Taboo Dancing with the Dead Or Taboo You

You’re home, all alone. It’s midnight—the proverbial witching hour when all the beasties and ghoulies of the night come forth and prowl (This, however, is the 20^th century; we know that there are no such things as vampires, werewolves, and goblins.  

Yet what was that creaking sound upstairs? That tapping at the window, is it1 branch blowing gently in the wind. or something more sinister’! Yes, perhaps all the “monsters” are gone, but in this hi-tech, post-nuclear, pre-apocalypse age, there is a new set of terrors to hound us and keep us awake at night.

The. media bombard us with the new lunatic fringe. Seemingly harmless neighbors that go ‘round the bend at the slightest provocation. Richard Speck slashes 10 nurses in Chicago; a young man climbs to the top of a tower in Texas and guns down innocent bystanders; a patron with an automatic weapon, snaps in a Burger King; a disgrun tled Postal Worker expresses his displeasure with the help of a handgun. And always the friends and neighbors appear on TV the next day mouthing the same inane expressions. “He was always such a good boy.” “He was such a nice kid.” “Never bothered anyone ...”

Of course there are no monsters, no demons crawling forth from the pits of Hell to ravage your flesh, and possess your undying soul ... or are there? In the cold clear light of day, we can laugh and joke about such things, but at night, when we are alone, down deep in our heart of hearts, we know that there are things that we can never know. Things that all of our science and advanced thought cannot explain, and we are afraid.

These may seem to be fairly morbid thoughts to place on the printed page (especially in a publication like Amazing Heroes); but they are even more unusual when you not only discuss them on a daily basis, but devote a fair portion of your life’s work to delving deeper into that portion of the unknown often termed horror fiction. Well, that is precisely what artist/writer (and now editor/publisher) Steve Bissette has been doing for the past decade. In a medium best and almost exclusively known for promoting the seemingly endless adventures of people who parade around in long underwear, Steve Bissette has never drawn a superhero comic.

No, not even once.

Perhaps best known for his work with John Totleben and the near legendary Alan Moore on DC’s Swamp Thing, he has, almost inadvertently, become first ah editor and now a publisher of what he hopes will become the cutting edge of horror in the comic medium. ‘‘The epitome of the horror genre,” Bissette told us, “Is about emotion. It’s about fear. And the epitome of fear is touching on or recognizing things that you would rather not touch on or recognize, hence they are taboo.’’

PLUMBING THE DEPTHS OF THE SOUL

To this end Bissette, under the guise of SpiderBaby Grafix, is compiling numerous horror short stories from a varied array of established and new creators to include in his ongoing anthology Taboo. “l would like (Taboo) to be a book that touches on the power and importance of the genre stories where people can confront , very unpleasant and yet very primal, aspects of living.”

Only when a person confronts his own fear or hate, puts it in terms that he can understand and actually hold in their hands, can he truly understand it. According to Bissette this is the power of the horror genre. “I think that that kind of vicarious involvement can ultimately be a very positive thing because then when you are confronted with dangero.us, life threatening, or disturbing situations it’s almost like you’ve had these little mini rehearsals that have prepared you for being more aware in those sort of situations.”

Bissette believes those things are important. So important, in fact, that he is committed to bringing them to the p11blic at large.

As one would expect, this is proving to be a monumental, uphill battle for Bissette. Aside from the oxymoronic nature of the very term “horror comic,” Bissette has to deal with the fact that nearly every other horror comic since the demise -of the classic EC line of books has merely imitated tile form without understanding the content.

“There are many horror films and novels, and especially horror comics, that I would call bad films, books, or comics, because rather than honestly dealing with these things (the crystalizing of our fears), they trivialize them or exploit them. The artists or creators who obviously have a passion, a vision and the imagination for this, and arc really skillful enough as writers or artists to actually take a reader by the hand and lead them through this vicarious experience and bring them back out the other end ...these are the people, and this is kind of the work that I would like to have Taboo embrace. It is out there, it is being done, but I’ve not seen anyone successfully put it under one cover.”

TRIPPING THE DARK FANTASTIC

To return to the roots of the project: in 1985, after over two years of pencilling Swamp Thing (most of that in collaboration with Alan Moore and John Totleben), Bissette left the strip. The grueling schedule of a monthly book had left him with a severe case of creative burnout-as had, oddly enough, the high quality of the collaboration. In a sense, Bissette had been spoiled: “After working with a writer like Alan,” he remembers, “none of the scripts l was working on (save for a couple I worked on with friends) even interested me.” Bissette even grew disenchanted with drawing. Desperately needing to recharge his creative batteries, Bissette started to take on writing assignments -scripting fill-in issues of Swamp Thing, writing articles for various film magazines, and writing stories for other artists to illustrate.

Then, about a year after he had left Swamp Thing, the idea of producing and packaging a horror book with John Totleben became a serious consideration. “Back when John and I were working with Alan Moore on Swamp Thing we bad a passion for doing horror in comics. When we were working with Alan, specifically around issue #29, we found that Alan was, as a writer, pointing us in a direction that we had never considered before. He was in my mind breaking ground, very simple ground, but breaking ground that hadn’t been touched on hardly at all in doing horror in comics.”

About that same time Pacific Comics was publishing Bruce Jones and April Campbell’s Twisted Tales, and Bissette and Totleben really became aware of the absolute lack of horror comics on the market. There was a brief period where (believe it or not) The X-Men was the closest thing to a horror comic, and another where Swamp Thing was literally the only horror comic on the stands. Both creators found that appalling, especially since horror in films, books and almost every other medium was flourishing. Yet, every time they attempted to approach a publisher, the companies would come back with the reply that horror doesn’t sell. “Trash is never going to sell,” is Bissette’s rejoinder.

According to Totleben, the original idea-an anthology along the lines of Berni Wrightson’s Bad Time Stories, to be entirely written and drawn by Bissette and Totleben -took form at a party. Later that year, at the MidOhio Con, they met Ce rebus creator/publisher Dave Sim and hit it off quite well.

At that time, Sim told them that he would be interested in publishing anything they wanted to produce. The deal that they eventually worked out was that Sim would front the printing expenses. and then, after the book began generating revenue, would take a portion of the profits for his efforts, with the lion ·s share to be split between Bissette and Totleben. This offer was attractive enough to get them seriously thinking about it.

When they got back to Sim, the two artists told him that a horror anthology was what they really wanted to do, proposing the Taboo project. Needless to say, this really wasn’t what Sim had in mind when he originally made the offer, as he would now be involved, even if only by proxy, with many creators. Nevertheless, he had faith in the project and gave the go-ahead.

Had Bissette and Totleben chosen to write and draw their own work (much the same way that Michael Zulli and Steven Murphy did with Puma Blues) then Taboo would have been a much simpler project by far. Making it an anthology only served to complicate the lives of everyone involved. Especially that of Dave Sim, who suddenly found himself being looked on as a publisher and began being bombarded with people’s pet projects and super-hero concepts.

As for Bissette and Totleben, they discovered how much they really did not know about their own profession. For the first time in their respective careers they were forced to think about per unit costs, printing, marketing, and all the million or so other things that their status of freelancers had thus spared them. “Here we were, professionals who had (at the time we began the project) worked in the industry for almost a decade, but we had always been working as freelancers. We never had to work with the nitty gritty of publishing.” Much to their surprise, not only were they forced to decide on matters for which they had little understanding, they were ill-equipped to make those kinds of decisions in the first place.

Thus, they relied heavily upon the vastly superior knowledge and experience of Sim, who had been self-publishing for close to 1O years by then (including a brief stint, publishing other people’s comics, most of which moved to California with his ex-wife, Deni Loubert, when they divorced and she founded Renegade Press). In a real sense, Sim became a mentor for the two men. While he did advise them on many matters, “Dave did not make the decisions on how the book was going to be printed or distributed or formatted,’’ Bissette emphasizes. “John and I made those decisions.” However. on at least two occasions they went to Sim with stories on which they could not agree and asked for his opinion.

TROUBLE IN PARADISE

Things went along smoothly for a time. Then, as it is wont to do, disaster struck. In February of this year (1988), a dispute arose between Diamond Distribution and Aardvark-Vanaheim (AV). In brief, the problems were the result of Sim’s announcement that he was going to distribute a previously solicited reprint of the High Society trade paperback and the second printing of the Cerebus trade paperback by mail order only. Diamond, the nation’s largest comics distributor, retaliated by threatening to stop carrying Puma Blues, published by AV’s sister company Aardvark-One International. Recriminations on both sides were swift, with Sim accusing Diamond of “blackmail’’ (actually, extortion would be closer to the mark): “Puma Blues had been reduced to a bargaining. chip,’’ said Bissette. ;’It was like the schoolyard bully saying, ‘If you don’t give me your lunch money, I’m going to beat up your friend.’”

As the situation snowballed, creators rallied around Sim. There was a rumor of a threatened boycott of Diamond by 12 creators and self-publishers including, among others, Frank Miller, Bill Sienkiewicz, Alan Moore, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle boys. Shortly thereafter Diamond announced that they would carry Puma Blues. This announcement was in turn followed by the “Toronto Sumit” which consisted of members of the “Gang of 12.” Eventually, when all the shouting died down, everyone appeared to be on cordial, if not entirely friendly, terms with everyone else. Yet the damage had been done.

GO YOUR OWN WAY

The short-term problems apparently solved, the long-term results were not long in following. Sim, after consulting with Bissette, Totleben, Zulli, and Murphy, announced that he had permanently dissolved Aardvark One International, and was returning solely to self-publishing. Never comfortable with public perception of him as a publisher (“Dave was just acting as a financial backer to our projects” is the way Bissette puts it), he opted out. Still, it was not just a simple kiss-off to the four creators and their two projects; Sim helped them out as much as he could. Puma Blues moved over to Mirage Studios (publisher of Turtles), and Taboo went the self-publishing route under Bissette’s newly formed SpiderBaby Grafix. By this time, Totleben had also bowed out of the project, first as co-editor, and then as co-publisher, for he too was uncomfortable with his dual role. “At first reading the horror stories was fun,’’ Totleben said, “but after a while it got boring. So, I told Steve that I didn’t want to edit the book anymore, which was okay with him because he was really into it.” Totleben also cited the great distance between them (Bissette lives in Vermont, and Totleben in Pennsylvania). “You really need to sit down face-to-face and discuss things. Over the phone just doesn’t work.” Accepting Totleben’s decision, Bissette geared up to take over the whole show. “Our relationship was, and still is, very strong and clear,” Bissette stated. “The Puma Blues situation realized Dave’s worst fears, which was someone threatening someone to whom Dave had extended an invitation, and who had accepted the invitation, and who was working in credibly hard on a project that they believed in. (Puma Blues creators) Stephen (Murphy) and Michael (Zulli) were being threatened as complete innocents.”

Even now rumors persist of in-fighting within the group. To this Bissette responds, “I stress that Dave, John, and myself, Steven, and Michael have worked this entire situation out between us and that we (Bissette and his wife Nanc,-y) are willingly taking on the role of publishing Taboo...We probably saved ourselves many problems because if Taboo had to switch from being a Canadian-based publication to being an American-based publication, we would. for one thing, suddenly be dealing with the enormous difficulties of international tax laws. So the fact that Taboo #I is starting as an American-based outfit is actually going to save us a lot of trouble.”

WHAT TO EXPECT

As one would expect, being new to the publishing game, Bissette has already made his share of mistakes-in spite of the guidance and council of Sim. Perhaps the most egregious of these has been the premature announcements made about Taboo ‘s release. Bissette’s initial intent was not to announce any story until the work was in hand. Unfortunately, some stories that were announced for issue #1 will not be appearing until later issues. One of these is a Steve Barron-John Totleben collaboration entitled “Space Invaders,” which Totleben now hopes will appear in the second issue: “If I don’t finish it Steve Barron will kick my ass,” he jokes. Bissette also regrets missing his two previously-announced ship dates (last October and this past May -current plans call for a late October release, hopefully by Hallowe’en). Although Taboos long lead time has come to be regarded by many as a typical example of self-publishers’ self-indulgence and disorganization, editors of prose short story anthologies will tell you that spending three years on a short story collection is not only not an inordinate amount of time, it’s almost considered rather rapid.

“I will stand by what we have in the first issue of Taboo,” Bissette said, “as being the cream of what we were offered and accepted over the two-year period. We would have had a very different book had we put it out a year ago. I don’t think it would have been as good a book. Some of the best stories we have in the first issue of Taboo only came in recently. By the same token, a number of the very key stories in the first issue were some of the first we received.”

Originally announced as having 176 pages, it was trimmed to 112 because this would a) allow for an accelerated publishing schedule, and b) they were getting into what Bissette refers to as the rock band syndrome. “If you have a rock band that has three members and you have a gig that pays $500, you all go home with a good paycheck. If you have a rock band that has 17 members and you have a full back-up choir and incredible percussion crew you all go home with $5.00.”

Similar in size and format to the Swords of Cerebus collections, each issue will be 10” by 7 ½” square and perfect bound. The covers will be varnished color paintings on front and back, with the front being by Bissette, Totleben, or another artis.t they’ve invited. The back cover will be dedicated to works by new artists or by artists who are unfamiliar to comic book readers. The interior pages will all be black-and-white.

WHY NOT THE BIG THREE?

Quite naturally, when discussing this project, the question came up, why independent? Why not present the idea to DC (where he had been working), or even Marvel, or First? Surely quitting full-time work to not only go freelance, but to self -publish as we”, is a chancy proposition. To this Bissette responded, “I can honestly say that had Dave Sim not extended the invitation tp John and I to publish anything that we wanted to do (which turned out to be Taboo) it never would have happened. Taboo, we hope, will stand as an alternative to the anthologies that have existed, and, as such we could have never done it with DC or Marvel or First.”

To illuminate his point, Bissette related that, at one point he was at the DC offices showing the 1aboo binder to some friends who were editors, and someone commented that DC was doing a horror book: Wasteland. Bissette dismisses the notion: “Wasteland’s not a horror book.”

At that same time DC was also producing Elvira’s House of Mystery where, according to Bissette, all they did was repeat every error they had made earlier in the ‘70s that drove their mystery line into the ground. “In a nutshell this is what happened, even with the quality horror anthologies, like Twisted Tales, the Bruce Jones anthology....First of all, they are all regurgitating the EC formula that Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein and their amazing stable of artists put together in the early ‘50s. At that time it was unique to comics. In the ‘50s, that was subversive.”

The EC formula generally consisted of taking a social wrong or some sort of injustice and trying to balance the scales of justice with some sort of supernatural intervention. One example of this is the classic walking dead story where someone has been murdered and the dead person comes back from the grave to exact revenge.

As a rule these were all wish fulfillment stories, the basic premise being that everyone sees injustices committed and there seems to be, in our lifetime, no adequate means of redress for many of these wrongs in our society. Thus, much of the power of the EC stories came from the satisfaction of seeing a wrong punished by a supernatural means. Or, to put it another way, “Whatever goes around, comes around.” Eventually (especially with the institution of the Comics Code in 1955), the law of diminishing creative returns took over, and everyone began repeating the same formulas over and over again.

This same son of thing occurred in the early ‘80s in the film industry: well-made ‘70s films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the original John Carpenter vehicle Halloween degenerated into slasher/hacker films like Friday the 13^th #s 1-1,006.

Joe Orlando, who started the horror revival at DC in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. came out of the EC school. He was one of the editors who passionately cared about doing quality horror anthologies but, according to Bissette, the editors that followed just couldn’t live up to his standards. “I’m not saying that they didn’t do their job, or that they weren’t professional-I don’t think they had any sympathy for the genre. I know that was the case with Eclipse’s Tales of Terror.”

Which is why someone like Alan Moore made such an impact on the industry at large. “It’s not just that Alan is an excellent writer, which he is, it’s also that he’s bringing life experience, as a reader, viewer, and Listener to the work that he was doing. He was not simply another snake eating his tail in terms of having been breastfed on and regurgitating the comics he was brought up with.’’ In AH #145 (Preview Special #7), Moore had this to say about Taboo: “For the first time I think that you might get a horror comic that is going to move a long way beyond EC .... Taboo, by its very nature, by its very tide, is pushing into territory that has never been touched before.”

THE CUTTING EDGE

For Taboo, Bissette wants contributions not only from the people currently working in comics, but from people both outside comic books and in other forms of horror fiction. People like underground canonist S. Clay Wilson, filmmaker Tim Burton, and prose fiction writer (and filmmaker) Clive Barker. By securing people of this stature, with names recognizable outside of the comic book field, Bissette hopes to add credibility to his book . “People’s ears perk up when they hear Clive’s name.”

Further, some of the best comic book horror material currently coming out isn’t in any of the horror comics but coming out in books like Raw and in regular anthologies and self-published books. Until now, Bissette says, “no one has assembled those people, put them together in one place. And they’re the people that remain on the cutting edge of doing won’t even say horror, of doing effective disturbing comic art.

“The only anthology that I saw that was beginning to pull those people together was Denis Kitchen’s revival of Death Rattle. They were very conscientiously trying to put together a very good anthology, and I think that more often than not they succeed.”

“I can’t say that the first issue successfully brings all those elements together, but I think it’s a good first step.”

To further widen the scope of his search, Bissette has recently joined the editorial staff of Fantaco’s Gore Shriek. He did this for two reasons; first, he enjoyed the title and wanted to lend a hand, and second, he wished to use it as a vehicle for placing good horror stories that had been submitted to Taboo but, for one reason or another, were unsuitable for the book. “I was first attracted to Gore Shriek as a contributor because they were trying to do something different, and they were giving people the freedom to experiment.”

THE FINAL QUESTIONS

One of the points that Bissette constantly stresses is that he is putting out a book called Taboo, and while he doesn’t think there’s anything in the first issue that could cause problems with obscenity trials and the like, he knows for a fact there’s stuff in the second issue that will cause some troubles. “In fact, that’s one of our goals. We’re not going out there as pornographers snickering, ‘Ha, this will get people pissed off,’ but part of the goal is to disturb people, to unsettle people. I honestly feel that that’s the goal of horror fiction, and art in general. There’s a quote by Franz Kafka that, ‘Good art should break the ice of the soul.’

“The only things that have ever mattered to me in my life that I’ve looked at or viewed, that were works of art or works of entertainment, were things that unsettled me or opened my eyes. It’s not just unsettling things that provoke you; it’s also things that are so beautiful or that touch on emotions that you can see expressed so clearly in your life...that move you in some way. I know for a fact that the comic publishers out there wouldn’t take that gamble. We had some interest from some publishers but as soon as they realized that we were serious about saying to people like S. Clay Wilson, ‘Hey, S. Clay, you can do whatever you want; they get very nervous.”

At the same time, that’s why Bissette wants Wilson in the book. Because Wilson has been doing comics since 1965 and yet he’s still one of the most provocative and disturbing artists out there. “He puts down on the page unflinchingly what’s in his imagination. I want that to be the core of Taboo.” In fact, after Wilson had submitted four plates to the first issue, he called Bissette and said, “I had this nightmare that I really want to draw; you guys into it?” Bissette enthusiastically responded yes, but what he got was far from what he expected. “It is this sort of Mark Twain piece of Americana. It’s light years away from that universe of bikers, and demons, and Mary giving blow jobs to Satan in Hell stuff that he usually does·

There is a very disturbing piece by Australian cartoonist Eddie Campbell entitled “Pyjama Girl,” which is based on an actual police case in Sydney. It seems that one girl disappeared and another was murdered but the body was never discovered. Later a body turned up but co ldn’t be identified. It was kept for years in a vat of formaldehyde in Sydney University. Finally, it was buried in an unmarked grave. This story in particular stayed with Bissette and Totleben for weeks after they read it, which is why it wound up in the anthology.

Other contributors to the first issue include Charles Vess, Alan Moore with Bill Wray, Charles Burns, Berni e Mireault (The Jam, Grendel), Jack Butterworth & Cam Kennedy (the

Light & Darkness war), Mike Hoffman, Tim Lucas, Tom Sniegoski, Ambush Bug creators Keith Giffen & Robert Loren Fleming (whose contribution “Chigger and the Man,” Totleben stated, is the sickest thing in the issue), Chester Brown (Yummy Fur), Rolf Stark, and Frank Miller.

Future contributors include Mark Askwith, Richard Sala, Toni Marnick, Cara Shennan-Tereno, Dave Marshall, Jim Wheelock (Screw), Tim Burton (yes, the director of Beetlejuice), Michael McDowell, Steve Perry, Tom Veitch, Greg Iro ns , Chet WiUiamson, and Tim Truman.

WHAT THE FUTURE WILL HOLD

For the foreseeable future, Taboo will be the only ongoing project for SpiderBaby Grafix. I’m not looking to build an empire of publications,” Bissette flatly stated. “I do not want people sending in all sorts of ideas for mini-series and such. I welcome any and all submissions of stories and art for Taboo. I have no plans of publishing spinoffs or other series.” Nor, he went on to say, is he really interested in any continuing features in Taboo, because of its proposed quarterly frequency. “It would be suicide to have continuing stories in a quarterly book.’’

In the long range SpiderBaby Grafix will prove to be an outlet for additional pet projects of Bissette’s (i.e., portfolios and the like). It is also his intension to have an annual of sorts for Taboo every fourth or fifth issue. (While he is hoping for a quarterly schedule, he is practical enough to realize that if he gets it out only three times per year, he will be doing quite well indeed.) The first of these proposed annuals will not re-collect material from the previous issues, but rather reprint older horror material that has never been reprinted.

One very important note: contrary to previous announcements, distribution of the series will in fact be handled through the normal channels of the direct sales market. (‘‘Actually

that’s the in-direct market; the direct market would be mail-only, from publisher to consumer.”) This decision to cooperate with the distributors was reached at the Toronto Summit. The members of that Summit jointly determined that, as of July 1^st of this year, everyone had a clean slate, and all previous “crimes” were to be ignored. It was felt that distributors had the right to carry or not carry any product they wished, and no one should be forced to carry any publisher’s entire line. Still, publishers had similar rights in that they had the right to choose how to get their products into the hands of the readers, and whether that was through the normal distribution methods. or mail order.

By way of conclusion, Bissette returned to the Clarens quote that began this piece, that horror fiction was, or should be determined, more by intent than by content: he pointed out that many of the pieces in the book will appear to be crude, or even primitive to the reader, but in many cases that look was deliberate. “The intent to disturb, unsettle, or scare people is really what defines the horror genre, says Bissette. “‘But the moment you tell someone this is a horror story their reaction is almost immediately, ‘Go ahead. scare me.’ Which naturally makes it that much tougher to do.

“But it’s