Chicken Skin Gloves and a Faggot of Thunderbolts

This is an odd little book of illustrated verse that I drew in 1987. It was based on a similar volume from 1983, entitled Talking to the Fat Man by the Laundromat, a title inspired by the song You Can’t Fool the Fat Man, from Randy Newman’s 1974 album, Little Criminals. The original version featured radically different illustrations.
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.

The GoodGang in The Attack of the Flowerman

I was nine years old in 1973, when I created this, the debut issue of my first real attempt at sequential storytelling. Not having seen a super hero comic before I’d moved to America from Scotland, some two years earlier, I was just beginning to grasp the genre and all its rigid parameters; its need for costumes and secret identities, its designation of powers, concepts only ever indirectly touched upon in the humor and adventure comics I’d read in Great Britain. The GoodGang represents, in its minimalistic presentation and storyline, my initial distillation of these literary precepts, as well as my first encounter with drawing paneled images. The lack of word balloons speaks again to my roots, many of my favorite episodic strips in Britain, like Rupert, having indicated dialog by quotations, like prose.

Big Suburban Fire Comics

During the summer of 1985 almost every aspiring cartoonist on the planet was dreaming of being the next Gary Larson, resulting in hordes of vastly inferior Far Side knock-offs spewing from the syndicate spigots. One can only wonder just how many never even made it past the editorial slush pile.
I wish I could claim that I was immune to this covetous rush, but I was not. I put together at least three separate takes on the single-panel gag cartoon, one being Big Suburban Fire Comics, a disparate, fleeting enterprise that culminated with a scant eight samples, none of which ever left my hands. Perhaps even I, locked in my thoroughly non-commercial mindset, saw how far removed this overly cerebral approach was from what the editors of American dailies were looking for. Nevertheless, I opted to adopt the Big Suburban Fire moniker and spent the next year creating many multiple-panel cartoons signed as such. I will be presenting many of these in posts to come. For now, I offer up the never-before-seen original octet, featuring two notably different drawing styles, not to mention some frightening misspellings.

An Ample Infatuation: From the Chopping Block

When, in 1988, at the ripe age of twenty three, I was asked to come up with a two-part, ten-page script for Marvel Comics’ Peter Porker, The Spectacular Spider-Ham, I went whole-hog (sorry) on the project, supplying not just the written text, but also complete panel-to-panel layouts.
Here, presented in all their glory, are those original drawn layouts, which I have updated, adding the scripted dialog, courtesy of the “magic” of the computer.
Also, I’ve included five pre-layout roughs, featuring strangely poetic shorthand script notations. Note the “ham-themed” pink paper and red pen work.

LT. BUBBA FIST REMEMBERS 1941

This unpublished, pseudo-memoir comic, created during the summer of 1984, was largely based on articles and advertisements found in pre-WWII era issues of Life, Collier’s, Good Housekeeping, Ladie’s Home Journal, Popular Mechanics and others (a trove of which I had acquired the previous year). All of the drawing was accomplished with two technical ink pens, a technique that involved no penciling or pre-planning, no rough layout of any sort, each page was drawn right onto large 11 x 14 sheets of sketchbook paper, starting at the top left, working my way down to bottom right. The text was improvised simultaneously, written, literally, as it was lettered onto the paper (my spelling suffered noticeably from this approach). The style of the scrapbook imagery is greatly influenced by the old news and advertising photographs I was absorbing, many being direct line translations of such, feeding it all into the mock life and sensibilities of my character, Bubba Fist.
     This was my attempt at writing far out of my social or political reach, focusing on the fascinating generation of American life I had recently become so familiar with, by way of the old magazine collection. The narrative eschews a devoutly patriotic, hard-boiled, male American ethos, circa the early 1940’s, one so at odds with my own twenty year-old feelings at the time of the Reagan Presidency that its sense of restraint amazes me. There is not an ounce of my adopted “punk rock” guise evident, not even in the odd parting letter from Mr. Fist, declaring his run at the highest office.
     Perhaps I saw something in these older days, something that greatly appealed to me, a climate so different from what was going on in the country at the time, a nostalgia for a world I had never known. I also saw Fist as the real thing, Reagan never seeming more than an actor.
To view all twenty one pages of the comic in a slideshow, click here. You can also peruse them individually.