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Sorry for skipping days here and there lately…just have a lot of stuff going on, on top of my aged body just being too tired to blog at the late hours that usually are the only time I have for such activity. So, let me get a few topics out of the way today and maybe sometime next week I can get back to the Final ’80s Countdown.
First off, it’s here, it’s here…or rather, they’re here, a sample of the very bullet and casing used to shoot them holes right through the much-discussed-on-this-site Jab #3.
And there they are, direct from Jab #3 contributor and “Too Much Coffee Man” creator Shannon Wheeler his own self. The accompanying note reads “Never let me see you near my girlfriend again!” and the temptation was to just hide this item somewhere in my collection, unexplained, and leave some serious questions behind for anyone eventually handling whatever passes for my estate. But no, here I am blabbing about it on my comic book weblog, which of course has immense worldwide reach so all my secrets are revealed. Ah well.
But big thanks to Mr. Wheeler for offering up this peculiar bit of comic book history (and also for kindly answering my questions about the whole Jab #3 project). Also, I need to add links to the older Jab posts so they get the whole story if they come upon my writings via Google or Ask Jeeves or whatever.
• • •
Next up, reader Cassandra asked if I could post a link to
William Messner-Loebs’ GoFundMe, and yes I can! That poor guy and his wife have had a real time of it for years now, and I most sincerely hope they can get themselves into a comfortable, stable place.
What would be nice is if more of his comic book work were in print and providing him at least a little money. Like, was any of his Flash work collected? A recent DC Pride one-shot had that one story of his with the Pied Piper, but beyond that there wasn’t a lot of comprehensive reprinting of his run, far as I can tell. I don’t think even #50 was reprinted anywhere, and that was kind of a hot issue at the time.
A chunk of his Wonder Woman made it into a trade that could stand reprinting. And how ’bout a nice big archival hardcover of Journey? Or maybe a new printing of Epicurus the Sage? Or just giving him new work if he wants to do it?
Anyway, help him out, even if it’s just spreading the word.
• • •
Sean asked about Pee Wee Herman (RIP the great Paul Ruebens) in comics, and the first thing I thought of was this:
…which, if memory serves, was a kinda/sorta parody of Pee Wee, maybe…it’s been a while since I’ve read it, but it’s something like that. Anyway, there you go.
• • •
Longtime reader Michael G. came by the shop in person and admonished me,
tongue-lashed me in the cruelest manner, for my lack of content this week. But to show me all is forgiven, he gifted me with some Dave Sim
Cerebus trading cards, which are, of course, the Dave Simmest, but you’d be disappointed if they weren’t:
Yup, they’re Swamp Thing-ish…the other cards are nice too, but look, I’m too tired to keep this post going for too much longer, so let’s just throw out one more scan here and call it a night.
• • •
As promised, one more scan, this time from my fanzine collection:
This ‘zine is from 1965, which means Spider-Man had only been around about three years. Weird, huh?
So a long time ago (early summer 1991, judging by the date on the file) customer Dave asked me if I’d like to contribute a cover to his mini-comic Wanted: The Rodent. I apparently agreed, and began production on it.
Pictured above is the main image for the cover, generated on whatever type of Macintosh I had at the time (may have still be the ol’ SE, but I might have upgraded to the LC II at this point). As you can see, I had a thing for that “brick” paint fill, which you saw on my “Hawk the Sensitive Skinhead” strip I showed you a few days ago. And also like that Hawk strip, I asked my dad to use valuable company time and resources to print out a copy or three on the business laser printer.
Once I got those printouts, I proceeded to cut ‘n’ paste my handdrawn image of the book’s hero, that wanted Rodent his own self (an anthropomorphic rat clad in cape and domino mask) on top of the background, which I thought looked reasonably good. I then handed a copy of the piece in to Dave, keeping the original for myself, natch, and at this late date I can’t remember if he ever got around to printing that mini-comic or not. At least, I don’t have a copy of it in my collection (though I do have another, earlier, Rodent comic he did).
And as you can tell by the lack of an image of the final product in this post, I don’t even seem to have a copy of the assembled piece. Or, at least, it’s not in any of the areas where I’ve kept my scribblings. I have folders of drawings of mine dating back to sometime around 1st or 2nd grade, but somehow this finished piece from a mere (checks watch) 30 years ago seems to have gone AWOL.
I can still remember the drawing as if I’d just done it. The upper chest along the bottom edge of the image, slightly right of center, the Rodent gritting his teeth and with a determined look on his face (it was the time for that sort of hero, after all).
Anyway, I still like this image, and I remember liking the final product, even if those “clouds” in the background make it look like the Rodent was about to defend the Earth from giant space doobies. And yes, the phone number is a Star Trek reference. Look, I was a 22-year-old dork, of course that was going to happen.
Watch This Space…if I find a copy of the completed picture I’ll post it here (and let you know in a future post, of course).
EDIT: no, really, WATCH THIS SPACE as I just now found a copy of the final piece…and did get a few details wrong so I’ll update later today. (No scanner at home so it’ll have to wait ’til I’m at work.)
EDIT 2: as promised, the final assembled image!
A couple of note: my memory that I had my dad print that background for me on a laser printer was incorrect, as I obviously printed the pic on…something a little more primitive. The old dot-matrix-y Imagewriter, maybe? Anyway, it was very light in color, which I contrast adjusted for the scan here.
Also, I could’ve sworn I had the Rodent with a clenched fist raised up in front of him, like he was ready for a fight. I guess the gritted teeth expressed that enough!
So my former boss Ralph was at my shop this past weekend, helping me out with some things and stuff. I still had the Gouda Gazettes featuring in a post here last week, and being that it was from Ralph’s store I originally obtained these back in the ancient 1980s, I took the opportunity to ask him if he had any more details on these. I was wondering who these guys were, about how old they were, if they did more issues than this, that sort of thing.
Alas, Ralph didn’t even remember having these in his shop, so no more info was forthcoming. However, I did ask him if he remembered carrying another ‘zine at about the same time, and he did — 60 Miles North from 1983:
Now undoubtedly you see how it’s packaged here, which brings me to Keef’s comment from last week:
“What do you use for Zine storage? Modern boxes are too big. I found some weird boxes at Office Depot that work if you use ‘em sideways, but… I’ve always wanted something proper.”
As you see above, Keef, I just put ’em in a regular ol’ bag and board and then store them in a standard comic storage box. There are probably other storage solutions involving differently sized boxes, but I feel this is the simplest solution, using (usually) readily available supplies. I mean, I could bag ’em all up in paperback sleeves, or digest sleeves, and so on, but this way the storage box is uniform with others, and the comics inside are in mostly uniform protective packaging. Given the wide variety of sizes ‘zines like this can come in, putting them in bags and boards like this keeps the smaller ones from getting lost in the shuffle.
The Gouda Gazettes are a little wider, so I had to put those in Silver Age bags and boards:
…but even still, bagged and boarded, it fits nicely in the box along the much smaller, but still in a standard bag/board, Things Not to Say to a Comic Shop Employee by a young cartoonist of some note:
…which, by the way, you can read right here.
The smallest comics thingie in my collection is this mini, Baby! from my pal Fred, measuring about 2 1/4 by 2 1/4 inches:
…but it folds open into a larger work. And the pic’s a bit blurry…sorry about that, but just as well as that cover’s a little naughty.
So Keef, I hope that helps. Rather than trying to find protective packaging and storage to fit the variously-sized mini-comics and ‘zines, it’s easier to make them fit into the boxes you’ve got. Easier to find the supplies you need, easier to keep them organized…because you never know when you’ll have to pull your copy of this comic out of your collection:
Continuing the nostalgia trip from Wednesday’s post are these two free ‘zines which I picked up in the early ’80s at Ralph’s Comic Corner, the Ventura, CA comic shop that would, just a few short years later, eventually become my place of employment.
Here is issue #1 of Gouda Gazette:
…and here is #2:
I don’t know if these were the only two to come out. If there were more, I never saw them. These were 8 pages (two folded pieces of paper, unstapled), mostly handwritten text with illustrations, like this example from the poetry pages the comprised the centerspread of both issues:
…as well as the occasional comic strip:
The last page was given over to a continuing story titled “Beach Pad Blowout ’83” (with part one coming out in 1983, and part two in the second issue from ’84). This tale involved The Rats themselves, the group of folks responsible for the production of this publication (who went by names like “Mojo,” “Doodle,” “Mellow Roast,” and Squeaker,” though their secret identities were given in a credits box).
I can find no information online about them, which, I suppose, shouldn’t be a huge shock. Best I can surmise is that they were a comedy performance group of some sort, as the second issue contains the blurb
“Come see The Rats at Ventura College Theatre perform their political satire ‘Twisted World’ Jan. 29th 9:00 P.M. Yeah!”
Well, darn, 37 years later I’m kind of wishing I’d gone to see that. You know, put some of those names to faces.
Anyway, these two artifacts have been floating around in my possession for decades, in that I knew I never threw them out but I also never had any idea where I had them stored. A rational person would have kept them with my other comics and magazines, but they always seemed to end up in storage boxes with other papers.
Since this week I’d been digging through boxes looking for old computer stuff, I came across them again, and this time I made sure to 1) put them in bags and boards to continue to preserve them (surprisingly they’re still in pretty good shape) and 2) PUT THEM IN THE ‘ZINES BOXES WHERE THEY BELONG. Now, when I’m 70 years old in 2039, I’ll be able to go right to them when I want to look at them again.
…so please accept this scan of a Linda Ronstadt book from 1978 in its stead:
I currently have this up on the eBay, so I’m using this as an excuse to plug my eBay auctions, I guess.
Oh, this does remind me, I did recently list some other music-related magazines that may be of interest to funnybook fans, such as these issues of the music ‘zine Who Put the Bomp. Issue #7 from 1971 has a cover by underground comics artist George Hansen:
…while #9 from 1972 has a cover by another underground cartoonist, Jay Kinney:
Later the mag shortened its name to Bomp and went to slick color covers, such as this one for #18 from 1978 by William Stout:
Also, I’ll put up actual scans of those first two Bomps here when I get a chance…the digital photos didn’t work as well as I thought they would.
So there you go…I started off claiming there would be no content, and lo, there was content. Just how do I do it? I must be some kind of miracle worker.
More stuff tomorrow, pals.
So here’s a thing I finally got for myself this week…issue #6 from May 1975 of DC Comics’s official company ‘zine The Amazing World of DC Comics:
…featuring this centerspread image of an unused Nestor Redondo cover for
Swamp Thing #15 (March-April 1975):
Here is the final printed cover for that issue, with a slightly less demon-obscured shot of Swampy:
There are one or two other tidbits of Swamp Thing info throughout the mag, most notably in the interview with Joe Orlando, where he briefly discusses the transition on the series from creators Len Wein and Berni(e) Wrightson to other hands. (A possible replacement mentioned in the interview was
Art Suydam of “Cholly and Flytrap” and
Marvel Zombies fame. I don’t think I knew he was ever considered!)
Anyway, that’s one more piece of Swamp Thing stuff in the ol’ collection. Once I get everything, that officially means I won, right?
Speaking of Swamp Thing stuff, as I usually am, this Kenner Toys Twitter feed has been featuring some of the Swampy toys from that now-decades old cartoon…scroll down a bit to see what your pal Mike has sitting around his house.
§ November 12th, 2014 § Filed under zines § 5 Comments
So let me take a break from constantly yapping about my comic book store to show you a recent addition to my collection that I’m not selling in my shop:
…
Collectors Dream #4, from Spring 1978, featuring a great Don Rosa cover. Just picture my face in the place of that blank question-marked fellow in the center, torn between two funnybook seller extremes. (Click on the pic for the bigification of that image.)
Sadly, I was hoping the cover-blurbed article “Consumer’s Guide to Comic Dealers” would be like an illustrated version of this, with cartoony caricatures detailing varying degrees of the Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy, identifying characteristics listed beneath. Alas, but perhaps even more shockingly, it’s a tell-all column in which orders were placed with multiple mail-order comic houses and the results were lovingly reported. Haven’t had too much time to read through it too closely, but I’ll see if I can’t pick up some tips for my own mail order business. But first, I need to spend some time restocking my boxes of Esoteric Comics.
Amazing Heroes #47 (May 1984) – art by Jack Kirby
As I recall, the slight coloring error caused a bit of consternation, and a few giggles, at the time.
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