The unusual title originated with a hitchhiking trip about Great Britain I’d taken the previous summer, the chicken skin gloves having been spotted on display in a military museum in Edinburgh, Scotland. The “faggot of thunderbolts” refers to the bundle of lightning often pictured in the hand of the god Zeus.
The style employed was mostly influenced by the American illustrator/cartoonist, Gahan Wilson, and his English counterpart, Ronald Searle, two of my favorite darkly humorous illustrators at the time.
The words, dubious at best, penned when I was still nineteen, are a reflection of my desire to write nonsense rhyme in a lyrical form, most probably inspired by having read a lot of Edward Lear, and John Lennon’s A Spaniard in the Works.
Living in Portland, Oregon during the summer of 1987, training to be a puppeteer, I set up an appointment with an editor at Seattle's Real Comet Press and took the train north one Monday morning, intent on selling them on the peculiar book. I was given but a few moments in the editor’s office, as she flipped through the photocopied version I’d mailed the week before, smiling and taking deep breaths. Needless to say, she didn’t know quite what to make of it, or what to do with it. It certainly wasn’t Lynda Barry.
And thus, it’s been sitting, hidden away in a box for some twenty one years.
If you’re curious to see the whole of what still exists of this orphaned little project, simply click here for a slideshow presentation.
