Babyhead Magazine
Edited by Chris Jordan
Published by Slave Labor Graphics
align=right border=1> All noise and no signal, the first issue of Babyhead Magazine arrives loudly and has nothing interesting to say, a party animal with a lampshade on his head who won't stop talking about Gary Coleman, DeGrassi Junior High, Josie and the Pussycats and other cultural detritus. And by the way, there's no party, he just showed up drunk on your doorstep. At five in the morning. On Sunday.
BM, as I think I'll call it, apparently wants to ride the same nostalgia wave in whose wake we now have to blame for new versions of GI Joe, The Micronauts and other comic books I don't want to read. It would be irresponsible of me not to point out that if you really, really miss Mr. T., Willie Ames, The Banana Splits and The Transformers, you might actually like this hideous publication. But I bet you won't.
Slick and professional and utterly without heart, the iconic banality of the cover tells you everything you need to know. Being from Slave Labor, this thing is packed with comics stories, but I can tell you that there's not one page in the 48 or so here on which I found anything worth reading. In 30 years of reading comics, I can't think of a time that that's ever happened, so they certainly are innovating in that regard.
"Zoe" aims tobe a supercool superhero thing -- kind of post-post-ironic -- but its clip-art style and wiseass "ain't we clever?" dialogue made my eyes glaze over. A Behind the Music" satire featuring Josie and the Pussycats features such hilarious revelations as Josie claiming "You name it, I smoked, shot, drank, freebased or ate it." Haw. Haw. "Size Matters" is a Godzilla movie on paper featuring monster-sized Gary Coleman vs. monster-sized Webster. Two paragraphs masquerading as an essay give you many words about DeGrassi Junior High while telling you nothing much at all. And on and on it goes for 48 tragic, tree-murdering pages.
Most of this material is merely uninteresting and vacuous, but "Hankland," a section of pseudo-newspaper comic strips (like Evan Dorkin does in Dork) managed to get my attention by being offensive, unfunny and probably racist. "Hankland" manages to make Mike Diana's work seem sophisticated and profound by comparison. It is slick, though -- the entire package is so slick and professional you may have trouble with it sliding off the table and making you slip, like a banana peel.
Except the insides of a banana peel are more interesting to look at. Grade: 0/5