Links

Creative Networks

• Boston Comics Roundtable, a Boston-based group of comics creators who publish the occasional anthology
• Trees & Hills Comics Group is for comics creators in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Western Massachusetts.
• Opus Terra Salon is an occasional Pioneer Valley event, an opportunity to be entertained the old-fashioned way — by getting together with other people in person to make music, tell stories, recite poems, play word games, draw jam pictures, and whatever else comes up.

Comics Creators

• Steve Peters is creator and publisher of Awakening Comics, a spiritual journey in print. Steve's inks blow me away. Some stories are "jams" in which each panel is drawn by a different artist. I've got a couple of two-pagers in some of his comics, as well.
• Donna Barr writes and draws what she calls "drawn books." Her best-known character is perhaps the desperately funny and heartbreaking Desert Peach, but she's got other stories as well.
• Carla Speed McNeil writes and draws Finder, a science-fiction comic with some fascinating sociopolitics underpinning it. Funny, freaky, tragic, thought-provoking; like all good sci-fi, it sometimes edges into the territory of satire.
• Rex Mundi is a recently-completed comics series written by Arvid Nelson, a story in an alternate 1930s Europe in which the Reformation failed and the French Revolution was squashed. Secret manuscripts, Latin puzzles, and Knights Templars are woven together in a mind-blowing mystery.
• Bill Shafer wrote the profoundly politically-incorrect comic book, GlueBoy. Inspired lunacy, definitely not for the easily offended. His current enterprise is Hyaena Gallery in Burbank, CA. Wish I was there, 'cuz it sounds like he's set up a very cool place (albeit not for the faint of heart).
• My inner 12-year-old LOVES Onion Head Monster! Deceptively crude, yet stylish and vigorous art, city-smashing monsters, rampaging giant sea monkeys, evil doctors who make you cool your heels in their waiting rooms, and Vaudeville slapstick puns make this series irresistable. Old-fashioned fun.
• Hilary B. Price is writer and artist of the daily newspaper strip Rhymes with Orange. She knows cats.
• Sean Wang is creator of the comic-book series Runners, a science-fiction humor and adventure romp. The first mini-series has been collected as a trade paperback, and the second mini-series is ready to rock.
• Luisa Felix is creator of Candy Blondell, a continuing strip set in the pre-WWII black-and-white movie era. Candy is an actress working for a studio in the old "studio system."

Other Visual Artists

• Signe Baumane is an animatrix from Latvia, who now lives and works in New York with the rest of the Avoid Eye Contact crew. WARNING: Her stuff is not for the squeamish!
• Julie Zickefoose has been drawing and painting birds a lot longer than I have. Her realistic renditions of birds in natural settings are based on field observations, and have appeared in a number of birdwatchers' publications.
• Mo Ringey is a Northampton, MA, artist who specializes in mosaics. Not just any mosaics. Mosaics made of colored tempered glass that makes nice little tesserae, rather than wickedly jagged shards, when you smash it (which is actually pretty difficult). She started with auto glass. And it's not just mosaics out of tempered glass, but mosaics covering antique refrigerators, washing machines, and other recherché objects. She also has a morning show on Valley Free Radio in Northampton
• Vitek Kruta does eye-popping trompe l'oeil paintings, but my first encounter with his work was his 3-D Mandalas!

Small Press

• Invisible Books. Translations of ancient Egyptian, and collections of odd-ball rants from editor Jacob Rabinowitz, plus Ackerman, Thom "Shock Totem" Metzger, and others even more controversial.
• John Held, Jr., unofficial online archive keeper of the Mail Art scene. (Note: The closest thing Mail Art ever had to an official archive keeper was a woman named Jean Brown, who lived in the Shaker seed house at Tyringham, and upon her death gave her collection to the Getty Museum.)
• Pine Tree State Mind Control. Be warned: They will start work on your brain the moment you get to the site. Turn your computer speakers off if you want to be safe.
• "Language Poet" John M. Bennett.
• "Vernacular Writer" Jack Saunders.

Science Humor

• The Journal of Irreproducible Results (JIR). Founded in 1955, to my knowledge the oldest science-humor publication in English. Under new management since 2004.
• The Annals of Improbable Research (AIR). Founded in 1995 by outgoing JIR editorial staff during the dark Blackwell Scientific days. Hosts of the Ig Nobel Prizes.

Kabbalah

You may have noticed some Kabbalistic imagery in the Mandalas section.

• Colin Low's Notes on Kabbalah, my favorite source for Kabbalistic information on the Web. His are the best explanations of the individual sephiroth I have read in any medium. (Perhaps I, personally, relate so well to his writings because it is clear that his background includes an education in natural science, and a career in computer software.)
• Kabbalah for Shiksas, my essay on the publicity surrounding Kabbalah several years ago.
• Kabbilliards, a Kabbalistic variant of billiards.