Dogtown Zoo # 1

OK, here's the screwy deal with the first three editions of this title. They all have the same info on page [2] of the cover: "First and final edition of 60 copies printed in Seattle and Olympia, Wash." But that is, in actual fact as we understand it in this plane of existence, not true.

1st edition, June or July 1982, Seattle and Olympia, Washington, 60 copies, blue cover, enlarged digest size. This was published during the time I moved from Seattle to Oly. I don't remember where it was printed, but the job was so bad I basically discarded most copies and started over. I think I went down a few streets in Oly and just stuck them in people's mail or newspaper boxes at random. Today this edition is one of the harder-to-find books I've published.

[2nd edition], 1982, Olympia, Washington, 30 copies, white cover, enlarged digest size.

[3rd edition], 1982, Olympia, Washington, 30 copies, white cover, enlarged digest size. Indistinguishable from the 2nd edition.

Print-on-demand, 1996 (reprint series), unknown number of copies, regular digest size.

1st Danger Room Reprint Edition, July 2005, 5 copies, yellow cover, regular digest size.

Page 5, panel 3: Another reference to Olympia's newspaper, The Daily Olympian. I think they changed their title to just The Olympian about the time I drew this comic. Who knows, maybe one of those blue cover editions found it's way to the owners of the paper and they decided it was time to change their name as a result of this snarky little detail in the story!

Page 9, panel 1: I always loved that leprosy scab joke, ever since I was a kid.

Page 10, panel 5: Based on Albert Camus, The Stranger, I think.

Page 11, panel 1: "Squirmy Eyed Q-Ball" is an insult my brother came up with and I have employed numerous times in my comix.

Page 12, panel 3: "Unga" was a comic sound my old friend (and comic art fan) Rex Munger used frequently.

Page 15, panel 4: Batum and Schrag are two small hamlets in eastern Washington State.

Page 17: If I don't use the long fadeout, then I'm concluding a story with Morty on the sax. Sorta tiresome after awhile if you ask me.

Page 18, panel 3: In addition to the obligatory "NRA" and "Reagan 80" stickers the others say: "We've been to Humptulips, WA," "Falwell for Prez," "Mukey River, Ioway," "Winooski, Vermont" (I used to drive a taxicab in neighboring Burlington. Sometimes I'd take drunks home from a certain bar in Winooksi. A female bartender would assist a few of these patrons to the car. In just a few years, by a weird coincidence, the bartender and I met again in Puget Sound country, where we were both librarians!).

Another bumpersticker, "Wildermuth Caves, Mo." is in honor of Missouri native (now Seattle resident) and conceptual artist Kevin Wildermuth. Speaking of bumper stickers, he made one that declared "I'd rather be masturbating" and proudly placed it on his rear bumper. While this was on his car I rode with him from Oly to Seattle. The response from the other motorists is worth an entire article.

Page 23: Another early version of the Big G.

Page 25: Apparently Prof. Verner Von Vernervon was a character I used a several comix in the early 1980s.

Page 27, panel 1: I think the fellow with the beard is Dean True, a friend from college days. There's probably a story behind his quote, "Avacados are too expensive to mash into your face," but I have no memory of why I included that.

The title of this comic has a little history. Around 1980 I got into a drinking contest with a Scandinavian guy in a Spokane bar. He was a fellow houseguest of some friends. I can only recall that I didn't lose. Anyway, the next morning we both accompanied our hosts on a little field trip, to an area they called Dogtown. And we stopped and looked through the fence at a small private zoo. In my hungover state I mumbled "Dogtown Zoo," but it took a couple years to surface in print.

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Dogs

Dogs was a regular digest size book designed for the earliest of readers and published by the Olympia School District. The connection was through my mother, Jeanette Willis, who was a teacher and sometimes administrator for OSD.

This was my first published work of the 1980s, printed in either January or February 1980. At the time I was working at Seattle Public Library as a low level clerk. In fact, my desk was way down in the basement, and that's literally low level.

Dogs was also the last of several books I drew for the Olympia School District, all of them constructed for beginning readers. I was given a list of words and letters thought to be the easiest for children to read, and then I used what they gave me to invent a story.

In 1980, this was my only solo book. My other nine published cartoons of that year were all in The Cooper Point Journal, campus newspaper for The Evergreen State College. The weird part about that-- I was no longer a student there. I had bequeathed a huge stack of unpublished comix to the CPJ when I left, and they spent a few years publishing more of my work after I graduated than when I was enrolled. Their August 7, 1980 issue was the first published appearance of "Mortie" the dog, but the panel was probably drawn in 1978.

Anyway, you can see how Odd Dog is a Morty prototype. Odd Dog first showed up in his own Olympia School District book in 1976.

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Dog of Dawn, Dog of Dusk

Another one of the delayed comix I created and printed in 1985 (like Cranium Frenzy #5), but held off from releasing until early 1986.

1st edition, 1985, 50 copies, yellow cover, enlarged digest size.

2nd edition, 1986, 30 copies, salmon cover, enlarged digest size.

Print-on-demand, 1994, regular digest size. I don't know how many of these are out there, but I imagine they outnumber the first two editions combined.

1st Danger Room Reprint Edition, June 2005, 5 copies (4 red cover, 1 green cover), regular digest size.

I'm not sure what this means, but of all my works this was a favorite for Jay Kennedy and Lynn Hansen, and both of these gentlemen are no longer in the world of the living. Jay liked "The Maze" so much he included it as the concluding piece in Giant-Size Mini Comics #3 (Eclipse Comics, Dec. 1986). "The Maze" is a very simple tale, perhaps too simple, but the message it packs still rings true to me.

Page 17 has a nod to the dog characters of my Newave comrades Steve Lafler and Bruce Chrislip.

The face on page 18, panel 1 was, I think, burned into the paper with a soldering gun. Panel 5 was a recognition that my friend Bob Richart (a fellow librarian who I worked with at WSU and later at WLN) introduced me to the history of dog butting, a very real sport played in Medieval France.

Page 19: Notice in panel 2 Bob Richartolovskii says "Hot Damn! A Morty Dog!" I believe this pretty much confirms Jim Ryan's theory that Morty is species, not an individual-- like a collie, a beagle, a poodle, a Morty Dog. This would explain why he seems to always come back from the dead after being killed.

Page 20+: I was laughing pretty hard when I was drawing the Cosmo Bear portion of the story. At the time, it seemed cute bears with balloons and rainbows were all the rage, as popularized by the Care Bears. I was probably laughing the hardest at page 23, panel 1 as I was drawing. OK, OK, so I have a sick sense of humor.

The final page on the back cover is a quintessential Morty ending, incorporating several devices I liked to employ: A Shakespeare quote, a metamorphosis (the hands), Morty surviving an attempt at being offed by his creator, and the main character drifting away as the viewer remains stationary.

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