The fine folks at Birdcage Bottom Books were so taken with my con drawings of punk stars that they rushed a Joey shirt into production. This one is a real beaut. Only $15 each! $17 for you huskier types that need an XXL. Pre-orders being taken now to ship the end of Feb. Come and get em HERE
On this day in 1986, the Challenger space shuttle blew up.
I was living and working in Palm Beach, FL, at the time, in my first newspaper job at a crappy, little daily, The Evening Times. I was also newly married, having made an honest woman out of my girlfriend of three years a couple months earlier.
A dozen or so space geeks watched the periodic Kennedy Space Center launches from the roof of the building. The space shuttles were going up regularly then. This was the 10th trip to space for the Challenger. They also launched satellites from Kennedy, although those weren't as spectacular. It was only about 100 miles to the north, so you could easily watch them with the naked eye or a pair of binoculars.
The Challenger launched a little after 11:30 am. TheEvening Times was (obviously) an afternoon paper, so the deadline for my cartoon was earlier that morning. I was working on the next cartoon, which wouldn't run for two days since I only did MWF cartoons, and also spending part of the day hand coloring the daily comics pages for both The Evening Times and the larger morning paper, ThePalm Beach Post, both owned by the same media conglomerate. It was an extra bullshit job duty used to justify my hire. I was the first cartoonist the Evening Times ever had. I started as a freelancer, then got hired on after two years. I would also be their last cartoonist.
So I had time to kill, and space launches were cool, even if they weren't the huge deal they once were. It was late taking off that day, and had been delayed for days for various reasons, but when word came, all who were interested went upstairs. There was the usual chatter when the pillar of smoke rose upward. "There it goes!" A few of the newsroom geeks had never missed a launch, stretching all the way back to Gemini. If you've never seen one live, space launches are amazing to watch.
Then that ball of smoke and that evil looking twin plume.
We stood there in stunned silence. Then somebody yelled "SHIIIIIIIIT!!!" and that jolted us all into action. Everyone sprinted for the roof door, scrambling to squeeze through all at once like a Three Stooges scene and thundered down the stairs to the newsroom. THE SHUTTLE EXPLODED!! THE SHUTTLE EXPLODED!! Any of you who have worked in newsroom can envision how the place burst into frantic activity. Reporters and photos racing around, editors screaming.
But me, I had nothing to do! My deadline had passed. The Evening Times would put out an extra edition that day, but they weren't re-doing the editorial page, just the front page and there wasn't enough time to re-draw a cartoon. There's nothing worse than an obit cartoon anyways. What would I draw? The astronauts as angels! Uncle Sam crying? Those cartoons are always incredibly lame and are inevitably variations of the great Bill Mauldin one after JFK's assassination: The Lincoln Memorial with his head buried in his hands. Just look up the post 9-11 political cartoons to see why the genre is dead.
Eventually, I went back upstairs and stared at that slowly dissipating plume for awhile. Alone.
A bad day. It pales in comparison to 9-11, of course, and indeed has been somewhat nudged from out collective memory because of that awful day the Towers fell. But it's the only time I was an eyewitness to history, so it sticks with me.
Especially since that next cartoon I drew got me fired! I wish I still had a copy of it. It was a bug-eyed tv newsman screaming something into the camera and cutting live to someone who once stood in a grocery store line with one of the dead astronauts. (or something like that). It was a riff about the idiotic round-the-clock coverage of the disaster, even though there was nothing new to report. Given what tv news would become, it was pretty damn spot on!
But the editor didn't see it that way. He had the offending cartoon pulled off the paste-up sheet in the composing room. It never saw print. This dude had only been on the job about six months and hated my stuff from day one. This cartoon was the last straw, for some reason. I think he objected to me besmirching the news business. Wonder if he felt the same way a decade later when FoxNews and CNN and rightwing radio were spewing out noxious garbage 24/7?
He summoned me to his throne room and fired me on the spot for "general tastelessness." And so ended my political cartoon career.
I didn't save much from this period. I was very raw and hadn't yet found my style or my voice. I was no prodigy. I wandered in the wilderness for pretty much the whole Eighties trying to find my path. The Evening Times cartoons were pretty rotten, but not in the way the douchebag editor thought. They weren't nearly controversial enough! Here's one, drawn a little before the one that got me sacked. Not a bad gag but hard to even recognize as my work, no? It would, in fact, still be another three years of labor before the lightbulb flickered on and I became the Derf you all know and "love."
So I have many old feelings and memories that clang together from this day long ago.
This past month has been a mad dash to the finish line. I leave tomorrow for a month-long book tour of France and Belgium. This, of course, necessitated that I finish all of February's CITY strips before I board the plane, since I won't have the time, or frankly the desire, to draw them on the road. Ground out the final one last night.
Unfortunately, in case you missed the earlier post, THE BARON OF PROSPECT AVE. webcomic will be on sabbatical while I'm gone. Can't be helped.
Before the before-mentioned mad dash, I had a crushing workload since August. In case you missed that earlier post, I was working 7-days-a-week on the TRASHED book proposal, which was just picked up by Abrams. (there is also a 2nd proposal, but I've shelved that for the moment). So it's been crazy since…. gulp… last summer! And now it's over. And ya know, I'm a bit jumpy just sitting around the house today. It seems like I should be working. I'm twitchy as I write this. Jesus.
Before I leave, thought I'd share yet another project I've been intermittently working on, The Punk Rock & Trailer Parks Punk Star Series. I drew quite a few of these (on the back of comic book backer boards) to sell at Cleveland's Genghis Con in November. The originals sold like hot cakes. I have an upcoming show in Paris, at the awesome comix store BD Super-Heroes, and the owner requested some for show. Here they are:
I'll be doing variations of these for sale at future cons, and probably selling them on my soon-to-be-upgraded webstore. Each pen & ink original is (now) drawn on 9x12 bristol. Ready to frame and hang in the bathroom of your choice. I draw a mean Wendy O. Williams, too, but I'm informed the French don't really know who she is.
A fan has helpfully posted my History Channel interview on Youtube. Can't post the video here, for some reason, so you'll have to go HERE
I don't do much tv and refuse most requests. This show is a good example why. They interviewed me for an hour and used a minute of footage. I wasn't familiar with this show, America's Book of Secrets, but it's just the sort of documentary mush that you find on cable tv.
It was a nightmare of an interview. My publisher's PR director begged me to do it. But History Channel would only put me up for one night in NYC for the shoot…. and then booked me a flight that went Cleveland/ f-ing Atlanta!/ NYC, with a 3-hour layover! So an hour flight to NYC took 7 HOURS! Each way!! I told them to forget it. More pleading. Finally, I agreed, but was NOT a happy interviewee, as you can see from my even-grumpier-than-usual demeanor. The shoot was down in the financial district, too, a week after Superstorm Sandy had flooded the area. Suitably apocalyptic. The drawing board here is a prop. Nice old board though.
If any of you out there are attending the Angoulême Int'l Comic Fest, here's my schedule.
All signings will be at the Editions çà et là booth, Stand N39, Espace Nouveau Monde, place New York
Thursday, January 30
14h-15h30 : Talk & presentation for high school students 16h-18h : Signing Friday, January 31 10h-13h : Signing 15h-15h30 : Talk Official Selection, Espace Sélection Officielle Cultura 17h-19h : Signing Saturday, February 1 10h-13h : Signing 17h-20h : Signing Sunday, February 2 10h-13h : Signing 16h-17h30 : Award ceremony Angoulême festival
My latest acquisition. Copies of the Los Angeles Reader from 1996! Attractively arranged on the shag rug in my studio, that I salvaged from my teenage room when my mother (at last) redecorated it.
That's two down and one to go. Scored a box of Chicago Readers last Fall. Still looking for a complete copy of the NY Press. I've been on a mission to pump up my archive, so I've been seeking out copies of some of my favorite weeklies, all containing my strip, of course. I used to get 20 papers mailed to me every week (I had to tip my mailman like crazy) but I'd just tear out the page with my cartoon and toss the rest. But these issues are such wonderful artifacts of the era, that I regretted not saving some. Thus my quest. It's proven harder than expected. Who, after all, saves a 20-year-old free weekly?
The LA Reader was founded in 1978 by the owners of the Chicago Reader. But unlike the corporate media chains that have totally taken over what's left of the weekly genre, the Chicago hippie owners provided guidance and inspiration, but let the staff of The LA Reader operate independently. All the Reader papers were wonderful, with terrific writing, amazing photography and… best of all… cartoons! These 1996 issues are near the end. The biggest one is a mere 60 pages. But they ran SIX cartoons!
Very early LIfe in Hell
The LA Reader was the first home base of Matt Groening's Life in Hell, after it began as a self-published comic book and had a brief stint in an LA zine. He was also an asst. editor and music critic at the paper. The LA Reader also launched filmmaker David Lynch'sAngriest Dog in the World, quite possibly the worst weekly strip ever produced. Love his films. Hated his strip. It featured the exact same drawing every week. The editor once told me he ran it more as a joke than anything. He mused that Lynch was almost daring them to drop it with each ever-more-lame strip. "Take him up on that dare," I advised. The joke was mostly on all the struggling real cartoonists out there who would have killed to be in an LA paper. The LA Reader picked up The City in 1992, and ran it until the paper was closed.
It's a sad tale. The dominant LA paper was the LA Weekly, which was a slick publication that was part of the Village Voice chain, which was, at that time, owned by dog food billionaire Leonard Stern. It was a fine paper, flush with cash. I guess in LA you call a billionaire's newspaper "alternative." The big rival of the Village Voice chain was the New Times chain of Phoenix, which owned a dozen or so papers and was known in the industry as The Evil Empire for it's cut-throat tactics. Without warning in 1998, New Times swooped in and bought TheLA Reader, fired everyone, about 35 staffers and another 30 freelance contributors by my count of the masthead, and closed the paper. In it's place, New Times started their own publication, The LA New Times. It was a decent paper, one that also ran my strip, but the forced demise of The LA Reader was a total waste. I'm not even sure why they bought it. I guess just to eliminate a competitor. The LA New Times only lasted six years before closing.
The last check I received from The LA Reader was huge, many times what I was owed! I called the editor up, because I didn't feel right just waltzing off with payment I wasn't owed. It was his last week on the job and he was pretty much alone in an empty office that was soon to be vacated. He laughed at my confession. Turns out New Times had given him a big wad to pay off all the freelancers and settle the paper's accounts. It was way more than needed, so the editor just divvied it up among his loyal freelancers rather than return money to New Times. "Screw the fuckers," he told me. It was the only time in the history of my newspaper career that I was given extra money. The norm was that papers screwed me.
I'm still looking for a couple copies of the NY Press. If anyone has some, I'll trade an original City strip of your choosing! Email me here.
Groan. The internet really sucks today. Or, to put it more accurately, I really suck at the internet today.
First, I pissed off some comic shop owners here in Cleveland with a Facebook post. Didn't mean to, but did so none the less. So I've been trying to patch things up with them.
Then Comic Book Resources, a popular forum, picked up my blog post a few down about my "One man crusade against slabbing." Flaming bags of shirt have been lobbed at me from all directions all day from CGC fans.
Look, if people are actually going the read the crap I post here I'm going to have to stop!
