Olympia Comics Festival 2019

As you can see my little 20th century Toyota Corolla was filled with so many Morty Comix that I consider it a major victory that I made it to Olympia without being pulled over. Driving on the back streets helped.

Those white bags in the center, next to Max Clotfelter, was my table. In all between the expo portion and handing them out at the wedding, I gave away about 250 Morty Comix.

With this project finished I will be moving on to to truly diabolical art scheme, also using Morty Comix. 

I'll keep this blog up for another week or two, then it returns to hibernation where only a few trivia hunters in the Diogenes Club come to occasionally visit. If you are comix historian and still want to have access to this blog let me know and that can be arranged.

See you on June 15th at the Olympia Comics Festival!

See you on June 15th at the Olympia Comics Festival! Celebrate Marisha and Casey's wedding and take home some free art!

Olympia Comics Festival June 15, 2019

I'll be giving away nearly 300 Morty Comix at the Olympia Comics Festival at the Olympia Community Center on June 15, 2019. The comix are wedding favors on the happy occasion of the wedding of Marisha Kay and Casey (Danger Room) Bruce.

https://olycomicsfest.tumblr.com/Exhibitors

A little more than half of the Morty Comix are in the "traditional" 4-page format. Each issue is one-of-kind original art. The series dates back to Feb. 1983. The rest of the Morty Comix are 3-dimensional "installation pieces" given away in wedding white bags.

I hope I can fit them all in my little 20th century compact car (see photos of giant plastic tubs and boxes, as well as a ton of loose bags). We might have a clown car situation here.

The issue number range is between # 2900-3200, created between Aug. 2018-Mar. 2019. Hope to see you there!

Cryogenic Comix # 30

Cryogenic Comix # 30
Copyright (c) 2019 Steve Willis

The first four portraits here are from Morty Comix # 875, created Feb. 5, 1984 while I was living in Pullman, Washington. The next seven images were created in late 1979 or early 1980. The last nine drawings are from 1980 and were drawn on very thin bond with felt tip. The Bushey Taxi quick sketch reflects my time as a taxicab driver for a fleet by that name in Burlington, Vermont in 1979. Big orange 1970s floater cars running 24 hours a day.

The Comix Files: Jack T. Chick

Back in 1987 I ordered the entire set of those oddball little Jack T. Chick comics so I could donate them to the Washington State University Comix Collection. Jack sent this letter with the order form. It was written during the same era when more famous evangelists than usual were getting caught with their pants down.

"Our enemy, the world ..." Wow. Jack really is from another planet.

But I always admired the way these little guys were distributed, and that method no doubt served as one of the inspirations for how Morty Comix is sometimes presented.

The Comix Files: Chester Brown

One of the advantages of being a perpetual amateur cartoonist is that I get contacted by amazing artists early in their careers before they really get discovered. Such was the case with the incredibly talented Toronto-based Chester Brown during our correspondence from 1984-1986. At the time he was producing a photocopy digest called Yummy Fur.

I loved the way he usually included a bunny graphic with his signature. It was fun jamming with Chester on our mini Lump Soup Sciopluieas in 1985.

During this era I sent Chester a Morty Comix that was something like 100 or 200 pages long. He shot back his own version, which was just as long, and is now in the comix collection at Washington State University.

Morty Comix # 2695

Morty Comix # 2695 was slipped into a stack of paper napkins at an Italian restaurant in Olympia, Washington.

Morty Comix # 2694

Morty Comix # 2694 was placed in a convenient plastic container at a gas pump as I was filling Nadine's tank at $3.39 a gallon in the early morning hours here in McCleary.