Allow me to introduce Casanova Nobody Frankenstein.
Whose Tears of the Leather-Bound Saints has just issued.[i]
And that is his real name.
Legally, since 2013.
In homage to the evil genius of Mystery Men comics.
(Forgive me if you knew this.)
He was born Albert Melvin Frank, III, in 1967. His father was a physically abusive Chicago cop and his mother emotionally frozen. He grew up near a municipal incinerator whose calcium and lead-based emissions, he has said, endowed him with the “dual super powers of drawing ability and sickness.”
Near-sighted, un-athletic, small, he was bullied by white classmates (“Nigger”) and black ones (“Oreo”). He found comfort in comics, horror movies, and sitcoms. (“Weird Al,” they called him.) He found it in art. (He began to draw at three and to study art at eight.) He thought of killing himself every day, but each pain “(chipped) off another slab of hardened grime from my soul.” By the end of high school, he had a scholarship to Texas Tech.
He majored in drawing, with minors in photography and fine art. He graduated in ‘91. Along the way, adopting dark glasses, black leather, and tattoos, he became Lubbock’s only black punk. (“Black Al,” they called him.) Punk provided “love” and “family” and made him one of these “abused, damaged, self-destructive angels” “not giving a fuck about the normal people’s world… (drawn) together like fingers in a fist.” But good looking white girls avoided him, and good looking black girls wanted white guys, and unattractive black girls laughed at him. The only girls available he disparaged for their looks, addictions, infidelities, or mental states.
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Between 1991 and 1993, he published five issues of a black-and-white comic, The Adventures of Tad Martin.[ii] Tad had begun as random drawings that developed into mini-comix that he’d given away. Then Caliber Press of Plymouth, Michigan took him on. Later, he would describe the work as “a Punk-rock art-project/experiment,” a “nightmare… hellscape… relaying uncomfortable truths… that straights found distasteful to the point of pornography” but which found an audience of “weirdos, trash, Punks, outlaws, and other outcasts… the true saints of this shitty world.”
The art was stark and primitive. The subtleties of cross-hatching and strippling were far away and the obliteration of solid blackness near. Martin was racially ambiguous, with slick-backed hair and dark-ringed eyes. He wore engineer boots and leather jacket. He carried knives, mace, brass knuckles. He was into pot, robe, and shooting crystal meth. His fantasies ran toward beheading girls and incinerating guys. When one girl drops him, he drugs her and her parents, pisses on their bed, ties her cat to his car bumper and drags it to its death.
Tad Martin sees no future. Rape and murder are commonplace. Sex leads to “babies smothered to death with their heads trapped between bars of wooden crib.” Aside from drugs, his only pleasure comes from hot-rodding into a black night. “It’s not that you have any place to go. It’s better just to drive… searching for some final freedom… as the rubber hums along the blacktop.” Negatively rings so tightly that nihilism shines. The hole at Martin’s center echos an anthem others could sing.
But not enough. The shitty world held too few saints. Each issue sold less. Caliber folded.
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Frankenstein quit comics. He wrote poetry and short stories. He painted, made dolls, jewelry, walking sticks, “pimped out” leather jackets. He worked as a dog catcher, delivery driver, warehouseman, laborer, substitute teacher, stock clerk, telemarketer, security guard, cab driver, in customer service and on assembly lines. He moved from Lubbock to Austin, to Chicago, back to Austin, to Jackson, Mississippi, and Austin again, where he has been since 2004. He had two nervous breakdowns. He married twice – first to a coke head to whom he proposed without having seen and, then to a woman he has characterized as a physically impaired, mentally ill, drug-addicted prostitute.
Around 2011, having learned that Tad Martin had achieved near cult status in the UK and Australia, through working freehand, in ball point pen, in notebooks secreted in a shoulder holster or pockets sewn inside a vest, and “tweaking on trucker speed” at one of his minimum-wage, mind-numbing jobs, Frankenstein produced what would become The Adventures of Tad Martin #Sick Sick Six (Teenage Dinosaur/Profanity Hill. 2015). Tad’s hair has thinned. His eyes have sunk. His leanness has shriveled into a heavily tattooed replica of Mary Shelley’s monster after a stint in Beuchenwald. He has bad teeth, low testosterone, hypertension, chronic depression, and incipient m.s. He is divorced from a “cheating coke-whore,”and, having lost 35 other dead-end jobs, works as a security guard, while married to an ex-hooker skin-head on SSI because of mental illness, who is into self-mutilation and having sex with strangers in toilet stalls.
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In 2016, Frankenstein was placed on leave from a janitorial job and went on disability. He moved into a sparsely furnished studio apartment. He isolated from friends. He eliminated all interferences with his art. He did not, he told an interviewer, “give a shit about the nonsense and niceties that create economic success. I’d rather just have peace and quiet than… pretending that fucked up shit ain’t fucked up just to make my cheese.”
Since then, Frankenstein has published Purgatory (F.U. Press.2017), 37-pages of autobiographical text, each balanced a single-panel drawing, carrying him from age 13 through high school; The Adventures of Tad Martin Omnibus (Lulu. 2019), which reprinted his six comics with additional material in a hard-cover, over-sized edition; The Adventures of Tad Martin Super-Secret Special #1 (Etsy. 2019), a wordless, 11-inch-by-17-inch, tape-bound, 36-page portfolio on heavy paper stock, which sent Tad on a Halloween trek through hallucinatory, demonic nightclubs. alleys and graveyards; Lucky Tad Martin No. 7 (Domino Books. 2019), the same story in more traditional size and format; and In the Wilderness (F.U. Press. 2019), a collection of lacerating autobiographical stories, one to 19-pages in length, drawn from the artist’s life from ages 12 to 30. Now comes Tears.
It contains 11 black-and-white stories, the first 13-pages long, the others five or less. All are first person narratives, with this narrator unnamed. In the first, he is an unspecified age, working in an unspecified city, in an unspecified factory. In half of the other stories, he looks back at the world of punk, and five are set in his childhood or his teenage years. Chicago is there. Nights are. So is a car. (A ‘77 Cougar in a land of Hondas and BMWs.) But sex is absent. Except for a dozen pill vials on a counter top, so are drugs. Violence is present, but “normal.” (No cats are dragged to death.) Teachers whop ten-year-olds with a leather strap. Whites spit and throw garbage at black teenagers. An alcoholic father terrifies his son with his pet “werewolves… two German Shepherds, hairy scary knife-edged monsters, teeth like a prison rape.” The narrator learns “to go it alone.” He learns to “inhale the monster,” to “examine existential terror with intimacy… and detachment,” to understand he is “helpless in this world.” “It doesn’t matter ‘why,’” he learns. “It just ‘is’ and it needs to be survived.”
The other reality is racism. It is driven like a stake through the narrator’s heart. It is there in the shouts of “NIGGERRRRS” which chase him down the street. It is there when a girl with “pale white skin” invites him not into her house, but, “like a runaway slave,” her court yard. Racism rebounds from the narrator too. The Asian owner of a ghetto grocery selling soured milk and spoiled bologna is a “Yin-Yang two-face smiling slash scowling… yellow-faced vampire living on Nigger-blood.” The strap-wielding teacher has “gargantuan coffee-colored waves of fat-layered muscles… (a) medium-sized Afro… (and) seemed… to be some horrible cannibal woman.” The child being whipped has already been inculcated with imagery worthy of a neo-Birth of a Nation, beset upon by this cannibalistic gorilla..
Tears lacks word balloons. (There are two “punctuation” balloons, one with a “?” and one an “!”) Conversation is summarized by the narrator within shaded blocks of text usually appearing at the top of a panel. The prose is clear and powerful: largely angry, sometimes mournful, short of love or tenderness, never easily escaped from or forgotten. The black-heavy art is “realistic” (non-abstract) but exaggerated, often to grotesqueness, often into nightmare, capturing the emotion behind/within the story without a feint toward neutrality. Sometimes the panels capture some aspect of what the caption is directly expressing. Sometimes, especially in “Killing Fields,” the opening story, the art seems to run along a parallel track to the text, adding to and amplifying it, but not point-for-point in synch with it, like alto and baritone horns laying out separate skeins establishing the same tune.
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With “Fields” Frankenstein steps forward. It is, I think, his only “as-an-adult” story not centered on a relationship. It feels based on his experience working a non-union job in the south, but I suspect the perspective in the story was not present at the moment of the experience but was won from time, age, and study. The narrator’s focus is not solely on himself, as Frankenstein’s customarily is, but on workers as a class within a system is destroying them. (Race barely factors in the story. Frankenstein slips it in slickly, like a knife piercing a liver, when he writes that the company’s leaving the choice of 12-hour shifts to each worker was “when you think of it… really white of them.” The bosses are “masters,” but the slaves are everyone.)
The hours are onerous and health-crushing. (Hence, the pills on the counter.) But the workers swallow them – the hours and the piils – because the company drums into them its “benevolence” in employing them and the gratitude due for having been bestowed what others lack. (“How lucky you are not to be shit hit out of luck,” is its message.) Meanwhile, temps take their jobs, lured by promises of benefits they will never see, and the owners prepare to shift all operations to China. The workers, fed “movies, sports and credit,” don’t notice. They contentedly ”bloat… on greasy food and stupidity,” lulled through America’s “death throes.”
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We all have stories we like to tell. But artists ask, Why, out of all the experiences of my life, does this one stand out? Why do I return to it, dwell on it, wish to repeat it to others? Frankenstein has rent his past with an axe, run it through a meat grinder, and lain its essence, flesh and blood, bone and gristle, upon the page, assault and misery, brutality and terror. The result is his truth. The result is compelling, savage beauty that pierces the heart and commands the mind.
NOTES
[i].F.U. Press. 2020.
[ii].Named after a character in All My Children. A car thief, con man, and womanizer, Wikipedia says he represnted “the good.”