(Editor’s Note: This “conversation” between myself, Justin Giampaoli, and Keith Silva about Bill Sienkiewicz’s Stray Toasters originally ran on Comics Bulletin on April 18, 2013 -- after four and a half years, I thought it would be nice to revisit. Some minor changes have been made to the original posting.)
Daniel Elkin: There are just some things you can't shake, like the image of your child being born, the eyes of your first love, the smell of the hospital room where your grandfather died, a really good club sandwich, eczema. For me, Bill Sienkiewicz's Stray Toasters is one of those things. It haunts me.
Since 2008, I've been toting the Image Comics trade paperback of Stray Toasters through one failed marriage, two changes of career, and three apartments. Throughout all these permutations, this book has stuck with me as a thick mystery, deep in its intent, heavy in its import. Somehow, I've begun to conceive of this book as a fundamentally profound question whose answer, upon arrival, will solve a myriad of my life's issues.
For me, Stray Toasters has become a koan of sorts, testing my progress as a reader, as a thinker, as a seeker of truths. But as of now, the answers it contains have remained shrouded, viscous, fecund, unavailable, and frustrating. I return to this book over and over again trying to unpack its contents and put together its pieces, but time and time again I've only ended up with new questions, slanted thinking, or reverie askance.
Originally published as a four-issue miniseries in 1988 for Marvel's Epic line, Stray Toasters was one of the first books Sienkiewicz both wrote and illustrated. It came on the heels of his collaborations with Chris Claremont (New Mutants), Frank Miller (Elektra: Assassin), Andrew Helfer (The Shadow) and Alan Moore (Brought to Light). Working with these gentlemen seems to have taught Sienkiewicz how to tell a story. In Stray Toasters, he gets to tell his story.
But what is the story? Ostensibly it's a murder mystery. Eleven boys have been drained of all of their vital fluids and have had their brains liquefied and sucked out. These victims are then left in various locations around town, the latest being on the couch of Ed and Alice Crewel, propped up and watching reruns of Star Trek. In addition to these horrors, there's been a woman murdered. Her killer has drilled her eyes out and "wired her system up like a machine." As the officer on the scene says, "She would've worked … if the guy who did this hadn't crossed some wires." Grizzly stuff this — the murder of children and mothers is fraught with all sorts of emotional, psychological, and mythological resonance. In this, Sienkiewicz is not subtle.
Into the mystery of these murders comes criminal psychologist Egon Rustemagik who has only recently been released from the Bosley Mental Institution, having been put there by his former lover, Abigail, who claimed that he abused or killed their child. Rustemagik is also an alcoholic who has the requisite Pink Elephant hallucinations following him around.
From there the plot turns around and into itself, introducing characters like bondage fetishist (and shark enthusiast) Assistant District Attorney Harvard Chalky, a toe-headed lad named Todd, a bloated and festering Doctor Montana Violet, Rustemagik's current lover Dahlia, a lord of the underworld named Phil, mechanical butlers and crows, the aforementioned Pink Elephants, and Mona.
Stray Toasters is an art book. Sienkiewicz pulls out all of his tricks here and as a visual piece of storytelling it is unparalleled — beautiful, horrific, confusing, stunning, enigmatic, uncanny — in this Sienkiewicz shows his mastery, and this book is unquestionably his masterpiece. But it is the story that leaves me with that feeling that I can't shake. It is in this story that my answers lie. I just can't figure them out.
So after working on unpacking The Coffin and Eel Mansions with my fellow reviewers Justin Giampaoli and Keith Silva, I felt it time to turn to them to try and make sense of this book, and thereby, perhaps, make sense of my life.
Fellas?
Justin Giampaoli: First off, I want to thank Elkin for inviting us as fellow archaeologists of the sequential arts on this particular grail quest. It takes some gumption to publicly tackle something that's a persistent personal puzzle. I also think it takes stones as a critic to admit that, although you may be intensely drawn to a work, you don't fully grok all of the intricacies of said work. I've always believed in my role as a critic that if life is a mysterious maze, artists are constructing the walls of a labyrinth trying to make order of it all, to build a way out toward some cosmic meaning, so perhaps critics can help navigate that byzantine chaos, continually looking toward that literary North Star. Let us together bring order to the chaos, gentlemen.
Personal anecdote, in 1987 I remember sitting on the floor of my room (in a house that subsequently burned down, the acrid smell of burnt toast filling the air) when I was in eighth grade. At this point, I'd come up reading a steady diet of Marv Wolfman and George Perez's New Teen Titans, Jim Starlin's cosmic opus Dreadstar (also from Marvel's Epic line), and I'd somehow gotten my hands on early issues of their in-house magazine Epic Illustrated. This was most certainly for mature readers, but my counterculture parents always encouraged such things. I recall seeing a full page ad for Sienkiewicz's Stray Toasters. I knew only peripherally (growing up largely a DC kid) that he was that "weird" artist on that book New Mutants that I didn't read. I highly doubt my 13 year old brain could have successfully navigated what would have then seemed little more than a word collage, nor was my eye yet visually attuned to such stylized art, but the memory was something I couldn't shake. It imprinted because it seemed so foreign. It's now mysteriously reentered my life 26 years later. Everything happens for a reason. Is this why I met Daniel Elkin? I wonder if Elkin likes his sandwiches toasted?
That said, this was my first (three) read(s) of Stray Toasters. While maddening at times for reasons we'll surely get to, I'll say for now that I was immediately drawn in by the fascinating central mysteries the work offers, and by the superimposed blend of genres Sienkiewicz was working with. There's this neo-noir detective procedural skimming the very surface. There's a PKD sense of sci-fi futurism, with sentient robots, low female survival rates, 97 dogs left on the entire planet, and the dystopian visage of a bleak, tagged-up Statue of Liberty. We've got this creepy-as-hell torture porn swimming in horror elements, all wrapped up like Laura Palmer in a Se7en style psychological thriller that predated David Fincher's filmic escapades by a decade. Sienkiewicz shoving these disparate genres together was quite avant-garde, nobody was really blending genres in mainstream comics back then.
I think you guys know that I started out professionally working in federal law enforcement, so I tried to engage with the work like I was legendary FBI profiler John Douglas, to approach it somewhat forensically and recreate the narrative, which is obtuse and non-linear. My mind tends to work in bullet points, so, if I may, I'd like to identify some of the walls in the maze, to reassemble what I believe the sequence is in order to answer Elkin's semi-rhetorical question "But what is the story?" for my own benefit, for the benefit of our mutual understanding as a launch platform, and perhaps for the benefit of any readers coming into this cold. If you can establish a timeline, you can infer causality, with causality you can consider motive, establishing motive leads to identity, and somebody said this was a murder mystery. That said, uhh, spoilers ahead, I guess?!
Dahlia has a baby. She wants Dr. Montana Violet to kill it because she believes it is evil due to her misguided religious zealotry. The baby is Todd. He's not evil. He's autistic.
Dr. Violet does not kill the boy. Despite conducting arcane and unethical medical experiments, he saves Todd out of a dichotomous sense of dedication to the Hippocratic Oath.
Todd's Savant Syndrome compels him to create robot guys in the image of Tuxedo, his cat, whom his mother killed. The robots provide warmth and an interpersonal connection (both items literally and figuratively) to Todd, in lieu of his absentee parent(s).
Todd ends up with a woman named Dissler who secretly attempts to raise him. She's ultimately killed by a Toaster (one of the stray robots).
Todd is then taken in by Abby, who is Dissler's psychologist.
Abby had a prior relationship with Egon Rustemagik. They lost a child together. Abby blames Egon for this and was instrumental in having him institutionalized for a time.
Dahlia is killing children in a psychopathic effort to excise the "evil" Todd, who she suspects is still alive and "coming for her."
Tuxedo Toaster is basically sentient and is killing what it believes to be unworthy mothers in a misguided effort to protect Todd and serve as a surrogate parent.
Egon Rustemagik, the criminal psychologist, is called in to investigate these murders (everyone mistakenly assumes there's a single killer). Egon is an alcoholic who sees flying pink elephants.
Egon has a current sexual relationship with Dahlia.
Egon had a former romantic relationship with Abby.
As a bonus, we have The Devil himself traveling the Earthly plane on vacation, sending postcards back to his loving family.
It takes a long circuitous route to get there (in fact, I'd submit that for most audiences it's too obtuse for its own good), but ultimately Stray Toasters is the story of Dahlia and Todd getting back at each other for slights, both perceived and quite real respectively, while Egon, Abby, Dr. Violet, and everyone else are all just caught in the middle. Yes, "the family circle is a triangle," with many hard edges.
I have so much more I'd like to discuss in terms of themes, storytelling flaws, influential aesthetics, and the core mysteries that propel reader engagement with Stray Toasters, but for now I'll defer to the resident scholars. Does that about sum up the basic narrative thrust as you guys interpreted it?
Keith Silva: "Follow the bouncing ball … oh-the itsy-bitsy spiiider …"
If my body ever ends up wrapped in plastic or on the edge of a lake or some muddy estuary with a Death's-head Hawkmoth stuck in my gullet, I hope, Justin, you are there to walk back the cat.
Elkin, my friend, I don't know what to say except to lean on my penchant for an insider's weak-ass defense, the wise-ass witticism: "I think my colleagues … we have a quote problem unquote."
As I have already pledged undying fealty to Mr. Sienkiewicz, there seems little at stake in this confession, so here goes: until pushy Elkin (like some mechanical mama-bird) force-fed us his agenda, I choose not to drift too close to this Scylla, this Charybdis, this Stray Toasters. Instead, I choose to cleave to the familiar (The New Mutants,) and the conventional Daredevil: Love and War.
Yes, Elkin, this is Sienkiewicz's masterpiece, his David (who shows up here), his "Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea," — the art of the possible. Why did I stay away for so long? Have you seen Stray Toasters? "I mean shit — appliances? Whud izzissshit?" To pile cliché upon cliché: next to the phrase, "this may not be for everyone," in the comic book critic's omnibus, slouches a picture of Phil, of the electric boy and of the entire Bolle-Happel catalog. I like what you said Elkin, this is Sienkiewicz's "art book." Perhaps, it should hang in a gallery?
My apologies, I'm sputtering on. You want to build some scaffolding around this bitched type, to "[re]introduce this bastard [of a book] to some structure," make some sense of it. Giampaoli provides the forensics: who, what, where and when. (All) we need sort out is how, more, why. Easy, yeah?
Giampaoli sez author, artist and text tasks the critic to "help navigate that byzantine chaos" in search of the proverbial lodestar. Okay. What if (at first) the narrative appears less like fiction and more like life? More like Stray Toasters? In our otaku, we talk (a lot) about the "the unlimited potential of the comic book form" and yet this capacity remains (for the most part) chimerical in the week-to-week and month-to-month cavalcade of the stale and the pedestrian. I know Stray Toasters rests within your ken, Elkin. No one carries something with them through life that doesn't resonate on some level at some frequency.
Where I think Stray Toasters succeeds (and fails) is that it presents as un-plotted, messy, life-like, but in the end for all its many intricate folds and switchbacks, Stray Toasters forms a tight, pre-creased construction; it begins flat — all potential — and by the end, origami-like, it becomes something else, something recognizable, a story, a plot, a narrative. Now, I'm not saying it's not without its raggedness, its wandering plot threads and over cooked narrative crumbs, but the answers — which is, after all, the expectation, the covenant one makes with fiction — appear in the end. Oh, before I forget, I can't imagine anyone would read this in singles. Stray Toasters is, as it's said, "of a piece."
So, Elkin, where to next? Let's go further. Do you want to ask about Phil? Rustemagik's questionable choices in sexual partners? How about what Sienkiewicz has against noses?
Quote unquote.
