MEOW!

by Sarah

Sunday morning conversation

Steve and I were discussing once again the merits of pdfs vs plain scans for his blog. The following bit of dialogue occured:

Sarah: You are such a contrarian.
Steve: No I'm not!

There was a long pause. Then we burst into hearty laughter.

Tell us in comments if you like Steve's work in .pdf form like this

Steve.pdf

State of the Morty Blog, 2/26/11

Still trying to post something every day, and as I look at the pile of material yet to be shared (I originally typed "shred" by accident. Hmmm), there is lots more to do in the scanning and posting department.

We've been slowly making material available via the Mortyshop. The funds we get through sales and the donation button are being poured back into other comix projects. Right now I am looking into the possibility of publishing the 5-part, almost 200 page Tragedy of Morty, Prince of Denmarke as a single volume squarespine paperback in the original legal size enlarged digest.

Of course the big excitement around here is in the preparation for attending SPACE in Columbus, Ohio next month! Sarah is going to remain here in Mortyville to keep the cats fed and the blog warm while I go Back East, so she shall remain a mysterious and shadowy figure, the power behind the blog.

We Rode With the Clowns could be called our first Morty the Blog comic. I'm gathering material for the next one and already have contributions from Harry Bell, Bruce Chrislip, Bob Vojtko, Anvil, and Roldo. Want to climb aboard? Send me a random drawing! The more the merrier.

Here are some interesting numbers, demonstrating we remain very obscure:

Total number of visitors so far: 10,503
43% of you use Firefox, 41% IE, 8% Safari.
81% use Windows, 12% Mac.

Top ten posts:

McCleary Time Capsule, 1943-1963

about that Donate button

Brad Foster Has Lit the Fuse

City Limits Gazette: Sample Discussion

End of the Earth and Turn Left

Strange and Unbelievable, but Real and True! I Inherit Over 5 Million Bucks From June Pointer!

City Limits Gazette: Lynn Hansen Interview

Newave Reader

Mr. Crawford Raises Herfords, Too

Brave New Nazis of the Inland Empire

Where the readers are from, the top 10 states:

Washington
Utah/New York (tie)
Texas
California
Oregon/Ohio (tie)
Minnesota
North Carolina
Pennsylvania

Top 10 countries:

USA
South Korea
Spain
France
Poland (mostly spammers, thanks a lot guys)
Germany
Canada
United Kingdom
Russia
Malaysia (more spammers)

Top Referring Sites:

Facebook
OlyBlog
Comics Reporter
The Jim and Frank Podcast
Midnight Fiction
The Magic Whistle

The minicomic Dante's Coat gets plenty of hits I assume from people trying to find a real life product that matches the overcoat of a character in the Devil May Cry game named Dante, or at least that's what I gather since the term "Dante's Coat" is one of the most popular here.

Anyway, I'm still having a blast and I hope you readers are enjoying this too. Many thanks to the Fabulous Sarah for making this particular place of pixels a reality.

Project ELF - Eliminate Legal-size Files

OK, so it has been a very long time since I went to a print shop to have one of my comix reproduced. And the experience has given me yet another in a growing number of Rip Van Winkle moments.

30 years ago we generally had three sizes of photocopied comix. There was the minicomic, those little 8 pagers which were letter size folded twice and cut; regular digest size, which was letter size folded once; and enlarged digest size, which was legal size folded once.

Throughout the 1980s I published a lot of comix in enlarged digest size, and eased into regular digest size by the 1990s.

So when I decided to use the original enlarged digest master copy to reprint some old comix from the 1980s for the Mortyshop I discovered legal size is, as one printer told me, "obsolete." In fact, trying to find legal size card stock for the covers of these things was a lost cause. The four print shops I approached don't even have it. The covers of these reprints had to be cut from larger paper, which, of course, made printing them much more expensive.

Then I learned about this thing initiated as a cost saving measure called Project ELF (Eliminate Legal-size Files) and pushed by the Association of Records Managers and Administrators. This apparently started in the 1980s (at the same time I was happily publishing in legal size) and has grown into an accepted standard since that time.

Meanwhile, Sarah has tracked down a place where I can order legal size card stock online.

In the meantime, it is weird to see printers more vexed over the form of my material than they are over the content. That's new.

Natural Functions

1st edition, February? 1986, 60 copies, orchid cover, enlarged digest size.

2nd edition, April 1986, 30 copies, orchid cover, enlarged digest size. (The version scanned and posted here)

Available as a print-on-demand, 1994, as part of the Reprint Series. Regular digest size.

Special Fandom House edition, 1994, 20 copies, regular digest size.

1st Danger Room Reprint edition, July 2005, 5 copies (1 blue, 4 yellow), regular digest size. (Wraparound cover example scanned and posted here)

This comic will soon be available in the Mortyshop, 50 copies from the original master copy, enlarged digest size.

"How Cats Got That Way" is up there on the list of my most popular stories, judging by how many times it has been reprinted and commented on. It is true that I'm really much more of a cat person than a dog guy. Ironic considering the name of this blog, eh?

I don't have anything against dogs, in fact I like them a lot. But cats are self-contained furry enigmas. They don't fetch, they don't do well with collars, and they don't need to go for walkies. They say they are too cool for those trifles. I live with four cats and sometimes at night I swear I can hear them in the next room chanting, "Cats rule! Dogs drool!" They all love Sarah and call her by name, but I'm known to them as "Mr. Food Giving Man."

This comic was dedicated to my buddy Ahab, who lived to be 10 years old. I found a photo of him sitting in the bathroom sink about the same year this comic was drawn, when he was around four years old. He was very slovenly, liked to eat potato chips, and had the most beautiful cat voice I have ever heard. He had so many ailments that the vet told us he was going to build a new wing to his clinic and name it after Ahab.

just when you thought it was safe

Back a few years ago I witnessed a bright yellow fireball meteor streak across the sky overhead late one November night in Olympia, Washington. Never saw the like before or after.

Steve kindly drew up a sketch of what I reported, though I don't recall saying anything about a caiman. Here is his sketch on notebook paper, I've cropped out some of that meteor tail to focus on his sketch and not on my text notes.

Being chased by a fireball meteor is one thing but imagine being chased by a caiman driven fireball meteor! Chilling thought.

The Wild World of Obscuro Comix

This is a VHS videorecording of a lecture I gave at a community event in Olympia, Washington, December 1993, sponsored by South Puget Sound Community College (SPSCC). It is not on YouTube, and I'm sort of a klutz with the online video-to-computer graphics, so you are stuck with still shots taken by my phone while the thing is playing on my bulbous antique television set.

Actually I'm scheduled to give another local presentation much like this one in April except the focus will be more on Puget Sound artists in the prehistoric era of self-publishing, when we used to make our drawings on clay tablets and send them to each other via the Woolly Mammoth Express.

This video was included in my Cheaper by the Dozen reviews on OlyBlog. Here's what I wrote about it on September 7, 2008:

The Wild World of Obscuro Comix (Piece of My Mind) / directed by Steve Whalen (1993, VHS). Steve Willis. Originally presented as part of SPSCC's Piece of My Mind series. When I played this the cats left the room, my companion claimed she was, er, "tired" and needed to sleep, the house itself snored and even I got drowsy. This was me 15 years ago giving a lecture about the evolution of comic art leading to "Newave" or "Obscuro" comix. I was a college faculty at the time, so it is very lectury. I'm using an overhead projector, which gives you an idea of how exciting this is. When I gave this talk at the Olympia Community Center I had no idea it would be broadcast over and over on TCTV for a year. Otherwise I would've combed my hair. Only the most esoteric of comix historians would be interested in this presentation. I say "Um" a lot, which I tend to do in front of cameras. This video might still be available at SPSCC, otherwise, you are out of luck. Heh-heh. Bil Keane, City Limits Gazette, and Morty the Dog get a special mention. The first thing I noticed when viewing this was back then I had thick hair and a thin body. Now I have thin hair and a thick body.

Newave! the Underground Mini Comix of the 1980s

When Michael Dowers told me he was going to put this book together, I had a difficult time imagining what the final product was going to look like. But knowing Michael's amazing history as a visionary publisher and coordinator, I had faith it was going to be great. He didn't disappoint me.

My personal file of the little minicomix which I keep as my portfolio fills up two card catalog drawers. I loaned them to Michael so he could see if there were any he wanted to reproduce for this book. He picked them up at my place, and about 6 months later Sarah and I went down to Puget Island, which sits in the middle of the Columbia River between Oregon and Washington and retrieved them.

Although this dense brick of a book clocks in at around 900 pages, it is just the tip of the volcano. But the impact of this little baby has been the Newave event of 2010. A lot of us Oldwavers have dusted ourselves off and gotten to know each other again. We knew in the 1980s we were on to something wonderful, and now we are seeing that we were way ahead of the pack, even pioneers.

Not only has Michael's book been a factor (along with Sarah's lighting a fire under me) in my decision to crawl out of my cave and revisit this comix stuff, but it has also brought forth a whole new audience of the next generation of comix readers.

Michael, you done good.

I'm reproducing the interview portion from this book. Rick Bradford, who is turning out to be one of the main historians of the Newave movement, conducted the back and forth via email. Since the spine of the book doesn't allow me to lay the pages flat on the scanner, I wish you luck on reading the photocopy version.