Pood

“He’s large,” sings Olive Oyl in Robert Altman’s extremely strange 1980 movie musical Popeye. When you’re singing about Bluto, largeness is a left-handed compliment, akin to so much that is super-sized in America: “More toxic feces, please! Because that small portion of toxic feces was way too small!”

And yet, done right, America’s fondness for scale in art and objects speaks volumes about who are as a country. The Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, Leaves of Grass, Moby Dick, certain canvasses by Jackson Pollock or Roy Lichtenstein. Who wants these things small? And so we come to Pood. In terms of scale, the new comic ‘zine Pood is, shall we say, slightly larger than Bazooka Joe Comics. To be more accurate, it’s like that newspaper that Buster Keaton keeps opening up in The High Sign, until it is roughly the size of a bed sheet. The broadsheet format for an all-comics paper hearkens back to the heyday of the Sunday funnies in the early part of the twentieth century, the age of the Yellow Kid, Little Nemo, Happy Hooligan, Krazy Kat, and yes, Popeye.

Of course, this being 2010, there’s a lot more variety and range to the 16 strips represented here, each of which occupies a page. The most extreme is Henrik Rehr’s “Nevertheless Alive”, a single panel filling the entire page, containing no words and seeming to depict an extreme close-up of a virus or micro-organism. None of the others is that abstract, although plenty are playfully surreal and downright magical (“Don’t Forget to Remember” by Tobias Tak is suitable for framing). Surprisingly few are old-fashioned-funny: the majority seem wistful, moody, melancholy, all in an extremely broad range of visual styles. Frankly, it’s pointless for me to try to describe it, when you can just go here.

If I had a coffee table, Pood would be on it! I hope they make some more issues. With four or five of these things, I could have the coolest wallpaper on earth.