The Birth of Faust: Love of the Damned by Tim Vigil and David Quinn
Wave of Mutilation Part 2: The Birth of Faust
Tim Vigil’s first project for Comics Express was Omega, a sci-fi series co-created with inker Paul Martin.
Omega was a big departure from Grips. Vigil tapped into his love of Jack Kirby and Fantastic Four to produce cosmic psychedelia complete with “Kirby Crackle.” The story is the tale of a hiker who stumbles upon a suit of armor and sword in a cave. He later awakes, Rip Van Wynkle style, in the year 3887. Now known as Omega (or later “Omen”), the man joins the fight against the galactic warlord.
Comics Express founder and retailer Wouk Baez showed some of Vigil’s early Omega pages to David Quinn, a playwright and punk singer who frequented his comic shop. Quinn thought Vigil’s art was great, but found the story lacking and told Baez so. “I was sort of cocky,” Quinn admits. But Baez evidently agreed with Quinn’s assessment.
“I had started some pages and had my friend John [Palmer] write it,” Vigil told Comics Kayfabe. “But they didn’t like it.”
Baez introduced Vigil to Quinn while Vigil was visiting New York City in 1987. The two hit it off and agreed to work together on Omega. “David was really easy to get along with, and he listened,” Vigil said. “He took the position of listening to what my ideas were and working with me.”
Quinn grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Like the Brothers Vigil, he was a longtime comics fan with a fondness for Marvel. Dr. Strange was his entry point and the Fantastic Four was another favorite. And like the Vigils, he discovered Underground Comix at an early age. “Ann Arbor was a metropolis of college students, so I could find undergrounds quite easily there,” he says. “I was around 13 when I discovered Richard Corben.”
Quinn went to college first at Amherst College then to City University of New York, where he directed plays for indy theaters and sang in punk and new wave bands such as Dolce Vita. “We played from ’82 to ’86 and made a record produced by guitar god Chris Spedding. If you saw Billy Idol, Lene Lovitch or Thompson Twins on the East Coast, you might have seen us as the warm-up,” Quinn said in an interview at New York Comic Con in 2012. “I credit punk rock with helping me find that primal writing voice.”
Quinn’s punk side is evident in Omega’s mission to overthrow an intergalactic government. But it’s his theater side that really comes through not just here but in so much of his writing. This was the time when the two biggest names in comics writing were probably Chris Claremont and Alan Moore, two notable wordy writers. With the exception of Frank Miller and a few others, it it was expected that “good comics writers” would be loquacious in those days.
Comics Express published an Omega preview ashcan distributed at conventions and then in August 1987 an Omega # 1 “Premiere Edition” with a black frame around the cover art. It was actually billed as a Rebel Studios/Comics Express co-production with the Rebel Studios displayed prominently on the cover.
Omega didn’t go over as well as Baez had hoped, so he suggested that Quinn and Vigil do a series that would appeal more to Grips fans. Vigil agreed to do a more violent, urban-based series but didn’t want to do a story that was similar to Grips. The seed of the idea for what became Faust came from an idea Quinn had for a play. “I was pretty obsessed with Hell, I think from loving John Milton,” Quinn says. From that seed grew a product of both Quinn and Vigil’s imaginations.
“We just talked about who was going to be in the story, what the story was going to be like,” Quinn said in 2012. “[It was] a collision of ideas from both of us, and not self-consciously organized, more direct to the page.”
The result is the meaty stew that is Faust: a story of “John Jaspers,” a former hitman and fine artist who sold his soul to a crime boss known as M; M’s sadistic lover Claire; and Jade, Jaspers’s lover and psychoanalyst. (Yes, that’s a reference to painter Jasper Johns.) However shocking Void Indigo, Miracleman, or Grips might have been a few years earlier, Faust went further. The first issue features Jaspers mutilating several different people, a sex worker exposing her vagina on the street corner, a couple shooting up heroin, and a graphic sex scene. That was only the beginning.
The Road to Hell
The first issue of Faust: Love of the Damned ushered in the Outlaw Comics-era in earnest. But it took some time to see print. Quinn and Vigil left Comics Express before Boez could publish Faust, once again over issues with payments. They soon landed at Northstar, a then-new company founded by Dan Madsen in Blue Island, Illinois.
Northstar reprinted Omega # 1 with a yellow thunderbolt on the cover. This was also dubbed the “Premiere Edition,” leading to some confusion. The Northstar Omega # 1 featured the first appearance of Faust in a four-page preview that wasn’t included in the Comics Express version.
The first version of Faust: Love of the Damned was another “Premiere Edition” from Northstar. This featured a black cover with dripping blood. Amazing Heroes reported its availability in July, 1988, but it might have already been available earlier.
Northstar started out selling directly via conventions and mail order, bypassing distributors. The more widespread release of Faust # 1 came in early 1989, with the famous “severed head” cover. Northstar also reprinted Omega # 1 as Omen # 1, due to a trademark dispute with Marvel Comics, around the same time. Meanwhile, Vigil’s barbarian character Cuda appeared in Caliber Presents in January 1989 alongside the first appearance of James O’Barr’s The Crow. The Outlaw Comics-era had truly arrived.
It’s worth setting the scene a bit. Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns had proven there was a market for “mature readers” comics. However squeamish publishers, distributors, and retailers were, they weren’t about to leave that money on the table. But sex and violence in comics, still seen largely as kids’ medium, remained controversial — Alan Moore’s Miracleman # 15 (1987) and Batman: The Killing Joke (1988) were notable examples. When Faust hit stands, Moore had only recently left DC Comics in part over plans to implement a rating system for comics, though the inciting incident was actually the firing of Marv Wolfman (it’s a long story).
Outside of comics, crime rates were nearing their peak. Drugs and crime were a real problem that people across the political spectrum worried. But media sensationalism entrenched the idea that major cities were gang warzones where no one was safe. Faust, The Crow, and later in 1989, Cry for Dawn, all reflected this growing fear and anxiety of urban living.
New York City was a major inspiration for Quinn while writing Faust. “New York City stood in for Hell in Faust,” Quinn says. “What makes it hell is the hypocrisy and crime, how everything is a lie and money is more important than any other value. You could be wiped out by a crack dealer who only sees you as a way to make a little more money.”
Meanwhile, the Iran-Contra affair compounded growing political cynicism following the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam War, and the Watergate scandal. Huge corporations were shifting what would have been middle-class manufacturing jobs overseas. Income inequality was rising, as was the religious right.
“I was pissed off at the hypocrisy of the 1980s,” Quinn says. “No one was going to come down on us if we had someone killing a drug dealer in the book. We’d be celebrated for it. You could sell that to a kid. But if you bring sex into it, no that’s awful.” Hence, Beef and Hapi shouting “Sex is dirty!” while gunning down the heroin dealer and his girlfriend in Faust issue 1.
Outlaw Comics were inherently political, though different creators had very different political views. Indeed, Quinn and Vigil have diametrically opposed political views. But they were united in a common outrage at the status quo. In the introduction to Faust # 5, Outlaw Comics patron Glen Hammonds wrote: “I see John’s uncontrollable demons as a symbol of America’s growing anger. Anger at gangs, multinational takeovers, and the sellout of America to anyone that can float a loan.”
Legacy
It’s hard to find much contemporaneous writing about Faust, which is part of why I started working on this series of articles. The Comics Journal, one of the few publications that took comics seriously as a medium at the time, largely dismissed Faust.
“Now a George Romero or David Cronenberg can pull you past the shock, or set it so firmly in context that involvement isn’t broken, but Quinn and Vigil pile on the shocks recklessly, with no thought that they’re dismantling their story as they do so,” wrote frequent Journal contributor Darcy Sullivan. “Not that there’s much to dismantle.”
Former Comics Journal editor Dr. Gregory Baisden took a more positive view of Faust, though he too initially dismissed it as mere splatterporn. “I found myself ineluctably drawn (the saying goes) into the book, huddled cold there at my desk, repulsed all at once,” Baisden wrote in his introduction to the Rebel Studios reprint of Faust # 1. “What goes on here? More than meets the eye.”
My experience with Faust was similar. For years I dismissed it as gore-porn excess. But when I finally took some time to pore over it, I found myself inexplicably drawn in, despite its problematic material and Vigil’s support for Trump and the #comicsgate harassment campaign and, more recently, his anti-mask posts on Facebook (I’ll reiterate here that Quinn’s politics are the polar opposite of Vigil’s. Joe Vigil’s politics are also more aligned with Quinn’s than they are with his brother’s.) I have a hard time recommending Faust to most people, but I’m a bit obsessed with it. I’ve been interrogating my own interest in this material ever since.
Quinn has often described Faust as an attempt to tap into something primal. “I was exploring ways to use words and pictures to feel something directly,” he wrote in 2012. “Body and soul as well as head.” That’s one place that Faust inarguably succeeds.
Sullivan’s scathing review did produce one of the most insightful comments on Vigil’s artwork I’ve found anywhere, even if he thought of it as a slight: “Vigil seems bent on forging a new aesthetic of psychedelic beauty of out of physical horror. He renders every twist of unfolding intestine, every flying red globule, as though painting a macabre pointillist still life.”
The artist perhaps most comparable to Vigil is not another cartoonist, but Alex Grey. Like some sage of the land-hand path, Vigil does on the page what John Jaspers tries to do in the story: he turns mutilation into fine art.
Quinn’s writing on Faust is often described as pretentious and overwrought. But it’s hard to imagine Faust without Quinn’s theatrical flare. Much of the feverish effect of the book comes from the prose — it’s one of the few instances where more really is more in comics. His approach was eventually validated when Quinn was nominated for a Bram Stoker award for Faust: The Book of M in 1999.
“My introduction to the reprint was not an endorsement of portrayals of gruesome violence, it was for what Quinn was trying to do,” Baisden tells me. “It’s deeply rooted in psychological issues. The whole thing is cast as a psychodrama, with Jaspers as the subject of psychological analysis and Jade trying to save him from himself.”
“Ultimately, Faust doesn’t say ‘violence is the solution to violence,’ instead Quinn tries to get to the root of violence,” Baisden says. “I don’t think Quinn is going to tell you force is wrong or that violence is wrong. I think he would say violence is corrupting and, in John Jaspers, here’s an individual corrupted by violence. It’s hard for individuals not to be seduced by it.”
Again, it’s worth remembering the context. Quinn and Vigil grew up in the shadow of the Vietnam War — is it any wonder their generation produced slasher movies, splatterpunk novels, and death metal? — and Faust was born into a time when the US was backing authoritarians around the world — including Sadam Hussain in Iraq. “You can’t really disentangle graphic violence in fiction from what’s going on in American culture, which is that we’ve perpetuated violence around the globe, saying it’s justifiable,” Baiden says. “We’ve made a Faustian bargain.”
Faust’s influence was seen almost immediately as new publishers emerged to publish more Outlaw Comics, including CFD, Chaos!, Boneyard, Anibus, London Night Studios, and Glen Danzig’s Verotik. But Quinn and Vigil’s longer-term legacy is more difficult to assess. More recently, Umbrella Academy creator and My Chemical Romance frontman Gerard Way has cited Faust as an influence as have indie artists like Tim Seeley, Jim Rugg, Ed Piskor, Michel Fiffe, and Ben Marra. Those creators have all done mainstream comics work (if you count Marra’s Adventure Time and Bloodshot work), but they’re relatively rare among mainstream creators in citing Quinn and Vigil as influences. Many have drawn parallels between Todd McFarlane’s Spawn and Faust, but the two books are different enough that I can believe McFarlane came up with his book independently. The way Rob Liefeld draws blood reminds me a lot of Vigil’s work — and having worked briefly at Silverwolf, Liefeld would certainly have been familiar with Vigil. But Liefeld told me on Twitter that Vigil was never an influence. Liefeld has cited manga as a big influence, and that’s certainly plausible as Japanese comics were increasingly present in the US market during the 80s and 90s.
Faust’s influence outside of comics is equally difficult to assess. Way, Danzig, Exhumed guitarist/vocalist Matt Harvey, and metal album cover artist Lauren Gornik, are Faust fans. Vigil did a cover for death metal band Banished. It’s hard for me not to see some Brothers Vigil in the animated series Metalacoplypse. But explicit references to his work remain hard to come by.
“I think Tim was more influential than people admit,” Joe Vigil says. “Faust broke the back of censors.” Indeed, Faust’s biggest impact may have been indirect: the freedom it gave other comics creators to explore sex and violence in comics.
“Remember, this was before Wolverine went to Hell (hmmmm, interesting concept, that) and DC superheroes routinely raped, murdered and betrayed each other as they did in the last decade,” Quinn wrote in 2012. “[Faust and The Crow’s] influence echoes in the darker side of comics culture today, for better (The Walking Dead) or for worse (Rapey DC).”
I don’t know if Garth Ennis (creator of The Boys and Preacher) ever read Faust, let alone whether it influenced him. UK comics have their own tradition and influences. Miracleman and what eventually became the Vertigo line (Sandman, Hellblazer, etc.) were already pushing boundaries in as Faust was first hitting stands. But it’s hard to imagine much of Ennis’s more gleefully lowbrow American work — especially his Avatar book Crossed — ever being published without Faust blazing the trail first.
The same can be said for so much of what followed Faust’s initial release. Even if McFarlane and Liefeld weren’t looking at Faust, Quinn and Vigil were kicking down the doors they walked through, making the hyperviolent early Image comics possible, both by proving there was a market for more extreme material (Faust was selling through multiple print-runs) and by proving that you could get away with publishing it.
“When Faust came out, they could have been prosecuted for obscenity,” Baisden points out. The biggest danger was to retailers who sold it. The Comics Journal reported in 1990 that an Orange County comic shop was accused of selling Faust and other adult titles to a minor, though no charges had been filed at the time of the story. “Retailers were scared shitless man,” he says. “Omaha the Cat Dancer had already gotten retails prosecuted. If you showed clits and dicks and asses you were going to get into trouble. Faust went so far beyond all of that.”
But while shipments to Canada and the UK were routinely seized by customs, Quinn and Vigil were never prosecuted for obscenity. That likely gave creators the confidence to go further than they would have otherwise.
“I think Faust was a permission giver,” Baisden says. “I think a lot of creators sat down and thought ‘I can do whatever I want.’”
Northstar gave Quinn and Vigil enormous freedom to work the way they wanted. But trouble on the business side led them to strike out on their own. More on that next time.
Faust/Rebel Studios Series
Part 1: Grips and The Early Works of Joe and Tim Vigil
Part 2: The Birth of Faust: Love of the Damned by Tim Vigil and David Quinn
Part 3: Rebel Studios [Forthcoming]
Plus: More from the Outlaw Comics series
If you want to follow this series, follow Sewer Mutant here on Medium, or subscribe to my email newsletter:
Further Reading/Viewing/Listening
Comics Kayfabe Tim Vigil interview
New York Comicon 2012 interview with Quinn and Vigil
David Quinn’s series of blog posts evaluating Faust through the lens of Pixar’s 22 rules of storytelling: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.
Dark Utopia fansite interview with Quinn
Comic Books Are Burning in Hell episode on Faust with extensive show notes by Joe McCulloch
