Olympia Power & Light: Bezango

Hey, Olympia Power & Light is online, covering Oly news, celebrating frivolity, and giving space to us lowbrow culture types. They have provided some of my Bezango columns on their website under the "Frivolity" category, I'm happy to report!

Check it out

Washington State Legislative Building

Snapped a phone photo of the main building on the Washington State Capital Campus in Olympia recently, right before a dark and swirling storm.

Not too long ago I wrote a piece concerning the dome for Olympia Power & Light # 7 (Feb. 24-March 9, 2010) and thought Morty the Blog readers might want to read it as a bit of comix ephemera.

The comic I make reference to in here was Random Reflections, 1976.

Phone photo 101

All these Halloween skulls and skeletons got me to thinking about Goose. You can read all about him in the attached Bezango column from Olympia Power & Light # 16 (June 30-July 13, 2010):

Bezango, WA 985 #4

1st ed., Mar. 18, 2002, 40 copies (20 green, 20 blue).

2nd ed., June 2, 2002, 15 copies, blue cover.

3rd ed., July 21, 2002, 5 copies, parchment cover.

An unknown number of copies were available as print-on-demand for a short time starting in Aug. 2002.

1st Danger Room Reprint Ed., June 2005. 5 copies (1 pink, 1 yellow, 1 red, 1 green, 1 blue).

I forgot to mention when I wrote the initial intro to this series that our comix comrade Mark Campos performed a visual reading of selections of this series at Seattle's Bumbershoot in August 2003. I think I have a photo from that and I'll include it here.

This special earthquake theme issue is based on the fact that we have a lot of quakes in this part of the world. Most of them are pretty mild, but occasionally we get a real corker.

Trivia: Page 3: Olympia once had a Christmas Island. I included it in a recent column for Olympia Power and Light (attached). Page 6: He's very real. Page 8: Around 1959 I once visited a Santa like this, in the top floor of Olympia's Mottman's Mercantile. It was one of the events that started me on the road of disbelieving much of what I saw. Pages 11-12: There really is a Zuba but her name isn't Zuba. Page 13: Fabiola lived just across the Columbia River in an Oregon town. Page 14: Marion Zioncheck was a very flamboyant Washington State member of Congress in the early 1930s. And there really was a kid named Greg who was Mars in a 3rd grade play about the planets I participated in. I believe I played Saturn. Page 17: She's still around. Page 18: This fellow is based on a guy I heard about in Raymond, Washington. If you visit Raymond, the Top Notch Tavern, which is still there, was once owned by London Willis, my grandfather's bootlegging twin brother.

Bezango "On Comics"

Olympia Power & Light is a biweekly paper in Olympia, Washington. It started up last December. I have an irregular column in there called "Bezango." If you look closely at the logo, you'll see a picture of Morty the Dog running. Editor Meta Hogan supplied that one. I could never place the source until I scanned and posted The Almost Complete Collected Morty Comix, and now I realize she found that image from the cover of that monograph. It works.

Since I had to haul out this newspaper to check the graphic, I might as well scan and post it. OP&L issue #14 (June 2-15, 2010) was the special comics issue, published in conjunction with the Olympia Comics festival. This column about cartooning was actually written about 6 months before. Olympia cartoonist Chelsea Baker convinced me to contribute a new 2010 work ("4 Panel Breakup") and Meta, I think, gave readers a sneak peek of page 2 or 3 of a new Morty story that may or may not ever get finished and/or published.

Sasquatch Comix #1

My first solo minicomic, if I'm not mistaken, first published early 1983 in Olympia, Washington, 67 copies on green cardstock. There is no edition statement on the comic itself. The little 14 cm. minicomic form was not a medium I had considered until I was exposed to Clay Geerdes' Newave network in late 1981.

Some qualification here is needed. As a Newaver myself, the word "minicomic" has always meant the little guys, usually measuring 14 x 11 cm. Over the years I've noticed the term has been used to describe all photocopied, small press, independent type comix regardless of their dimensions. That's fine. But in this blog, I still speak in Newave. Perhaps a comix anthropologist should track us down and compile a Newave glossary.

Yes, I am a Newaver. I'll always be a Newaver, no matter how outdated the term becomes. I guess I'm now an Old Newaver, which sounds like a paradox. But as one who embraces paradox as a life philosophy, that suits me just fine.

So. Anyway. Back to the collector stuff. The 2nd ed., not on cardstock but still green, was published March 1983 in Olympia, 74 copies.

The 3rd. ed., physically like the 2nd., was published by Robert Stump in Hopewell, Virginia, in October 1983.

All five issues of Sasquatch Comix were collected under one cover and presented in digest form during my 1994 print-on-demand period.

In June 2005 five copies (4 green, 1 red) of the digest form were published as the 1st Danger Room Reprint Ed.

Sasquatch Comix #1 was posted on OlyBlog, Feb. 2006.

Somehow I have a nagging feeling I'm leaving out some other appearances of this comix, but if I did I'll update this post once it comes back to me.

This series came about from my desire to celebrate regional stories about this great corner of the world, where I was born and raised. Although the scientific discussion concerning our legendary creature is interesting, I was really more involved in what makes a good story.

Shortly after I published the 2nd ed., I moved across the state to Pullman, home of Washington State University. There I met Grover Krantz (speaking of anthrolopogists) , one of America's greatest Sasquatch scholars. Grover and this comic recently became the subject of my column, Bezango, which I occasionally write for the biweekly Olympia Power & Light. I've included a scan of the essay, it's from OP&L issue 15 (June 16-29, 2010).