Bert Stabler calls Johnny Monomyth, a comic he created with Noah Berlatsky in 1999, a “poetic collage.” The 32 pages tell the loose story of a superhero, a villain, and a girl through text cribbed from Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces, Fortune magazine, Diamonds Are Forever, and Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces. When the panels are unbound and arranged into a two-and-a-half-by-six-foot grid, however, they form a single intricate work rich with detail.
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David Heatley first met Stabler in a painting class at Oberlin College in 1993, but they “forgot about each other,” he says, until December 2000, when both participated in a group show at the west-Loop NFA Space. Stabler exhibited the Johnny Monomyth montage; Heatley, a comics artist who’d been working in film at the time, brought a piece called Work Week, which consisted of long strips of slide film documenting five days of his life every hour and a half. Heatley had moved to Chicago six months earlier from San Francisco, and he and his wife, Rebecca Gopoian, had been tossing around the idea of hooking up with other artists to produce a comics anthology. “Blown away” by Stabler’s work at the show, Heatley says he instantly knew he’d found a coconspirator.
Heatley and Stabler see their project as an extension of Raw’s mission. “There are a lot of anthologies out there filled with people who are just reading comics all day long and trying their best to absorb the language and styles and iconography that’s already been canonized,” says Heatley. “The exciting thing about amateurs and nonartists is that they all have this very novel approach.” Says Stabler, who’s taught art for five years (most recently for the Cook County public guardian’s office), “You can talk about comic strips being marginalized and geeky, but comics is a medium that matters. It’s something that has history and that kids can immediately connect to, and it’s pretty simple to do.”
“For me,” says Heatley, “part of doing comics and making art is this pathological need to give gifts to people. So making the kit was like this gift to all these people. And when they started coming back in the mail, it was like Christmas for two months.”
