Sinking Islands & Other Stories

1st edition, 1992, Seattle, Washington : Starhead Comix. Enlarged digest size. The "Sinking Islands" portion of the cover was printed in color and pasted on.

1st Danger Room Reprint edition, July 2005. 5 copies, blue cover. Enlarged digest size.

Trivia:

The script of "First Line" is comprised entirely of the opening sentences of various books. What I love about the bibliography is that Michael Dowers obviously used one of those exciting new dot matrix printers to initially print it, giving this a real period piece feel.

"The Parade" is one of my personal favorites, describing a state of being that seems to be perpetual and never settling for me.

The Rise and Fall of Morty the Dog

1st edition, 1987, Seattle, Washington : Starhead Comix, 200 copies. white gloss cover, regular digest size.

2nd edition, 1992, Ocean Shores, Washington : Starhead Comix, white cover, regular digest size.

1st Danger Room Reprint edition, August 2005, McCleary, Washington : [The Fool on the Hill]. 5 copies (4 red, 1 blue), regular digest size.

When Michael Dowers published the 2nd edition he gave the outside covers a bit of red and changed the content of the inside and outside back cover. I must've drawn "Famous Taxi Scene" sometime between 1987 and 1992.

Hey, here's an eyeball joke I posted on OlyBlog last month. Apparently only pupils of puns get this one:

I know this rich guy named Arthur. He has a morbid fear of going blind. So he buys eyeballs to keep in stock at the eye bank just in case. He has so much money he can afford to hire a group of people just to take care of his stored eyeballs. They have a special room only they can enter, and on the door it says: "Arthur Eyes Personnel Only"

Morty the Dog Who Walks Like a Man!

1st edition, Seattle, Washington : Starhead Comix, 1987. Color cover, 18 cm. spine. Newsprinty paper.

1st Danger Room reprint edition, July 2005, 5 copies (4 pink, 1 green), regular digest size.

1987 was one of several years where I was convinced I had "retired" from comix. But as Clay Geerdes accurately predicted at the time, "You'll be back. No cartoonist ever retires."

According to the intro inside the cover, this story was really drawn in 1986 for another publisher who left the scene before I finished the piece. And now, a quarter century later, I can't even begin to remember who that would-be publisher might be.

I've had short comic stories printed in anthologies that were translated into Finnish and Portuguese, but so far as I know, this is my only stand-alone comic book that has been translated and published in another language, in this case-- Greek. Michael Dowers made all the arrangements. I posted Mopti on December 30, 2010 if you want to compare the English and Greek versions.

This comic has most of my usual texture tricks, except there is one additional bit that might be unique to this story. The fridge on the 1st panel of the 5th page of the story has a piece of patterned cloth acting as shadow texture.

Here's some real trivia, especially for you cataloger librarians out there. The background of the 2nd panel on the 6th page of the story are modified delimiters used in MARC records for the now extinct WLN bibliographic utility. I have used this symbol in a few other stories.

It is interesting that Morty has been in a few comix where he is a political candidate. Still, no matter how weird my stories might be where this is a premise, none of them can compete with the surrealism of his real life run for McCleary Mayor in 1999.

Morty the Dog in the Shadow of the Rainbow

This was a reprint of Starhead Presents # 1 (1986). Starhead published this one in 1992 under a new title, called it "second edition," and released it as a regular digest size book. The color cover was mounted and the inside covers were blank. The full wraparound color cover of the original was absent here. One of the more unusual physical specimens in the world of comix.

1st Danger Room Reprint edition, July 2005, 5 copies, green cover. In this one I included the original Starhead Presents # 1 info on the inside front cover, and note about the history of the comic on the inside back cover.