Limbolympia

1st edition, January 1983, Olympia, Washington, 50 copies, ivory cover, enlarged digest size.

2nd edition, March 1983, Olympia, Washington, 56 copies, goldenrod cover, enlarged digest size.

Print-on-demand reprint series, 1994, McCleary, Washington, regular digest size.

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

So named because I was back in Oly 1982-1983 and not feeling all that great about being trapped in that city, yet again. I was holding down a temporary job in my field after having just gotten married and wanted something permanent. Hence in Limbo in Olympia.

Trivia:

I think the Darwin Corksniffer story might've been born in a writing class with instructor Peter Elbow during my senior year at The Evergreen State College 1978-1979. I revived the idea and made it into a comic.

"The 13 O'clock Movie" story has the feel of purging a bunch of stuff.

Apparently Joe Stalin knew a lot more English than he let on. I once made a constructive suggestion involving Stalin's stuffed corpse to the Russians via my comic The Tall Elf.

The D.B. Cooper story is true. The case remains unsolved although several strong candidates (all of them now dead) have emerged in the last decade.

There have been a lot of reprints over the years of some parts of this book, but Found Loose in the Mail was made into a minicomic of it's own by Hal Hargit in 1987.

Phone photo 206

The Life and Times of Morty the Dog / The Lives and Deaths of Morty the Dog

Consisting of reprints, some of them going back to a decade, Michael Dowers assembled this comic in 1992 under the Starhead Comix banner. He gathered this material from several different titles.

It was a 2-in-1 book, one of those flip-over reverse deals with two covers.

A bit of trivia:

I'm pretty sure I did not draw the logo for the Lives & Deaths cover.

The page with Morty continually dialing and being answered with a recorded message seems incomplete. But I can't quite place where the original appeared in order to look it up.

The skiis with ice cubes panel: I had a roommate in college who did this.

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Library Comix

Although this was really a comic book by committee, the group pretty much let me do what I wanted with the graphics and story for the little tour guide critter.

The Evergreen State College was where I attended school in my undergrad years (1974-1979), and I returned there to work as the acting head of cataloging in the library from 1986-1988. When I arrived as an employee the printed library guide then in use was a Lynda Barry booklet that had apparently been modified and reprinted for a few years.

My version was first published in 1987 and then revised and reprinted for the 1988 and 1989 school years, but by that time I had moved on. I don't know if it was published beyond 1989. It is safe to say that out of all my comix this one has had one of the highest copy counts.

Trivia:

Pages 4-6: The Library has since been gutted and rebuilt. There was a ghost residing on the floor on page 6. He was seen by a library student worker in 1988 striding from the "Big Hole" to where the letters "PA" are drawn. I'm told he's still around. This fellow was the subject of one of my Bezango columns for Olympia Power & Light.

Page 16: Morty the Dog readers might've heard of Marge Brown (1956-2006) who was also known as an animator and all around nice person.

Page 20: Yup, there's yours truly. With less weight and more hair.

Phone photo 204

The Office Christmas Party, Columbia Room, Legislative Building, Olympia, Washington