McCleary: Fact or Fiction?

Here are four historical myths (of varying degrees) about McCleary, Washington.

How the Bear Festival Became the Bear Festival

Actually the short answer for how the McCleary Bear Festival developed this bizarre culinary sideshow probably had something to do with this equation: Journalists + Alcohol x 2 = An argument over which county has the best tasting bear, Grays Harbor or Skamania.

I hope these articles put to rest the error made over and over by my townsmen, even proclaimed on banners and to the press, that the McCleary Bear Festival was first held in 1958. The first was held in 1959.

Susan Brown and I created a documentary on the history of the Bear Festival back in the 1990s. Thanks to our IT wizard Sarah it is available on Vimeo.

Cranium Frenzy # 8

Along with a few other titles, Cranium Frenzy # 8 came into the world during my print-on-demand phase, so it never really had a 1st edition print run in the Kennedy Guide sense. The first ones were printed about October 1995 and the title was made available on a demand basis through 1996. I'm guessing maybe a hundred or so in this time period? All versions were published in regular digest size.

Yellow Edition, 1998, 2 copies, pink cover, yellow guts.

1st Danger Room Reprint Edition, June 2005, 5 copies, blue.

One of the very first long comix I drew after nearly dying in March/April 1995. Not only is my existential side more entrenched in the storyline, but the surgery had an impact on my nervous system. If you look closely you can detect the unsteadiness of my drawing hand by the Richter Scale-like seismic squiggles in the felt tip lines. At first it didn't seem so bad, but then it worsened and finally peaked around 2000, I guess. I'm steadier today but my left hand has never regained the old control.

What had happened to me? The doc said I had swallowed a toxic substance, a poison of unknown origin, and it was killing me from the inside out. The lab could not identify it and I have no clue what it was. They slit me up a treat and took out pieces of me on April Fools Day, 1995. I still have a nice long scar on my abdomen. There is much more to this story, but that is for another post.

Trivia:

Page 1: When Evergreen student Lee Norton interviewed Morty in the mid-1980s for the Cooper Point Journal, she described his ear floating in his drink. That image stuck with me, so I used it.

Page 4: Yes, that wooden bear really exists. I'm attaching a news article from the Jan. 15, 1997 East County News where my sister-in-law Susan and I are photographed next to thing on top of McCleary City Hall. I remember the bear was cracked and covered with a fine patina of thin green moss not visible from the street. Such are the realities of living at the edge of rain forest country.

Page 6: Hamlet stuff.

Page 8, panel 5: And that's exactly how it happened.

Page 9: Nixon in Orwell's 1984.

Page 10, panel 5: I really was reading Whitman's Leaves of Grass at the time they told me I had to be sliced apart or die. Somehow it seemed fitting.

Page 11: How Can You Sleep?

Page 12+: The Big G has always been one of my favorite characters to use as a foil for Morty. Mukey too. In this case, I've got all three interacting.

Page 15: It's them damn giant reptiles again! I think I must enjoy drawing all the jagged and pointy lines on these critters. That's the only explanation I can come up with.

Page 20: I'll talk more about Mukey the Mutant Membrane when we see his only solo comic which is entitled, strangely enough, Mukey the Mutant Membrane.

Back cover: Two truths. Both correct. Paradoxism needs a snappier label than "Paradoxism."

By the way the video we produced was entitled From They To We, it was 30 minutes long and aired on Olympia's TCTV for the better part of a year.

Bezango WA 985 #2

1st published Dec. 8, 2001, 50 copies, digest size, parchment cover.

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

Starting in August, 2002, this was a print-on-demand comic for a brief time.

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

This issue has the local festival as the theme. Here in McCleary we have the Bear Festival, where bear stew is served. Seriously. In Winlock they have Egg Days, where eggs are eaten. It makes me wonder what they consume at Montesano's Festival of People.

The mountain beaver is real animal pretty much regulated by nature to the Pacific Northwest.

The character on page 3 was someone I witnessed up in suburban King County. The man on pages 4-5 is based and modified from a story that came from Port Townsend. The guy on pages 6-7 was a neighbor. The fellow on page 12 was from a story I heard about a local character in Winlock. I have a cousin on the Winlock City Council, by the way, and need to talk to him about why they have the world's 2nd or 3rd largest egg replica on display. The page 13 character really exists to this day. Page 14: I wrote about the Midnight Sponge in Evergroove Trivia pt. 39. Page 15: This guy gave me a ride while I was hitchhiking on Cooper Point in the 1970s. Page 18, my daughter, Rose, used to collect pieces of the road.

Tulpa

First published in 1990 by Starhead Comix in Seattle. My guess I had 4 pages left over from Raining Quills pt. 3 and this was used to fill the space.

The June 2005 1st Danger Room Reprint Ed. had 5 pink cardstock copies and 1 regular white paper copy.

I'm not sure where this story came from. Maybe it was a dream. Black bears are all over the place around here. In fact, McCleary has an annual bear festival where bear stew is served. Seriously.

The tulpa first came to my attention when I learned about Alexandra David-Néel, an adventurer a century ago who wrote of her travels in Tibet and India. In short, she said a tulpa was a fictional character you could visualize until it became real, but they always turned bad and then they became extremely difficult to destroy. She claimed to have actually done this.

After my experience with Morty the Dog, I know how she must've felt.

Morty the Blog, Not a Boaring Place

Just to show this won't be all comix all the time, I'll relate this local news. In answer to my query, the City of McCleary informs me that no, I cannot keep a wild tusked boar running loose in my totally fenced 3/4 of an acre yard.

Grays Harbor County, where I live, has been home to wild Russian boars for a few decades. Instead of going out and killing them, which the State encourages, I say we take them in and befriend them.

Sure they are an invasive species. That makes them strangers. Therefore as a stranger, as Shakespeare would say, we should give them welcome.

McCleary, where I live, is known for the annual Bear Festival, where citizens celebrate the community by eating bear stew and holding a parade. By changing just a couple letters, we could forget the consumption of hot stew in July (how crazy is that anyway?) and have a big parade of boars. Then our town could have a welcome sign that says, "Welcome to McCleary - Home of the Boar Festival!"

Now that would liven things up a bit.