Rick Kogan: Designer and illustrator Monte Beauchamp brings comic anthology ‘BLAB!’ back to compelling, colorful life

CHICAGO — “BLAB!” is back and although you may not even know what “BLAB!” is, I tell you that it is among the most creative books to ever come from Chicago, even if a writer for the Los Angeles Reader once wrote that “At its peak, (“BLAB!”) is like The New Yorker for mutants.”

I love “BLAB!”, the creation of one of our most creative people. His name is Monte Beauchamp and he has long been an art director and graphic designer here, creating a stunning body of work that includes many books, exhibitions and this amazing comic anthology he calls “BLAB!”

He once told me “I am really an ideator,” using a wonderful word that is synonymous with “problem solver” or “conceptualist.”

“BLAB!” was born in 1986 at the suggestion of his then-wife as a way for him to find an escape from the office politics of the design firm where he worked. Beauchamp was born in 1953 in Moline, Illinois, and, like many of his generation, he was a fan of comics and the magazines that featured them, especially one that was home to a fellow named Alfred E. Neuman.

As he has written, “I was aware that the underground cartoonists had flipped their lids over Mad,” and so he contacted some of those artists asking them for contributions.

“Nearly all of them responded,” he said, “with a resounding ‘Yes.’”

That first long-ago issue was a revelation, its back cover featuring the art of J.D. King and this quotation from singer-poet-songwriter Patti Smith, “After Mad, drugs were nothing.”

Beauchamp grabbed some of the 1,500 copies printed and took them around town, placing them in record stores, boutiques and comic shops. An initial quiet response swelled and there came another “BLAB!”

I have written about “BLAB!” in the past, as issues arrived every now and then, in various formats, sizes and styles, and from different publishers through the decades. In 1998, I called it “simply, a great book,” and mentioned the work by such noted contributors as Chris Ware and Tony Fitzpatrick. It attracted a loyal following and has won a prestigious Harvey Award for Best Comics Anthology.

I have also noted some of Beauchamp’s other adventures.

There has been his relationship with Krampus, a mythic character with roots that go back centuries in Austria, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, and parts of Germany and Italy. He’s a half-goat, half-demon creature covered with fur. He has a long tongue, pointed horns and wicked eyes. He is in the nasty business of visiting towns and cities in advance of Santa, making the rounds of houses and punishing children who have been naughty.

Beauchamp described him as “the bad cop to Santa’s good cop … The ‘Dirty Harry’ of Christmas.” He has given the world such books as “The Devil in Design: The Krampus Postcards” and “Krampus: The Devil of Christmas.”

His Krampus work sparked something of a Krampus cottage industry of greeting cards of various sizes, playing cards and “Creepy Krampus” sticker books. “Does this surprise me? Not really. People are people,” he told me. “And this is a country that goes nuts for zombies in movies, books and TV. Why wouldn’t they like Krampus?”

In 2019 came his “A Sidecar Named Desire: Great Writers and the Booze That Stirred Them.” A collaboration between Beauchamp and Los Angeles-based award-winning illustrator and writer Greg Clarke, it explored the relationship between writers and booze. I called it “a delightful, clever, smart and witty concoction,” featuring such familiar drinkers as that Hemingway-Faulkner-Fitzgerald trio as well as James Thurber, Joan Didion and many thirsty others.

But “BLAB!” is his focus and this new issue, published by Dark Horse Books comes in a handsome 8-by-11 inch format in full-color with clever fold-in cover flaps and peppered with fascinating vintage comic book ads.

What Beauchamp describes as “editorial-focused comics, sequential art,” is a 112-page feast. Among its offerings is children’s book illustrator Giselle Potter with a charming look at “Peter Rabbit” author Beatrix Potter’s life as a naturalist; “The Death of Comics” by Noah Van Sciver; and Greg Clarke humorously tackling the story of a dog named Frank, “an insufferable typeface snob.” And there is more.

A longtime fan of gorillas, I was especially captured by a multipage gathering of those creatures, with artwork by many and Beauchamp’s marvelous essay that charts the lively history of gorilla art, writing in part, about “the link between the gorilla and popular cultures (and how) it has long remained a lucrative commodity in the merchandise industry (but now) the well of enthralling gorilla graphics … has long been running dry.”

Beauchamp is a fine writer, as he also displays in his collaboration with artist Ryan Heshka as they provide the story of Superman’s creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. There is also a portion from his “A Sidecar Named Desire,” giving us three sad pages on the Fitzgeralds, F. Scott and Zelda.

Little wonder that people are raving. Here’s what Emil Ferris of “My Favorite Thing is Monsters” writes, “The new edition of ‘BLAB!’ is so filled with great stuff. It’s a KNOCKOUT!”

The full title of this publication is “Comics and Stories That Will Make You BLAB!” and Beauchamp could not be more pleased. He tells me, “I am really jazzed about our new magazine format. In many ways, I feel a kinship with (Playboy founder Hugh) Hefner. There he was on the South Side making a magazine and here I am on the North Side doing the same.

“By the way, Hef was a fan of the comics and had hoped for a time to make a living as a cartoonist. When that fell through, he decided to try making a magazine and we know how that turned out.”

At its most successful, Playboy had a circulation of 7 million. Beauchamp’s ambitions are, needless to say, more modest. But he’s in the “BLAB!” business for keeps, saying, with typical enthusiasm, “‘BLAB!’ No. 2 is nearly wrapped up and I have the lineup for issue No. 3 already mapped out.”