Local cartoonist Steve Chappell puts the “mad” in Madison, in his new graphic novel, Stark Plug Book.Com, set in the capital. Billed on its cover as “a nice alternative to television,” the dot-com part really is in the book’s title. It’s also the wild book’s website.
Equal parts comic strip, comic book, sketchbook, scrapbook, animation and storyboard, Stark Plug is a tour de force throwback to the underground “comix” of the 1960s and ’70s. That was when racks in State Street head shops showed off cascades of alternative comics, often adult. Sometimes druggie, often hippie, with color covers and black-and-white guts. Today we’d label them as indie, alternative and sometimes even — from a fancy, fine-art perspective — “outsider.”
The period and medium are recognized today as a distinct sub-category art form; they were even the subject of a 1999 exhibit at the Chazen Museum of Art. (Full disclosure: In association with that show I taught cartooning at the Chazen.) Chappell delightfully tweaks the Chazen and other institutions in the book, which is a bizarre, expressionist collection of brief stories and experiments in design narrative recounting the adventures of the main character — lover, fighter, everyman and artist Mr. Stark Plug.
Chappell’s previous cartoon book, Stark Reality, was released in 1997. Since 1999 he’s produced prints with his basement etching press. He’s completed nearly 100 woodblock editions, notably a portrait of the Bartell Theatre, which hangs in its lobby. “I love comics, but people don’t appreciate their aesthetic value,” says Chappell. “I realized that if I enlarged a single cartoon panel and carved it into a block of wood, rolled ink across it, and then printed the image on hand-made paper, it’s ‘fine art.’”
He claims cartoon influences as various as Mad magazine, The Adventures of Tin Tin and the underground Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. Chappell’s cross-hatch technique — and especially scripting — owe more to an influential but unrecognized underground artist, the late Bruce Walthers. He was creator of Oscar “O.K.” Kabbibbler, introduced on the pages of Milwaukee’s short-lived alternative newspaper, The Bugle American.
Stark Plug breaks the underground format in four ways: It occasionally features inside color plus computer fonts, it’s comparatively long at 146 pages, and it’s neither druggie nor dirty. The times, they are a-changin’.
In addition to being sold on the author’s website, and on eBay and Amazon, Stark Plug is available locally at B-side Records, Graham Crackers Comics, Sugar Shack Records and Capital City Comics.