Mortymail 5/9/12

OK, I admit I have become a terrible correspondent to those of you who contact me via USPS. And I have been for a number of years. Burnout is liberating yet guilt-inducing.

Anyway. It is not my intention to make this a regular feature of Morty the Blog, but I thought I would report on some of the stuff I get in the mail before I send it off the to the Washington State University comix collection. In no way is this making up for Richard Krauss basically suspending Midnight Fiction, and I am not reviewing. If you are looking for a networking place, send your comix to Rick Bradford at Poopsheet.

I let my mail pile up quite a bit before I even look at it. Then I get out the jack-knife, slice those babies open after they have collected dust for a week or more, and mostly pay bills while some old movie is in the VCR. Yes, you heard me, I said VCR. Occasionally some comix stuff slips in there.

Here's what arrived this week:

Kel Crum sent me his latest, Scribbles. I'd like to know how he found legal sized paper to print this work in the classic enlarged digest size which I loved. I finally got to meet Kel at SPACE last year and admired his performance skills during the comix reading show.

Bruce Chrislip sent me a big packet of material. Included were copies of a couple jams from SPACE 2011. I found his reprint (20 years later) of Thurber of Ohio to be especially wonderful. Before Bruce and I left SPACE in Columbus last year to head for Cincinnati, we visited the Thurber House. I really enjoyed visiting the home of one great Ohio cartoonist while accompanied by another great Ohio cartoonist.

I hope one day Bruce and Joan Chrislip return to Washington State.

And finally, our old Newave comrade, Gary Fields, sent this great version of Morty the Dog! 

I love it!

City Limits Gazette # ...---... (April 1991)

Uh, er, did I say the first issue of CLG was the only one printed in broadside format? Oops. Guess this one was as well.

The "cranky letter" I make reference to in the second news item had been published in The Comics Journal # 140 (Feb. 1991). I'm including the actual printed letter below. As you can see, the Family Circus zen party is being prepared.

City Limits Gazette # !* ... (Feb. 1991)

OK comix comrades, time to get comfortable and prepare yourself for a looong haul. I'm going to scan and post every issue I published of City Limits Gazette.

Here's the first issue with an introductory essay by CLG founder Bruce Chrislip, and a bit by me declaring the death of photocopied comix. I was only half right.

Although all issues of CLG were printed on legal size, this is the only issue where it was presented in a vertical fashion, like a broadside.

I hope in the process of posting this series I get all the issues in the correct order. Here we go!

State of the Morty Blog, 5/31/11

Above: Buster makes his shameless bid for playtime. He often jumps on to my lap as I type these posts and edits my work with a very critical eye. This is a fellow with melodramatic acting skills made for the silent film era, such is his repertoire of purely visual emotional expressions.

Two major comix gatherings have taken place since my last State of the Morty Blog report: SPACE in Columbus, Ohio and the Olympia Comics Festival in Olympia, Washington. Attending both of these events was a wonderful experience and helped reconnect this old Morty to the spirit of the creative cartooning community.

I was thinking of collecting old work and reprinting it in squareback books, like those I have seen available at both conventions I attended. I have even talked to a couple printers about it. But after a lot of thought I have backed off. Apparently there is a modern a-go-go requirement for the art to be in digital pdf. But my work was made for straight-ahead photocopy, which carries much more power in the fluid lines that are part of my style. Digitizing my drawings seems to diminish them somehow. Also, a lot of my older work was made for folded legal size, a format now called obsolete by every modern printer I've talked to.

Perhaps I'm a bug trapped in amber, but there it is. So if I ever do publish a squareback, it will be a photocopy, and maybe in legal size folded ("enlarged digest" as we said in Newave days) . Unfortunately, that option appears to be much more expensive.

Call me a dinosaur, but when I see a photocopied comic adrift in a sea of color cover publications, I zero in on the black and white toner produced work. The format just has more of a visceral punch for this ancient Newaver. There is a difference between offset vs. photocopy, between toner vs. digital. The photocopy format itself is a rejection of the slick. And I like the subversive feel of that.

I guess it comes down to being able to master the technology that lands in your lap. There are many great new artists producing wonderful works in the digital and online formats. It is first nature to them. So interesting how technology and the generational landing spot shapes our methods of expression.

But I am working on a way to deliver my stories in a multimedia format. The Fabulous Sarah, the technology brain behind this Morty the Dog outfit, is helping me figure out how to realize an insidious Morty vision that has been forming in my cranium. BwahahahahaHAHAHAHAHA!!!! Hopefully you'll see the results of my evil plan within the year. It will be a new toy that will be too obnoxious for words.

The numbers:

Total number of visitors so far (since Aug. 2010): 20,504
This month (May) we topped over 4000 visitors, so we enjoyed a big spike from the previous average of 2500
45% use IE, 38% Firefox, 8% Safari
82% Windows, 12% Mac

Top Ten Posts:

McCleary Time Capsule, 1943-1963

Tsunami Warning System, Ocean Shores, Washington

Olympia Comics Festival 2011 Report, Pt. 1

SPACE 2011 report, Pt. 3

City Limits Gazette: Sample Discussion

SPACE 2011 Report, Pt. 1

About That Donate Button

Brad Foster Has Lit The Fuse

The Bulletin Board

I Am NOT D.B. Cooper

Where the readers are from. The top ten states:

Washington
New York
Oregon
California
Missouri
Ohio
North Carolina
Texas
Illinois
Minnesota

Top Ten Countries:

USA
Russia
Spain
Slovenia
South Korea
Germany
France
Canada
United Kingdom
Malaysia

Unlike Russia, the sustained hits from Spain appear to be from real people and not spammers. Why? This interests me. Picasso was always a fraud to me, but I love Dali's work. In the pre-Internet days I had a good audience from Portugal (where my comix were translated) and parts of Spain, and although I was flattered I could never figure out why although I suspect it had something to do with Morty the Dog's universal call for liberty. Anyway, the current interest in this blog from Spain is intriguing.

Top referring sites:

Facebook
OlyBlog
Comics Reporter
Back Porch Comics
The Jim and Frank Podcast
Poopsheet Foundation

And no, I am not a member of Facebook, or Twitter, and have no plans for signing up.

Henard Adventures

Although commercial advertising illustration isn't my deal, I have been known to draw images for the enterprises of my pals. Such was the case in 1983 for Henard Adventures. The contact here was Doug Hendrickson, the same Doug you can read about in How Two Ex-Presidents Went Up My Nose!

My scanner can't handle that obsolete old legal size, so here's a Henard poster in two pieces. In some ways this drawing was sort of a rough draft for the Woofer the Psychic Dog image I drew three years later. I can't remember why I used the name "Arnie Schwartz" when I signed my name. I made up a lot of different names back then.

As anyone who knows me well will tell you, the real humor behind this poster is that I am among the most sedentary of people. If I were a club joiner, the Diogenes Club would be the one for me.

Assorted Thoughts on Insanity : Ephemeral Comix 1980-1982, pages 1-15

1st edition, Late May or early June, 1982, Seattle, Washington. 3 copies. Legal size leaves. Blue cover. Velobinding.

Yes. Only 3 copies. I'll wager very few of you out there have seen this book.

When I started graduate school at the University of Washington in 1980 we were told to save all our lectures notes for our final exam in order to complete the course. Apparently the questions would be based on our notes.

So I saved several notebooks, and passed the exam in 1982.

But while going through my notes I noticed I did a lot of drawing during those mind numbing and countless hours in class. So I clipped out my scribbles and produced a book of almost 200 pages.

One copy was given to The Evergreen State College (where it hopefully still resides in Archives), I kept a copy, and the third was sold to Lynn Hansen. After he died in 1995 I assume it was donated to Washington State University with the rest of his collection.

Not everything in here was drawn during class, but most of it was. In some cases the images were used in some of my comix in the early 1980s. You can also see where I was playing around with concepts that I later enhanced in my books.

My scanner can't handle legal size, so each page is covered in two images. It isn't easy to scan this behemoth.

So settle in. This is going to take awhile.

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.