The work was a bit crude. Yes.  It was a small book. OK.  Some of the whimsical violence and sex seemed at first glance to be merely gratuitously outrageous.  But the deftness and novelty with which the story shifted from one point of view to another seemed truly astonishing to me.  The story also had a circular narrative arc.  The last page (the back cover in this case) moved right into the first page again.  This is where I got the idea to make my own story circular in just this way.



There were lots of pictures and windows and doors.  Most of the action took place in what seemed to be a central room that was continually reinventing itself.  The action might depart by morphing into different shapes or vanishing into a picture; but it would come back again and again. I loved the idea that the “room” was a kind of theatrical arena where the action took place.  The walls of this room seem deliberately artificial (when the gun blows a hole through one, we see only black space).  And I absolutely adored the transitions!



As I first read it, it seemed merely whimsical; and then gradually I realized that human reproduction (as well as spin-off sub issues) was its theme.  Yes, there is sex (important for sales in the head shop underground market) but there are also multiple version of “storks” (the birds which bring the babies).  The space ships become penises and then sperm.  They take on egg like cargo.  They transform into organic shapes.  The “play” between the images is extraordinary!  There is no way I could do it justice to it in a verbal description, so I have reproduced the entire story here.

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Perhaps, the biggest influence that this “little” story had on me was a realization of the power and potential that a traditional comic book frame could have.  I particularly liked the fish tank pull back.  It even now reminds me of some of those videos that illustrate scale by pulling back from something small (an atom, a couple having a picnic, a guy NYC’s in Central Park) to something much larger (the galaxy, the universe, etc.).

In the photos of me in my “Eraserhead” apartment in early 1982 one can see lots of hints of what I was working on; but if one looks closely, one will notice I am actually reading this little comic by Victor Moscoso.  I can not overstate the influence that this had on me.