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Bughouse
BugHouse is cartoonist Steve Lafler's graphic novel about the life of a jazz band of the same name. Set in an "insect noir" Manhattan of the early fifties, BugHouse is built on an ensemble of characters, who are essentially human beings with bug-like features. Tenor saxophone maestro, Jimmy Watts, leads his talented band of bugs from the swing era into the uncharted maelstrom of Bop. And as he and his band mates claw their way to the top of the jazz world, they must fight the temptation to be consumed by addiction to a substance known as "bug juice" (users of bug juice cook the drug over flames and suck it in through their antennae). Never has a more "human" portrait of drug addiction been portrayed, and never before has the art of music felt more alive and real on the printed page.
- GenresComicsGraphic Novels
208 pages, Paperback
First published October 21, 2002
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 19 reviews
March 20, 2020
Bughouse is a jazz band, fronted by sax player, Jimmy Watts. The band's star is on the rise, but will Jimmy’s bug juice habit bring it all crashing down?
Oh yes. One more thing. All of the characters are anthropomorphic bugs.
I don't know if there's some metaphor at work here along the lines of the cats and mice of Maus, or whether Steve Lafler just felt like drawing everyone as insects. I certainly don't think I’ve seen any interviews where he's commented on it. It seems like a riff on some of the imagery of Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, which ties it into the whole 50's beat era feel of the book.
The story’s structure is a bit odd, with some abrupt jumps back and forth in time. It fits in with the mood Lafler is going for, and may also be an artifact of this book's creation. If my memory serves me correctly, it was originally published in shorter sections, which were then cut up and mixed with new material to tie everything together (and yes, the idea of cut ups ties back to Burroughs as well.)
The result is a quirky, idiosyncratic graphic novel full of memorable characters and scenes. I’m particularly fond of the page where the band plays after Jimmy announces, “This next song is called ‘Big Cats, Dancin’ Cats’!” Now that's how you portray music on the comics page!
I’ll admit that part of this book's appeal for me is the whole underground comics scene of the 90's, with which Lafler will always be associated in my eyes. I remember discovering his work (Dog Boy!) around the same time as Joe Matt, J.R. Williams, Dori Seda, Mary Fleener, and countless others. Those not re-living their young adulthood may have a very different reaction to this story.
Steve Lafler is one of those talents deserving of a wider audience. Recommended!
Oh yes. One more thing. All of the characters are anthropomorphic bugs.
I don't know if there's some metaphor at work here along the lines of the cats and mice of Maus, or whether Steve Lafler just felt like drawing everyone as insects. I certainly don't think I’ve seen any interviews where he's commented on it. It seems like a riff on some of the imagery of Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, which ties it into the whole 50's beat era feel of the book.
The story’s structure is a bit odd, with some abrupt jumps back and forth in time. It fits in with the mood Lafler is going for, and may also be an artifact of this book's creation. If my memory serves me correctly, it was originally published in shorter sections, which were then cut up and mixed with new material to tie everything together (and yes, the idea of cut ups ties back to Burroughs as well.)
The result is a quirky, idiosyncratic graphic novel full of memorable characters and scenes. I’m particularly fond of the page where the band plays after Jimmy announces, “This next song is called ‘Big Cats, Dancin’ Cats’!” Now that's how you portray music on the comics page!
I’ll admit that part of this book's appeal for me is the whole underground comics scene of the 90's, with which Lafler will always be associated in my eyes. I remember discovering his work (Dog Boy!) around the same time as Joe Matt, J.R. Williams, Dori Seda, Mary Fleener, and countless others. Those not re-living their young adulthood may have a very different reaction to this story.
Steve Lafler is one of those talents deserving of a wider audience. Recommended!
July 13, 2016
Yuck! So damn boring.
Characters with insect faces are dull to look at.
I quit after the first few pages.
Characters with insect faces are dull to look at.
I quit after the first few pages.
September 17, 2024
Here's a graphic novel that probably needs some background to fully appreciate. It's independent in nature, published by Top Shelf Productions in 2002 long before they were bought by IDW and it's very loose in approach. While there is a vaguely sequential story, it's fragmented into an unusual order that doesn't always seem to make sense, because it's much more about setting a mood and capturing a time than of telling a specific story.
So, while it's about Jimmy Watts, who gets a saxophone for Christmas at seven and grows up into a jazz musician who starts a band called Bughouse, it's really about a much bigger picture with a single musician like Jimmy dwarfed in comparison. It's about music above all, the way that it isn't remotely definable but changes everything anyway. It's about jazz in particular and how it shifted from swing to bop in the forties. It's about the trials and tribulations that individual musicians go through and the constantly morphing collaborations they make. And it's about drugs and how the positive side of drugs fuels the music but the negative side kills everything, as epitomised by Slim Watkins, who's dead in the first panel of the book, in a hit and run while he's high on bug juice.
The vaguely sequential side of this follows Jimmy from his earliest years, getting a new bike and attending Catholic school, through to his retirement in old age, as he reminisces about his life in music. He gets that sax and learns how to play it in new and imaginative ways. He's from Fittsville but enrols in City Music College in Bugtown, where his roommate is Slim Watkins. After they add a third musician, Reggie, on double bass, they start to get serious and think about this as a career. They want to be like the Buggy Eckstone Band, who they go to see live at the Savoy. They get hired instead but soon fired as well for those time-honoured musical differences. And by that point, the bug juice is so readily available that it becomes almost impossible not to indulge; especially when it sparks metaphysical trips during performances. And so Bughouse is born.
However, that story doesn't follow a straight line. Steve Lafler, who both wrote and drew it, isn't interested in building suspense about what might happen next. We know Jimmy lives to old age, so we know he's not going to fry his brain on bug juice, however it might appear at any particular moment. We know Slim dies, which means that his part in Jimmy's story is going to end at some point and someone else will presumably take his spot. I believe the point is that these characters could be any musicians, whether in this anthropomorphic bug world or in ours, and the suspense applies to all of them currently alive. They're all walking that balance beam between genius and death.
The more I think about it, the more the cut-and-paste approach isn't just an homage to William S. Burroughs, who popularised it around the time that this book is set, albeit maybe slightly later in the fifties rather than the forties. It's also an homage to the drugs. Musicians like Jimmy and Slim aren't merely playing music, they're reaching for something transcendental that might manifest itself through their performance and bug juice; which may be this world's cocaine but also feels a little like acid, is a way to tap into that. The result is that they're always living in the moment. It's not about what they did last week or what they might do next week. It's all about right now, man, and it always will be. I think Lafler chose to present this story to echo that.
Given that I've mentioned bugs in a dozen different ways already, I should get round to stating in no uncertain terms that Lafler's characters are drawn like human beings who happen to have the heads of insects. Why, I have no idea, except to play along with the ever present bug theme. They aren't one specific type of bug; Lafler runs the gamut of the species. However, they all have arms and fingers just like we do, all the better to play those musical instruments with. Only their heads (and the antennae sticking up from them) differentiate them from us.
I liked this book while I was reading it, but it certainly didn't knock my socks off. Part of that was the way it seemed to be about Jimmy Watts but wasn't really or being broken up into sections that didn't always seem to be in the right place. I wondered as I was reading why Lafler had chosen to frame his story this way. It's also drawn in deceptively simple black and white, appropriately given that it takes place in the era of film noir, with plenty of nods to that genre in drugs and detectives and gangsters and whatnot.
However, I have to say that I liked it more as a subtly blurred memory. Right now, I still remember Jimmy and Slim and Julie and a bunch of other characters. As time passes, they'll blur too, but the general feel will abide. As I mentioned early in my review, this is about a mood and a time and the more I learn about jazz, the more sense it'll make. Is Buggy Eckstone meant to represent a single real jazz musician? Is Jimmy Watts? I don't know enough about jazz to tell. It feels like they might indeed and there's a passing of the torch going on in the background.
Maybe it doesn't matter at all and, as long as we feel what it was like to be a jazz musician in the forties, then Lafler's done a good job. And, while it doesn't feel immersive while reading, it feels more and more immersive when thinking about it afterwards. I don't have the other two books in the series, 'Baja' and 'Scalawag', but it looks like they work in a similar way. Given how this initial book works, I have a feeling they'll add new moods and times into the mix. I'll keep my eyes open.
Originally posted at the Nameless Zine in August 2024:
https://www.thenamelesszine.org/Illus...
Index of all my Nameless Zine reviews:
https://books.apocalypselaterempire.com/
So, while it's about Jimmy Watts, who gets a saxophone for Christmas at seven and grows up into a jazz musician who starts a band called Bughouse, it's really about a much bigger picture with a single musician like Jimmy dwarfed in comparison. It's about music above all, the way that it isn't remotely definable but changes everything anyway. It's about jazz in particular and how it shifted from swing to bop in the forties. It's about the trials and tribulations that individual musicians go through and the constantly morphing collaborations they make. And it's about drugs and how the positive side of drugs fuels the music but the negative side kills everything, as epitomised by Slim Watkins, who's dead in the first panel of the book, in a hit and run while he's high on bug juice.
The vaguely sequential side of this follows Jimmy from his earliest years, getting a new bike and attending Catholic school, through to his retirement in old age, as he reminisces about his life in music. He gets that sax and learns how to play it in new and imaginative ways. He's from Fittsville but enrols in City Music College in Bugtown, where his roommate is Slim Watkins. After they add a third musician, Reggie, on double bass, they start to get serious and think about this as a career. They want to be like the Buggy Eckstone Band, who they go to see live at the Savoy. They get hired instead but soon fired as well for those time-honoured musical differences. And by that point, the bug juice is so readily available that it becomes almost impossible not to indulge; especially when it sparks metaphysical trips during performances. And so Bughouse is born.
However, that story doesn't follow a straight line. Steve Lafler, who both wrote and drew it, isn't interested in building suspense about what might happen next. We know Jimmy lives to old age, so we know he's not going to fry his brain on bug juice, however it might appear at any particular moment. We know Slim dies, which means that his part in Jimmy's story is going to end at some point and someone else will presumably take his spot. I believe the point is that these characters could be any musicians, whether in this anthropomorphic bug world or in ours, and the suspense applies to all of them currently alive. They're all walking that balance beam between genius and death.
The more I think about it, the more the cut-and-paste approach isn't just an homage to William S. Burroughs, who popularised it around the time that this book is set, albeit maybe slightly later in the fifties rather than the forties. It's also an homage to the drugs. Musicians like Jimmy and Slim aren't merely playing music, they're reaching for something transcendental that might manifest itself through their performance and bug juice; which may be this world's cocaine but also feels a little like acid, is a way to tap into that. The result is that they're always living in the moment. It's not about what they did last week or what they might do next week. It's all about right now, man, and it always will be. I think Lafler chose to present this story to echo that.
Given that I've mentioned bugs in a dozen different ways already, I should get round to stating in no uncertain terms that Lafler's characters are drawn like human beings who happen to have the heads of insects. Why, I have no idea, except to play along with the ever present bug theme. They aren't one specific type of bug; Lafler runs the gamut of the species. However, they all have arms and fingers just like we do, all the better to play those musical instruments with. Only their heads (and the antennae sticking up from them) differentiate them from us.
I liked this book while I was reading it, but it certainly didn't knock my socks off. Part of that was the way it seemed to be about Jimmy Watts but wasn't really or being broken up into sections that didn't always seem to be in the right place. I wondered as I was reading why Lafler had chosen to frame his story this way. It's also drawn in deceptively simple black and white, appropriately given that it takes place in the era of film noir, with plenty of nods to that genre in drugs and detectives and gangsters and whatnot.
However, I have to say that I liked it more as a subtly blurred memory. Right now, I still remember Jimmy and Slim and Julie and a bunch of other characters. As time passes, they'll blur too, but the general feel will abide. As I mentioned early in my review, this is about a mood and a time and the more I learn about jazz, the more sense it'll make. Is Buggy Eckstone meant to represent a single real jazz musician? Is Jimmy Watts? I don't know enough about jazz to tell. It feels like they might indeed and there's a passing of the torch going on in the background.
Maybe it doesn't matter at all and, as long as we feel what it was like to be a jazz musician in the forties, then Lafler's done a good job. And, while it doesn't feel immersive while reading, it feels more and more immersive when thinking about it afterwards. I don't have the other two books in the series, 'Baja' and 'Scalawag', but it looks like they work in a similar way. Given how this initial book works, I have a feeling they'll add new moods and times into the mix. I'll keep my eyes open.
Originally posted at the Nameless Zine in August 2024:
https://www.thenamelesszine.org/Illus...
Index of all my Nameless Zine reviews:
https://books.apocalypselaterempire.com/
February 2, 2016
I basically liked this book. It's basically the life story of a guy getting hooked on jazz music. Except that everyone has the head of a bug. I don't know why everyone has bug heads because they all still have human bodies. It just seemed like an excuse to not draw real faces, maybe? It didn't even feel surreal, just out of place. I liked it as a little slice of life comic, but the bug heads just seem out of place.
January 7, 2020
A case of "Action Potential" that didn't get "Kinetic" (if I'm not bungling those science terms).
The meat of the story is SOLID but he should have cut all foreshadowing- main character dying on page one takes away the surprise and distracts your attention to him throughout the book. The same goes for the many dreams of the future that destroy plenty of suspense. Who wants to know a tragic character is going to make it to grandpa age towards the beginning of the story- you need to worry about that kind of thing.
There is NOTHING wrong with Lafler as an artist but spending/sharing on/with a noir-experianced ||\>shadowsmith artist|| would have added to the story where the natural comedy of Lafler's style took away. There's nothing funny about the story unless you're a sober addict and even if you are it still frequently trivializes the darkness of the story.
It's about ascending jazz musicians wrestling with "bugjuice"- a liquid (from a powder that's cooked on an oven) that most mimes crack which they suck in through their antennae. It's nice to know Lafler never got in deep with that level of drugs but he should've ran the plot by someone who did. Those with intimate knowledge will come upon some "it doesn't work that way" scenarios which you need to mind when you go so deep into a subject. What most know is that detectives don't have the time to follow drug addicts everywhere who they know aren't "holding" in an attempt to nab their dealer.
The meat of the story is SOLID but he should have cut all foreshadowing- main character dying on page one takes away the surprise and distracts your attention to him throughout the book. The same goes for the many dreams of the future that destroy plenty of suspense. Who wants to know a tragic character is going to make it to grandpa age towards the beginning of the story- you need to worry about that kind of thing.
There is NOTHING wrong with Lafler as an artist but spending/sharing on/with a noir-experianced ||\>shadowsmith artist|| would have added to the story where the natural comedy of Lafler's style took away. There's nothing funny about the story unless you're a sober addict and even if you are it still frequently trivializes the darkness of the story.
It's about ascending jazz musicians wrestling with "bugjuice"- a liquid (from a powder that's cooked on an oven) that most mimes crack which they suck in through their antennae. It's nice to know Lafler never got in deep with that level of drugs but he should've ran the plot by someone who did. Those with intimate knowledge will come upon some "it doesn't work that way" scenarios which you need to mind when you go so deep into a subject. What most know is that detectives don't have the time to follow drug addicts everywhere who they know aren't "holding" in an attempt to nab their dealer.
February 23, 2020
Set in an "insect noir" Manhattan of the early fifties, BugHouse is the tumultuous story of Tenor saxophonist, Jimmy Watts, as he leads his talented jazz band of "bugs" from the swing era into the uncharted maelstrom of Bop. A good look at drug use and music in the 1950s and 60s. Excellent use of anthropomorphic art, each chatacter is incredibly distinct.
June 14, 2020
A really cool analog for the ups and downs of being a jazz musician in the early 20th Century, drawn in Lafler's distinctive style. Definitely see some Charlie Parker in the main bug.
April 27, 2012
The first book in a trilogy of ‘bug noir’ novels set in the 1950s Jazz era, BugHouse is the story of four musicians (snazzy suit and hat wearing anthropomorphic insects of varying types) who form the Jazz band ‘BugHouse’. Through the eyes of Ralph, Slim, Bones, and Jimmy, readers watch the band from its infancy (and from Jimmy’s childhood) through small gigs, one-night stands, and too much ‘bug juice’ (drugs) to their rise in fame and big record deal (to Jimmy’s elder years). Although the main story is firmly centered in music, interpersonal (interbug?) relationships, and bug juice, there are several side stories worth reading for as well, including a not-very-undercover detective who mucks up constantly while trying to make his big bust. If you are looking for a graphic novel that will make you laugh constantly, this isn’t it. If, however, you are looking for a noir 1950s Jazz-age slice-of-life comic, then BugHouse is worth a read.
Sticking to the dark theme, the majority of BugHouse is an exercise in drawing shadow. Lafler occasionally, though rarely, uses full black frame backgrounds, so most of what the reader gets is exposure to every kind of shading, crosshatching, and creative way to create a dark effect with simple line drawing imaginable. The comic is aptly printed in black and white. Newer comic readers may have issues with the often-jumbled, seemingly out of order frames in this work (especially used to show chaotic activity or the characters under the effect of drugs).
Sticking to the dark theme, the majority of BugHouse is an exercise in drawing shadow. Lafler occasionally, though rarely, uses full black frame backgrounds, so most of what the reader gets is exposure to every kind of shading, crosshatching, and creative way to create a dark effect with simple line drawing imaginable. The comic is aptly printed in black and white. Newer comic readers may have issues with the often-jumbled, seemingly out of order frames in this work (especially used to show chaotic activity or the characters under the effect of drugs).
February 6, 2008
This is a really cool exploration of the evolution of jazz through the thirties and forties, using bugs as substitutes for humans. Lafler weaves a super sharp narrative about musicianship and drug addiction, and how those different things collide and destroy lives. The artwork is crisp and sharp, but the bug-like characters take some getting used to. Probably my favorite work to come out of Top Shelf.
October 3, 2010
This graphic novel probably deserves 5 stars, not sure exactly why I'm withholding one. Both graphically and plotwise it's an excellent look at addiction, music and the seductive world of performance. Maybe the (very minor) reservation is that the jumps in time and space are hard to grab hold of. But that might just be me.
March 2, 2009
If only the art inside was as colorful as the cover. It's not. It is in fact in black and white and rarely exceptional. The story is largely derivative as well. Add a star if you like traditional jazz (or heroin).
April 22, 2010
A collection of short comics done at different points in time pieced together to create a linear narrative about the lives and downfall of a jazz group. Of course everyone is drawn as anthropomorphized bugs but that only adds to the drug and music fueled whimsy of a familiar story artfully told.
September 7, 2020
Graphic novel about anthropomorphic bugs doing Jazz and drugs in 50s Manhattan by an obscure cartoonist, very strange and almost charming! Have no idea how it landed in our hands but I do know we've had it for a long time.
June 16, 2009
Imaginative, involving, authentic-feeling.
February 12, 2013
I think this actually spoke to the Icarus type heights you can reach as a musician, and the pitfalls you can stumble into.
August 10, 2018
Ultimately quite disappointing. Despite everything that happened, I never really cared about any of the characters.
August 11, 2015
I don't know what the four and five star reviews are smoking, this book is seriously boring. It's a struggle to get further than 20 pages.
May 7, 2017
This is a fun simple story about up and coming Jazz musicians with a good helping of drugs, sex, and a bit of a noir aesthetic. The art is basic, but the story has a nice visual flow that is easy to read. I appreciated the mature counter-cultural feel.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 19 reviews