$25 Sale - City Limits Gazette Misc. Packet

City Limits Gazette # blue sky blue (May 1991), slightly dented

City Limits Gazette # zillion and six (May 1991), gentle vertical crease in middle

City Limits Gazette # hup, hup, hey! (July 1991), excellent condition, no creases

City Limits Gazette # dead porcupine icebox (Oct. 1991), excellent condition, no creases

State of Beings # 11. Georgia! (June 1992), slight and gentle crease on lower right corner. Given the color of the paper, I'm thinking this was a special printing not distributed with CLG as a bonus.

City Limits Gazette # ** (Mar. 1993), excellent condition, no creases, very small stain on edge of cover.

City Limits Gazette # Zizz (Mar. 1993), excellent condition, no creases

City Limits Gazette # Ecstatic static on automatic (Mar. 1993) No creases, but cover appears to have some small red watercolor(?) stains

None of the above issues of CLG include the State of Beings bonus comic.

CLG was normally folded before it was mailed to subscribers, so unfolded copies are quite unusual to find.

$25 ppd
Check or money order to
Steve Willis
PO Box 390
McCleary, WA 98557-0390

SOLD!

Attention Phineas and Ferb Fans: Meet the ORIGINAL Floating Baby Head

It came to my attention that a popular animated cartoon has a character called Giant Floating Baby Head.

I wonder if any the folks behind the show saw my Floating Baby Head character comix in the 1990s? And if not, what sort of collective memory were we tapping into?

State of Beings # 1 (1991)

Bezango / Bezango Obscuro (1994)

Morty Comix # 2404

Morty Comix # 2404 was drawn on a notepad given to me as an incentive to subscribe to the magazine Golf Digest, which is very strange since I have never played golf and have no desire to learn. In fact, the whole world of sports strikes me as incredibly and expensively absurd, but I recognize I am very much in the minority view here in America and realize millions find joy and meaning in this activity. This is a major part of the human experience most people find very important but has somehow escaped me. I just don't get it. But I'm OK with being a freak in this regard.

Sports have appeared in my comix. In my book Dog of Dawn Dog of Dusk I highlighted the historical sport of Dog Butting, introduced to me by my friend Bob Richart, who was featured in an altered way as a character in the story. Also in State of Beings # 5 I proposed my new baseball team, the Stationary Pus-Filled Pancakes.

Sarah introduced me to Robin Williams' great take on golf a few years ago. The fact I have a healthy dose of Scottish blood made me laugh even harder.

Page 2-3 of this Morty Comix came from two leftover old post-its I had from Morty Comix # 2394, which were affixed to an outside door almost two weeks ago and were, incredibly, still there when I drove by  today even though the weather here has been rainy and windy!

Anyway, since someone in my town has seen fit to take down anything I put up on the Post Office community bulletin board, rip it into shreds and throw it away, I decided to tuck this Morty Comix behind the bulletin board. I know who the perpetrator is and I highly doubt she follows this blog, so I think this one will survive her strange and unvoiced hostility to my work.

McCleary is kind of a weird place. I tried to capture the culture in my Bezango WA 985 series. We enable our many local eccentrics and that adds to the surrealism.

Meeting Notes, July 1990-Sept. 1991

Today I've been weeding through my books and in the process ran across a notebook I kept of work related meeting notes from July 1990 to September 1991.

This was a time period when the Washington State agency I worked for had converted into a private nonprofit corporation (only the 2nd such instance in the history of Washington). After privatization in July 1990 I was promoted to a position where I managed anywhere between 12 to 20 people at any given time. This was a bibliographic utility called WLN (now extinct since around 1999/2000) and I kept copious notes of every meeting. For anyone interested in the history of online library services in the Pacific Northwest, or in the topic of public to private conversion, this notebook might be a valuable primary document.

WLN (originally called the Washington Library Network, then Western Library Network, and finally just WLN) was a great place to work and we had an excellent set of products and top notch crew of dedicated people. Even so, I was recruited and lured away by South Puget Sound Community College in Olympia, Washington in September 1991 where I worked as a librarian and member of the faculty. WLN was the hardest job I ever left, but in the long run it turned out to be a good decision.

Anyway, I noticed while looking through these notes that there were a lot of illuminations. Almost all of them in pencil (sorry, I know many are difficult to see). Contrary to being distracted, we cartoonists actually listen and think better while moving our drawing hands around. Non-cartoonists think we're goofing off, but actually we are processing what we are hearing through our special comix-vision. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

During the second half of the time period covered here I revived City Limits Gazette. Some of the drawings seem like the very beginnings of comic ideas that were later fully developed and published, such as Tulpa and State of Beings # 2.