Postcard - Seattle, Washington

"An interesting view of Seattle, Washington from the central business district across Lake Union toward the northern residential area. Showing on the right is the freeway, part of U.S. Highway 5, which runs from Mexico to Canada without a single stop sign."

1970s. I was living in the Ravenna/Bryant District (top right) at the time when Cranium Frenzy #1 was drawn in 1981.

Morty Comix # 2497

Morty Comix # 2497 needed to be sent somewhere out of the routine, and at random. So here's what I did.

 I took a long piece of wood out of the carport and set it up as a ramp in my living room.

 

  Then I went back to the studio and blew dust off my old World Book Encyclopedias.

This is the 1961 set. I purchased these for 4 bucks at a garage sale here in McCleary about 20 years ago, I think. 

Since I rarely go in my studio, Charlie timidly tried to enter the room-- a place he knows he isn't supposed to be.

Then I located an old toy car of mine, dating back to the late 1950s. A rare survivor of our 1965 house fire. I used this car as a model for Morty the Dog's vehicle in a few pages of Cranium Frenzy # 1 (1981)

The encyclopedias were arranged at the bottom of the ramp according to the thickness of the volume so all together they sloped down.

 I let go of the car at the top of the ramp.

 In an exciting moment it raced down, and came to rest on four different volumes.

 

And those volumes were H, J-K, L, and Q-R. That means Hawaii, Kansas, Kentucky,  Louisiana, and Rhode Island.

  

So I suspended the ramp above the floor a few inches and placed the four volumes underneath. Then I situated wooden blocks on the top, two above each book.

 The contraption was seasoned with catnip. Yes, I was going to enlist the help of the Fabs.

Dreamer was first, and actually he quickly chose the winner by knocking the blocks on one of the tomes right away.

 Then Buster had to have a turn, but the blocks he knocked over missed all books.

 Charlie came over and just enjoyed the catnip.

Hettie, meanwhile, just watched the whole exercise, regarding it as a silly waste of time. In many ways she is the smartest one in this house.

 The winner was Rhode Island!

Rhode Island is our 13th state. So I picked the 13th largest city there, North Kingstown. In looking at a map I liked the sound of Spink St., but had to settle for a nearby address I could verify, which turned out to be a bank on a street with a much more boring name. So I am sending this Morty Comix to that bank, care of the "Art Director."

This February will mark the 30th anniversary of Morty Comix. I have sent them all over the world. But this might be the first time one has landed in Rhode Island.

Bezango: Driving

Olympia Power & Light, May 5-19, 2010

As it turned out I was never unemployed. I was indeed "bumped" by someone with more seniority but I had a part-time job the next day. And in a weird twist of fate, I was hired back to my old employer within a month.

The drawing of Morty dates back to 1981, in Cranium Frenzy # 1. Notice I cropped out the "Outta my way, ya peckerheads!" word balloon from the original. They trained us to curse like that when I drove a taxicab in Burlington, Vermont.

Jack's Shoe Repair still exists in the same storefront in Olympia. I often wonder where that little girl is today and if she has any inkling of how she scarred me for life.

No one has taken me up on investing in the thermotropic mood car idea yet. But you'll see. You'll see.

Cranium Frenzy # 1

1st edition September 1981, Seattle, Washington, 40 copies, cherry cover, enlarged digest.

2nd edition, October 1981, Seattle, Washington, 25 copies, cherry cover, enlarged digest.

3rd edition, January 1982, Seattle, Washington, 25 copies, cherry cover, enlarged digest.

It was at some point in the first three editions I was first contacted by Jay Kennedy, author of The Official Underground and Newave Comix Price Guide, and was educated to the fact print runs were of extreme importance to some collectors. From this point on I started keeping closer track of this kind of trivia. The first three editions of Cranium Frenzy # 1 are, to my eye, indistinguishable from each other.

Available as a print-on-demand title, regular digest size, 1995-1996.

1st Danger Room Reprint Ed., June 2005, 6 copies (3 blue, 2 green, 1 red) also regular digest size.

This is my longest running title and probably the best one to trace my career as an obscuro cartoonist. The first issue was drawn during my torturous time in graduate school at the University of Washington-- the comix project was keeping me sane. The latest issue, #10, was published in Century 21.

Somewhere between the three printings I learned about Clay Geerdes Comix World newsletter and the Newave comix network, so this title served as my initial calling card and trading stock as I quickly became introduced to a small army of amazing fellow cartoonists through the mail.

It is pretty safe to say most of the 1st editions were handed around to my social circle in Seattle at the time, and hardly any of them were comrade comix artists. I imagine most of the copies circulating among comix collectors out there are the 2nd and 3rd editions.

Jay Kennedy liked my work and I think included mention of the first two Cranium Frenzys in his Guide as something of a last minute effort since it seemed he was practically finished when he initially contacted me. I've attached his listing, although I must restate there is no way to tell the first three editions apart.

Trivia:

P. 2: Panel 1 anticipates my future Tragedy of Morty, Prince of Denmarke. Last three panels: I had the pleasure of meeting the Pacific Northwest poet William Stafford in the 1970s. A pacifist in WWII, he pointed out this inconsistency about society's attitudes toward murder with sort of a quiet rage.

P. 3: The smartest man in the world shows up again in Cranium Frenzy # 2.

P. 4: Ronson Rabbit was a character I drew in funny animal comics during my childhood.

P. 7: Giant reptiles were later used in Amused to No End, Cranium Frenzy # 6, and most notably in Fetid Lake of Doom.

P. 10: Using the population statistics as a title and a way to set the tone was later employed in the microcomic Pop. 1075. Panel 6: I was a taxicab driver in Burlington, Vermont for awhile in 1979. Every budding cartoonist should drive a taxicab for little bit as part of the training for a career in comic art. It's a trip, man.

P. 11+: By a weird coincidence, an excellent cartoonist named Chad Woody came up with a toasterhead character about 10 years later, utterly unaware of this comic. Now what sort of cosmic consciousness did we both plug into (no pun intended)?

P. 20+: Based on the bizarre real-life journey of Oliver Cromwell's severed head. As an aside I had two ancesters who were minor officials in the Cromwell regime. This duo, father-in-law and son-in-law, were Puritan ministers who enjoyed going into those magnificent cathedrals with sledgehammers in order to whack away at graven images. After Cromwell died they became "Nonconformist" Puritans. One of them died young as the result of constant imprisonment.

P. 23: "Puny and absurd ..." I think it was a line from the movie The Incredible Shrinking Man.

P. 24: Last panel. Notice Maxwell from the earlier giant reptile story lurking in the background. I forgot about that until I scanned this thing.

P. 25: True story. And it is still all I know about Indiana from first-hand experience. This page was sort an ancestor to my later State of Beings series.

P. 26+: By 1981 Morty the Dog had already been around for about 5 or 6 years as one of my characters, but this was his first full-length story. Notice he's called "Morty Mutt" in the title. In an earlier incarnation I called him "Mortie the Dog." But back on page 2 you'll see he's "Morty the Dog."

P. 26: Parvo Nakacheker, I think, was the inventor of the jock-strap. Or at least that's what I thought at the time.

The car and truck were based on two childhood toys I still have. They survived our housefire on the farm, so the fact they remain in my possession is pretty neat. I'll attach a photo of them here.

P. 29: Panel 4. One of my all-time favorite panels ever. The word "peckerhead" entered my vocabulary during my cab driver days.

P. 32: "Mr. God" later became known as "The Big G," the bald little guy with the Yellow Kid smock. I do believe in God, by the way. I think after I bite the Big One I'll get to meet God and she'll thank me for making her laugh about how goofy all these religions are.