Dylan Williams

Sad news from The Beat that Portland cartoonist Dylan Williams lost his battle with cancer.

I had met Dylan at the last couple Oly Comix Fests. A nice guy and wonderful cartoonist. He was one of the official Morty the Blog followers.

Dylan on the left at the 2011 Oly Comix Fest.

Can o' Worms issue # 2

1st edition. Olympia, Washington : The Evergreen State College, January 1992. Enlarged digest size. I'm just scanning the front and inside covers here.

A look at the contents page (by Ed Martin) is most interesting. Matt Groening, Lynda Barry, and your faithful pixel correspondent were already considered old guys almost 20 years ago!!! Jeez. A milepost worth noting for this blog.

By now the three of us must be in the fossil category.

Of this second generation of Evergroove cartoonists, I've met Edward Martin III, Cat Kenney, and Megan Kelso.

Ed was a student worker in the Evergreen library when I was employed there as Head of Cataloging 1986-1988. I liked his creativity and he was a fun conversationalist. It seems today he is a film director.

Cat Kenney, who I always liked both as an artist and person, worked in a local comic shop for awhile. She was the one who first alerted me that my work was woven into Understanding Comics.

This book has a very early example of Megan's work. I had the pleasure of meeting her this year at the Olympia Comics Fest.

I like the nice visual directory of the artists on the back cover. The previous Evergreen cartoonists anthology, Tales From the Steam Tunnels (1981), couldn't do that since most of us had already graduated when that title was published.

State of the Morty Blog, 5/31/11

Above: Buster makes his shameless bid for playtime. He often jumps on to my lap as I type these posts and edits my work with a very critical eye. This is a fellow with melodramatic acting skills made for the silent film era, such is his repertoire of purely visual emotional expressions.

Two major comix gatherings have taken place since my last State of the Morty Blog report: SPACE in Columbus, Ohio and the Olympia Comics Festival in Olympia, Washington. Attending both of these events was a wonderful experience and helped reconnect this old Morty to the spirit of the creative cartooning community.

I was thinking of collecting old work and reprinting it in squareback books, like those I have seen available at both conventions I attended. I have even talked to a couple printers about it. But after a lot of thought I have backed off. Apparently there is a modern a-go-go requirement for the art to be in digital pdf. But my work was made for straight-ahead photocopy, which carries much more power in the fluid lines that are part of my style. Digitizing my drawings seems to diminish them somehow. Also, a lot of my older work was made for folded legal size, a format now called obsolete by every modern printer I've talked to.

Perhaps I'm a bug trapped in amber, but there it is. So if I ever do publish a squareback, it will be a photocopy, and maybe in legal size folded ("enlarged digest" as we said in Newave days) . Unfortunately, that option appears to be much more expensive.

Call me a dinosaur, but when I see a photocopied comic adrift in a sea of color cover publications, I zero in on the black and white toner produced work. The format just has more of a visceral punch for this ancient Newaver. There is a difference between offset vs. photocopy, between toner vs. digital. The photocopy format itself is a rejection of the slick. And I like the subversive feel of that.

I guess it comes down to being able to master the technology that lands in your lap. There are many great new artists producing wonderful works in the digital and online formats. It is first nature to them. So interesting how technology and the generational landing spot shapes our methods of expression.

But I am working on a way to deliver my stories in a multimedia format. The Fabulous Sarah, the technology brain behind this Morty the Dog outfit, is helping me figure out how to realize an insidious Morty vision that has been forming in my cranium. BwahahahahaHAHAHAHAHA!!!! Hopefully you'll see the results of my evil plan within the year. It will be a new toy that will be too obnoxious for words.

The numbers:

Total number of visitors so far (since Aug. 2010): 20,504
This month (May) we topped over 4000 visitors, so we enjoyed a big spike from the previous average of 2500
45% use IE, 38% Firefox, 8% Safari
82% Windows, 12% Mac

Top Ten Posts:

McCleary Time Capsule, 1943-1963

Tsunami Warning System, Ocean Shores, Washington

Olympia Comics Festival 2011 Report, Pt. 1

SPACE 2011 report, Pt. 3

City Limits Gazette: Sample Discussion

SPACE 2011 Report, Pt. 1

About That Donate Button

Brad Foster Has Lit The Fuse

The Bulletin Board

I Am NOT D.B. Cooper

Where the readers are from. The top ten states:

Washington
New York
Oregon
California
Missouri
Ohio
North Carolina
Texas
Illinois
Minnesota

Top Ten Countries:

USA
Russia
Spain
Slovenia
South Korea
Germany
France
Canada
United Kingdom
Malaysia

Unlike Russia, the sustained hits from Spain appear to be from real people and not spammers. Why? This interests me. Picasso was always a fraud to me, but I love Dali's work. In the pre-Internet days I had a good audience from Portugal (where my comix were translated) and parts of Spain, and although I was flattered I could never figure out why although I suspect it had something to do with Morty the Dog's universal call for liberty. Anyway, the current interest in this blog from Spain is intriguing.

Top referring sites:

Facebook
OlyBlog
Comics Reporter
Back Porch Comics
The Jim and Frank Podcast
Poopsheet Foundation

And no, I am not a member of Facebook, or Twitter, and have no plans for signing up.

Olympia Comics Festival 2011 Report, Pt. 6

Olympia Comics Festival 2011 Report, Pt. 5

Neo Trash Comix

Bad Breath Comics and Swellzombie

With Sprinkles, a new Alaska transplant!
Welcome to Olympia!

Three troublemakers from Portland who I hope to meet again soon
Ian Sundahl is the Mike Hill of the West Coast


Profanity Hill


Only a half hour to take down.
Frank from the Danger Room in the foreground

Comix from the Fest I'm sending to the WSU collection

Olympia Comics Festival 2011 Report, Pt. 4

Megan Kelso (in green sweater) as she prepares for her afternoon "long" interview. As it turned out, her "brief" morning discussion with Jon-Mikel Gates was actually longer since most of the later session was taken up with a great visual presentation/narration overview of her cartooning career. Since I had agreed to be her interviewer, this made my task much easier!

I must admit although I was very aware of Megan's stature as a cartoonist, I had not really been exposed to much of her work until last week, when I was conscripted into the Fest as an emergency measure. This is no reflection on her, since I confess in addition to not being a comic collector, I'm also not much of a comic reader! Go figure. Actually I'm not much of a reader in general, either. So why am I a cartoonist and librarian? But this isn't about my existential mind taffy, so let's move on.

Anyway, I took a self-imposed crash course on her work and career and found an intriguing artist I'll enjoy watching for the next few decades. She graciously signed a copy of Artichoke Tales for me (which will go to the WSU collection) and treated all my questions with serious consideration.

I felt a real kinship with some aspects of her development as a cartoonist. Both of us were born and raised in Washington State, we both attended The Evergreen State College, we both lived on the East Coast for awhile and found ourselves missing the special kind of rain and mystery our corner of the world possesses.

But in many other ways her work was very foreign to me, as I mentioned in the interview. Most comix create a lot of noise in the head of the reader, but her show-not-tell style is very quiet and nuanced. The Japanese film director Ozu was one her stated artistic influences, whereas I was emotionally touched by Jim Varney's Ernest movies. But we did have Lynda Barry in common. And like Lynda, Megan came to the world of cartooning during her time at TESC.

I really enjoyed Kelso's Watergate Sue series and hope she expands the concept of exploring that era through the eyes of the little girl that she was during the first half of the 1970s. Such a great way of storytelling on many different levels. Megan's insight here is nothing less than astounding considering she was working from the memory of child. I'm speaking as one who was a McGovern volunteer at the time.

Generally Megan takes more risks in her writing than she does with her graphics, which creates the effect of a cautious visual lid on the cauldron of emotion in the story, of which there is plenty. And since she doesn't use captions, this creates a sophisticated tension. She makes comix for grownups. And does it well.

She seems at a crossroads, which is where any good artist should frequently find themselves. Hope I get a chance to have the long interview with you in a few more years, Megan, to catch up on your interesting journey.


For some reason, and this has never happened before with my phone photos, my shot of the photogenic Katy Ellis O'Brien got eaten by the pixel monster. So I'm substituting the promo sheet she handed out.

G. Fling and Eight and a Half by Eleven Comics

The Comix Jam Workshop hosted by Chelsea Baker with me as her co-pilot. I was gratified to see almost half of the people in the room were left-handed. At the table in the foreground, 3 out of 4 were lefties! Hopefully, Chelsea will be scanning and the posting the results of this effort on the Fest blog. In the space of an hour several coherent and very funny jams were produced.


The right-handed gentleman is Mr. Rex N. Munger. He is my oldest friend. We have known each other since Eisenhower was president. Rex and I were avid comrades in comic book collecting during the 1960s and early 1970s. He also has many of my earliest publishing efforts when I drew superhero and funny animal comic books. So if friendship includes mutual blackmail, Rex has the goods on me! But don't mess with him, he's an attorney.

Rex is also an astute student of sequential narrative and any comic art scholar would benefit from hearing his observations.

The left-handed gentleman is Steve Blakeslee, who came up with great laugh out loud zingers to conclude a few comix jams.


Chelsea Baker was the 4th member of our comix jam table. Perhaps there is no other cartoonist in Olympia history who has done as much to create a community of comrades in our art form. Given our natural contrary nature, this is an objective with many inherit obstacles.

The Olympia Comics Collective!

OK, I'll only say this once. I'm not much of a joiner, but if I was, I'd join these guys. This trio really projected a true love of our genre. It is great to see their kind of creative energy in Olympia. Having gone from Kindergarten through college in Oly, I never would've dreamt this sort of interest would ever happen here, especially in the days before Evergreen landed.


Jon Mikel-Gates apparently said something that made the poor guy at the table cover his face. Meanwhile, Angelica Blevins, the artist who created the poster for this year's Fest, looks on with the kind of detached amusement we cartoonists are noted for.


So, there is a young woman who slid out of the middle chair and under the table rather than appear in this phone photo. I was tempted to lift the tablecloth and snap a shot of her crouching underneath. Charlie Daugherty handed me a microcomic in the meantime.


Rick Perry gave an excellent presentation at the morning stage show on the different social interpretations of Superman during the last 70+ years.

Olympia Comics Festival 2011 Report, Pt. 3

Jim Blanchard

I first met Jim at the launch party for the Newave! book in Seattle early last year


Rapt in Fear


Max Clotfelter and Kelly Froh
Max and I had traded comix via *gasp!* snail mail a few months back, and I enjoyed meeting him in person at last. Kelly and I had met at the Newave! launch party last year. Two artists I most definitely want to keep track of. Hopefully we'll have other opportunities to get together.


Eroyn Franklin with Martine Alicia and
Neoglyphic Media


S. Mann's Eye Bot
I bet she was a good pupil in art school

Chelsea Baker's table, but she was so busy making the exhibit area run smoothly that it was rare to catch her here

There must've been a disturbance in The Force when I snapped this phone photo of
Jordan M. Dalton of Vancouver, Washington

Vancouver is technically in Washington State, but is right across the Columbia River and considered a suburb of, yes, you guessed it, Portland! I'm at a loss to explain it, but I think this fact has something to do with the photo oddity.

The Art Bureau


That seated gentleman with the serene smile is
Aron Nels Steinke
His work is wonderful!

Olympia Comics Festival 2011 Report, Pt. 2

Microcosm Publishing

Dracula Sauce, Tom Van Deusen


Stun Nuts and Crappy Comics


Sparkplug Comic Books


Theo Ellsworth


An abandoned table when I came by, but I like the art


Family Style, homemade comics and zines


Breanne Boland