Outside In # 8

1st edition, 1983, 150 copies on white cardstock.

2nd edition, January 1984, 20 copies on white cardstock.

3rd edition, 1984. Seattle, Washington : Starhead Comix, regular stock white paper.

James Waltman, Anina Coder Sill, Paul Curtis, Greg Blair, Wayne Gibson, Clifford Neal, Harry Onickel.

After decades of circling each other, I finally got to meet Wayne Gibson at the Newave launch party last year. I always loved Harry Onickel's work and felt he and Richard Wayne must've attended the same upper Midwest cartoon school since their comix seemed to come from the same wacky source.

Giant-Size Mini Comics

You can find my reprinted work in issues #1 (August 1986, edited by Larry Marder), #3 (December 1986, edited by Jay Kennedy) and #4 (February 1987, edited by Paul Curtis). Published by Eclipse Comics.

To be selected for this series by three editors of this caliber was exciting but also, for some reason, sort of intimidating. For a lot of readers of mainstream comic books, this was their first exposure to the world of Newave/Obscuro/small press comix.

Richard Krauss has a nice summary of the four-issue run of Giant-Size Mini Comics over at his Midnight Fiction website.

Pop. 1075

In the mid-1980s Paul Curtis was active as a cartoonist and publisher in Saegertown, Pennsylvania. He produced a series called Micro-Comics, little comix about 3.5 inches high, drawn by a wide variety of artists. Reading a packet of these tiny comix was like eating potato chips. You would find yourself reading one after another until your head was full.

I got my turn to contribute to this fun series with #125. It was drawn in 1986 and published in 1987. In June 2005 I reprinted 5 copies on green card stock as the 1st Danger Room Reprint Ed.

The story told in Pop. 1075 is basically true. By the time the comic was published I had returned to McCleary and was rediscovering the town. The theater/auction hall in the story burned to the ground, cause unknown, about 2003-2004.

The concept of using real stories from rural Southwest Washington as story material for comix was expanded in the Bezango WA 985 books I wrote about 8 years ago.