Lordy, Lordy, Where's Mr. Morty?

Phantasy Press of Lakewood, Colorado was known for having slightly higher production values than most other minicomic publishers. Back in an era when doing so was more problematic for us independent photocopy guys, they printed many of their comix with color covers. Including Lordy, Lordy, Where's Mr. Morty?

Publisher Bob Conway printed 500 of these puppies (get it?) in 1984. 50 of them were signed and numbered. Bob paid his contributors with copies, so at one time I had a whole ton of these to give away or trade. Apparently the one copy I kept for myself has grown legs and ran away, but I found an image of the cover elsewhere to display the color for you.

However, you collectors will get to see something rarer than that. I've scanned the black and white proof copy Bob sent to me a few months before the big printing. Compare it to the color version and notice the lack of background texture, Phantasy logo, and price on the cover. There can't be too many of these floating around.

The 1st Danger Room Reprint Ed. had 5 copies in June 2005. All had yellow covers but two had green guts, three had yellow guts.

The entire comic, along with the color cover, was reprinted this year in Fantagraphics Newave book.

Detective Arnie Wormwood was a character who occasionally popped up as Morty's sidekick. He was the way I imagined myself looking 30 years later. And I wasn't too far off!

The sidewalk hammering is based on a true story. One of my relatives back in Kentucky or Virginia suffered this fate. Or so I'm told.

The Daily Lump O' Pain is what I call our local Daily Olympian, but they changed their title to merely Olympian in the 1980s. Most locals just it The Daily Zero.

"Another widow in Commie-Land tonight!" was a real line I had read in an Eisenhower-JFK era war comic and the intensity of it stuck with me. Of course in 1984 the Cold War was still going on and this was my little jab at it.

The big reptile in the story is a dark sign of things to come in Century 21. But we'll cross that bridge when get to it as I dig out more comix and talk about them.

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Another stop I made today: Annabelle's Diner in Satsop, Washington

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It has been raining today out here in Grays Harbor County. When the weather gets like this, the trees take advantage of humans being inside and start gathering to reclaim the land and exact revenge on the loggers.

This photo was taken just a few hours ago at Brady, Washington (trivia: One member of the local Brady family here went down with the Titanic), not too far away from Morty the Dog HQ in McCleary.

Notice how the older and bigger tree is instructing the baby firs to form a line and advance. It was barking out orders! Soon they will attack with military skill, an army of evergreens, and the human citizens will scream, "Oh no, the infant tree!"

Ah, glad I got that one out the way.

LHO

LHO was published May 5, 2001. It had a print run of a whopping 26 copies (5 blue, 2 red, 4 green, 7 pink, 8 yellow).

The 1st Danger Room Reprint Ed. of June 2005 had 5 copies (2 pink, 3 yellow).

This minicomic was drawn with a #1 lead pencil.

I know it is fashionable these days to believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, but the circumstantial evidence of the assassination being a group effort seems too big to ignore for me. But that doesn't mean I don't have a sense of humor about conspiracy theories, as evidenced (I hope) with this work.

The story is basically true, except for a few details. Since there are people who will believe and quote everything they read (Wikipedia is a good example of a very bad reference source in popular use and frequently cited) I feel obliged to spell out some things. There really was an aquarium fellow and he did indeed look like Oswald, but I believe he had teeth. There was no Texas Book Depository box in his house. The person I knew who lived in his house later was actually living in the house next door, but she told me the new resident in her neighbor's house found tons of discarded aquarium stuff in the place.

And by a coincidence, not a conspiracy, the real-life fellow who looked like Oswald died shortly after this comic was first published.

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Lori's Mermaids

Job Under the Strobe

Not exactly the feelgood comic of 1985, my take on the Book of Job with a dash of Hamlet was first published by Small Town Publications in Cloquet, Minnesota. The first printing was on white paper. The second Small Town printing was later that same year with blue covers. Small Town Publications was actually Ross Raihala, who was, from what I could gather, a teenager at the time. He later became a newspaper journalist and columnist. For awhile he even worked for The Olympian in Olympia, Washington, but I understand he's now back home in Minnesota and still writing. Unfortunately we never met while he was working out here.

In 1994 I revived the title in my own Reprint Series and made it available as a print-on-demand minicomic.

Five copies on red cardstock were printed as the 1st Danger Room reprint Ed. in June 2005.

This appears to be something that only gets published once every ten years. Perhaps I should aim for 2015 for the next round?

Whose leftover pizza is this? (call and response)

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If Heaven was managed like it was the Mob, then the I suppose you could say today's pastel sunrise sky was the result of the Rosey-Fingered Don.

A little pun there for you readers of the Classics.

From Tokeland to Topeka

John E. is a Kansas-based artist of all trades. Writer, musician, painter, and fortunately for us, cartoonist. In the Newave heyday, he had a comix anthology serial featuring various cartoonists called Mumbles. Today he is better known by his full name, John Eberly.

This jam was conducted through the mail. I published 60 copies in 1985, and I believe they were on ivory colored card stock. As far as I know, it has never been reprinted.

The resulting book was one of the more unusual specimens I've published. The folded product measures 11 x 7 cm. There are no staples as the entire comic is one folded sheet. Two 7 cm. cuts were made perpendicular to the center of the shorter border of the letter-sized paper.

I've included scans of both sides of the unfolded sheet, as well as a phone photo of the minicomic itself to illustrate the oddness of the collation.

Hitchhiking was a more common way for us young guys to see the country in the 1970s than it is today. John and I recorded a few of the pitfalls of this mode of travel. The Hole Man was my nod to our fellow Newaver, the most excellent cartoonist Par Holman of Sandy, Utah.

Tokeland, by the way, is a small community on the Washington coast. It is home to our state's oldest hotel, the Tokeland Hotel. I've stayed there several times. The word "funky" comes to mind when I think of the place. It has a ghost, and for awhile a cat named Hunter (pictured here) who would "knock" on your door, strut right in, and let you know you were staying there at his pleasure. Tokeland is very vulnerable to rising ocean levels.

Anyway, I always thought this was a charming little work and one of the better jams I've had the pleasure to be part of.

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Evelyn's Cow

How Do You Doodle? : Meanings of Unconscious Scribbles

The source document that inspired this little work has fled from my memory. The text was reprinted right from whatever it came from. 17 copies were published in Feb. 1998, and the 1st Danger Room Reprint Ed. in June 2005 had a total of 5 copies on pink paper.

This gallery of worn out old guys was probably drawn while attending some exciting faculty meetings. They were all out my head. Drawing caricatures of real people is not something I would advise, it has been my experience most folks are not real happy when they see the result.

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Olympia Oyster House

Hungry Stairs to Heaven

The final entry in the Cranium Station DMZ and Eternities of Darkness trilogy, this minicomic has pretty much the same printing history as the latter title (meaning I'm not aware of any digest size versions). The 1st Danger Room Reprint Ed. consisted of 5 copies with red covers and yellow and orange guts.

Trivia: Like the two previous parts, this one also has a secret message, although not as obvious."Omnia Exstares" was my nod to The Evergroove State College. Our school mascot was the geoduck (pronounced "gooey-duck"), a very obscene looking shellfish found on the shores of Cooper Point, where TESC resided. Although the college didn't actually have any official athletic teams in the 1970s, we still considered the geoduck as our icon. "Omnia Exstares" was as close as the college could get in Latin to "Let it all hang out," which, when captioned under a picture of a geoduck in full glory, was pretty rude. Cougars and huskies drool-- geoducks rule, man! In the 1978-1979 school year (the year I graduated), certain officials attempted to get rid this mascot, but the students overwhelmingly voted in a special campus election to keep the critter, and the geoduck mascot remains at TESC to this day. Omnia Exstares!

National Union Catalog, Volume 666

Roldo, if you're still out there, I'm sure you'll find a numerological explanation--

Freefall

15 copies on white paper were printed in the Fall of 1998. The 2nd printing in June 2005 was the 1st Danger Room Reprint Ed. with 5 copies on blue cardstock. With a grand total of 20 copies out there, this is one of my more obscure comix.

As I recall, the cover image was drawn with #1 lead pencil and is printed as the same size of the original art. The same image of the jet was just copied and pasted over and over from page to page with its placement on the panel being the only difference. The image of the person kept growing bigger from page to page, but the initial drawing was still used. By the final panel the image starts to break up and the lines have texture. I love the way #1 lead looks when it is enlarged and decomposed by toner limitations on a photocopier.

Sarah has commented on how this is a "quiet" comic, hearing only silence as one reads it.

It seems like a strange topic in hindsight. In 1998 I was, on the surface, a successful, safely tenured faculty member at a community college, secure for life if I had wanted it that way. But less than two years later I took an opportunity to get out of there, so something wasn't working. OK, maybe it wasn't such a strange topic.

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