New ‘zine, Take Two. More on that below.
Announcing FUN TIME FALL 2022, the second issue in my self-published mini-comic series, currently only available to order online, since I don’t foresee myself making it to many small-press comics shows in the near future. You can secure yourself a copy by backing me for $3.00 a month on Patreon, or becoming a paid subscriber to this Substack.
The fellow on the cover here is a guy I like to call “The Stereotypical Alternative”. He’s based on a drawing I made during the grunge era (1992? 1993?) that I published in my High School’s literary magazine The Subterranean.
I was always a corporate rock apologist, and I guess during those heady days of the early Seattle Scene, I found myself chafing at the concept of “Alternative” rock. As all the hair-metal older brothers I knew at the time would say, “How can they call it alternative when it’s the only thing playing on the radio”.
Yesterday I published a very similar post to this, announcing my new ‘zine, which I was thinking to call first “Generation ECCCCHH!”, and then “Generation YECCCCHH!”, in reference to a book I was recently re-reading called “Generation ECCH!”.
It felt to me amusing to rip-off the title and cover, I sort of had justified it to myself thinking about how when I was a fine-arts student from 1994-1998, all we talked about was appropriation. Combined with what I felt like were ‘zine sensibilities, and my assumption that I’d be selling well south of a hundred copies of this comics anyway, it seemed OK to just take the title. But, once I’d published yesterday’s entry, I was overcome with waves of self-consciousness about the “reference”. Is it really a reference if I’m just using the same joke? I tried adding letters, changing it from ECCH! to YECCCCHH!, but there was no way to really change it enough to turn it into something else, which is kind of the idea behind appropriating.
By the end of the day I’d concluded that no, that wasn’t a great idea. Annnnd, it sort of sucks, because I’ve stepped all over my own announcement by publishing and republishing it, but ultimately I feel better about scrapping it altogether.
FUN TIME FALL 2022, 24 pages, full-color, should be ready to ship by mid-to-late September. Sign up to receive a copy through Patreon, or subscribe to this Substack here.