There are certain things I love so, so much I’m sometimes afraid I’ll squeeze them apart like one of Lenny’s doomed woodland creatures. The Future Sound of London is one of these things. Marilyn Monroe is another.
Then there’s Platinum Grit.
I dunno, maybe no one else gives a rat’s ass, but I am psychotically in love with Platinum Grit and therefore want to share it with everyone on the planet.
It’s a comic book, see, and you can read the whole thing (thus far) on the Internet. For free! I knew this computer of mine was good for something....
Platinum Grit is written and illustrated by the amazing Australian, Trudy Cooper (with script and/or plot assists by Danny Murphy). I discovered it in 1995 (about a year after it began) while flipping through a copy of Diamond Previews. This is the image that caught my eye, and it was only the size of a postage stamp. I immediately ordered it, read it when it arrived, and nearly swooned as a result of its unadulterated awesomeness.
Then I met a guy named Doug Bayne a few years later at the San Diego Comic Con, and I think he was a bit taken aback by how much I started instantly fawning over him. You see, I recognized the name on his nametag from the credits page in Platinum Grit (though I still, to this day, have not discerned what his level of involvement in the book was—-he kept it kinda secretive). Lucky for me he didn’t run away screaming and we talked about Platinum Grit as well as all kinds of pointless shit that day. (The one bit of our non-PG-related conversation I remember most vividly was his disappointment in being unable to tell the difference between the way the water drained from toilets in the States versus how it drained from toilets in his native Australia. I have yet to be presented with an opportunity to check this first-hand myself.) Because I’d toned down my hyperventilating about halfway through our first conversation, Doug even swung back by the booth I was manning in order to chat a couple more times during the subsequent days of the show, and he gave me his card before he left. So we struck up a correspondence, a few weeks later he sent me some awesome T-shirts with all these great images on them (one of which I still wear on a regular basis), and he kept me in Platinum Grit comics until things stalled out after issue 10. I can only assume, knowing how difficult it is to publish a comic book if your numbers are anywhere below the already-rock-bottom sum of 3000 copies, that they just didn’t have the funds to continue.
I am nothing if not a terrible corresponder, so I fell out of touch with Doug eventually. Years passed, and I often wondered if Platinum Grit #11 had ever been printed. Then last night I stumbled upon Trudy’s website and whatta ya know? Issues 11, 12, and 13 are all available online!
Sadly, there aren’t a lot of women working in comic books today (Jill Thompson, Carla Speed McNeil, Jessica Abel, and Linda Medley are among my favorites), but Trudy is hands down one of the most talented cartoonists working in the medium—-male or female.
I’m not saying Platinum Grit is the greatest comic book ever made, but if I could save only ten comic book series from nuclear annihilation, Platinum Grit would be among them. Future generations crawling from the ashes, possibly with access to information on the “great” comic book series of the twentieth century, might wonder why the dumbass in charge of saving ten comics had chosen Platinum Grit instead of, say, The Fantastic Four. My response to them would be “Because it rocks, motherfuckers. Deal with it!”
(I do feel compelled to mention here that Platinum Grit owes quite a bit to Jaime Hewlett’s Tank Girl, and I love Tank Girl dearly—-but I love Platinum Grit even more. Maybe because Tank Girl, for all its charm and humor, was a bit too anarchic for me. I like a little story with my comic—-even if it doesn’t make much sense. Platinum Grit’s story is goofy as hell, but it’s still the kind of thing that makes you long desperately for the next installment. Ahem. Clock’s ticking, Trudy!)
Anyway, as I mentioned on Tuesday, I don’t push things on people. Besides, if this image doesn’t make you want to read Platinum Grit, nothing will. So I’ll leave it at that.
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