Comixjoint

While digging through the internet's endless archives looking for cool zines and underground comics (comix), I found a website called Comixjoint. It appears to be and older site, I suppose. Many of the links are broken. In fact, if you go into the A-Z list of comics and click on individual listings, you'll find that everything from Tits & Clits Comix forward is broken. Sadly, clicking on Tuff Shit Comics yields no results.

Anyway... the site is chock full of reviews and passable scans of comic covers. It's a nice collection of books on display and shows you the array of underground stuff available - though mostly leaning toward the prurient and NSFW side. Which... I mean... really is was underground comix movement, wasn't it? The whole point was counterculture. It was a reaction against the puritanical Approved by the Comics Code Authority bullshit that dominated the spinner racks. These guys were saying fuck that shit, I'm a gonna draw Mickey Mouse with a boner and you can't stop me.

I haven't read any of the reviews on this site and I have no idea if the creator is still around, still doing reviews. For damn sure, the site is not maintained. Clicking on the Forum link leads to an error, for example. It's something that was around and got abandoned. The internet is full of abandoned sites, I think. But typically the owner allows the domain name to fall back and so clicking on the address leads to "this domain is for sale" or something like that. In this case, the owner wanted to maintain the domain but not maintain the site.

Warning: Clicking on any sites dealing with underground comix will lead you to nudity, sex, violence, and rude art. If you're not into that shit, don't click.

The Memory of Comic Book Times

Herein I'm going to take a stab at remembering and recounting my personal journey with comics. I'll approach this like a scientist (on drugs). This is long and rambling. You've been warned.

FUNNY FUNNIES

When I was 7, my parents divorced. My mom and I moved from Louisville to Somerset (where I was born and where she was born) into an old shack without a bathroom or running water from what I can remember. I do not remember any comic books prior to this time, though it is possible I had a few here and there. I mostly remember TV shows like Shazam and Hulk and cartoons like Quick Draw McGraw and Bugs Bunny.

Sometime after the divorce, before I turned 9, someone in the family gave me a stack of comic books. These were legit funnies. I had some Casper, Hot Stuff, Wendy, Donald Duck, Archie, and probably Uncle Scrooge and Richie Rich. My memory is very old, of course. This was the late 70s. I was born in 1970, so this would have been 1977-1978. I'm guessing the stack of comics was about 15-20 in number. They were beat up, well-read, and came from a cousin who was kind of a blacksheep and died far too early. He would have been a young man at the time, probably 18-20.

I read and flipped through those comics quite a bit. I'm guessing several of them survived and were carried from home to home by me (we moved a lot between 1977 and 1984).

Perhaps it is largely this exposure to silly fun comics like Hot Stuff that lead to my lifelong love of cartoon art. I do credit Hot Stuff as the progenitor of Zarp, though he wasn't based on that character explicitly.

FOOD LION AND THE DIX RIVER CONNECTION

My mom and I lived in the red shack for about a year, I guess. I have lots of memories from there. I remember the nasty outhouse (I tended to go in the woods instead of going into that thing). I remember a dog named King and another dog whose name I don't remember. I remember a bicycle that got ran over, much to my dismay. I remember getting some toy cowboy guns for Xmas and my little cousins crying for them. I also remember coming home from school one Friday eager to watch Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park, which was heavily advertised on TV for that Saturday. But our cable had been cut off that day due to non-payment. I was crushed. Perhaps, in hindsight, I was spared.

We were less than poor. We had fucking nothing. We relied on charity from family and on a welfare pittance of about $90 per month. My mom, may she rest in peace, was in over her head and had no prospects.

Anyway... she met Lee about 1978, winter. I was 8 at the time. I know it was winter because he was a ramblin' man who was making a meager living selling truckloads of coal. He would go to houses and ask if they wanted to buy coal. He would then go load his old white pickup truck with coal, then charge the person for the coal and the labor. My mom must have met him through a friend and he brought us some coal.

They hooked up for the next 30 years until his death on May 12th 2008. Lee was, by all measures, my dad. My biological father, kind of a lazy asshole, was never around. Lee was around.

Ok, let me steer this back to the road...

Lee came, he helped us out, he bought me strawberry ice cream, which was super nice. He, being a rambler and a piddler, didn't have a job. We moved around... all the time. Lee "ran off" multiple times and my mom would leave me with this or that aunt or uncle and go off chasing him. She always found him and they always ended up back together. It was a wild time to be a kid. Remind me to tell you stories about garbage dumps and living in a van later).

So we eventually moved to Standford into a trailer in the Dix River trailer park. I was in 4th grade, so it would have been 1980 or so. I was held back in 3rd grade. Anyway, here we were and I was having a good time and met a few friends. One of them, a black haired toothy kid named Danny, was a nerd. He was into Star Wars and comic books.

I do not remember the exact order of events so I'll do my best to jam it all together.

We lived in the Dix River trailer park twice: once when I was in 4th grade and again when I was in 6th grade. My journey into "real comics" happened during this period. I'm guessing Danny showed me some of his comics and I showed him mine. All I had at the time were probably funnies.

It was the second time at Dix that I got serious. I was in Food Lion with my mom and I immediately gravitated to the magazine rack where my eyes fell on Amazing Spider-Man #238... which happened to be the first appearance of the Hobgoblin. I didn't know shit about shit, I just knew that was an awesome looking comic and I begged for mom to buy it. To her great credit... she did.

This is how learned about "monthly comics". Every month from then on I would make it my mission to ensure that I ended up at Food Lion or Mac's Village Pantry or some other store and feverishly search the spinner rack for the new issue of ASM (eventually expanding to Spectacular and Web Of). I proudly took my comics to school where Danny and a few other pals (a curly headed kid with chubby cheeks, a fat kid, and a black kid - I do not remember any of their names, sadly) would sit in the stairwell and read them.

Beyond reading comics, Danny and I wanted to draw. We had this thing where we would put a sheet of paper under a comic cover and then use a BALLPOINT PEN to trace over the art, leaving an impression on the paper so we could then "draw" it. We savaged a lot of comics in those days. But I attribute this time period to a substantial leap forward in my interest in art and my ability to draw.

Thank you, Danny, wherever you are. You were a friend and I wish we could have stayed in touch somehow.

THE STANFORD FLEA MARKET VIETNAM VET

There was a tiny flea market very close to the Dix River trailer park. My folks were heavily into flea marketing and auctioning (it was our primary income). So I basically lived at flea markets and auctions between 1979 and 1986.

There was this guy at the Dix River flea market. I believe his name might have been Doug... but somehow that seems wrong. We'll call him Doug, though. He had a slightly oversized head and mom would say there was something wrong with him (in a kind way... she was very kind and compassionate to him).

Doug was a Vietnam vet and even I, as a kid, could tell he was troubled. But he was super nice to me and he was into comics. He had boxes of them he sold at the flea market and he let me pick from the boxes and read what I wanted. He gave me a few Incredible Hulk comics. Probably the very few Hulk comics I ever owned. They featured Woodgod and those guys. I would sit next to Doug and absolutely burn up his ears talking comics and I'm sure I was an annoying little shit that he tolerated.

Thanks, Doug. You were instrumental in setting me on my path and I hope you found peace for the rest of your life.

FLEA MARKET FINDS AND BUDDING CREATOR

Lee was always finding these oddball things he could try to sell. He got his hands on a few cases (CASES!) of Marvel Super Heroes bubble gum and rub-on tattoos. He gave me a whole box (the kind you'd see in the store for display). Naturally I used them all.

He also got hold of some kind of DC Comics shit because I had multiple copies of these little miniature comics featuring the retold origins of Superman, Batman, Aquaman, Wonder Woman, etc. I was a Marvel snob even then, but I loved those little comics. I just didn't care enough about DC to actually pick up any DC comics.

It was those mini-comics that gave me the idea to make my own. So I did. I do not remember what year it was. Both the tattoos and mini-comics were sold in 1980, and 1980 was my first time living in the trailer park. But I don't know if Lee would have picked these up at the time or 2 years later. I think it was 1980... which means this was happening prior to my entry into collecting "real" comics.

I drew Hulk and Spider-Man and, I think, The Thing. I folded two sheets of 8.5x11 paper in half and made a digest comic out of them. I'm sure it was pure trash... but it laid the groundwork in my head.

THE SUMMER OF 1983: CARROT STYLE

We moved away from Standford again. We were in Somerset, possibly in one of its sub-areas like Nancy or Burnside. I can't remember. But I remember Flo's Flea Market. I lived at Flo's.

Flo was an indoor/outdoor setup. Indoor there was something truly amazing... comic books. They were a quarter each. Flo got them, apparently, from overflow from local stores. I have no idea how. But her bins were filled with multiple copies of fairly-recent comic books. If a book was on the rack in January, Flo might get multiple copies of it in Feb or March.

And a quarter wasn't so much money that I couldn't swindle a handful out of my mom. So I haunted those boxes day after day and therein I discovered one of the greatest treasures of all time: Captain Carrot and his Amazing Zoo Crew!

I remember stumbling upon the Captain and thinking "WOW!". I dug through the boxes and managed to find the first issue, which I immediately bought. I carried it off, read it, and came back ASAP with more quarters. I hunted like a god damn predator through those boxes of unorganized comics until I managed to piece together the first 5 or 6 issues of CC. Happy as a pig in shit, I read them over and over.

During the following few months of summer, I scored every other issue she acquired, which brought me up to issue 16. That's it, that's all she had, and that's all I was able to get. But it was more than enough to fire up my imagination for years.

Thanks, Flo. I hope your remaining years were fruitful and pleasant.

THE SAVAGE CIMMERIAN

Time passes. We moved around a little bit more. I eventually happened upon an issue of Savage Sword of Conan at Mac's Village Pantry. It was more costly than other comics and it was black and white. But it was awesome. And it had women. Sometimes... they were naked. But also, lots of violence and muscles and monsters. It was MY JAM. I made it my mission to pick up SSOC every month from then until I was an adult.

My first SSOC, that I can remember, was issue #104 with its sweet-ass Joe Jusko cover. I drooled and drooled over that book all day and night. This was 1984.

My cousin Charlie, younger than me, had picked up a copy of Conan the Barbarian, the regular color series. I read it but was not impressed at the time. It felt like it was meant for kids. What's the "comics code" anyway? Where was the nudity? The neck-to-navel disembowelments? Nope, not for me. I snubbed it. I never once collected that book... what a silly asshole I was. I wish I had got into it.

But then again: poor. Limited funds, you know.

OF DUNGEONS AND MAYBE DRAGONS

It was about this time, the Conan time, that I got into D&D. It was by accident. Kids at school were playing it and I heard them and was observing with curiosity. I was invited to play an elf with a +1 sword. It was amazing. I did a lot of trading with this kid named David, the Dungeon Master. I gave him some of my comics, he gave me the 1981 D&D Expert book. My uncle bought me the red box at the same time. I was SET UP.

We all know that many artists working on those game books were into comics. Willingham and Dee alone were enough to make my mental connection complete. My life went on the comics/RPG path from then on.

APAS AND DIGESTS AND SMALL PRESS

I won't go into this in detail here. It's a whole other story. But by 1987-1988 I was making my own comics and publishing them with friends. This was the natural progression of what I've already told. It was the influence of my good friends in high school that set me on this path. I learned of APAs (Amateur Press Association publications) and digest comics and people who self-published. I wanted in! I got in. I created and published a few dozen comics and contributed to dozens and dozens of other folks' comics through the 90s and into the 2000s. I had a good time.

ENOUGH RAMBLING

That's about it for now. There's a lot more to say, of course. Just how did these events affect me? Which individual comic issues made the biggest impression? Who were my favorite creators? What other comics did I encounter? We all have our stories, don't we?

Love the stuff you love. Be critical of it where merited, but love it nonetheless. These are treasured memories of times long gone. They live in our hearts. I still tear up when I think of me and Danny sitting next to each other in class tracing our comic book covers. I'll never let that feeling go. 

Books for 2023?

Although I stopped making new year's resolutions decades ago and refuse to even think about committing to such nonsense, I can at least talk about the projects I have "on the burner" right now. I can at least speculate that these are the most likely candidates to be published in 2023.

Let's go!

(All details subject to radical change.)

 

1. ROCK HARDY BOOK OF DWARFS

Of all these projects, this one is closest to completion. It is written, mostly illustrated, and is ready for some layout. Problem is I wanted to do the layout myself using a proper layout tool, such as Scribus or Affinity, but that means I have to learn how. And I'm lazy.

In the end, I might ask someone else to do it for me. Maybe Matt Hildebrand will take pity and agree to do it. Who knows?

2. HEAT DEATH

This is a space RPG idea. I'm currently running it for the Monday night Doomslakers group. I'm not sure exactly what this will be in the end, but since I'm already "playtesting it", maybe this could come together pretty quickly.

3. BLACK PUDDING ADVENTURE JOURNAL

This is going to happen for sure. Peter Regan is planning a Kickstarter to print Black Pudding #7 and reprint older issues. We're planning to include a blank GM notebook as part of that project. This is the cover for it, revealed here for the first time!

HONORABLE MENTIONS

Here are some logos and images suggesting books that could be on the front burner in 2023. But it's far too soon to say for sure.

A Pan-Gea project?

Zarp comics.

Comic? I'm not sure yet.

Another space RPG idea.

Witzend

I only know about Wally Wood's Witzend zine by way of seeing Vaughn Bodé's cover for issue #7, pictured below in all its violent glory. I have never see a Witzend in the wild nor held one in my hand. This post is just going to be me learning about this zine and sharing the knowledge for posterity. Mostly my own.

Vaughn was nothing if not subtle.

Wally Wood launched the comic in the summer of 1966 as a way to give his artist friends and upcoming artists a way to showcase their own work, owned by them, by their own hands. This is important because back then the major comics publishers owned the absolute FUCK out of everything the artists did. If you wrote a comic or drew it or lettered it and it was published by Marvel or DC then it was Marvel or DC who owned that work, top to bottom. Creators were paid labor, period. So things like Witzend attempted to change that dynamic.

Here's a nice write-up about the zine by Charlie Meyerson, I believe from Grimjack.

Limited-edition comics publications until then had almost all been projects by fans, interested mainly in writing about or drawing characters owned by Marvel, DC or out-of-business publishers. Witzend was one of the first efforts by professionals to publish their own work, featuring characters they created and owned.

Publicized mostly through those other limited-edition magazines, the first issue of Witzend came out in the summer of 1966. It featured work by Wood, and a collaboration by Al Williamson and Frank Frazetta. “Most contributors got nothing except their work in print,” Pearson says. “It was very important for them to get their copyright on the material. Look back at those issues: our copyright notes were in 18-point type. We wanted to be sure everyone would see them … because at the time there was none of this ‘sharing the rights with the creators.’ It was a real breakthrough.”

Looks like Pearson continued to publish Witzend after Wood sold it to him for $1.00. They published 13 issues over 19 years (sounds like MY kind of pace). There's a lovely looking hardback collection you can snag if you're willing to drop a couple hundred bucks.

I love that this ad tells you to remember to put your zip code on the order!

Ultimately: I want all 13 original issues. Currently I own zero. Given the prices and conditions of these rare books, it is unlikely I will ever have them all. But that's ok. Gives me something to look forward to, right?

Blindor

Sketched on the inside cover of an old toned sketchbook. Fun times. Let's see if we can work up who this guy is.

His name is Blindor (like "blender" but ending with a distinct "or" sound) and he's definitely up from Hell. Perhaps he's the devil's cousin or something. I dunno. He has a few great loves in life: parties, beer, beating people up, and calling out the names of various demons while doing all these things.

Blindor is highly resistant to magic and laser fire. His preferred weapons are swords, axes, and machine guns. While not a softy, he's also not "evil", strictly speaking. He'd get your cat out of a tree, but he'd also trash your kitchen looking for snacks and never offer to clean it up or pay for anything.

He doesn't hate people but he does think they are mostly foolish and dumb. He enjoys pranking religious folks by inverting their crucifixes and replacing the holy water with the blood of his enemies.

Heat Death

Monday night I started running a sci-fi game (working title "Heat Death"). This is an original system and the tone is supposed to be a bit of Alien + Firefly. Naturally, the players will shift the tone far more towards Ice Pirates no matter what I do... god damn players.

I don't know if this will be a project I'll publish or not. Maybe. I'm putting a decent amount of work into it. I think in the end, if nothing else, I'll put it out as a little mini-game zine or something.

Here's the intro text I provided to my players:

Life in the Main was nice. Strip malls, concert moons, a steady paycheck, and no alien robot infestations. But you don’t live on the Main anymore. You live out here in the Frontier Zones where careers (and people) come to die. Whatever you did to get cast out… was it worth it?

Now you pinch out a living doing contract gigs for the colorfully named Site Evaluation and Data Collection Agency (SEDCA), an inter-governmental department that specializes in “low-profile, moderate-risk projects for the public good”. This arrangement was part of the legal settlement that kept you out of prison.

You work for less than half what you would earn back in the Main. If you keep your nose clean, in three to five years you might get to go home.

In the meantime, it’s all about collecting soil samples, tracking lost cargo, investigating unknown transmissions, and, from time to time, “helping to peacefully contain local disputes”. Life is good if you just grin through it.

It was noted during the game that this idea borrows heavily from Star Frontiers. I can't deny this fact. Star Frontiers was the second RPG I ever owned so it has a very deep and permanent place in my inner world. I even lifted some of the items directly from SF, such as magnigoggles.

The system uses two exploding d4s for task resolution and has a Life Point system. There are no fixed stats, only Traits you can assign to your PC during play. The idea is you have a pool of Ranks (like skill points) and you assign them during play as the inspiration arises. So if you wanna be great at throwing knives, you just put Ranks into it as you describe how you throw knives at the target of the scene.

Anyway... the most important thing is the scenario. It's all set up to run scenarios, not simulate battles or space flight. This scenario has the PCs assigned the mission of investigating a rumored resource of interest on a distant and unknown moon shrouded by radioactive interference that has prevented long range study. By the end of the first session they had arrived at the moon, but were surprised to learn that a second ship was detected by the ship's systems before they dropped out of FTL travel.

GOZR on Save For Half

The fine halflings at Save for Half (my favorite podcast) have taken a look at GOZR! I haven't listened yet, but you should definitely listen immediately!

Looking in the Mirror at 3 AM

Honest look in the mirror:

You have what people call natural talent. You don't work hard enough to turn it into a career, but it's good enough that most people around you are impressed.

You have impressed a few other people who are more well-connected than yourself, and that has granted you some notoriety.

You occasionally create something raw and wild enough that people notice, which contributes to your trivial successes.

You continue to meander through a creative life without direction.

Yrrin vs. Demons

 Yrrin, a warrior character from my Yria setting, is beset by demons!

This was just a fun exercise in using pens to make marks and tones.