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

• "Blaster" Al Ackerman, one of my favorite short story writers, is the author of the Ling Master stories, which I am adapting as comics. Most of his work has been published in the small press (including the "marginal" press, below the underground). Blaster has no site of his own, but is referenced widely. The following sites should leave you even more confused about this enigmatic character, who has been described by various folks as "America's Cervantes" and "the Yogi Berra of the Twilight Zone."
  • Seven By Nine Squares, a maze of twisty little passages, all different/alike. For "Spanish Art" read "Mail Art".
  • The TAM Interview. I honestly have no idea who or what TAM is (or was).
  • The Chela Gallery Show, a 2002 retrospective of Blaster's drawings at the Chela Gallery in Baltimore. Show photos. Review in City Paper.
  • In July—August 2008, the Gormley Gallery at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland exhibited Blaster's most recent art project, the Thriftstore Mystery Paintings.
  • Blaster: The Blaster Al Ackerman Omnibus is available by mail order from Normal's Books in Baltimore. Or used at Amazon or Barnes & Noble. But try Normal's first. Originally published by Feh! Press. Read this book! It will change your life! Or maybe just make you never want to touch Vienna sausages again.
  • I Taught My Dog to Shoot a Gun (out of print)
  • tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE's review of Misto Peas, a collection of Ackerman's recent John M. Bennett parodies.
  • John Held, Jr.'s interview with Blaster, from a couple of decades ago.
  • An undated interview at the True Vine Record Shop site. The photo is worth a more careful look.
  • Shattered Wig Press publishes recent writings by Blaster and others.
  • Video of Blaster reading at Normal's Red Room
  • People actually still make LPs? If you have a turntable, you can get I Am Drunk, a recording of some of his recitations, including live readings at the 14 Karat Cabaret. If you don't have a turntable, you can download the MP3s. But then you won't get the Blaster Al cover art.
• 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, obliquely referred to in "The Squid Boys of Terre Haute". Blaster loves to parody his writing at Wig Nite poetry readings.
• "Vernacular writer" Jack Saunders, cast as the antihero of "'I, The Stallion!'" My portrayal of him does not look anything like him, any more than does Blaster's 1985 portrait of Saunders on the latter's website looks anything like what Saunders was like when he was younger. Though at least Blaster got the glasses and hair right.

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 game some Otisian friends and I invented during the yuppie billiard craze of the 1990s. Introduction and Fine Print by Pope Jeoffe I of the Intergalactic House of Fruitcakes.