11
CHAPTER I
1.2 The Beautiful Stories For Ugly Children: a brief introduction.
The BSFUC are a collection of illustrated stories created by Dave Louapre and Dan
Sweetman, author of the texts and illustrator respectively, and published by American
publishing house Piranha Press, “an imprint of DC Comics from 1989 to 1994, which was
a response to the growing interest in alternative comics. The imprint was edited by Mark
Nevelow, who instead of developing comics with the established names in the alternative
comics field, chose to introduce several unknown illustrators with an eclectic and diverse
line of experimental graphic novels and stories. Unusual for the time, Nevelow succeeded
in getting DC to agree to contracts giving creator ownership to writers and artists.”
1
Another internet source specifies that “Piranha Press was DC's first attempt at
constructing a "mature readers" brand of serious pictorial fiction. It was also the first DC
imprint to allow for creator ownership.”
2
Among an overall number of about 30 projects published by Piranha Press, the BSFUC
probably represented the most complex and durable: the whole collection covered a three
year span, from June 1989 until September 1992, for a total of thirty issues in the run
3
(and a couple of anthologies published separately
4
), a low amount if compared to those
reached by mainstream comics, nevertheless relatively high if we consider the short life of
its publishing house. Despite this, the collection immediately received positive reviews
and soon became an outstanding example of the less known graphic novel subgenre,
gaining the status of ‘cult series’ amongst underground comics fans.
Unfortunately the BSFUC have never been reprinted since 1992, and more than fifteen
years apart from the last published issue they became desirable collector’s items for those
nostalgic readers who missed the whole series or some of its numbers, nevertheless they
still exert a strong charm even on those new hosts of enthusiasts who lately discovered
them by chance or by hearsay. In fact it is thanks to these people that much information
about the BSFUC can still be found on the web. With the exception of a handful of sites
dedicated to comics reviews, a concise but reliable page on Wikipedia, and a site which
1
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piranha_Press.
2
From http://dccomicsartists.com/dchistory/piranhapress.htm.
3
See appendix on pp. 62-63 for the complete list of titles.
4
Namely “A Cotton Candy Autopsy” and “What if this were Heaven, wouldn’t that be Hell?”.
12
offers a general retrospective on the wide DC Comics catalogue, the data about the
BSFUC are mostly based on fans’ personal accounts, amateur pages, forums, a Facebook
fan club, and perhaps on comments and ratings posted alongside the description of
volumes’ conditions in order to sell them on sites like E-bay and Amazon. The most recent
web links related to the BSFUC concerns a stage adaptation of some of the stories made in
2009 as a co-production between Hardcover Theater and Workhouse Theatre (two
American independent theatre companies)
5
, and an interesting interview with Dave
Louapre broadcasted in December 2008 and February 2009 by The Onomatopoeia Show,
a Canadian online radio podcast dedicated to the world of comics
6
.
However it is strange to notice that the official site of DC Comics makes no mention either
of the Piranha Press or of the BSFUC. Thus the only ‘trustworthy’ source of information
about the series seems to be the official site run by the authors themselves: a site which
has been created recently and has not been updated since October 2006, though. The
domain is more a showcase to promote new projects (such as BSFUC’s animations) and an
occasion to keep in touch with old and new fans by updating them on upcoming events
than a complete and thorough retrospective on the stories. Nevertheless the site actually
represents the long-awaited answer from the creators to the uninterrupted and yet growing
interest of the public, and a positive sign both for those who still hope to read new material
from the artistic duo and those who are still waiting for the BSFUC to be republished.
Consulting the official site one is still unable to obtain more detailed information about the
series rather than those reported by other amateur pages. Here is the original text with
which the two authors introduce themselves and their work.
“Dave Louapre and Dan Sweetman have known each other since high school and have been working
together as a creative team since college. Their first collaboration, a weather machine, failed miserably.
Their second, a photon-driven “death ray,” actually made the weather machine look like a success. It was at
this point that the pair turned to comics, producing a one-panel strip called The Wasteland, which ran in the
L. A. Weekly and Fangoria magazine, to name but a couple. Well, actually, to name both. While unable to
control cloud patterns or rain death from above, The Wasteland proved a valuable tool in confusing the
masses and getting attention, albeit very little.
Soon, Dave and Dan expanded their ideas into a series of self-produced illustrated stories, which they sold
on consignment in local book stores. This led to a quasi-lucrative deal with upstart D.C. Comics imprint
Piranha Press, where the happy go lucky duo found a home for the next three years creating Beautiful Stories
for Ugly Children, turning out a story a month and gaining a respectable level of positive media response
from the likes of MTV, Mother Jones, Sassy, and The Nation. In its first year, Beautiful Stories garnered five
5
From http://www.workhousetheatre.org and http://www.hardcovertheater.org.
6
From http://www.cartoongal.com.
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nominations for the coveted Eisner award – a comics industry biggie. Unfortunately, this happened to be the
year that the computer tallying the ballots blew up (or something like that – we were never really clear on
what actually happened), and the awards were cancelled. That luck has followed Dan and Dave ever since.
Boo-yah!
Beautiful Stories stopped publishing in 1992 when the entire Piranha staff was struck by a meteorite on their
way to the welfare office. Dan and Dave both entered the realm of Hollywood, with Dave writing
screenplays as penance for killing all those people in a past life (he still maintains that playground had no
business being so close to what he thought was the road), while Dan has become a top storyboard artist in
the industry, working closely with the likes of Mel Gibson and Sam Raimi (not the actual people, just their
“likes”), and even doing some second-unit directing on Spiderman II: Electric Boogaloo.
The sorry pair is currently manufacturing animated shorts adapted from the Cotton Candy Autopsy stories
that were published under the BSFUC umbrella and are posted on this very site. They are actively seeking a
republishing deal for Beautiful Stories, and are currently in discussions, yet again, with good-hearted
humans trying to bring BSFUC to the big incredible world of television.
May God have mercy on their souls!”
7
As a matter of fact, far from contradicting themselves and thus according to the ironic
style of the biographies that precede each story, Louapre and Sweetman provide an
introduction that if on one hand does not reveal any plausible explanation neither about the
‘making of’ of the BSFUC, nor about the way the two authors worked together, on the
other hand it gives away some interesting cues about the origins, the nature and the public
response of the collection to linger over in the following paragraphs and chapters.
A possible cue concerns Louapre and Sweetman’s first work The Wasteland, that, due to
some common traits shared with the later artistic collaboration such as moods, subjects
and style, can be easily considered as the direct predecessor of the BSFUC and provides a
basis to better understand their context and their communicative code.
From another point of view, constant references made by the authors about the universe of
comics may raise the legitimate question whether the BSFUC are indeed a comic or a
literary work of illustrated fiction, since neither official nor amateur sources seem to set
this argument straight.
Lastly, a third cue concerns the explicit influence of the American mass culture of the 90s
on the fictional world recreated by the stories, an assumption that in the next chapter will
allow us to consider the BSFUC as a complex ‘idiolect’ other than a representative
‘product of its time’, where comics, literature and cinema merge together and are
supported by crossed references that cover and go across a vast and intricate universe of
knowledge.
7
From the BSFUC official site http://www.beautifulstoriesforuglychildren.com.
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1.2 General features.
Each issue of the BSFUC is generally composed by a preliminary one-page section used
by the authors to report acknowledgements and introduce themselves with a short, always
different - and presumably false – biography (see images 3-4) written in the third person,
followed by the illustrated story itself, a section whose overall length varies from thirty-
one to thirty-nine pages, excluding the covers and two final pages reserved to advertisings.
Worthier of attention is the length of the text which, compared to that of earlier stories,
was increased from issue number twelve to issue number eighteen. This fact seems to be
ascribable to the increase of particulars and accuracy paid to the structure of the story,
including the development of longer plots and more articulated characters. Nevertheless
layout proportions of textual and visual parts remain quite the same and they usually
maintain a ratio of one half written page to one fully illustrated page approximately.
The covers are colour-printed and paged according to two different types of layout: the
first type (see image n. 1) - used from issue n. 1 to n. 18 - produces a central frame which
portrays the main subject of the story and a vertical band on the left on which is printed
the Piranha Press logo, but never displays the title of the issue; the second type of layout
(see image n. 2) is used from n. 19 to n. 30 and is more ‘structurally free’: if on one hand
the lateral band is generally maintained, on the other hand the covers are entirely occupied
by a coloured illustration, and the title of the story – which is paged alongside the names
of the authors – is written each time with a different font.
15
Image n. 1: BSFUC issue number 1 cover. Image n. 2: BSFUC issue number 30 cover.
The contents are always printed in black-and-white, and do not follow a standard layout.
The space dedicated to both texts and illustrations may vary according to the length of the
story and the size of the drawings, thus, from issue to issue – but also from page to page –
each number of the BSFUC is highly differentiated from the others, to a point that to an
inattentive observer consecutive issues may seem to belong to a different series or to be
created by different authors. Of course this feature is deeply magnified by Sweetman’s
artistic skills. His capability to cover a wide range of illustration techniques and his
masterful employment of drawing tools (from inks and charcoal to watercolours, from
pencils and nibs to paintbrushes) make the stories unique, and give them always new and
unexpected nuances of tone depending on the subjects they depict and their moods.
Textual parts are always digitally printed except for issue n. 6, ‘Happy Birthday To Hell’,
whose text is directly handwritten beside the drawings, probably in order to imitate or
recreate the page of a diary (see image n. 5), and for issue n. 23, ‘Tiny, Slimy, Writhing
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