Twisted Conundrums

1st edition, February 2001, 15 copies, orchid cover, regular digest size.

1st Danger Room reprint edition, June 2005, 5 copies, blue, regular digest size.

This is a great example of how my work can be recycled over and over, seemingly without end.

This was originally a column around 2000 in the weekly Seattle tabloid The Stranger. Well, I think it was. They sent me checks for each one, but I never did see them in print myself.

Some of the situations I used in comix prior to the column. In this book most of the drawings were cannibalized from my stories in the past.

Many of these columns were collected and given yet another life in OlyBlog, where I continue to occasionally add a few.

People who are around me a lot are now to trained to roll their eyes and groan in pain after hearing me open a sentence with the line, "What would you do if ..." But hey, that's how cartoonists think.

I say Conundrums. Rick of OlyBlog put together the collection under Conundra. The Guardian has a nice discussion on this difference.

Twisted

OlyBlog T-Shirt

OlyBlog was one of the first community blogs in the country to bill itself as "hyperlocal" when it was started by Rick McKinnon in 2005.

In the early days of the blog we OlyBloggers would meet at the Brotherhood Tavern (locally called the BroHo) in Olympia on occasion. Some of us had a little problem about the caimans in Oly's Capitol Lake and made an issue out of it. I even drew a comic about the sordid affair called Fetid Lake of Doom.

Anway, I drew a logo for OlyBlog using the caiman image about mid-2006. As you can see by perusing through this Morty the Dog blog, drawing giant reptiles has been a theme of mine for years.

OlyBlogger Visudha De Los Santos, a former neighbor of mine here in McCleary, took the logo and produced about 10 or 12 of these shirts. They were distributed at the BroHo in January 2007. The shirt is blue and the logo is white, but my phone photos have sort of changed the color of everything.

The Fetid Lake of Doom

Not exactly a full length story-- more like an extended minicomic in regular digest size, but I guess this qualifies as my most recently published book.

This was originally published as an online work on OlyBlog, April 23, 2007. Rick Bradford's Poopsheet Foundation first brought it into hardcopy in October 2007 with 100 numbered copies.

Right after this was printed by Rick, I pretty much stopped keeping bibliographical track of my comix, lectures, etc. I'm not sure what that means.

A little history here. My friend Rick McKinnon started OlyBlog as a place for citizen journalists covering news in the area of Olympia, Washington in 2005. It was one of the early sites deliberately embracing the concept of "hyperlocal news." Rick asked me to join in the starting days (I'm member # 31) because he wanted two things: 1. A local old guy who knew some of the area's history and 2. Someone who was not deadly serious about politics.

One of the early discussion points in OlyBlog centered on whether or not to return the artificial Capitol Lake to it's original state-- an estuary. I suggested the lake be populated with gators, crocs and caimans to make it more exciting. One thing led to another and the Fetid Lake of Doom was born.

This took me about 8 months to complete, I think. And that's at a faster rate than the comic I'm currently working on!

Also attached is a photo of the real FLOD with the Washington State Legislative Building dome.

Trivia:

Page 1, panel 3. Zach Willis is my nephew. He helped fill in the dark background on the last panel of page 4 when we were on a family visit to Springfield, Oregon.

There is a brief clip of page 5 in progress as part of video documentary on artists balancing their day jobs by Mark Shimada. The USNS Fisher did indeed visit Olympia in late 2005, I think.

Page 6: Rick is, of course, none other than Rick McKinnon. By a coincidence, in real life the FLOD was invaded by the non-native nutria about this same time! Nutria just happen to be one of the crunchy little tidbits caimans down in Latin America love to eat. Beautiful!

Page 7: I used XERK! and QUONK! as sound effects because I realized I had never used comic sounds starting with X or Q before. Both of these completed my Obscuro Comix Sound Effect Dictionary. Fetid Lake of Doom by Steve Willis