Everything Old is Newave Again

I had forgotten about this, but a couple friends of mine have seen it and brought it to my attention.

About a year or so ago, an artist named Michael Dowers asked for permission to reprint a cartoon of mine in a collection he was compiling of Underground Comix. Michael was in the nucleus of a group of underground cartoonists in Seattle during the Minicomix Boom of the 1980s. This was back in the Antediluvian Past, before the discovery of things like Fire and the Internet, when the advent of the Local Photocopy Shop had opened up a new dimension for the amateur comic book artist and promised a glorious new age of creativity allowing the Common Man to enter the field of comics.

(Naturally, I used this creative freedom to do parodies like Rambi and Brisbane the Barbarian and Arizona Schwartz the Lost Archaeologist).

Anyway, the quarter-page minicomic, photocopied on 8 1/2 x 11" paper and sold out of your backpack when lucky or traded for someone else's minicomic when not, has largely vanished today, superceded by the Webcomic. But Dowers has collected a sampling of some of the prominent artists of the Do-It-Yourself Comix era. And I'm in there too.

His book: Newave!: The Underground Mini Comix of the 1980s will be published by Fantagraphic Books this year.

Now I've forgotten which strip of mine he asked to reprint; so I guess I'll be surprised when it comes out.