#08 Falling Birds
#08 Falling Birds
Kitchen Sink October 1978
Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly do the inside front cover of this issue, a single, four-panel strip called “A Slice of Life, with Art and Françoise” that is instantly reminiscent of the “art zine” look of Raw. Howard Cruse’s fairly breathtaking parody of Little Lulu that leads off the book. Here, Lulu is a young adult who is haunted by nightmares of her childhood, seemingly focused on the heinous Mr. McNabber, the local truant officer.
Trina Robbins follows with “Lulu Goes to Paris,” though the importance of her Lulu is entirely unrelated to the more famous Little Lulu. Robbins spins a tale of international intrigue featuring an American heroine named Lulu cleverly foiling evil Nazi plots with a little help from her French Resistance friends.
After Steve Stiles continues the socialist theme with a wisecracking one-pager about Joseph Stalin, Sharon Kahn Rudahl takes it even further with the five-page “The Dying Swan,” which also takes place in Nazi-occupied Paris! Rudahl’s solemn tale is about an aging ballerina named Alexandria Levantina, who gets caught up in the consequences of the Nazi’s seizure of Paris and is betrayed by her young protégé, the beautiful Odette.
Justin Green follows all this Nazi business with a one-pager called “Zen Time,” which is about a Tibetan monk who is soon departing for an extended meditation in the wilderness. The monk yearns to meditate on the “special spectrum” of color that represents immortal light, so before embarking on his journey he asks his master to describe that specific color. Steve Stiles follows with a one-page Zen lesson of his own, entitled “Piece O’ the Action!”
Joel Beck gets us off of this crazy Nazi/Zen merry-go-round with his three-page “Love Story!”, a fateful tale of a young couple whose passionate love affair changes their lives but coincidentally sets off an extended series of tragic events. Doug Hansen joins the Snarf family and contributes “Ten-Speed Tommy,” in which a boy and his dog prove that it pays to remember that speed limits save lives! Kim Deitch closes the book with “Keep ‘Em Flying,” a five-pager about Deitch himself undergoing hypnosis.
#08 Falling Birds
