Tales from Palomar #2
Gilbert Hernandez, Fantagraphics

Delphine #2
Richard Sala, Fantagraphics

Sammy the Mouse #1
Zak Sally, Fantagraphics

“The pamphlet market is dead,” Gary Groth decreed last year, and with some exceptions Fantagraphics has of late been trying other formats for its comics. This usually means hardcovers, but recently Fantagraphics, as part of some international conglomerate whose workings I cannot unravel, has been publishing the Ignatz Library, a series of magazine-sized comics on heavy-stock paper. Trying new formats to appeal to non-comics readers is nothing new: Love and Rockets and Raw are the obvious examples, but manga certainly owes its American success in part to its format. For this gambit to work, Fantagraphics has to persuade readers that there’s a substantial difference in the Ignatz Library, which, sadly there isn’t. The books are oversized, with sturdy covers, oversized dustjackets, and heavy-stock cream paper—they’re certainly high-end comics—but they’re also 32 pages for $7.95. This isn’t very different, but it sure is more expensive. Add to the injury of this price point the insult of an ad/catalog stapled into the center of each issue—sure you could just remove it, but for many comics fans, myself included, an atavistic desire to keep things mint will make such an action problematic, or even traumatic. I mean, If I buy a backissue of Fantastic Four #252, I want it to come with the Tattooz Decal insert intact, and, analogously, I want my Delphine issues to have everything inside, even if it means the catalog is breaking up the narrative flow.

The books themselves have so far been fairly good. Of June’s releases, Zak Sally’s Sammy the Mouse is at once the weakest and the most interesting, most interesting because Richard Sala and Gilbert Hernandez are proven hitters of long standing, and you know you’re going to get something solid with them. Zak Sally is a newer face, but his shaggy-dog story about a hapless, drunken mouse stands out only for the artwork, which looks cool, and by cool I mean really creepy. It’s the same kind of two-color work he used on “Two Idiot Brothers” last year, and, as was the case with that story, the form oversteps the content.

New Tales from Old Palomar’s selling point is that it is a flashback in Palomar’s continuity to the Heartbreak Soup days when everyone was a child, which offers both the nostalgia of the days when Love and Rockets was the most important comic in America and the promise that these characters could be freed from 25 years of continuity. After playing it straight in issue #1 last year, for issue #2 Gilbert has moved some of the bizarre elements from his stories “BEM” or Grip to Palomar, which may not be what everyone wants to read, but which makes for a story that is, if not fully decipherable, then at least interesting. The art is, again, probably the true hero here. There are two ways to modify your artwork with the increased panel size the Ignatz library offers: You can cram in more details or you can reduce the art to simple, iconic drawings that stress design over linework. Gilbert has chosen the latter route, and the look is striking and beautiful, with vast, surreal landscapes and backgrounds of enormous black clouds.

Sala’s Delphine is probably the best the Ignatz library has produced yet. Sala knows his niche and never wanders far from it, so Delphine is not exactly adventurous territory. But the ink-washed art and mysterious, convoluted story are pretty much exactly what any Sala fan would want. The terrifying cover to #2, depicting a hanged deer dangling before a yonic opening in a grotesque and gnarled wood, is a minor masterpiece. Any Sala fan, or any fan of the grotesque, will want to read this series.

Except for eight bucks a pop they’ll probably wait for the trade.