***
At this point, it is worth noting the literary adjective ‘Cometbus-esque’ that has come into use over the years—lacking a wider body of other literary heroes to refer to, punk literary types have come to describe most pseudo-literate fanzines as ‘Cometbus-esque’. It is true that most fanzines bear some debt to the genre-defining Cometbus in terms of content and style, and ethical considerations. Aesthetically, ‘Cometbus-esque’ is any zine that utilizes high-contrast, black-and-white Xeroxes, or rasterized images taken from old 1960s newspapers, blown up on a photocopied. This luddite, lo-fi aesthetic, borne of necessity, is now consciously being reproduced by Internet-era zine writers who romanticize the analog. Strangely enough, the punk lifestyle scene has unconsciously molded itself to Cometbus’s often cartoonish representation of it, like participants in a reality TV show who alter their behavior based on what they’ve seen characters on other reality shows do. So powerful is the effect of the long-running zine, that there is today an entire generation of people who read it in their malleable adolescence and now can’t help but view their own lives through Cometbus-colored glasses. The lead singer of a cult early-2000s punk band called Abe Froman described this effect in a song addressed to the zine writer, titled “Dear Mr. Elliot”, the lyrics of which described an inferiority complex in the face of the persistence of Cometbus’s stories:
Thanks for your help but your stories make me have no voice of my own
My whole life, when compared to yours is really lame
You don’t even know me, you don’t even know my name
Cometbus’s moral fortitude is such that much of his progeny have a reactionary kind of ingrained guilt—any interaction with commerce or ‘the mainstream’ feels contraband and transgressive—like a kid that’s raised vegetarian that grows up and moves out but still sneaks around when he eats meat. It is a strange fate that the steadfastly earnest efforts of Cometbus have, like everything else, lengthened a shadow. The zine has pioneered an entire genre of progeny and copycats—I know a guy who does a zine who is considered “The Canadian Cometbus”—then there is the notorious traveling kid who goes by the name “Aaron Vomitbus” Now, in certain circles, when someone tells an anecdote involving sentimental affirmation of life—such as, say, finding a twelve-pack of beer in the woods and then meeting a pretty girl to share it with, a kind of ironic self-awareness kicks in. It is not simply just a sweet anecdote, but “like Cometbus” or “Cometbus-esque.”
***
There is a cynical suspicion that accompanies writers and musicians who refuse to engage with the market—that perhaps they weren’t able to ‘make it’ and thus turned to negation as a gimmick, a kind of ‘you can’t fire me, I quit’ mentality rather than evidence of genuine conviction. Cometbus has been for zines what Fugazi was to independent music—the progenitor of an entire community and strict ethical guidelines for engaging with commerce (Cheap products, total creative control, no publicists, no PR, no mainstream exposure) When asked during an interview with Punk Planet if he would ever work with a big publisher, Cometbus relied, “People have come to me—I have a list … and when you start talking numbers, talking price … I can sell 11,000 copies of an issue for $2 each. And they’re offering to do a 1,000 at 10 bucks apiece.” While self-publishing is obviously problematic in many ways (much of what is self-published is unreadable crap) Cometbus is the inheritor of subterranean literature of the 50s and 60s, of a world that is rarely represented unless it represents itself. A trade paperback that you buy at Barnes and Noble has to first be injected with perceived value by a top-down PR campaign—blurbed by notable figures, reviewed in prestigious publications, featured on NPR, excerpted in literary journals. Even then, a mass-market book has to surpass the roar of its own publicity to keep readers from saying, “This isn’t as good as I expected it to be.” as was the case with much-hyped fiction like Lowboy. In contrast, Cometbus relies on a much more simple, grassroots approach—the zines slowly acquired value as they passed from hand to hand, people liking the work and giving it to a friend.
Zines are a low-hurdle medium in terms of the readers’ expectations—most people expect so little when they open a photocopied pamphlet, that they are impressed when its well-written and interesting. Cometbus is an incredible subterranean archive, a venerable one-man WPA project for the underground; but the world it embodies seems now historical rather than current and relevant: handwritten letters, posted fliers, run down cafes is now a kind of sweet and sentimental physicality that is under constant threat by the data cloud. Faced with new increasingly digitized generations, there is the question of whether Cometbus will at all be relevant to internet-age youth since it is only available in print—is anything that doesn’t appear on a blog or that isn’t iPad compatible destined to become an idiosyncratic cultural artifact in the papers of some college library? Only time will tell, but the answer is probably yes. The other problem is Cometbus’s audience, who, as they get older, often come to view zines as something they were into when they were young and that they grew out of—a nostalgic part of their personal history. They want to read ‘real’ books, ‘real’ newspapers. And while other writers are malleable and willing to adapt themselves fluidly to the times by starting blogs, Twittering, and digitizing, Cometbus is not. He remains true to his idealized vision of what a writer should be: being mostly occupied with the quality of the work, rather than if the way its being disseminated is gaining the author social capital. Perhaps history will look fondly upon those who don’t go with the flow, but instead stand strong against its current.
