Jazz Scarecrow #2

What follows is the second issue of Jazz Scarecrow, a self-published mini-comic from 1986, which was drawn in sketchbooks, photocopied and distributed to my fellow employees at National Record Mart, a music store in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Each issue featured the lead story, a continuing serial adventure, plus a back-up story starring The Man From Country X, which was drawn in a sketchy, line-based style, as opposed to the more graphic black and white Jazz Scarecrow, a tale of Ronald Reagan-inspired paranoia and Orwellian conceit, plus a one-page cartoon, usually in yet another style/approach. All stories were drawn and written panel-to-panel, page-to-page, without any preliminary planning. No pencils were involved, just technical pen ink on the paper, even solid blacks were filled-in with the same technical pen, as I’d yet to attempt using a brush and ink or pen. The title lettering was created with the inimitable Letraset Brand Prestype. Spelling mistakes were not unusual.
This second issue introduced gray wash tones to the art, created using watered-down India ink. This was one of the first times I had ever attempted this technique.
Note the misuse of the term “sibling”, as used in Operation Sibling, which should have been Operation Offspring.
For those of you who like to curl up with a pillow and watch your cartoons, click here for a handy slideshow of all twenty-four pages, soundtrack not included, but I suggest The Midnight Room by Jennifer Gentle, or most anything by John Fahey.
Either way – any way – I hope you enjoy!

The Super World of Poetry

The following gallery consists of the only remaining pages of a peculiar coloring book I owned as a child. Entitled The Super World of Poetry, it was published in 1970 by Japco, a British publisher of whom I can dig up very little on the internet, other than their having also produced a brief line of “magic paint” books that featured updated versions of fairy tales, drawn in a positively mod fashion.
The Super World of Poetry was given to my brother and I as a gift from our great aunt and her husband, Larry. I clearly recall us both having the same fat edition, probably over a hundred pages thick. We received these the summer before moving to America and I’m quite sure only mine made the journey across the Atlantic. It was a well-loved book, treasured along with the giant-sized Star Trek coloring book I’d received that same summer. The pages shown here, lovingly colored and otherwise doctored by yours truly, only exist due to my having removed them from the book in 1981, to utilize in a show-and-tell demonstration for a class in art school. I cannot quite remember the point of the demonstration, but I think it had something to do with the “potential” of the comics form – a lecture that went out to mostly deaf ears in Pittsburgh back in the early 80s.
I can only now feverishly imagine the rest of this strange attempt at imbibing classical (read: stodgy) poetry with DC super heroes, especially such odd choices as Wildcat, and The Challangers(sic) of The Unknown – who took a truly bizarre ride through Leigh Hunt’s Jenny Kiss’d Me.
The section I salvaged, Green Lantern doing William Blake, is weird enough, especially in its queer shift in tone in the latter half, the car crash pages as intoxicatingly “off” to me now as they must have been back in those blurry days of adolescence. The art, as usual for such quickly knocked-off productions, is a clear amalgamation of the work of Silver Age artists like Murphy Anderson, Gil Kane and Sid Greene, all who worked on Green Lantern at one point or the other.
Having searched fruitlessly for any evidence of this unusual publication (I vaguely recall a cover over-flowing with juxtaposed heroes, framed by vine of roses) I now present what little I have left, a testament to its inscrutable production. I hope you enjoy!
- J.W.E.

Jazz Scarecrow #1

What follows is the first issue of Jazz Scarecrow, a self-published mini-comic from 1986, which was drawn in sketchbooks, photocopied and distributed to my fellow employees at National Record Mart, a music store in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Each issue featured the lead story, a continuing serial adventure, plus a back-up story starring The Man From Country X, which was drawn in a sketchy, line-based style, as opposed to the more graphic black and white Jazz Scarecrow, a tale of Ronald Reagan-inspired paranoia and Orwellian conceit, plus a one-page cartoon, usually in yet another style/approach. All stories were drawn and written panel-to-panel, page-to-page, without any pre-planning. No pencils were involved, just technical pen ink on the paper, even solid blacks were filled-in with the same technical pen, as I’d yet to attempt using a brush and ink or pen. The title lettering was created with the inimitable Letraset Brand Prestype. Spelling mistakes were not unusual.
For those of you who like to curl up with a pillow and watch your cartoons, click HERE for a handy slideshow of all twenty-three pages, soundtrack not included. But might I suggest any early record by The James Taylor Quartet, or perhaps The Legendary Pink Dots. Maybe even a more recent recording by The Residents or Stan Ridgway’s The Drywall Project?
Either way – any way – I hope you enjoy!
And, for those of you who were there – “Rock against Reagan!”