"Love's Savage Fury" by Mark Newgarden, 1986.
Not many experiences can compare to the thunderclap of reading Mark Newgarden's deconstructive examinations of the gag comic format for the first time. In this famous strip, first published in RAW #8, Bazooka Joe and Nancy are forcibly dragged into the netherworld of the New York City subway system and experience a "missed connection" that reconfigures our understanding of sequential narrative.
The critics: “Newgarden’s dense, formally experimental work began appearing regularly in RAW from the publication’s first issue. ‘Love’s Savage Fury,’ a narrative about the failure to find love on the subway, is based on a personal advertisement Newgarden read in a newspaper. The characters who Newgarden chose to star in this story were also drawn from mass culture: the lead character of Ernie Bushmiller’s comic strip Nancy and Bazooka Joe, the main character in a series of comic strips printed on bubble gum wrappers manufactured by the Topps corporation. More than an act of détournement, ‘Love’s Savage Fury’ intensely deconstructs the visual appearance of Bushmiller’s Nancy as a meditation on heartbreak, memory, and the iconic precision of those widely known fictional characters who exist within the public imagination.” – Bill Kartalopoulos, Formula Bula 7, Paris.
