Pirate Nightmare Vice Explosion: Inherited Remnants of an Amateur Dadaist’s Library

In the late 1990s, American comic artist Michael Kupperman bought a stack of men s magazines from the 1950s and 1960s, with titles like Sir!, Real Action and Man s Thrills. "They all had the owner s name stamped on them," Kupperman observed, "but the stamp is slightly illegible, so it s impossible to know if the name is C. Buechtel, C. Brockel, C. Buschol or some other variant. This man--I m assuming it was a man--spent years acquiring lurid men s magazines and taking them apart, using the contents to form his own hybrid magazines with the pages from several reassembled inside the cover of one. With a grease pencil he d cross out the headlines on the covers that didn t apply anymore, and stamp his name on the results, along with a number. Why was he doing this? It s not clear. It might have been a need to make the magazines seem like a serious collection, his re-editing emphasizing his sober interest in subjects such as modern fiction and wife-swapping. Maybe this was one way he justified collecting these lurid periodicals, to himself or a spouse. Or maybe it was a version of the impulse that drives many artists (and three-year-olds): a need to remake and impose personal order that comes from some very deep place." Pirate Nightmare Vice Explosion presents highlights from that collection, and takes place in a murky, monochromatic world where mysterious, energetic sin is always happening behind closed doors. Some of it is factual; some of it smells of heady invention.
Michael Kupperman is the author of Tales Designed to Thrizzle, Snake n Bacon s Cartoon Cabaret and Mark Twain s Autobiography 1910 2010 (Fantagraphics). His work has appeared in The New Yorker, McSweeney s and Saturday Night Live.