Stevetreads # 1

1st edition, 1987, Chico, California : Jeff Nicholson. 3 copies, regular digest size.

That's right, only 3 copies.

The hopefully-not-really-retired-from-comix-for-life cartoonist Jeff Nicholson, creator of Ultra Klutz, Through the Habitrails, Colonia, and Father and Son published a 4-issue short run of this "bootleg" Stevetreads series to fill out his own collection.

I believe everything in this first issue has already been scanned and posted here in various places.

We'll be seeing quite a bit of Jeff's work down the road when I reach the part of the backlog containing our Ultra Klutz jam.

Hmm, I see a cat hair got into the scan of the final page. That makes it a cat scan, right? I guess I should've stopped the machine by hitting the paws button. Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk.

Six Mazes

1st edition, Aug. 26, 2001, 18 copies, all yellow, regular digest size.

1st Danger Room Reprint edition, June 2005, 5 copies, all green, regular digest size.

This book has some mazes. Six of them to be exact. Hence the title, Six Mazes.

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.

Retreads 12

1st edition, November 2005, 25 copies, white cover, regular digest size.

Trivia:

Page 3: Hey, you draw cartoons! Draw a cartoon for our boss who is leaving. And make it look like Calvin and Hobbes. We need it in 45 minutes.

Page 13: The Mona Lisa rubber stamp was made by Kevin Wildermuth.

Page 17: It appears Maximum Traffic took a Morty Comix drawing and enhanced it into a minicomic cover. He also provided the caption for the white buffalo images I sent him.

Page 20, panel 1: A quote from Bob Dole's speech at the 1996 Republican Convention. The thing I always liked about Dole is that he was a mean-spirited, cranky old S.O.B. who always mentioned himself in the third person. And winning new voters to his base was apparently not important to him as he insulted major chunks of the American demographic with obvious glee. I particularly enjoyed watching Dole and Steve Forbes during the 1996 primary season debates, quite the comedy team.

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.