASM #1 (C&T Graphics, 1987).
I picked up a copy of this black and white small press anthology magazine in those long-ago days prior to my entry into the funnybook selling business. In fact, if I recall correctly, this magazine was in a stack of books being offered “FREE with $10 Purchase” (or something like that). Anyway, I grabbed it partially because of my interest in sampling a lot of the black and white indies at the time (and the ’80s were a real heyday for that sort of thing), but mostly because I saw Cynicalman creator Matt Feazell‘s name on the cover.
As it turned out, this wasn’t Feazell’s usual stick-figure style…actually, it was a story that had been drawn back in ’81:
However, there was a stick-figure style story elsewhere in the anthology (The Stick Dick in “Vengeance Day” by Eric Mayer), as well as a Morty the Dog story by Steve Willis and a Mightyguy lead story by Tim Corrigan. The magazine contains mostly short humor strips like the above (though the Feazell strip is more “slice of life”), and there is one horror strip that seems somewhat out of place. But overall, this is an entertaining mix of cartooning styles, some more polished than others, but all demonstrating an honest, homemade expressiveness that your typical 30-part superhero crossover punch-em-up can’t match.
The black and white boom of the 1980s did result in a lot of junk, but it did occasionally come up with a bit of enjoyable oddball weirdness like Czar Chasm, and I kind of miss that.
Those aren’t the artists pictured on the cover, I hope.
I still have quite a bit of 1980s B&W stuff cluttering up my collection. It seemed as though everybody and his brother came out with a B&W comic back in the day.