$50 - An Untitled Portfolio, 1st ed.

An Untitled Portfolio

1st edition, Fall 1977, Olympia, Washington. 100 copies, dark blue cover, light blue guts, enlarged digest size. I have one copy available in good condition.

$50 ppd.
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Steve Willis
PO Box 390
McCleary, WA 98557-0390

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An Untitled Portfolio

1st edition, Fall 1977, Olympia, Washington. 100 copies, dark blue cover, light blue guts, enlarged digest size.

2nd edition, Fall 1982, Olympia, Washington, 25 copies, light blue cover, enlarged digest size.

3rd edition, presented as a print-on-demand title starting in November 1995. Regular digest size.

1st Danger Room reprint edition, July 2005, 5 copies, red cover, regular digest size.

My 4th and quite possibly most important comic in terms of my development as a cartoonist.

This was originally drawn as a class project for the program "Self Exploration Through Autobiography," an interdisciplinary writing/literature class at The Evergreen State College during Fall quarter, 1977.

Earlier that year I had lived in Seattle and taken a couple life drawing classes. One was during Summer quarter at Shoreline Community College and the other was a night course at the University of Washington Experimental College. In both cases I learned to loosen up my drawing hand a bit and give myself permission to make plenty of mistakes. Since I never studied art at Evergreen, these two courses constitute the only graphic art training I've had in my adult life.

It would be a writer, not an artist, who turned my head on comic art. His name is Thad Curtz, one of the best teachers I've known. At the time he was very interested in child psychology and the creative process. Today our paths still cross on OlyBlog, where we are fellow moderators.

Another member of the Evergreen faculty, Peter Elbow, was an adherent of freewriting. His book Writing Without Teachers was one of the good old Evergreen standbys in the 1970s. I would enroll in Peter's class the following year, but by then I had already been using his techniques as applied to comic art-- thanks to Thad's guidance.

During this period I was enamored of the works of William Steig. His books like All Embarrassed, The Lonely Ones, and Persistent Faces from the 1940s really grabbed me. His work would be my model for climbing out of the stilted and constricted method of cartooning I had been employing in my earlier books.

In fact, I dedicated this book to Steig and sent him a copy. He wrote back a brief and nice response. Imagine my surprise when in one of his later books (I don't remember which one) he employed my "Boy Kaboing" interlude concept with a bunch of people dancing to "Hot cha, cha cha cha." He lifted my idea! Oh, well, turnabout is fair play since his style heavily influenced mine, so I can't kick too much.

In fact I still use this method of storytelling now and then. Bezango WA 985, which ran 8 issues, is built on the same kind of foundation.

005

Mythic Residue

1st edition, spring 1978, Olympia, Washington, 30 copies, letter size leaves bound with a plastic strip which I think is called velobinding. Dark blue covers with light blue guts.

2nd edition, 1983, Pullman, Washington, 30 copies, light blue covers, enlarged digest size.

3rd edition, print-on-demand, 1996, probably regular digest size.

1st Danger Room reprint edition, July 2005, 5 copies (4 blue, 1 red), regular digest size. This is the one scanned and posted here.

My fifth comic was drawn for a class at The Evergreen State College called "Old Stories/Re-Creations." Part of the focus was finding universal themes in world literature throughout history. Our final project was to present a re-creation of an old story. So this was mine.

Actually it was more of an exercise in learning how to loosen my drawing hand. In my previous comic, An Untitled Portfolio (1977) I had finally turned some corner in developing a fluid style, so in this book I was going hogwild.

The next book wouldn't come until 1981, but by then I had calmed down a bit.

One of my classmates was my friend Steve Charak. The faculty who worked with me on this project was Hazel Jo Reed (1938-2009), who we all called Josie. She was a mathematician with a Ph. D. from the Carnegie Technical Institute and had no previous experience with comic art at all-- which means she was an excellent teacher! To this day I can barely add or subtract, and when Josie gave me artistic feedback she was responding from a side of the brain I seldom visit.

Having a mathematics Ph. D. as a comic art teacher was a great experience, and was probably only possible at Evergroove and only in the 1970s. Josie had a great sense of humor and allowed me to develop my own style.

But on the flipside of TESC, as I recall, when I went to pick up the finished copies at the campus print shop, the guy behind the counter was loudly telling his co-worker for my benefit what a piece of crap and waste of time this book was to print and jeez, what is the world coming to when garbage like this is encouraged in college? He was pretty intense and riled up about the whole thing. It was real charming. Looking back I think that experience probably chilled me from producing any more books while I was at Evergreen, but I also saw firsthand how simple lines on paper could evoke some hot reactions.

Trivia:

Only the first edition had illustrated covers (pictured here), subsequent editions merely had the title on the cover. The later editions included an introduction from my then-spouse, Robin.

My usual formula was to draw 4 panels and then make a line at random over the whole page. Then I would incorporate the line into my narrative.

Page 1: I believe this might might be the first of many times I have drawn someone using hot dog buns as shoes.

Page 2-3: The Odyssey was one of our class texts.

Page 5: Obviously in hindsight I was anticipating Reagan.

Page 15, 21, 26: I retold 4 panels from various old comic books.

Page 23, panel 4: Self-portrait.

Page 25, panel 4: Jobbo Bonobo. All hail Jobbo Bonobo!