Broken Frontier

My teenaged mind never knew what hit it that Sunday afternoon in the lobby of the Ambassador Hotel. Taking a break from the rigors of the monthly Los Angeles Comic Book and Science Fiction Convention, I eagerly read through a comic book that looked like nothing on the stands at the time, before or since.

The book had a simple white cover, in the center of which floated a bizarre and mysterious object. It’s odd how I remember it: a bright green tuber with gemlike red eyes, colored in simple flat tones yet simultaneously pulsing with life. Larry Marder’s Tales of the Beanworld was about to create an ecological shift in my thought process, and it might have been impossible for me to prepare myself for the way this simple book would change the way I viewed the world.

It’s not easy to explain what made me buy that first issue of Tales of the Beanworld. Though, I’d missed out on previous icons in the black-and-white pantheon like Cerebus and American Splendor, the first parody-laden issue of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (might have) arrived shortly before. Yet the Beans didn’t market on any of the familiar trappings of the adventure comics of yore. The nearest antecedents for the Beanworld were Herriman’s Krazy Kat, or Edwin Abbott’s mathematical romantic satire, Flatland.

How would I actually describe what I found in that comic? An alternate universe? A social allegory? A discourse on the roles that we take in the food chain? Perhaps it would be quicker to simply explain the way things work in the Beanworld.

The Beanworld is a small wedge of land, inhabited by a small tribe of Beans. Their Hero is a fellow named Mr. Spook, an angry fellow who carries a fork. Mr. Spook leads the Beans into the realm of the Hoi Polloi Ring Herd to forage for chow. After the violent exchange, Mr. Spook presents the Hoi Polloi with a sprout-butt, which the Hoi Polloi then serenade into chow, which is divvied up and used for gambling. The Beans take their chow and turn it into food. It’s a simple system, and as long as everyone keeps up their part everything works.

Get it? Yeah, I thought not. Maybe that’s why every issue of Tales of the Beanworld came with a handy glossary.

The characters of the Beanworld were really a very simple bunch. In the beginning, Gran-Ma’Pa, the spiritual and physical guardian of the Beanworld (a giant tree between the legendary edge and the proverbial sandy beach), provides the sprout-butts which lubricate the cycle of life. Mr. Spook, the Hero, was a crack commander. Mr. Spook leads the other beans on their dangerous Chowraids as Spear Fling’n Flank’rs (whose job it is to enrage and separate the defensive Hoi Polloi, encircled to protect their beloved Chow) and Chow-Pluk’rs (whose job is to retrieve the Chow from the thrashing, giant Hoi Polloi). Professor Garbanzo, the Thinker, was pragmatic, experimental, and logical, always searching for new inventions and ways to see the world. There was the Boom’r Band, the musicians, whose wild scat-style speech patterns grew less and less understandable as time went on, and whose tunes inspired the dancing that stimulated the Beans’ appetites. They provided the entertainment for the Beans as the book began. For the Beans it was often said, “The life Gran’Ma’Pa provides is perfect as long as we each follow our given jobs.”

It seemed like a perfect ecological system until a foreign invader came and disrupted everything! While searching for parts for one of Proffy’s new inventions, Mr. Spook finds a first clue that things are changing fast: a small ring of Hoi Polloi have been skinned and harvested for their flesh. Their gruesome fate: to be slaughtered and canned as luncheon meats for the Mirthful Mossy Mammoth.

For those of you who are completely perplexed, if the Mossy Mammoth were to decimate the Hoi Polloi population, the Beans would have no way to turn the sprout butts into the vitality enriching Chow. In other words, they’d have no way to make food. How would the Beans avert this catastrophe? That’s a question which only Gran’Ma’Pa could answer. Of course, answer it s/he did.

After the Beans averted their world’s most imminent doom, their world was placed in a state of flux. Other Beans “Broke Out,” developing new skills to earn their bath in the Chowdown Pool. One of the more prevalent began shortly after healing a krink’led leg by the Hoi Polloi. The young Bean takes to looking and seeing the various shapes floating around the Four Realties that buoy the Beanworld, and which Proffy used as parts for her tools. The Bean finds some used experimental parts and creates the Beanworld’s first picture, and then subsequently Breaks Out as Beanish, the Artist.

Here’s the thing, the more I try to explain Tales of the Beanworld, the more it defies definition. Was it a metaphor for a passionate environmentalist view of the world? Was it a political allegory for the way governments and their people interact? Was it an exploration of the human condition and an examination of the soul? It could have been all of those things and more. Certainly Tales of the Beanworld was Larry Marder’s labor of love, a book that inspired so many more thoughts, ideas and joys.