J.J. Komix Vol. 1 No. 1 (Jan./Feb. 1940) is sometimes called the El Dorado of early comics, not because of its literary or artistic merits but solely on the basis of rarity.  Only two copies are known, one (the “Haversack” copy) in near-mint condition and the other (the “Bagpuice/Pupnik” copy) in poor-average condition (cover creases, yellowing, some pages sawtoothed).  The mag never sold well, and the long-defunct (1942) Green Ace Novelty Co. of Hooterwell, N.J., which printed and distributed it, left no records.  J.J. Komix was ignored in the great wave of comic collecting that erupted after WW II and shows no sign of abating, because it was so obscure, shoddy and unappealing. 

At the time when talking animals were fading and superheroes in the ascendant, this little ill-conceived, smudgy and nearly illegible rag offered no thrill of novelty to a potential pre-teen reader.  It was an Aesopian fable with philosophical-religious overtones written in an impenetrable stage-Irish prose four reading levels over the head of its most likely audience.  A recipe for failure, echoing many other fiascos in the life of James Joyce, its writer.  He had failed as a language teacher, though he was famously multi-lingual, failed as a silent-movie-house operator, though he was fascinated by popular culture and loved to “borrow” ideas from such early comic strips as Krazy Kat, The Katzenjammer Kids and Mutt and Jeff, failed as a popular novelist, though he wrote the last and bulkiest Victorian novel (Ulysses). 

This idiosyncratic, perhaps lunatic, venture by Green Ace Novelty may have been a last-ditch attempt to thrust the young medium of comic books into the roaring mainstream of modernism.  It may have been a desperate venture to bail a Depression-era job printer out of debt.  It may have been an inspired vision anticipating the graphic novel/grown-up comix movement of the 1990s.  Whatever its unsolved mysteries, it is a beacon to assiduous comix collectors to probe further into the dark corners and recesses of the genre, to find other rare and hidden gems in the deep, rolling oceans of pop culture. ###

            —Roland Syndix,  President, KomiKollektors of America Ltd.

jpt is privileged to present here a unique reprint of the ultra-rare J.J. Komix Vol. 1 No. 1, to commemorate our own first anniversary of printing The Journal of Provincial Thought Vol. 1 No. 1.  Publications that bear this seal are likely to endure, however scarcely, forever.  The printing was prepared from the so-called Bagpuice/Pupnick copy, made available to us by a prominent collector who wishes to remain anonymous.  The original text was lifted directly from James Joyce’s then-recently-released  Finnegans Wake, a massive and impenetrable writing which has defeated all attempts at simple understanding for nearly 70 years.  It may be, as acerbic critic Edmond “Killer” Veelson once said, “The world’s most turgid shaggy-dog story.”  Or it may be the modernist monument praised by Hugh Kennel, who said, “Never to be surpassed or suppressed or soupraised or superating, a cow’s breakfast threw where riverrun past eve and adams . . .”

            —The editors