flotation device 11

many years ago i was young. and i had no shame, no lack of ego and no concept that asking a bunch of artists to illustrate a zine of my writing wasn’t anything other than ordinary. now i’m older and i think, why the fuck did i do that? who the fuck did i think i was? wow! i’m glad i did it, but there’s no way i’d ever do that now.

anyways – i had this idea to write a zine about how i got into zines and then have comics people set the words to comics. at the time i was working at a comic book store in chicago and was in touch with many people who would shortly go on to be well known and published by large publishing types. again, at the time i was a dumb kid and these were mostly artists who were coming into the store and who were making mini comics that i was buying for myself and for the store. some of them were already well known at the time.

after many years i decided to get the whole issue back into digital print so that the artists’ work could be seen more largely. so feel free to read the thing here. or you can download a large pdf that contains the whole thing.

i am insanely indebted to the artists for their time and work and completely humbled that they agreed to help me out. those artists are: gabrielle bell, jeffrey brown, allison cole, benjamin chandler, dylan horrocks, kevin huizenga, onsmith, cole johnson, missy kulik, ted may, anders nilsen, ryoko oguchi, john porcellino, robert ullman, ted may – who made did the amazing cover art, and lilli carrĂ© – who did the border design on the last two pages. the funniest bit for me is that he drew me in my zine bunker with a portrait of myself on the wall. ego, natch!