Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Spontaneous Combustion by Fire Prevention 52: Spontaneous Combustion–Fact or Fiction? A pile of dirty rags spontaneously catches fire in someone's garage. Round hay bales stored in a farmer's field go up in flames. Smoke can be seen coming from a city's large compost pile. All three scenarios occur without the addition of flame or heat. Are these stories fact or fiction? Spontaneous combustion or spontaneous ignition, as it is often called, is the occurrence of fire without the application of an external heat source. Due to chemical, biological, or physical processes, combustible materials self-heat to a temperature high enough for ignition to occur. According to the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), an estimated 14,070 fires occur annually from spontaneous combustion. Think something like this cannot occur in your park or home? Think again. A few months ago, an NPS fire crew in the was conducting routine maintenance of their hand tools. One of their tasks involved applying linseed oil with a rag to their tool handles. Even though the crew took precautions with the rag, placing it outside to dry flat on a workbench at the end of the day, the rag caught fire, started the workbench on fire, and spread up the wall of an attached shed. Fortunately, an employee saw the smoke and the fire was extinguished before significant damage occurred. Rags and towels soaked with oils, including cooking oils; hot laundry left in piles; large compost, mulch, manure, and leaf piles; and moist baled hay can spontaneously combust in the right conditions. Avoid this type of fire by following a few simple and proven tips: Store piles of hay, compost, mulch, manure, and leaves away from buildings, in case a fire occurs, and keep the piles small to allow for the circulation of air and the dissipation of heat. Work groups or businesses using large quantities of oily rags should dispose of those rags in an OSHA-approved container to await pickup by an industrial cleaning company. If you're working on a project at home, spread the soiled rags in a single layer on concrete to prevent the buildup of heat and allow the rags to become hard and brittle. Place the rags out of direct sunlight and secure the corners to prevent movement by wind. Hay should be completely dry before baling and moving to a storage facility. Ensure that the facility is well ventilated. Dial 911 or your local fire emergency number if your hay bales or mulch, leaf, manure, or compost pile is emitting smoke. The combustible material will need to be spread out to dissipate the rising heat, but the introduction of oxygen can result in an immediate fire. Firefighters should be standing by onsite. Fire Info for You. Employees Learn more about spontaneous combustion by viewing an ABC News video with Diane Sawyer , which demonstrates how a linseed oil-soaked rag spontaneously combusted. Discover more about the NPS fire mentioned above by reading a Facilitated Learning Analysis of the incident. Firefighters Increase your knowledge of spontaneous combustion and its occurrences by reading the NFPA report titled, " Fires Caused by Spontaneous Combustion or Chemical Reaction Fact Sheet ." Park Structural Fire Coordinators Keep watch for unsafe storage and disposal of oily rags in concession facilities and maintenance buildings. Park Leadership Prepare standard operating procedures (SOPs) that outline the proper disposal of oily rags and ensure that the proper storage containers are available for use. Take Action. Walk through your home or workplace and identify spontaneous combustion risks. Immediately remove the risk by taking appropriate measures, such as removing the pile of rags in your garage, or inform management of the fire hazard. Contact the park's safety officer or park structural fire coordinator for approved disposal options. Spontaneous Combustion by Skip Williamson. These are the remains of Dr. John Bentley (on left)who died of spontaneous combustion in Pennsylvania in 1966. The spot where the body lay is burnt, but the rest of the room, including the toilet, was not even scorched. This shows a quick, hot flame that devoured the body in seconds. Only the bottom of one leg remained to identify this as a person. On the right is a picture of workers cleaning up the remains of Mrs. M H Reeser of Florida who apparently died of spontaneous combustion in July of 1951. The only remains found was her skull, shrunken to the size of an orange. There are theories on this occurance but no one is sure how or why it happens. It does happen even without scientific explanation. One theory is ball lightning which would produce similar results, but many of these instances seem to rule out this possibility just by the location of the death. A majority of these deaths have the opposite characteristics that one would see if a person was burned to death, such as the shrinking of the skull. Crematorium Specialist have viewed photos of combustion victims and say they cannot duplicate the complete destruction of bones in such a short period of time. They find it even harder to believe that this could happen so completely in ordinary rooms such as living rooms, bathrooms, etc. There are over 100 unexplained fire deaths a year just in England. If just ten of these deaths are spontaneous combustion, then the number world could be well over 100. Does the body have chemical reactions that science has yet to discover ? It seems that an internal reaction of some kind is the most likely explanation for these deaths, but what triggers it ? Can it be detected ? Avoided ? This picture is another case of spontaneous combustion that occurred in London in 1964. One compiled database states the following statistics on possible reported cases: 1950's - 11 cases. 1970's - 13 cases. 1980's - 22 cases More Cases of SHC 1932: Mrs. Charles Williamson suddenly burst into flames on a Janurary morning in 1932. She lived in Bladenboro, North Carolina. She had not been beside any kind of fire, and her dress had not been in contact with any cleaning fluid or other flammable substances. Her husband and daughter ripped the dress off her with their bare hands, but not any of them were burned by the flames. Not to soon after a pair of her husbands pants caught fire while hanging in the closet. The same thing happened to a bed, and curtains in an unoccupied room. Although the house was inspected by special investigators from gas and electric companies, arson experts, and police, there could be found no logical explanation for the sudden fires. The family described the flames as 'bluish, jetlike', and other adjacent objects were not affected. There was no smell, and no smoke and until the object was consumed the fire would not stop. - sent in by [email protected]. Jan. 13, 1943: 52 year old Allen M. Small was found burned to death in his Deer Isle, Maine home. The carpet beneath his body was scorched, but there was no other sign of fire in the house. Small's pipe was unlit and on a shelf, and his stove lids were all still in place. - sent in by [email protected]. March 1, 1953: Waymon Wood's body was discovered in the front seat of his closed car in Greenville, South Carolina. His car was stationed on the site of Bypass Route 291. Little remained of Wood, but his car was basically untouched, even though it contained half a tank of gas. The windshield was the only damaged area; it had bubbled and sagged inward, an affect from the intense heat. - sent in by [email protected]. October, 1964: Mrs. Olga Worth Stephens, 75 years and a former actress suddenly burst into flames while waiting in her parked car. The burns were fatal, and she was killed before anyone could come to her aid. Firemen later concluded that nothing in the car could have started the blaze, and her car was undamaged. - sent in by [email protected]. The images on this page were obtained from publicly available sources, and to the best of our knowledge, the images are in the public domain. If you own the copyright on any image on this page, and you would like us to remove it, please identify yourself and the image, and we will. If you own the copyright and you are willing to give us permission to use the image, we would like to know that also. Bibliography - get these books, they are great ! Strange & Unexplained Mysteries of the 20th Century, Randle,Jenny ; Sterling Publishing co, Inc, NY 1994 pp73-5. Is Spontaneous Human Combustion Real? Late at night on Christmas Eve 1885, in the small farming town of Seneca, Illinois, a woman named Matilda Rooney burst into flames. She was alone in her kitchen when it happened. The fire quickly incinerated her entire body except her feet. The incident also claimed the life of her husband, Patrick, who was found suffocated from the fumes in another room of the house. The tragedy left investigators baffled. There was no reason to suspect foul play. The Rooneys had been relaxing and drinking whiskey that evening. A farmhand who had spent a few hours with them hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary. Furthermore, no source of ignition could be found for the blaze. Although the flames had been intense enough to reduce Matilda Rooney to ashes and a few fragments of bone, they had not spread to the rest of the room. The fire seemed to have started in her body and stayed confined to her body. It appeared that the Rooneys had fallen victim to the rare and enigmatic phenomenon of spontaneous human combustion. Spontaneous human combustion is a mystery with an impressive literary pedigree. Herman Melville and Nikolay Gogol used it to dispatch characters in their novels Redburn and Dead Souls , respectively. But the most notorious case in fiction is Bleak House by Charles Dickens, where the sleazy alcoholic junk merchant Mr. Krook ends up as a heap of ashes on the floor and “a dark, greasy coating on the walls and ceiling.” In the preface to the book edition of Bleak House , written after the novel had already been published in serial form, Dickens defended his use of spontaneous combustion against accusations of implausibility, citing several famous cases and the judgments of eminent medical doctors that such a thing was indeed possible. “I shall not abandon the facts,” he concludes with typical Dickensian panache, “until there shall have been a considerable Spontaneous Combustion of the testimony on which human occurrences are usually received.” Descriptions of spontaneous human combustion date back to the 17th century, with a large number of cases recorded in the 19th century and a handful in the 20th and 21st centuries. Altogether, there are a few hundred recorded possible cases. Although the scientific support for spontaneous human combustion was weaker than Dickens stated, it was a widely discussed phenomenon in his time. The public largely accepted it as a reality on moral grounds. The victims were often alcoholic and overweight, and more were female than male, so there was a general perception that it was a kind of retribution for a debauched lifestyle. This idea was reinforced by lurid newspaper accounts of suspected cases. It made intuitive sense, after all, that a body saturated with a flammable substance—alcohol—would become flammable. The answer is almost certainly no. None of the proposed scientific explanations for how a body would spontaneously burst into flames have held up to scrutiny. Some of the early proposed mechanisms rely on outdated medical ideas, such as the notion that an ignition could be the result of an imbalance of the bodily humors. The Victorian explanation that alcohol rendered the body flammable doesn’t work either, seeing that the concentrations of alcohol in even the most intoxicated people are much too low and that an external source of ignition would be required. In the 20th century, forensic scientists noticed the “wick effect” in which clothing worn by a victim can soak up melted fat, acting like the wick in a candle and creating conditions for a body to smolder for an extended period of time. Experiments have shown that this effect can produce many of the unusual characteristics associated with spontaneous human combustion, such as the complete or nearly complete incineration of the body and the lack of fire damage to the victim’s surroundings. The likely explanation for suspected cases of spontaneous human combustion, then, is that there is an external source of ignition—a match, a cigarette, an electrical spark—that sets off the wick effect, but the evidence of it is destroyed by the fire. Although alcohol doesn’t make the body more flammable, severe inebriation or other forms of impairment may be a factor in some of these deaths since the victim may be unable to react to a slowly developing fire. Skip Williamson. Skip Williamson was one of the pioneers of the movement in the 1960s. He is best known for his satirical comic strip 'Snappy Sammy Smoot' (1968-1996) and was furthermore closely involved with the underground comix magazine , as well as the section ' Funnies' in Hugh Hefner's Playboy. Williamson worked in a fluid, roundish, psychedelic style and was known for his highly political stance. "Underground comics should be both propaganda and entertainment," he once said. "They're effective - the antithesis of rhetoric." To him comics could be "subtle and exaggerated at the same time. So they are a valuable propaganda tool." The infamous Trash Can cartoon, Williamson's first published work. Early life and career He was born in 1944 as Mervyn Williamson in San Antonio, Texas. His father hailed from Virginia, while his mother had Hispanic/Native American roots. His future career seemed predestined, since his grandmother nicknamed him "Skip" as a reference to the comics character 'Skippy' from Percy Crosby's eponymous newspaper comic. Comics weren't allowed in Williamson's parental household, which of course made them all the more thrilling. One could state he already took his comics "underground" then. He often got caught reading and stealing them, and was punished for drawing cartoons in his school books. Even in those days Williamson was something of a rebel. In 1952, during the U.S. presidential elections, he already showed political interest and bravery to be different from the norm despite being only eight years old at the time. While most other children liked Dwight Eisenhower - who'd eventually win the elections - he made a stance by wearing a button promoting his opponent, Adlai Stevenson, and got beaten up for it. Among his graphic influences were Walt Disney, Tex Avery, Harold Gray, Al Capp, Chester Gould, Harold Foster, , and Marcel Duchamp. But like most underground cartoonists Williamson his biggest inspiration were the early issues of Mad Magazine, written and drawn by and Will Elder. In fact, his graphic career took off after he managed to sell a gag cartoon to Kurtzman's magazine Help! It depicted two trash cans in New Orleans, one reading "Negro Trash" and the other "White Crash". This clever satire on the segregation laws still in effect in most of the United States at the time was picked out by , then editor of Help! and later America's most famous feminist. The cartoon received further exposure when African-American comedian Dick Gregory showed it on television while he was a guest of Jack Paar in . 'The Thrilling Adventures of Bozo Rezebo' from Bijou Funnies #6. The character’s name is a pun on Bebe Rebozo, a businessman who was well known in the 1960s and 1970s for being a friend and confidant of U.S. President Richard Nixon. Underground comix In one issue of the magazine Cracked, Williamson discovered that the editor had just published a fanzine, Smudge, which offered information about every possible satirical magazine in the United States. He applied for a job in Smudge and got hired as a cartoonist. Many of his later friends, like Jay Lynch and , also discovered Smudge the same way. Soon Williamson got actively involved in the fanzine network and published various articles and cartoons in magazines like The Realist, The Idiot, Aardvark, Triad and 's Wild!. He met many of his future colleagues during this period and even launched his own short-lived magazine, Squire. Independently published magazines like these eventually created a press outside the mainstream media. They offered news and entertainment which appealed more to young people, including the rising hippie movement. Because of their subversive content these publications couldn't be sold in regular stores and thus had to "underground". They were distributed in stores specializing in hippie fashions, gadgets and drugs, the so-called "head shops". One of these magazines was The Chicago Mirror, founded in the summer of 1967 by Jay Lynch and Skip Williamson. It featured a lot of satirical articles which unfortunately weren't always recognized as such. One day Lynch invented a story how smoking dog excrement could be used as a substitute for marijuana. To his concern some hippies actually came forward to congratulate him for giving them this tip. Even when Lynch explained it was satire the men still didn't believe it was all meant as a joke. This made them decide to change the format into a comic magazine, because then at least their satire would be a lot clearer. The Chicago Mirror was discontinued after four issues. Inspired by Robert Crumb's groundbreaking , Bijou Funnies hit the market in the summer of 1968. It quickly became the second most-read underground comix magazine after Zap. Snappy Sammy Smoot In the first issue of Bijou Funnies, Williamson's signature character Snappy Sammy Smoot made his debut. Snappy Sammy is a flamboyant man with a large chin, pencil-thin moustache and a curly beehive haircut. He comes from a more old-fashioned, innocent past and thus behaves accordingly. Whatever happens he remains the eternal optimist. Even when confronted with hippies, drugs, angry policemen and activists he never loses his innocent outlook on things, even if he is blissfully unaware or in denial of what really goes on around him. The comics were funny because they lampooned both the politically left as well as the right. Sammy's neighbour, Ragtime Billy, for instance, is an angry ultraconservative rightwinger, while Necropolis Keester is a braindead hippie, completely dependent on drugs. 'Snappy Sammy Smoot' appeared in other magazines as well, like Blab!, , and National Lampoon. He was one of the few underground comix characters to gain mainstream exposure. The comedy TV show 'Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In' (1968- 1973) featured Sammy Smoot as a real-life character in a few sketches, played by . Snappy Sammy was also a rare example of a 1960s underground comic which survived the hippie era. It kept running on a regular basis until the mid-1990s. This gave the character the opportunity to get involved in many other sociological changes, such as born-again Christians and rappers. Other recurring underground features from Williamson were 'Bozo Rebebo', about an odd monster whose name was a pun on Nixon's confidant Bebe Rebozo, and 'On The Job', a satirical comic about the magazine publishing business. Williamson was also one of several comic artists, including Robert Crumb, , Jay Lynch, Jim Mitchell, Peter Loft, Ned Sonntag, Dave Dozier, Wendel Pugh, Dave L. Herring, Bruce Walthers, Dale Kuipers, S. Clay Wilson, Justin Green, Pete Poplaski, , Art Spiegelman, Evert Geradts, , and Bill Grifith to make a graphic contribution to a special 1971 tribute comic book named 'ProJunior', starring Don Dohler's eponymous character. 'Black Icarus' (Bijou Funnies #3, October 1969). Social activism and obscenity trial Skip Williamson was a politically conscious man. He actively joined the protest marches against the Vietnam War, Nixon and for civil rights for African-Americans. He once designed a flyer for some yippies, but it was rejected because it depicted Vice- President Spiro Agnew as a child molester in the Boy Scouts movement. In 1969 a trial was held against "The Chicago Eight", a group of left-wing anti-Vietnam war activists charged with conspiracy and inciting riots. Williamson and Lynch published a comic book, 'Conspiracy Capers' (1969), to raise funds for the activists' legal defense. The case was controversial and Lynch had to go through great lengths to actually find anybody in Chicago willing to cash the check with the benefit money. He was forced to sign it over and send it off to Washington D.C. to more kindred spirits. By the time he received everything back in the mail two months had passed by. Even worse: his letter had been opened and inspected. It turned out that the printing shop he had in mind for the job had been visited by two men in suits who'd threatened to put the owner out of business if he dared to published Conspiracy Capers. Nevertheless, 'Conspiracy Capers' did get published and featured graphic contributions by Skip Williamson (who designed the cover), Jay Lynch, Jim Osborne, Baron, Daniel Clyne, Paul David Simon, Jay Kinney, , Gary Arlington, , Charles Winans and Art Spiegelman. Skip Williamson attended the Chicago Eight trial as a courtroom sketch artist and sketched the proceedings. The trial itself originally resulted in only five "guilty" verdicts, but these too would later be overturned in a federal court of appeals. As a good friend of the most famous activist on trial, , Williamson not only illustrated the cover of 'Conspiracy Capers' but also of Hoffman's cult book, 'Steal This Book' (1971). He provided art work for Jerry Rubin's equally anarchic 'DO IT! Scenarios of the Revolution' (1970) and 'We Are Everywhere' (1971) too. Unfortunately not all trials ended in underground comix' favour. In 1973 the court case Miller vs. California brought forward an official decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to broaden prosecution of "obscene material", making it nearly impossible to publish and distribute underground magazines with the same amount of freedom. Bijou Funnies too called it quits with their eighth and final issue, in which all underground artists took turns spoofing each other's series in the style of Mad Magazine. Skip Williamson took it upon him to parody Robert Crumb's 'Mr. Natural', while his own 'Snappy Sammy Smoot' was lampooned by William Stout. Gallery / Hustler Williamson, like many of his colleagues, now ventured to more mainstream media. In 1973 Williamson became the art director of Gallery and of Hustler, one year later. For Gallery he created the column 'The Girl Next Door', in which readers could send in photographs depicting their own girlfriends or wives. His job at Hustler, on the other hand, only lasted a week because Larry Flynt "drove him crazy". Playboy Funnies Williamson was also the main instigator behind the 'Playboy Funnies' (1976), a comics section in Hugh Hefner's Playboy which featured hip, young artists like Lynch and himself, Art Spiegelman, Jay Kinney, Randall Enos, Lou Brooks, Mark Alan Stamaty and . Naturally he also had comic strips of his own there called 'Neon Vincent's Massage Parlor' and 'Nu-Wave Romance with Nell 'n' Void'. Williamson additionally survived by publishing comics, cartoons and illustrations in The Chicago Seed, High Times, The Industrial Worker, National Lampoon, The Realist and even the prestigious Encyclopaedia Britannica. Halsted Street In 1977 Williamson drew 'Halsted Street', a daily newspaper comic for the Chicago Daily News section 'Sidetracks'. 'Halsted Street' centered around a couple, Bosco and Sheila Spoonbread, who tried to make a living in the tough street life of Halsted. The newspaper editors hoped that hiring a well known underground cartoonist like Williamson could bring in more young readers, yet at the same time limited him by keeping the content non-offensive. The artist nevertheless still snuck in satirical jabs at the media, governor James R. Thompson and even the politically left. Naturally this didn't please his bosses, especially when sales kept going down. They reduced the size of the comic, moved it to the back pages and were bothered by the seemingly relevant question whether his protagonists were an interracial couple? 'Halsted Street' was inevitably discontinued soon after. The newspaper itself went bankrupt three months later. 'Class War Comix', from Bijou Funnies #5 (December 1970). The caricatured politicians in the second panel are U.S. President Richard Nixon and his Vice President Spiro Agnew. Graphic and written contributions Together with Jay Lynch Williamson designed the album cover of 'The Genuine Imitation Life Gazette' (1969) by The Four Seasons. The cover was made to look like a newspaper, even featuring an eight-page newspaper-like booklet inside with an underground comic named 'High Frequency Funnies', drawn by Lynch and Williamson. While an obvious attempt to appear more hip to young listeners, the record cover did prove to be quite influential. Jethro Tull's 'Thick as a Brick' (1972), John Lennon's 'Some Time In New York City' (1973), Tom Waits' 'Heartattack and Vine' (1980) and Radiohead's 'The King of Limbs' (2011) also designed their album covers to look like a newspaper. Williamson also designed album covers for blues artists like Albert Collins ('Cold Snap', 1986), Koko Taylor ('An Audience With the Queen', 1987), Little Charlie and the Nightcats ('All The Way Crazy', 1987) and Mudcat ('You Better Mind', 2013). For the band Wilderness Road he drew a special comic book, Snuk Comics, to promote them. Williamson wrote a personal homage to Robert Crumb in Monte Beauchamp's book 'The Life and Times of R. Crumb. Comments From Contemporaries (St. Martin's Griffin, New York, 1998). Final years and death By 1994 he moved to Atlanta, Georgia, and started making politically conscious paintings on large-scale canvases. His works often poke fun at famous politicians like Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew and Ronald Reagan. Some of these works have been exhibited in various musea and cultural centra all across the United States and Europe as well. In 2017 Skip Williamson passed away at the age of 72. He was a diabetic and died after a bad reaction to antibiotics while undergoing treatment for a toe infection in Albany Medical Center. He died only a week and a half after his frequent collaborator Jay Lynch. Legacy and influence Skip Williamson was an influence on Rod Kierkegaard. Books about Skip Williamson He and Jay Lynch were interviewed in John Paul Kinhart's documentary 'Blood, Boobs & Beast' (2007) about Don Dohler. In 2016 Williamson became subject of another documentary by Kinhart named 'Pigheaded' (2016). The underground comix veteran also published an autobiography: 'Spontaneous Combustion' (2011) which, aside from his life story, also offers the most complete overview of his graphic career available. The Bijou Funnies team, as presented in Bijou Funnies #1 (1968). Spontaneous Combustion by Skip Williamson. The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists by Seth. Seth has been working on Clyde Fans forever. It seems like he got into a need to create something artistically perfect, and perhaps this is a bit overwhelming. So while he has been working on Clyde Fans , he has published three books, each of which involved techniques for curing writers block. The first, Wimbledon Green: The Greatest Comic Book Collector in the World , was drawn in his sketchbook--which freed him from having to do "perfect" drawings. It was also done in little self-contained episodes, which freed him from having to have a sense of absolute unity for the work. (Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad squad operates similarly.) George Sprott: 1894-1975 returned to a highly polished drawing but kept the episodic approach--each page was kind of a separate story relating to the life of George Sprott. The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists was also drawn in a sketchbook, but it has a continuous story flow. It imagines that there is a professional society of Canadian Cartoonists that was at one time extremely wealthy due to the huge popularity of comics in Canada throughout the 20th century. Some of the ideas are similar to Dylan Horrocks' graphic novel Hicksville -- including that of a great library of all the important works of comics. But at the end of the book, the narrator--Seth himself--explains that the GNBCC was never as wealthy and successful as he has portrayed it here (obviously). It's an extended, lovely fantasia on the idea of comics and comic strips being an art form as respected as visual art or literature--a fantasy of many cartoonists, to be sure. The Armed Garden and Other Stories by David B. David B. is one of the most important cartoonists in France. A member of L'Association, his most important work is Epileptic , an autobiographical work about growing up with a severely epileptic brother, and his parents' fruitless search for ways to control the condition through both conventional medicine and alternative therapies. But I will confess that I like the stories in The Armed Garden more. These are stories about heretics. Heresy is a subject of particular interest for certain storytellers--for example, Jorge Luis Borges. And interestingly, Borges wrote two stories involving Hakim al-Muquanna, who is the subject of the story of "The Veiled Prophet", one of the three stories here, which describes the origin of al-Muquanna as a prophet and his battles with the Caliph. "The Armed Garden" deals with clashes between two sets of heretics in 15th century Czechoslovakia--on one side, the free-love practicing nudists led by Rohan the Blacksmith, and on the other the Taborites, lead by the bloodthirsty general Jan Žižka. The first panel of this story starts with the words "1415 was not a very good year for Christianity." In such times, heresies are born. These bizarre fable-like tales may seem far from us, but they show want can happen when societies are stressed. The Man Who Grew His Beard by Olivier Schrauwen. Most of these stories were published in the anthology Mome . I admit that when I read them there, I kind of skimmed them. They seemed like trifles. But in this book collection, the effect is much stronger. The stories are funny, ironic and absurd. In that, he reminds me of his fellow Belgian cartoonists, Kamagurka and Herr Seele. But he also reminds one of the avant garde Belgian cartoonists of Freon (later Fremok). These are more "art comics," where the visual aspect is paramount. Olivier Schrauwen, The Grotto p. 6, comic page, 2011. This is not to say the narratives are unimportant, mere hangers onto which to hang the art. They are amusing, weird and compelling--the visual aspect makes them all the more so. I think this book was overlooked when it came out--but it deserves to be read. Love & Rockets #04: Love and Rockets: New Stories by Gilbert Hernandez and Jaime Hernandez. This book, on the other hand, has gotten tons of recognition. The Hernandez brothers have been producing Love & Rockets comics since 1981, and in 2008 started releasing them as book collections. I have to admit I don't get Gilbert's work anymore--he's gone so deep into his obsessions (old genre movies, ginormous boobs) that it's hard for me to see anything else. Jaime's stories are the ones that people really responded to in this issue. For the past few years, he has been concentrating on his character Maggie, and filling in her life. The previous volume contained a particularly powerful story about her childhood and her brother Calvin. This time around, the Maggie stories are a little more sentimental. (SPOILER ALERT) She finally ends up with Ray Dominguez, a character that has been a part of Maggie's life for decades. Jaime is too oblique a storyteller for this to be a cliche. But still, I think one reason people like it so much is because they have wanted to see these two characters settle down and be happy for so long. Flesh and Spontaneous Combustion by Skip Williamson. These are self-published Kindle books by the long-time underground cartoonist, Skip Williamson, and they could have used a good copy-editor. But between the whiff of vanity publication and the amateurish editing, they're actually great! Skip Williamson is a funny writer--he writes as if he's telling you a longish shaggy-dog story in a bar, and his use of language (as anyone who has read his comics knows) is interestingly florid. I wish it had been organized a little better, and hadn't been so episodic--there are spaces between the anecdotes he shares that I would like to have heard more about. At the very least, I'd like to see the trajectories of his career, his various relations, his life in Chicago (and why he moved to Atlanta), etc. As it is, we get glimpses of these things. The two books are kind of a "greatest hits" collection. Readers of Pan will be especially interested in Williamson's adventures in Atlanta's art scene as related in Spontaneous Combustion . Flesh mostly deals with underground cartoonist Skip Williamson's time as an art director for various naughty magazines, including a long stint as an art director for Playboy . Like Spontaneous Combustion , it's highly readable if scattered. Williamson self-published both books as short Kindle books, but what would have been better would have been a single book in which the essays were sliced up and reassembled into a single, full- length auto-biographical narrative. In short, these books would have benefited from having an editor. As it is, they are quite entertaining if sometimes a little confusing as far as chronology goes.