What's My Line? The Missing Piece

When I posted my What's My Line? series a few months ago, I noted one was missing. It surfaced during the studio cleanup.

This line was submitted by an OlyBlogger known as Spareshoes.

Bezango: Oh, It's Just Goose

Olympia Power & Light, June 30-July 13, 2010

The Thurston County Coroner never did answer my many calls. So much for public service.

Morty the Blog readers have seen Goose Kaler's handiwork here before, in the What's My Line project. He drew the initial line on the back of an envelope.

What's My Line?

What's My Line? was another online-only comic series I drew for OlyBlog. There were 17 installments from Nov. 29, 2008 to Jan. 31, 2009.

I asked several OlyBlog contributors to draw a line on a paper, then the challenge was for me to make something out of it. Like the UML series, dogs smoking cigarettes was a theme. Take a trip to OlyBlog to read the text and contributors.

One set is missing from OlyBlog, so I'll see if I can find it in hardcopy around here.

Dada Gumbo Morty

1st edition, 1994, print-on-demand, regular digest size. I have no idea how many of these are out there. It was available from 1994-1996, so perhaps 100 of them, give or take 75.

Special Fandom House edition, 1994, 20 copies.

This is a reprint collection of comix jams with Dada Gumbo publisher Dale Luciano. Some of them were originally released as pages in anthology comix (Dog Boy #7, Scratchez Magazine #8, Stevetreads #3, and Worker Poet #9), others as individual minicomix:

Harnessing the White Elephant

It Has No Story ...

The Persecution and Assassination of Morty the Dog ...

Something Morty This Way Comes ...

All of these were initiated by Dale, who also decided where and how they would be published. He sent me pages with the panels containing random images and I attempted to impose order on them, an exercise I thoroughly enjoyed. I have used this technique in other comix, most lately online at OlyBlog with the UML series and the What's My Line? series.

When I occasionally give cartoon presentations to classrooms, I'll ask the kids to close their eyes and draw a line on the blackboard (or in recent years, whiteboard) and then I'll show them how they can build an image around this line if they approach it with some imagination. I like this method-- it forces me to get outside the cookie cutter way of drawing where I can easily imprison myself since I'm essentially a sedentary and lazy artist.