Phone photo 1845

A diner in Montesano, Washington called the Beehive which has been around since the 1930s and still has an Art Deco look has lots of interesting things on the walls, including this framed decal of Rat Fink by Big Daddy Roth.

Roth and I have a history, as portrayed in my minicomic, Musical Chairs.

By the way, I cannot praise the Beehive enough. A great place to stop for you Puget Sound folks on the way to the coast. Monty, our county seat, is a nice town and worth exploring a bit.

Morty the Dog # 1

Do not be misled by the numbering. This is actually the second of a three issue run.

The first issue was Morty the Dog # nothing, released in an odd oblong minicomic format.

Issue # 1 was printed in April, 1987 and consists of reprints from Natural Functions, Tales From the Timewalker, Starhead # 9, and Shin Kage.

This was one of my few nationally distributed comix. I think Michael intended it to be a quarterly. It is now a fairly common visitor on eBay. Notice Michael's recognition of the famous black and white glut of the mid-late 1980s in his intro.

I notice that on the inside back cover advertisement, I'm the only artist listed who is still above ground today. Little shudders like that creep into my cranium on a more frequent basis these days as I reacquaint myself with these old comix. I never knew Sloan, sad to say, but Big Daddy Roth and I had sort of an interesting connection. I covered it in a minicomic called Musical Chairs.

Nils Osmar, who has an ad on the back cover, is a Seattle artist, writer and nice guy I met a few times at those comix get-togethers Bruce Chrislip used to host up there before he skeedaddled back to Ohio. Nils is apparently still active in Seattle and has a webpage worth visiting.

The panel in the first story where the scientist shows Morty the Starhead Comix on display under museum glass was sort of how I felt seeing the Tragedy of Morty on display in Maryhill Museum last October!

Musical Chairs

First published in March 1999, 50 copies (8 pink cover, red guts; 3 pink cover, yellow guts; 1 all pink; 6 yellow cover, pink guts; 12 all yellow; 2 green cover, blue guts; 5 green cover, yellow guts; 1 green cover, pink guts; 12 green cover, red guts).

The 1st Danger Room Reprint Ed. (June 2005) had a run of five copies, yellow covers.

This is pretty much a true story. "Big Poppa Ross" was, of course, Ed "Big Daddy" Roth (1932-2001), the brains behind Rat Fink, hot rod comics, and grotesque cartooning for a generation of us Boomers. He influenced many subsequent cartoonists, and helped lay the groundwork for the later underground comix. One of the Newavers who continued Roth's style was a nice guy named Steve Fiorilla (1961-2009), although many others owe Roth as well for bits of their presentation. Including me. Hence the O-The-Irony-Of-It-All!

When I heard Roth had converted to the LDS faith and expressed disapproval of Morty the Dog, the karma of the whole thing made me laugh. Then I drew a comic about it. You can't make this stuff up.

And yes, our teacher really tried to sell us that load of garbage about pale Commies in NYC skyscrapers.

Ouroboros.