Obscuro Bezango Show!

The following press release was found in my email this morning about an art exhibit opening in Pittsburgh, PA that will be something of a landmark in the history of the Obscuro genre. I am very excited about attending this event!

Obscuro Bezango!

Curated by Thomas Rehm

At Future Tenant 819 Penn Avenue

Opening reception Friday August 2, 2013 | 7-10 PM

On display from August 2 to September 1, 2013

Free Admission

(June 18, 213) Future Tenant presents Obscuro Bezango!, a body of work by three creators in a little known arena of art called Obscuro Culture. This four-week visual arts exhibit will feature traditional sculpture, outsider sculpture, and Obscuro art and comics all unified by their singularity of vision. In addition to curating the show, Thomas Rehm will display work alongside Maximum Traffic- the assumed name of a prolific artist- and Elmore “Buzz” Buzzizyk. These three unlikely gallery-mates help carry on the underground culture of self published artists and cartoonists that arose in the advent of widely available, inexpensive photocopying, today known as Obscuro art.

Meet the curator and enjoy complimentary drinks at the opening reception FRIDAY AUGUST 2 FROM 7-10 PM. This event is free and open to the public.

Buzz Buzzizyk Is Now Online!

And he's trying to blame me for it! Well, if that's true, I'm glad!

Check out his website at: http://buzzbuzzizyk.blogspot.com/

Morty Comix # 2533

OK, so I check to see if Morty Comix # 2527 is where I left it. Sometimes these Morty Comix sit for months before anyone finds them. The spot is at a phone booth in a gas station/minimart in Tumwater, Washington. Actually various places on this retail space have served as a depository for Morty Comix for awhile. I think I have left at least half a dozen in this general vicinity in the last year or so.

But wait, I see an interloper.

What should I find at the place where I left Morty Comix # 2527 but a Jack T. Chick weirdo minicomic! This one is called The Contract! and it is the second Chick publication I have found on this retail space this week. How deliciously bizarre.

So is this how the game is played? Two anonymous comix droppers in a turf war? One Obscuro the other Fanatically Religious? Then so be it. I accept the challenge with a sense of fun. It so happens I like Chick publications (for reasons the publisher doesn't intend, I'm sure) and send all I find to the Washington State University Comix Collection.

Morty Comix # 2533 has taken the game up a notch as I replaced the Chick comic with my own work at the phone booth the next morning. Perhaps this is just a brief conflict. Or perhaps not.

Comix Anniversaries in 2013

 

50 years ago, 1963: President Kennedy is assassinated. Lee Harvey Oswald, JFK's alleged assassin, is shot on live TV by Jack Ruby.  I was in grade school and later documented an eerie follow-up in a 2001 minicomic entitled LHO.

40 years ago, 1973: My first obscuro pre-Newave comic, Gimmie Comics # 1, is cranked out on a mimeograph.

30 years ago, 1983: I publish my first 8 page 14 cm. minicomic, Sasquatch Comix # 1. 1983 also marked the very first issue of Morty Comix, which I believe was sent to Hawaii. Other comix published that year: Limbolympia, Sasquatch Comix # 2-5, Retreads # 1, Bonafide Child Innocence # 1, Cranium Frenzy # 4, The Big Picture Picture Book, Outside In # 1-9, As I Recall the 'Sixties, Tragedy of Morty Prince of Denmarke Act 1. Plus there were a number of reprints (called "editions" by collectors) and contributions to various comix with others.

20 years ago, 1993: Most of the year was taken up with editing City Limits Gazette, where I served as editor from Feb. 1991 to Sept. 1993. Also involved with some exhibits, short contribs, a televised lecture called The Wild World of Obscuro Comix, a jam with Max Traffic called Flying, and another with Pat Moriarity in Big Mouth # 3. Bruce Chrislip records our mutual experience with Robert Crumb in Paper Tales # 1.

10 years ago, 2003: By 2003 this old dog was slowing down considerably. Cranium Frenzy # 10, at 60 pages, remains my most recent full length comic book. Will I ever produce another full-length comic? I don't know the answer to that.

2013, what to expect: I'm working on more creative ways to distribute Morty Comix and documenting the process on this blog. Once Ron and Louise are finished with me in the making of their NW cartoonist documentary Bezango WA it is my intention to fully return to my hermit existence here in the hills of the Washington Coastal Range and begin a new phase of my comix art. I have no idea where the lines will lead me.


The last couple years have seen me out and about as a cartoonist in classrooms, panel discussions, performances, conventions, and I even hosted a Mini-Comics Day here in McCleary (which was quite fun!), but we true Mossbacks can only take so much of the sunlight of attention and social interaction.


However, as we all know, Fate has a way of screwing up our plans and sending us places we never expected to visit. I'm enjoying this blog very much (thanks Sarah for making this possible when you set me up in 2010 with your technical know-how) and for now it remains a fun venue for creative expression and provides a medium where my old prehistoric photocopy work can find a new audience.     

Morty Comix # 2494

Morty Comix # 2494 looked like the kind of comic art that needed to travel, so I turned to my online card deck to help me decide where to send it.

The 5 of diamonds. Five. Our 5th President was James Monroe, the first of the subset of Obscure Presidents. Since this blog is basically an online Obscuro Comix, Monroe was the perfect choice Fate decided to use.

There are 17 counties in the United States named Monroe County, and I am guessing each one is named after the President. I whittled the list down to the counties residing in states I have visited: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and West Virginia. I've been in Missouri, but only in the St. Louis airport changing planes and I won't count that.

Next card, 6 of hearts. Six. Ohio was the 6th state I listed. Hearts starts with "H" so I searched for a place in Monroe County, Ohio that starts with that letter and found the small settlement of Hannibal, on the Ohio River across from West Virginia.

I've actually been within about 40 miles or less of Hannibal in 1999 when I was driving north on I-77. Nearby Cambridge, Ohio was the home of Henry McCleary, who founded McCleary, Washington. The McCleary family farm now sits under an artificial lake created in the 1950s and is part of an Ohio state park.

Hannibal is nestled in some nice country.

I also visited Ohio during SPACE 2011, with my friends Bruce and Joan Chrislip as my hosts. In both visits I was impressed by how welcoming the natives of the Buckeye State were. My own ancestors lived for a generation or two in the northeast and southeast corners of pioneer Ohio on their way West.

Anyway, it turns out Hannibal is unincorporated and about a quarter of the size of McCleary (we have a bit over 1600 people here). So I simply searched for Hannibal online and chose the first place that popped up with an address, which turned out to be a vacant place of business up for sale. So I'm sending it care of the "Art Director," with a brief note, and hope whoever receives it has a sense of humor and an appreciation for the unexpected.

I submit that there will be no other comic art title harder to collect than Morty Comix. In March this serial will be 30 years old. And in a weird twist, it is the later issues that will be much harder to find. I am sure most of them have been thrown away since I have created this art form of Obscuro random distribution.

Morty Comix # 2488

We had our family holiday gift exchange a couple days before Christmas. Susan gave me a potato gun with two spuds to use as ammo.

It does NOT shoot up to 50 feet, as we shall see. However, I am looking forward to years of service. We'll get back to this gift in a bit, but let's move on to ...

... a somewhat revolting present from Bryan and Zach. These dismembered plastic monkey parts are in a bag. And as if that wasn't creepy enough, the monkey's eyes on the severed monkey head BLINK!
 

Stay with me now. All will be be revealed by the end. I made a grid with 50 little squares on a sheet of cardboard.

Then I arranged the disgusting monkey parts on a TV tray. 

The grid was placed under and behind the tray.

I shot several potato pellets at the monkey parts, which were precariously balanced at the edge of the tray. Although the little spud bullets hit the targets, they lack the required velocity to knock them to the floor. So when the label declared "Shoots Harmless Potato Pellets," they meant it.

So it was time to haul out a more advanced technology to achieve my goal. I went to the toybox and extracted the gyroscope.

 You can tell the monkey's expression is politely apprehensive at this juncture.

 I let the gyroscope rip

It did not fail me as it knocked over two revolting monkey parts. A foot landed on numbers 27, 28, and 32.

 

Now it was time for the next phase, but I knew the potato gun would not be able to do the job. Mr. Spud himself told me this was all a half-baked idea anyway, and he took his leave. But I thanked him for helping me with the initial parts of this project.

  

So I made a much simpler grid, narrowing the field to three.

And this time I brought out the heavy artillery,  foam darts!

 

It took a few tries, but in less than 3 minutes I knocked a repulsive monkey hand into the grid. It landed on number 32.
 

32. That means Minnesota, the 32nd state, admitted to the Union in 1858. I've been over Minnesota in a passenger airline but have never set foot there, but hopefully someday I'll be able to pay a visit.

None of my ancestors parked there on their way West in the pioneer era (but a few were next door in Wisconsin in the 1850s-1860s).

Minnesota has a great tradition of creative comic art, was one of the hotspots in the Newave era, and today remains a prominent place for our brand of comix. Meeting Matt Feazell at SPACE 2011 was a real honor and even though he now lives in Michigan, I nominate him for Minnesota's Cartoonist Laureate for his amazing past contributions.

 Anyway, I rolled the dice the for the next step. As you can see, the number was 7. That's lucky!

And the 7th largest city in Minnesota is Plymouth. I consulted a map of that city and decided to just pick a street name I liked, and Cheshire was my choice. A co-worker calls me the Cheshire Cat and I admire that character.

So I randomly selected an address on that street, which turns out to be home to a business enterprise. I'm mailing it tomorrow morning. This issue of Morty Comix will probably be tossed in the trash or recycling, but I hope you readers enjoyed the narrative. Actually, in many ways, these blogposts are the real Morty Comix, the hardcopy product is residue.

Obscuro comix in action!

Fifteen Heart Attacks, page 6

From this point on, all the pages are entirely written and drawn by the amazingly incredible creative ball of energy we know as Maximum Traffic. Students of Newave and Obscuro will notice what care he took to  mimic my drawing style in certain instances in order to have some sort of continuity in the inevitable anarchy of the open jam.

Max is a brilliant star in the comix universe. I am so glad I got to meet him in person last year at SPACE in Columbus, thanks to Bruce Chrislip and Bob Corby making my trip possible.

Morty Comix # 2353

 

So I had to rummage through one of my several junk drawers, and finally found the hole-punch tool. Now how often does anyone find an occasion to use one of these?

And here we see the hole-punch tool doing what it does best, punching a hole. In this case it happens to be in Morty Comix # 2353. Why am I doing this?

Here's why. I have a big helium balloon shaped like a ladybug. The store even pumped extra helium into this thing when I purchased it.

So I tied the Morty Comix to the end of the ribbon dangling from the string on the balloon, using the hole I punched with the seldom used hole-punch tool.

From my front yard the wind was strong, heading west from the Pacific Ocean (about an hour away while driving).

And so I released this Morty Comix to the Heavens and watched it for about five minutes before it actually entered the cloud layer. What amazed me was that even though the wind was strong at ground level, the balloon basically went slightly west but vanished in the clouds still over McCleary city limits. See if you can spot it in these subsequent phone photos. I was able to observe it until it vanished into a cloud.

This is one Morty Comix that should be a real collector's item! Well, that is, if anyone out there is nuts enough to try to collect these babies.

This is the second issue of Morty Comix I have sent out on a balloon. Back in my last house here in McCleary I launched one probably in the 1980s. It was during Bear Festival time. I suppose I could look up the number but I lack the energy.

As I recall that particular Morty Comix was an index card folded in half with four images drawn into it and the card stock weight made lift off rather iffy. And instead of being herded east, as the winds here usually do, that Morty Comix barely cleared a giant evergreen and floated magically to the west-- toward Elma.(7 miles away)

Of course back then when I launched the first Morty Comix, in 1983, there was no such thing as Internet or scanning. And I kept no record of the image.

Of all the places that have been Mortyfied since I have started this new phase, only one has responded.