Doghead | |
---|---|
Publication information | |
Publisher | Tundra Publishing |
Format | One-shot |
Publication date | 1992 |
No. of issues | 1 |
Creative team | |
Written by | Al Columbia |
Artist(s) | Al Columbia |
Doghead is a 48-page one-shot comic book by Al Columbia. His first solo publication, it was released by Tundra Publishing in 1992 while he was involved with Alan Moore's ill-fated Big Numbers series. It contains two short stories in black and white (the Pixies-inspired "Broken Face" and "Patio Lanterns") and one ("Poster Child") painted in full color.
Doghead's reception was mixed. A 1995 review by Vincent Aliberti dismissed it as "Dave McKean and Bill Sienkiewicz impersonations, some fine colour work and an occasional exchange of witty dialogue", [1] and Marshall Pryor in The Comics Journal called it "forgettable, but lovely, work [...] most notable for its experimentation with disturbing single images and animation-style movement, strengths of [Columbia's] later comics." [2] Writing in 2002, Paul Gravett allowed that Doghead was "indebted" to Sienkiewicz and McKean but saw "hints of [Columbia's] emerging singular identity" in it as well. [3] Columbia told an interviewer in 1992 that "OK, it's derivative... I suppose in Doghead I felt obligated to do some crowd pleasing. I felt obligated to do something impressive... I felt I had to show people: 'Look, I can do this'. Maybe that was a mistake, but it was the most honest thing I could do. I make no apologies for my influences. I mean, I'm only twenty-one." [4]
The last page of Doghead includes Columbia's "apologies" to some of his early sources of inspiration, including Black Francis, Nick Cave, William S. Burroughs, David Lynch, Franz Kafka, and J. G. Ballard.
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The Biologic Show is a comic book series written and drawn by Al Columbia. The first issue, #0, was released in October 1994 by Fantagraphics Books, and a second issue, #1, was released the following January. A third issue (#2) was announced in the pages of other Fantagraphics publications and solicited in Previews but was never published. "I Was Killing When Killing Wasn't Cool", a color short story with a markedly different art style originally intended for issue #2, appeared instead in the anthology Zero Zero. In a 2010 interview, Columbia recalled that the unfinished issue "looked so different that it just didn’t look right, it didn’t look consistent, and it didn’t feel right to keep putting out that same comic book, to try to tell a story where the style is mutating." The series' title is taken from a passage in the William S. Burroughs book Exterminator!. The passage in question is quoted briefly in a story from issue #0, itself also titled "The Biologic Show".
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Amnesia: The Lost Films of Francis D. Longfellow Supplementary Newsletter No. 1 is a 2018 comic book by Al Columbia. It is a 24-page collection of promotional posters allegedly created for animated cartoons by the (fictional) titular director/producer and his company, Podsnap Studios. Some of the "lost films" feature Columbia's recurring characters Seymour Sunshine and Knishkebibble the Monkey-Boy, which are depicted here as cartoon characters performed by voice actors. The posters also contain references to earlier Columbia works including "The Trumpets They Play!", "I Was Killing When Killing Wasn't Cool", and his 1997 "Amnesia" short story, suggesting continuity with Amnesia's fictional universe.