Before I explain why this was one of the weirdest and potentially dangerous comix I ever produced, let me get into the printing stats.
I believe this was first published by Starhead Comix in 1985. Starhead was the baby of Michael Dowers, who lived in Seattle at the time. Since this is the first mention of Michael in these little comic profiles, I must say the only reason my work is known at all to anyone beyond the dozen or people who follow my comix was due to Michael's promotion. He always believed in my comix and spent considerable energy publishing and distributing my stuff. Including this minicomic.
The original Starhead edition was an odd size. It had the traditional spine height for a minicomic (14 cm.) but it was 1.5 centimeters less wide. I think this was due to the fact the master stats were pasted on legal instead of letter standard paper, and folded in a different way. The scanned copy presented here is from the original edition.
The entire comic was reprinted in Maximum Traffic's massive
Truth Be Known in 1997 (Butler, Pennsylvania).
In June 2005, 5 1st Danger Room Reprint editions were printed with yellow covers and pink guts. These were colors picked on purpose and deemed appropriate for the subject matter.
In Sept. 2006, 10 copies were printed up as the 1st OlyBlog Reprint Ed. (5 yellow, 5 pink and yellow mixed) as Olympia was experiencing some
Nazi activity. I made them as gifts to a certain pro-democracy activist.
I first became aware of local neo-Nazi activity in 1981 when, as a grad student at the University of Washington, a fellow was handing out racist literature in the neighborhood as a self-professed Nazi. He told the press the time was ripe since he felt President Reagan's policies were really not that far from his own. He felt safe at last, he said. In fact, the Ku Klux Klan had endorsed Reagan in the 1980 election.
By 1985 I was living in Pullman, Washington. The home of Washington State University (where I was a librarian and faculty member), this town was, as the natives say, "Not in the middle of Nowhere, but you can see it from here." Only a few miles from the Northern Idaho panhandle, Pullman was in wheat country. Conservative Republican country. It was also the Party School for the state. Not noted for their political awareness, the student body supported Reagan's re-election by an overwhelming margin. WSU supporters of good old boring Fritz Mondale whispered their support as if they were members of the French underground in 1942. It was with amusement I noted the pro-Reagan kids' sense of betrayal when Ron the Con cut student aid as one of his first acts in term 2.
Anyway, right across the border, there was this mentally diseased character named Richard Butler who ran some sort of Nazi compound. His minions would stand in full uniform on the WSU campus and hand out racist literature. Amazingly, well, maybe not, the WSU students blandly accepted the fliers as if given by the pep squad concerning info on the next football rally.
According to the local news, the Nazis torched parts of neighboring cities and always made some guy stay behind to tell the press he witnessed an African American running away with a gas can. Classy.
So, feeling quite politically alone out there, I drew this little minicomic as my response to the nuttiness around me. And then I did something that perhaps I shouldn't of. I sent a copy to Richard Butler as my own little pitchfork jab. Right after that I started getting weird phone calls in the wee hours like 2 am with just silence on the other end. My co-workers and neighbors told me I was asking for suicide by Nazi. Their fear was real. But somehow I wasn't all that afraid. I knew I was either not all that important, or, Butler's group was filled with incompetent failures who couldn't even hurt a mild-mannered cartoonist if they tried.
And I thought, "My God, if just a few of these yahoos can inspire such terror, imagine what a really intelligent well organized group could do!"
You can argue with these clowns all you want. They dig it when you're angry and engaged. But they really really hate being laughed at.
