Category: Mini-Comics
Last article published: 23 August 2012
This is the 5th post under this label
I've always been a do-it-yourselfer/self-publisher, never really patient enough to insert myself into the cogs of the Establishment, and I realize that's to my detriment, though when it comes to my comics work, well, I don't have the artistic skill for them to be anything BUT amateurish. I did, upon graduating from university, have a project where I would self-publish comics work in partnership with local contemporary artists, but that needed financing that I couldn't get (maybe that's a story for another day), so I turned to the mini-comics medium and abused the photocopier at work through Summer-Fall of 1995.
I came up with 3 series running concurrently, the first of which played on my (Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol-fueled) interest in Dada and automatic/accidental writing. Dada was a collage comic, which really didn't require any drawing ability. Inspired by an art teacher who used to construct his somewhat surreal images by doing a boolean search at the library for key words associated with his theme, I did the same based on a word salad title. Then, I just cut up a lot of words (I still have a full bag somewhere) and images from those books and either drew them at random, or arranged them (in the case of images) intuitively. The first issue has football players going up against fish, the second was evidently cribbed from a potty training manual and a book about shoes, and so on. With issue 3, I'm poaching comic book panels from all over, while the final issue features empty grids and more than enough loose panels to create your own comic, either randomly or with some kind of purpose.
Meanwhile, I was also self-publishing a 'zine for my improv league - news and humor - and ImproVision was the mini-comics equivalent. Essentially, I would take improvs we had on tape (they're all from the same game, it wasn't like we routinely taped them) and draw them with the characters, props and sets the audience had to otherwise imagine. A quick improv lesson made up the inside back cover. The cartooning is rough, but the tracing on the first two covers is fun.
Before doing mini-comics, I had done a lot of even rougher comic strips for various school papers (since my senior year in high school). The inked copies were gone, but I still had the pencils (I traced them with a light box so I wouldn't lose the art), so I inked them again, put the panels in a 2x2 grid and published them in Mini-Omnibi as Stripper. Certainly easier for me to revisit those gags this way - I don't think I have all the original newspapers. Nik the Ninja was really my friend Rob Tam's concept, which he had done for an "underground" (read: Mad Magazine-style) another friend and I had conceived of, not realizing it would get us into hot water with school admins. My friend and I were almost expelled (and if we'd actually been able to distribute it, we might have), and Rob, who was going to a different school, merely got his artwork confiscated. He wasn't too happy. In defiance, I took the Ninja in High School idea (I'd at least scripted it) and redid it for the school paper AND yearbook. Kok Rell was a cockroach who skulked around my first university campus, making fun of it. I was editor-in-chief of THAT paper (yes, first year, very small school) and needed content (I wrote most of the articles too AND it was the first time I'd publish something with a photocopier because the previous year's crew had blown the budget on a party). When I got to the bigger campus, I submitted a strip called "Ag!" (which always ended with someone saying the "Argh" like catch phrase) about D&D characters going to the school. The next year, the new editor-in-chief wasn't interested, so the mini-comic was my chance to publish a couple of the strips for the first time.
It's all mostly in French, which is why I'm not showing off the interiors, but then it also saves you from my crude drawings. I used photo-collage to do an improv-related strip for the same paper years and years later, but my "Stripper" days were far behind me by then. I don't know that I can write a full-length comic, but I did know how to set up and deliver a gag in 4 panels. Stripper almost had a 4th and completely original issue, where I crossed two Philip Roth book titles (My Life as a Man and The Breast) as My Life as a Breast, a short Kafka novel about a man who wakes up to find he is a giant, floating boob. I never completed it. One might ask how it would fly in the current environment.
I suppose Mini-comics became Webcomics, and I've done a couple of guest strips for friends, using digital means (still can't draw), but did YOU make Mini-comics? Did you perhaps drop some at the local comics shop (I think I did, but I don't know what issues they might be)? Did it lead to bigger things? Do you still have them? Do you still MAKE them? I'm interested, as this feels like the product of a bygone era.
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