In which Mike is briefly cheered by the thought of a dead dog.

§ July 30th, 2008 § Filed under wood eye Comments Off on In which Mike is briefly cheered by the thought of a dead dog.

So here are a couple of covers I assembled for our local small-press comics anthology digest Wood-Eye, from back in my mini-comics days:


That first one is Wood-Eye #11 from July 1997, and if you’re familiar with pulp magazines or Golden Age comics, you’ve seen this terrible, terrible ad I used to create this cover. As I recall, we had a collection of old, beat-up comics and pulps come in, and just running around loose in the box was a torn-off back cover for a pulp magazine featuring this ad. I couldn’t match it up with any of the pulps in the box, so I ended up just keeping it.

Now, had it been ten years later, I would have scanned the thing and threw it up on the site, here (though I know, without even checking, that ad is somewhere on the internet). But, hey, we were in the midst of our mini-comics-producing mania, and I thought “hmmm, bet I could make a good Wood-Eye cover out of that.” Well, some would say I lost that bet, but that cover still amuses me. And by “amuses,” I mean “depresses me immensely when I look in that poor dog’s eye, as it pleads with me to give it a home,” and then I remember the dog they used for that ad has been dead for decades, and that makes me feel a little better…until I realize what I just thought and fall into depression again.

Okay, moving on….


That’s my pop! Wood-Eye #12, the last in the series, came out in July 1998…wow, a year between issues…I’m almost Frank Miller-esque in my timeliness. Still a better record than Ultimate Hulk Vs. Wolverine, however. Anyway, for that cover I used a photo of my dad from his teenage years, taken from a 1961 newspaper clipping. I think it was from a model-making competition or club my dad participated in at a local sporting goods store, and not from a police report, so I better not see any cracks like that in my comments section.

So, yeah, ten years since the last issue of Wood-Eye. That’s a very oddly specific way of making one feel old. I occasionally think about doing another issue, but…well, we’ll see. As a publisher, I make a good comic shop manager, but doing the comic was fun, if a bit of a time sink and not exactly a money-maker. But there is an undeniable bit of satisfaction in having the final printed product in your hands, even on this exceedingly low level of the publishing scale.

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