Review by Frank Plowright
With typically self-deprecating wit, Mark Stafford subtitles this assortment of his work as A Collection of Crimes Against Cartooning, and that couldn’t be any further from the truth.
The Smogasbord aspect of the title refers to this being primarily a collection of strips from small press work onward, but also featuring plenty of illustrations, posters and commercial assignments. There are collaborations on a few strips, but for the most part this is solo, unfettered Stafford. The love of horror films mentioned in David Hine’s introduction shines through, but elevated not only via fine cartooning, but observational commentary, a magnificent attention to period detail and gloriously fetid people. Even when dealing with something more straightforward, the slasher serial killer experiences an ennui concerning his trade.
More so than most who draw comics in a cartoon style, Stafford has a viewpoint, so some of what he offers is Mad Magazine quality, but with greater truth and, to be frank, greater bleakness. A series of strips is set in a pub called The Old Hope in Hell. Among topics so precisely skewered, sometimes requiring no more than the single panel are hypocrites, displays of ignorance, and hollow positivism, the latter in a series of extraordinarily grim single panels contrasting aphorism and situation. It’s profoundly disturbing, a feeling generated on several occasions. A great single page cartoon has a couple as normal as Stafford draws sitting at a table asking whether an unseen guest would like a cheesy wotsit. It’s a relatively ordinary scene apart from the surreal touch of only the single cheesy wotsit on a plate. That draws the attention, and then you notice the plate is being held by a deformed, squid like hand. Ugh!
Stafford doesn’t draw pretty. There aren’t any cheery Charles Addams misfits here. You’d image most of his characters have personal hygiene problems, oozing assorted bodily fluids, and they’re drawn as pinched and tormented, existential angst as the starting point. Yet everything is meticulously crafted and Stafford loves sneaky background detail. The biggest surprise to those who already know his comics is that he’s actually quite a versatile artist. There’s a poster for Diary of a Madman that could be Drew Friedman and he can do a great Jack Kirby. And Stafford’s clever. A library mural consists of six panels of characters reading, the smart idea being each successive panel has the person holding a book reading about their predecessor.
Almost everything is unfiltered Stafford, but a few others are involved. In Alan Grant’s case it’s a single page, and while David Hine is Stafford’s most frequent collaborator, Korean poet Bo Seon Shim provides the most pages, a creative partnership organised by Shakespeare Lives project reinterpreting a sonnet.
An extended interview by Jason Atomic ends the collection, although it’s really a case of prompting and letting Stafford go. It’s amusing, enlightening and engaging. All three terms apply to Salmonella Smogasbord also. Despite wit and talent in abundance, Stafford somehow still swerves under the radar, which must be incredibly frustrating for a man who will one day be the UK’s greatest cartoonist. If it weren’t for that pesky Hunt Emerson he might be there now.
