Tuesday, May 18, 2010

While waiting for the Ocracoke ferry...

...we found this confirmed ex-bird on the beach. It's been awhile since I've found anything dead on a beach and had a camera with me. I love the way the feathers fan out, sticking up in the air and the stark white of the bones and skull bleached by the sun.

OK HW

Friday, April 30, 2010

The hard part begins...

I have been tracking down folks and publications whom either contributed to my old comix "Reluctant Sadist" (remember the book project I'm working on) or reviewed it to get permission to reprint their work. It's been a fun and enlightening bit of detective work. Everyone has been very supportive and cooperative so far and that has been encouraging me to get more done. My biggest enemy right now is negative inertia. It's too easy to let the job, socializing and household duties eat up all of my time (not to mention the TV and the intertubes). Getting all the material cleared is a huge step. Now the hard bit begins. I have to actually start writing something. To jump start that creaky chunk of grey matter, I have dug out the old journals from that time period and have been reading through them trying to get back to that time and place. Sifting through the petty gripes and endless blathering to find a live wire that reconnect me to the heat. Help me understand why I was doing what I was doing and why I stopped. Examining each issue again is setting off smoke bombs and bottle rockets, flashes of memory and insight and I know once I get the hand moving the words will lay down.

I added a link on the sidebar to the right to Brad Foster's web site Jabberwocky Graphix. Brad contributed a cool one page piece to the fifth issue of RS and has agreed to let me reprint in the book. Thank you Brad.

OK HW

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Ralf Schulze Blog

I discovered recently that a good, old friend of mine, Ralf Schulze, has a blog about his art called Aardvark Farms. Ralf and I met through the underground world of self-published comix. He was a New York guy hammering out his weird, purposefully offensive punk art (check "Wah Tem Eye" left) back then and our mutual desire to shock the rubes made us instant friends. Twenty years on, we are both reasonably responsible adults now with families and jobs and such, but both still hold on to that sharp, rusty blade, carving out our strange visions, but man, it is much harder to shock people now or even get them to notice. Lots of competition for eyeballs and the underground is no longer so under, nor dangerous, or exotic. Just another page to surf through...

OK HW

Thursday, April 01, 2010

Progress...


I have actually been moving in what could be mistaken for a forward direction on my "Reluctant Sadist" book project. "Reluctant Sadist" was an underground, self-published comic that I did back in the late 1980s'. I printed seven issues before I got distracted by sculpting, but that's a story that'll be saved for the book. All the artwork has been scanned, plus loads of stuff that I did for other comix and even a nice chunk of scribbles and sketches. It's been a lot of fun to dig back through the piles and look at all that old stuff. I've finally made my pack-rat tendencies pay-off, as I have plenty of material for the book, including old reviews from "Factsheet Five" and "Small Press Comics Explosion". Next up will be getting folks who contributed to my old comic to sign release forms, so I can use their stuff. Then the hard part, I have to start writing.

OK HW