Retreads

1st edition, 1983, Olympia, Washington, 46 copies, salmon cover, enlarged digest size.

1st Danger Room Reprint edition, July 2005, 5 copies, blue cover, enlarged digest size.

Retreads was a way for me to collect a lot of my work that had been published hither and yon and round it up in one series.

Some of the drawings appear out of context, but I'm sure as this blog continues we'll revisit them in their native state.

Most of the work in this issue dates back to college and much of it makes me cringe today. Really cringe. A lot.

Trivia:

Channel 14 was the name I chose for a comic strip. Obviously this was before cable TV really took hold. In broadcast television days Channel 14 didn't exist, at least around here it didn't. That's Dixy Lee Ray, our pro-nuclear, pro-supertankers in Puget Sound Governor at the time on page 4. Cartoonists loved her the way we loved Nixon-- easy to draw and such an inviting target. She wasn't our worst governor in my lifetime (Gary Locke gets that distinction) or the most arrogant (Locke wins that one too), but she was the most entertaining and loony.

I drew posters for the weekly film series at The Evergreen State College for awhile. Page 10 has drawings I made for a John Ford movie, and another for a Hitchcock triple feature.

Page 16, lower panel: That's Joan Armatrading, I think.

The bottom of page 21 has the very first appearance in print of "Mortie" the Dog, as far as I know. It was probably drawn in 1978, but wasn't printed until 1980-- after I had graduated TESC. The school newspaper, The Cooper Point Journal, published more of my work after I left Evergreen than when I was a student, taking illustrations from a big pile of artwork I left them.
"Art Laboe" was among the many fake names I used when I signed my work. I was part of a band in college called "Art Laboe and the Happy Martyrs." Although we had one guy who could really play the piano, we never performed or even practiced. But we did have a band because that was expected of all Evergreen students and at parties you could say, "Yes, I'm with a band," which was supposed to make the mystique meter go up a notch.

Page 25: I had given a pile of original art to Lynda Barry as a gift when we were fellow students at TESC. Apparently she had several of my comix from this present I made printed in the University of Washington Daily after she left TESC, and my name was forged on the panels. Although this was flattering, I didn't find out these had seen print until a couple years later. I have no idea how many were published, but a friend did supply me with the issue of the Daily that had the lower panel here on p. 25.

Page 31: Originally compiled and titled by the CPJ editors, Starhead's Michael Dowers took Life With Skippy and reprinted it into a bonafide minicomic. I always liked this one. "Life With Skippy" was later used as the title for a non-existent television show as part of an elaborate marketing hoax.