He Plugs New York Street Food, Sheesh, NO

Outside a  tony MIdtown locale is the finest street grub I’ve had in New York. This is not a blazing revelation. The Halal Guys do it right and do it when you need it all the time.

The website.

Some are thinking: “He’s lost it this time. I’ve tried those Halal stands in Midtown and they literally reek.”  Some sure do. The Halal Guys don’t offer any hot dogs or kebabs or beef buns or any of that crap. All they push are Gyros lamb, chicken, felafel, and a simple combo of settings. The lamb and chicken are hand-chopped at their nearby grills.

I had chicken and Gyros combo on Pita with lettuce & tomato, yogurt sauce and a splash of hot sauce. Big as my head, savory but flavors calibrated to a tee, and it was off the charts that track off the charts.

Seriously, forget the competition on this one.

There’s lines around these carts literally night and day. For a reason.

And the pita sandwich cost $6. I tried to think — “When’s the last time I thought ‘I got a damn good deal in New York’?” I could not remember when.

Mark Alan Stamaty … and the KRAZINESS

Not long after I moved to Boston, at the peak of my publications consumption that included the Boston Globe, The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Real Paper, the Boston Phoenix, Rolling Stone and the Village Voice every time they appeared, I was delighted to discover a new weekly comic strip in the Voice that I thought was the most inventive and zany since the advent of Jules Fieffer (earlier, R. Crumb’s “Mr. Natural” strip was actually a bit tamer than much of his underground comix and he clearly did not enjoy working on weekly deadlines). It was called “MacDoodle St.”, created by one Mark Alan Stamaty and it presented the adventures of a young poet schnook awash in the fast-decaying urban heap of New York City in the late ’70s.

It’s easier and clearer to just show a couple pages from the strip rather than try and fail to describe Stamaty’s scenes of erupting Kraziness —

Stamaty wasn’t deeply topical — punk lurked around his New York, but no hip-hop — though he did have one prophetic flash: the Conservative Liberation Front, a bunch of businessmen who re-wrapped their ties as headbands and began acting like Yippie hooligans. It was an eerie foreshadowing of how, very soon, being reactionary would be cast as being bold, adventurous, unconventional.

“MacDoodle St.” was the high point of Stamaty’s narrative comics. He went on to do the superb, but more contained and topical, “Washingtoon”. My fave installment of that strip was a confrontation between a frustrated buyer and a clerk in a store during the rising craze for bottled water. Stamaty grasped the wacky tension between companies trying to brand their water with the freshness and purity of Nature and the grubby essence of Nature itself. So he came up with the perfect bottled-springjuice name: Crystal Mountain Deer Toad Tick Water.

Stamaty now does completely charming and completely domesticated illustrations for Slate —

http://tinyurl.com/nhhs9nn

– and other publications as well as children’s books (well, I guess he’s always done children’s books for all ages), some of which sound profound and inspirational (Alia’s Mission: Saving the Books of Iraq), but notably lacking in Kraziness.

All this was prompted because I discovered there was a major earlier work by Stamaty, Who Needs Donuts?, which came out in 1973, when he was 25 or 26. In many ways a warm-up for “MacDoodle St.” it’s got plenty Kraziness and shows a wonderful light-heartedness.

Like Matt Groening, Stamaty was one of those guys comic-strip fans know exist but can’t really imagine — the son of a cartoonist. (Hope this explanatory link works)*

http://tinyurl.com/muz86ss

I expected to be more saddened/nostalgic reading vintage Stamaty. Kraziness has been stamped out today and it’s sometimes tough to revisit a vanished world where it felt like an ageless essential. But Stamaty’s work seemed more at ease and philosophical than I imagined. After all, there’s plenty of evidence he can still summon the Krazy when he wants to:

And hey, Who Needs Donuts? was reprinted in 2001 — so there ya go.

Some more scoop on the man:

http://tinyurl.com/lrygbkc

*[EDIT] Well, the link worked a couple times. I guess as long as I was logged into The New Yorker as a subscriber. Anyway, it’s a moving and informative story of how Stamaty came to identify himself as a cartoonist through the association of both his father and mother’s work in the field. I don’t think it’s been collected anywhere and sure is a shame I can’t seem to include it here. Crap. I’ll log in a few more times over the next few days, so it may or may not work.

*[EDIT][EDIT] Whattaya know? As of June, 2016, the link seems to work again. Let it roll …

Catching Up with a Couple Comix

I know I promised to do a review of the recently published The Best of Milligan & McCarthy but for a knot of reasons I concluded that devoted fans would know about it and I couldn’t quite jolly myself into pushing it for the merely curious. My first love remained strong, the initial adventure of Paradax, plain-dude taxi driver who comes across a suit that gives him ghost powers (can move through objects, become immaterial, etc.)

If the hippies inspired Underground Comix in the US, the trigger in the UK was punk. Paradax is a media-savvy striver with ripped jeans, a beer habit, a girlfriend that looks like Debbie Harry with a pink Afro — all set in the scuzzy kind of New York that was already disappearing when the comic came out in 1984. Paradax’s first enemy was a warmongering lout named V-2 Pinhead, given to muttering things like “Despicable, soft-bodied, stool-faced liberal! Prepare to feel the Hardness of PINHEAD!” Even Paradax’s catchphrase — “Hi! Everything Okay?” — was perfect for the times.

But he remains stuck in those times. Milligan & McCarthy only completed one more Paradax escapade, and it was much more ordinary, if still wild. Not only is it just too painful to look at the first page of the first Paradax story as the superhero leans on the World Trade Center Towers with the Statue of Liberty in front of them both, but other things had changed by the time the second Paradax tale appeared only three years later. By then the Dark Knight had taken over and ever since, the purported heroes of mainstream comix have been more like V-2 Pinhead.

The rest of The Best of M & M is visually zany a lot of the time — especially inspired to incorporate India-art comix into a psychedelic tale — but too much of it is more fun to breeze through than actually sit and read and tease out what’s supposed to be up. Lots of weird/obscure for the sake of weird/obscure. Some cultural ‘tudes that don’t make it across the Big Pond. But there is that Paradax character — smart design, smart dialog, the Roxy Meets CBGB’s of superheroes.

Speaking of all those neurotic, nasty, all-too-SERIOUS-muderous superheroes that have made mainstream comix geared to adult diehards way more than kids these days, my favorite discovery late in the year was a comic explicitly aimed at kids — Paul Pope’s Battling Boy.

Pope bowled me over with Heavy Liquid in early 2001 (I remember it as my last major glimmer of comix before 9/11), the most vivid and far-reaching dope epic in a comic since the counterculture era (that I know of, anyway). Pope’s storytelling could be a little jagged back then, but at his best he whams home action on the page like Kirby reincarnated and he has this “thing” about lips and teeth that I find endlessly fascinating. Anyway, you do a multi-universe fantasy about a divine-warrior kid who battles monsters with a diverse posse of pals there’s one prime requirement: you gotta draw pretty cool monsters.

Paul Pope draws pretty cool monsters.

PS: I noticed that Pope did a story in an Adventure Time comic (#5), which shows he knows what’s what with animation these days. But like every cartoon-inspired comic not written by Carl Barks, the books are no more than an aside to the show. And indeed, now that I’ve read the Pope story, it’s undeniably more Paul Popey than Adventure Timey.