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Eno and
Plum
Dark Horse
Comics
128 pages,
$12.95
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Cud
Comics
Dark Horse Comics,
1995-'98
In 1994, eager to capture some
of that LaBan magic, Dark Horse Comics lured me
away from Fantagraphics with promises of fatter
advances, bigger sales and a plush office suite.
The series I did with them, Cud Comics, had
almost the same name as the Fantagraphics series,
but was otherwise very different. Really, it
should've been called "Eno and Plum" since every
issue contained several stories about those
characters, a "slacker"('90s term)couple living in
the city. The set up was similar to Unsupervised
Existence, but Eno and Plum were much more
overtly satirical and comic-strippy. Cud Comics
contained a lot of '90s-style
postmodernism--the Eno and Plum stories owed a lot
to Archie Comics(an old obsession), though their
cat was a steal from Gilbert Shelton. Eno was a
lazy Gen-X stereotype interested chiefly in
watching cable TV, while his girlfriend Plum was
more of an active go-getter,though her choices of
associates was questionable. Other major characters
included Plum's dad, Seymour Riverpeace, a wealthy
aging hippy with a jones for dope, Catherine,
Plum's unhappily-single girlfriend, and Edgar
Reamington, a sort of yuppie Reggie who was always
trying to steal away Plum. There were also random
side-stories in Cud Comics, but less of them
than in Cud.
Cud Comics was my
"slickest" comic book series, an attempt to creat a
sort of Generation X Freak Brothers. The attempt
may have been misguided--sales for this book
actually weren't much better than the previous
one--but it was what I honestly wanted to do at the
time. Most of the stories in the first four books
were collected in a 1997 paperback called Eno
and Plum; the others remain out of print. The
longer story posted here, "The Haunted Shirt", is
one of those later ones and, in my opinion, one of
my best.
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