Gritty in Pink
In which we review a primitive minicomic.
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Happy Saturday from Hollywood Gardens, PA. My latest blog post recapping a week of crash test dummy cartoons is now live.
I’ve spent the past several days working on a batch of cartoons for October. These gags featured customers at a cigar bar, a robot, a garden gnome, a chameleon, and some clowns.
Looking Ahead & Looking Back
Our preview image is a panel with the text and Secret Symbols redacted. Feel free to suggest your own dialog for this one.
This week’s backward glance is an eight-page minicomic from 1988 called ALTERcATIONS.
My cartooning career began in pre-Internet days, when I was part of a large, lively network of maniacs self-publishing minicomix and selling/trading them by mail. I called my imprint “No Way Comix,” incorporating a syllabic inversion of “Wayno.” Every once in a while, I’d issue a “secret publication,” which I didn’t advertise or sell. I usually xeroxed fifty copies and gave them away to friends or added them to orders as a little bonus.
The book is a non-narrative collection of images using photos taken from magazines, which I cut up, collaged, and defaced with ink, white-out, stickers, and rubber stamps.
The assemblages were photocopied on pink Astrobrite paper. When I scanned the pages this week, the results were ridiculously dark, so I adjusted the brightness and tweaked the pink color to make them more readable.
The center spread was made from an ad in a technical magazine lying around the office where I worked at the time.
For this page, I cut up a three-quarter view of a person’s face to create a grotesque profile. I’m fairly certain the original photo was of Elvis Presley. In any case, the word balloon should be read in an Elvis voice.
The small object in the lower right is a rubber stamp of Hedorah, the Smog Monster from the Godzilla monsterverse, which I scribbled over.
The central image on the back cover is a “McHale’s Navy” bubblegum card. As a kid, I never collected sports cards, but I had plenty of TV show cards (“Batman,” “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.,” “The Monkees,” etc.) I drew big Tim Conway and Ernest Borgnine heads and pasted them on the inked-over card. The background field is an enlarged photocopy of a Pep Boys matchbook cover.
Much of ALTERcATIONS was inspired by the brilliant art of Bruce Carleton, whose work I discovered in Punk magazine and New York comix papers STOP! and Comical Funnies. His ads for the punk fashion store Trash and Vaudeville were and still are inspirational.
Bruce created one of my favorite self-published books of all time, Fun is Sick. It’s extremely rare to come across a copy, but if you see one, grab it.
I found mine at the Dallas Fantasy Fair in 1992, in an otherwise unremarkable box of comic books for sale. It was in a plastic sleeve with a sticker reading, “Weird Little Book—$5.” I wish I had held onto that sleeve.
Alternate Configurations Department
For the strip version of Friday’s crash test dummy street preacher gag, I went with a rotated view.
That’s the old ‘stack for this week. Thanks for your readership, support, and input.
In two weeks, the National Cartoonists Society will present the Reuben Awards at their 80th(!) annual meeting. Bizarro is nominated for Best Newspaper Panel, along with Loose Parts by Dave Blazek and Free Range by Bill Whitehead. Wish me luck, but I’m already thrilled to be named alongside these two excellent cartoonists.
Cheers from your cartoonist,
Wayno
My caption for the first panel is, "I can't hear you. My right ear has not yet been drawn."
Thanks for using my pipe pic! For the caption, “No, backwards baseball caps are totally back in fashion, especially of they are red.”