$100 - Original Art - Chow Time

"Chow Time" originally appeared in Dog of Dawn, Dog of Dusk in 1985.

4 pages, 11.5 x 9 inches. Nonphoto blue pencil and felt tip on light bond. I find a tiny spot of whiteout on the top left corner of the final page. The art is in very good condition.

As an extra bonus, I am tossing in a copy of the 2011 enlarged digest reprint of Dog of Dawn, Dog of Dusk!

$100 ppd.
Check or money order to
Steve Willis
PO Box 390
McCleary, WA 98557-0390

or order through PayPal

Morty Comix # 2404

Morty Comix # 2404 was drawn on a notepad given to me as an incentive to subscribe to the magazine Golf Digest, which is very strange since I have never played golf and have no desire to learn. In fact, the whole world of sports strikes me as incredibly and expensively absurd, but I recognize I am very much in the minority view here in America and realize millions find joy and meaning in this activity. This is a major part of the human experience most people find very important but has somehow escaped me. I just don't get it. But I'm OK with being a freak in this regard.

Sports have appeared in my comix. In my book Dog of Dawn Dog of Dusk I highlighted the historical sport of Dog Butting, introduced to me by my friend Bob Richart, who was featured in an altered way as a character in the story. Also in State of Beings # 5 I proposed my new baseball team, the Stationary Pus-Filled Pancakes.

Sarah introduced me to Robin Williams' great take on golf a few years ago. The fact I have a healthy dose of Scottish blood made me laugh even harder.

Page 2-3 of this Morty Comix came from two leftover old post-its I had from Morty Comix # 2394, which were affixed to an outside door almost two weeks ago and were, incredibly, still there when I drove by  today even though the weather here has been rainy and windy!

Anyway, since someone in my town has seen fit to take down anything I put up on the Post Office community bulletin board, rip it into shreds and throw it away, I decided to tuck this Morty Comix behind the bulletin board. I know who the perpetrator is and I highly doubt she follows this blog, so I think this one will survive her strange and unvoiced hostility to my work.

McCleary is kind of a weird place. I tried to capture the culture in my Bezango WA 985 series. We enable our many local eccentrics and that adds to the surrealism.

A Visit to the Danger Room

That's Casey on the left, Frank on the right. These are the Danger Room guys. They love comix and have a section of shelves set aside just for us obscuro cartoonists, helping to get our comix out there without permission from the big publishers and distributors. They are both also keen observers of comix as social indicators.

As you can see by the photo, Frank is the chief storyteller, armtwister and Sam-I-Am here. Somehow he talked me into providing the store with Danger Room Reprint editions of over 120 titles in 2005. Actually, he also talked me into finally attending the Oly Comix Fest, and hey, I like green eggs and ham! I do, I like them, Sam-I-Am! So you can thank Frank for reviving all those titles and getting me out on the local comix scene in person.

The 2005 Danger Room Reprint editions are no longer available there, but I do supply them with copies of the recent material I've printed like Dog of Dawn, Dog of Dusk and Natural Functions.

Yesterday I dropped off a couple copies of We Rode With the Clowns and took these photos.

The Danger Room is also where I first met Chelsea Baker, another cartoonist who migrated to Oly in order to attend the Evergroove State College. Not only is she one of the organizers of the Oly Comix Fest, but she also contributed to We Rode With The Clowns. You can find her cartoons in Olympia Power and Light, a local biweekly.

201 4th Avenue West
Olympia, WA 98501-1003
(360) 705-3050

Alan Fiore-- Patron of the Morty Arts!

Once again we thank Morty the Blog reader Alan Fiore for dropping some smackeroos into the "Kibble & Cigars For Morty" donation box, enabling us to get closer to putting another comic in print-- and earning him the second book in a row where he'll be recorded in the publishing info as sort of a producer.

Dog of Dawn, Dog of Dusk was the first comic we have listed in the Mortyshop. I have found the master copies in enlarged digest size to some other comix from the 1980s and hope to have more items listed in the shop soon.

Mortyshop is Open

After many delays, we are finally getting together a Mortyshop, a space available for those of you who want hardcopy versions of the comix I am scanning and posting. You can find Mortyshop under the "Pages" section on the margin.

This is all new to us, so I am going to ask for your patience as we bumble through this online shopping game. We'll try this one title for awhile, and once we get the system figured out I plan on offering more titles and some original art.

The first title I have up is Dog of Dawn, Dog of Dusk.

I have ideas for several other titles to sell, and want to explore the possibility of publishing The Tragedy of Morty, Prince of Denmarke (almost 200 pages!) in a single hardcover volume.

Morty the Blog News

First, the studio is back again and as I'm archaeologically digging through all the crap crammed in there I'm uncovering a bunch of stuff I didn't know I had. Much of it I'll be posting, so the scanning and posting coverage here is going to be even more obscure than ever.

Second, this is the month I'll start offering things for sale. The first title I'll be reprinting is Dog of Dawn, Dog of Dusk-- from the original master copy. This means it'll be presented in the original enlarged digest size, just like it was in 1985. I'm preparing it for the print shop right now. Although this title is available online in this blog, I realize some readers want to have a hardcopy in hand.

I'm also hoping to draw original, individual issues of Morty Comix inside copies of the Newave book and offer them for sale as well. I'll also be listing some published original art and other odds and ends, mostly odds.

2011 should be a fun year.

Dog of Dawn, Dog of Dusk

Another one of the delayed comix I created and printed in 1985 (like Cranium Frenzy #5), but held off from releasing until early 1986.

1st edition, 1985, 50 copies, yellow cover, enlarged digest size.

2nd edition, 1986, 30 copies, salmon cover, enlarged digest size.

Print-on-demand, 1994, regular digest size. I don't know how many of these are out there, but I imagine they outnumber the first two editions combined.

1st Danger Room Reprint Edition, June 2005, 5 copies (4 red cover, 1 green cover), regular digest size.

I'm not sure what this means, but of all my works this was a favorite for Jay Kennedy and Lynn Hansen, and both of these gentlemen are no longer in the world of the living. Jay liked "The Maze" so much he included it as the concluding piece in Giant-Size Mini Comics #3 (Eclipse Comics, Dec. 1986). "The Maze" is a very simple tale, perhaps too simple, but the message it packs still rings true to me.

Page 17 has a nod to the dog characters of my Newave comrades Steve Lafler and Bruce Chrislip.

The face on page 18, panel 1 was, I think, burned into the paper with a soldering gun. Panel 5 was a recognition that my friend Bob Richart (a fellow librarian who I worked with at WSU and later at WLN) introduced me to the history of dog butting, a very real sport played in Medieval France.

Page 19: Notice in panel 2 Bob Richartolovskii says "Hot Damn! A Morty Dog!" I believe this pretty much confirms Jim Ryan's theory that Morty is species, not an individual-- like a collie, a beagle, a poodle, a Morty Dog. This would explain why he seems to always come back from the dead after being killed.

Page 20+: I was laughing pretty hard when I was drawing the Cosmo Bear portion of the story. At the time, it seemed cute bears with balloons and rainbows were all the rage, as popularized by the Care Bears. I was probably laughing the hardest at page 23, panel 1 as I was drawing. OK, OK, so I have a sick sense of humor.

The final page on the back cover is a quintessential Morty ending, incorporating several devices I liked to employ: A Shakespeare quote, a metamorphosis (the hands), Morty surviving an attempt at being offed by his creator, and the main character drifting away as the viewer remains stationary.