1st edition, Fall 1977, Olympia, Washington. 100 copies, dark blue cover, light blue guts, enlarged digest size.
2nd edition, Fall 1982, Olympia, Washington, 25 copies, light blue cover, enlarged digest size.
3rd edition, presented as a print-on-demand title starting in November 1995. Regular digest size.
1st Danger Room reprint edition, July 2005, 5 copies, red cover, regular digest size.
My 4th and quite possibly most important comic in terms of my development as a cartoonist.
This was originally drawn as a class project for the program "Self Exploration Through Autobiography," an interdisciplinary writing/literature class at The Evergreen State College during Fall quarter, 1977.
Earlier that year I had lived in Seattle and taken a couple life drawing classes. One was during Summer quarter at Shoreline Community College and the other was a night course at the University of Washington Experimental College. In both cases I learned to loosen up my drawing hand a bit and give myself permission to make plenty of mistakes. Since I never studied art at Evergreen, these two courses constitute the only graphic art training I've had in my adult life.
It would be a writer, not an artist, who turned my head on comic art. His name is Thad Curtz, one of the best teachers I've known. At the time he was very interested in child psychology and the creative process. Today our paths still cross on
OlyBlog, where we are fellow moderators.
Another member of the Evergreen faculty,
Peter Elbow, was an adherent of freewriting. His book
Writing Without Teachers was one of the good old Evergreen standbys in the 1970s. I would enroll in Peter's class the following year, but by then I had already been using his techniques as applied to comic art-- thanks to Thad's guidance.
During this period I was enamored of the works of William Steig. His books like
All Embarrassed, The Lonely Ones, and
Persistent Faces from the 1940s really grabbed me. His work would be my model for climbing out of the stilted and constricted method of cartooning I had been employing in my earlier books.
In fact, I dedicated this book to Steig and sent him a copy. He wrote back a brief and nice response. Imagine my surprise when in one of his later books (I don't remember which one) he employed my "Boy Kaboing" interlude concept with a bunch of people dancing to "Hot cha, cha cha cha." He lifted my idea! Oh, well, turnabout is fair play since his style heavily influenced mine, so I can't kick too much.
In fact I still use this method of storytelling now and then.
Bezango WA 985, which ran 8 issues, is built on the same kind of foundation.
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Then I would remove the grid lines, allowing the dots to float free, thusly:
Then the dots would start to connect:
And finally the lines would form an image, which would almost invariably turn out to be a dog smoking a cigarette (or cigar):
In one case it turned out to a be a cat, but that was quickly undone and reformed into a dog. These sequences were all accompanied by text, which you can read on OlyBlog. Something happened to the graphics in the early ones, they need to be refitted. OlyBlog has gone through a couple major resets since they were first posted.
