Carry on the good fight in your own unique creations!" (Alex Toth). "Excellent textural/design/tonal delights in B&W-and fine color pieces, too, by gosh!. Heartbreaking, bewildering, mystical and honestly wonderful in so many ways" (Frank Thorne).
I thought Bode's stuff was the supreme visual-text catharsis in this medium. Phantasmagoria is so very interesting in so very many ways. "My modest research into the world of zines is over.I've now seen the ultimate. "I really don't think you're producing a 'comic book,' but something much beyond that-on the order of visual narrative, or narrative and pictorial poetry -you're upgrading the field, in another way, and I salute that" (Burne Hogarth).
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"Thank you for caring enough about art and philosophy to produce a series of delightfully beautiful magazines" (Arnold Fenner). A truly fine work loaded with thought-provoking imagination-tripping detail, a marvelously inspired series of pictures" (Tom Sutton).
"Again and again I find myself paging through your wonderful book about the fish. "A pleasure from cover to cover" (Jaxon). Over the years its art and stories were praised by dozens of comics and SF artists: ".To encounter the combination of excellences -in concept, writing, lettering, layout, draughtsmanship, rendering, and production-all in one person, is downright frightening! A really beautiful job" (Kelly Freas). It was a limited-edition publication before its time, sold originally at prices to compete with newsstand-periodicals or other prozines of far less costly printing. PHANTASMAGORIA's every issue set higher standards of quality for reproduction-tinted inks, hand-finished negatives, glorious color printing. PHANTASMAGORIA served also as a significant extension of an artist/author's creative vision into the technology of reproduction and printing. The closest venture to PHANTASMAGORIA may have been Frank Zappa's Barking Pumpkin Records.
Although comics would later see several creator-controlled publishing houses, few if any other than PHANTASMAGORIA attempted to introduce ideas and material that transcended the conventional framework of mass-market commercial culture. It was critically acclaimed for its rich concepts and renditions and excellence in production values, an idea too soon before its time: a creator/publisher developing a direct access to his public, to challenge ordinary notions of what was commercially publishable. Sales of that set of prints funded the first issue and inaugurated a modest venture in quality self-publishing unique in popular culture.ĭuring its first phase of existence (until 1983), when it competed for his time as a professor of philosophy, Phantasmagoria yielded 7 books & over 20 portfolios. In 1970 Kenneth Smith advertised a portfolio of fantasy art which would eventually be incorporated into his book/magazine PHANTASMAGORIA.