Unpublished Drawings 1971-1974

Page 2 of the comic collector story is missing. I believe this was drawn about 1971. There might have been other pages after page 4, but I can't recall. The drawing pad is dated December 1972. The Bogart portrait is dated March 18, 1974.

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"Love/Hate" created by the incredible Maximum Traffic/Borpo Deets/Buzz Buzziyk.

I used this dead outlet cover in my kitchen after my daughter repainted the walls.

Random Reflections 1976

1st edition, summer 1976, Olympia, Washington, 100 copies, 30 leaves, olive covers, light blue pages, stapled at edge.

Another cringeworthy comic that will never be reprinted as long as I'm alive. It was my misfortune to make 100 of these and I can only hope most of them no longer exist. This is one of those comix I wish would just vanish from memory and existence. But I shut my eyes real tight, and when I reopen them this damn book is still there, mocking me. I'm scanning and posting one page as a sample and that's all you are going to see.

At the time I was drawing this I lived a house with a bunch of students (actually I was a dropout at that point, but I did go back to school). It was a run down dwelling on Olympia's East Bay Drive, but it had a great view. Here's a photo of the artist as a young dog on the back dock of the house during the time this book was being created. That's downtown Olympia in the background. I think I had a job working in a summer school as a teacher's aide with developmentally disabled children in the summer of '76.

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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.

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Dreamer and the Beckoning Cat

Elephant on a Bicycle

The flooding of the studio forced me to move a bunch of boxes I had sort of forgotten about, and while I'm putting things back together some lost pieces of the past are resurfacing.

Here's something from the early to mid-1960s, I'd guess. An elephant on a bicycle. Not something you see every day.

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Pacemaker Defect

Back in 1982 I thought Pacemaker Defect would've made a great name for a band I wanted to start. Only problem is I can't play any musical instruments. Or read music. Or sing. So I drew a comic instead.

1st edition, 1982, Olympia, Washington, 30 copies, pink cover, enlarged digest.

1996, print-on-demand, regular digest size.

1st Danger Room Reprint edition, July 2005, 5 copies, red, regular digest size.

This is sort of a companion to another half-comic I drew around the same time, Fun in Acapulco.

Pretty much a cathartic cranium streamo comic. The question "I wonder what the Hell happened to my other karmic half?" has been something I've been asking myself in real life ever since I drew this.

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A Fork in the Road

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Dreamer

Natural Functions now in Mortyshop!

Reprinted from the original quarter-century-old master copy! 36 pages plus a Morty Comix tossed into the deal. The most beautiful print job this comic has ever had. Check it out at Mortyshop!

Natural Functions was posted here January 22.

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Dreamer and the Bear

Obscuro Presidents: Monroe and Harrison

I found a couple more pencil drawings of United States Presidents (Monroe and Harrison) in my studio the other day. I think these are more recent than the set I posted not long ago, Washington to JQ Adams.

As I recall I was going to start a series on the obscuro Presidents and started with James Monroe and William Henry Harrison. I have a particular fondness for Franklin Pierce, but I didn't get that far.

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OlyBlog T-Shirt

OlyBlog was one of the first community blogs in the country to bill itself as "hyperlocal" when it was started by Rick McKinnon in 2005.

In the early days of the blog we OlyBloggers would meet at the Brotherhood Tavern (locally called the BroHo) in Olympia on occasion. Some of us had a little problem about the caimans in Oly's Capitol Lake and made an issue out of it. I even drew a comic about the sordid affair called Fetid Lake of Doom.

Anway, I drew a logo for OlyBlog using the caiman image about mid-2006. As you can see by perusing through this Morty the Dog blog, drawing giant reptiles has been a theme of mine for years.

OlyBlogger Visudha De Los Santos, a former neighbor of mine here in McCleary, took the logo and produced about 10 or 12 of these shirts. They were distributed at the BroHo in January 2007. The shirt is blue and the logo is white, but my phone photos have sort of changed the color of everything.

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Self-portrait

New URL

We are changing our URL from:

http://mortydog.blogspot.com/

to

http://www.mortythedog.com/

although the old URL should still get you here eventually. The changeover should be complete by the end of the week.

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Junction City, Washington

It's not a junction. It's a dead end. And it's not a city.

So there you have it.

Junction City, Washington

One Way Flight to Anywhere But Here

1st edition, February-March? 1977, Olympia, Washington, 50 copies, orange cover, 33 leaves of various colors, letter size stapled at margins.

A work so cringe-worthy I only mention it here for the record. I'll scan and post a couple of the few edible parts. There are two comix from the 1970s I will never reprint, and this is one.

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In Cosmopolis, Washington, there is a fading mural on some kind of water treatment plant that sits behind a nasty barbed-wire fence. This picture depicts the first territorial governor, Isaac Stevens, in an historic pose while in the act of stealing the land from the Native Americans.

One Normal Guy Talking With a Nut!

1st edition July 1985, Pullman, Washington : Kage Comics. Letter size cardstock stapled at margin.

2nd edition, 1985, Pullman, Washington : Kage Comics. Letter size cardstock stapled at margin.

Available as a reprint-on-demand title, 1994, regular digest size.

Clint Hollingsworth originally published this in a format that makes it difficult to scan, so you Morty the Blog readers are stuck with my posting the digest size version, which is unfortunate given the amount of fine detail work by Brad Foster. Also you'll need to extra enlarge the images to read the thing.

My personal copy is the 2nd edition and it is pink. I don't know if Clint used different colors in his printings. As a note to you bookpeople, Newave collectors tended to regard printings as editions, something that was more or less institutionalized in the network by Jay Kennedy in his Official Underground and Newave Comix Price Guide.

Clint's original editions included some extra material: Foster's short pieces "The Button" and three whimsical illustrations, and my story "A Glimmering Ray of Despair." These extras were all excluded from the print-on-demand version.

This was a very enjoyable jam with one of the most prominent artists associated with the Newave comix movement. Sending this thing back and forth between Washington State and Texas was like a long game of chess with a master. We made attempt after attempt to trap each other in this visual gamesmanship.

Brad and I are from the same generation and shared a somewhat parallel development as cartoonists, growing up with shared influences. We also, and I think I can speak for Brad here, found the Newave network to be a great outlet for our artistic freedom and expression. An outlet that was fairly unique at the time.

With those things in common, the differences were in the details. And we had fun with those differences in this jam.

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Elmer Fudd's stove