Illustration Portfolio, updated.

Been dabbling in Illustration a bit lately, looking to do more.
Here's the latest version of my online portfolio.

Above, milkbug on a skateboard for Sarah's Science. Am I crazy to think that this drawing is informed by my child hood delight in the art of Jack Kirby?

Is Print Dead? Or Does it Just Smell Funny?

If you are like me, you have a lifelong love affair with print in all it's manifestations—books, magazines, newspapers, graphic novels, comics books, posters, drink coasters—in short, anything you can feed through a press and slap some ink on can be the object of this affection.

With the rise of the web and “new” media, newspapers and magazines are shrinking from reduced ad revenues and circulation. The venerable Punk Planet has folded, publishers of every stripe struggle to break even, and kids spend the majority of their reading time online, instant messaging and the like.

Sure, electronic media is stunning and fun, but a deep-seated part of me wants to bury my head in the sand and focus exclusively on print, for ever and ever.

I felt compelled to poll several of my colleagues in the ink stained world of comic books and graphic novels on the state of print today.

Jesse Reklaw, the cartoonist behind the weekly strip Slow Wave, is a keystone personality in the vibrant world of mini-comics. “I think about this all the time lately. My feeling is that things are shrinking in some ways (newspapers, magazines), but growing in others (graphic novels, printed archives). Maybe we're readjusting and getting better focus about WHAT should be in print...it is one of the most durable forms of information storage.”

Another lover of print, a true blue avatar of art comics, Dylan Williams, cartoonist and publisher of Sparkplug Books, suggests a more active approach.

“I don't believe print is dead. I've actually had a lot of time spent thinking about what I'm trying to do with my life and the whole idea of punk rock is something I keep on coming back to. I've been a punk since I was a kid and those values are really my core values. If you feel bad about stuff the only thing we can do is fight it. I love print, love drawing, and love art comics. I hate what comics became in the 90s, things like web comics, ‘the new independents’ and all the money-speak that took over comics bugs me. I'm an underground kid and that is my idea. I think, all we can do is light our little fires and stoke them. I don't ever feel like giving up.”

Sparkplug has issued outstanding titles by the likes of Mats!? (Asiaddict), Renee French (Edison Steelhead's Lost Portfolio), the gifted young artist Austin English (Windy Corner), and Williams’ own standout series Reporter, to name a few. Both Williams and Jesse Reklaw are in the vanguard of comics kids coming to full maturity—these are people who have vision, ambition and confidence. They believe in print and are willing to bet their careers on it.

Veteran underground cartoonist and painter supreme Mary Fleener offers a historical perspective on how we got to where we are. “I think the print world began to die with the television. When radio was king, books were still popular because radio didn't have the visual kick. Don't forget, we humans are a lot like magpies—we like shiny things and TV provides that fix. However, today, print and TV are dying because there's nothing of substance on either TV or within newspapers.”

Rob Clough, comics editor of Other magazine and a high profile comics critic, joins Fleener in naming TV as the real culprit in the waning primacy of print, but holds out hope for the graphic novel.

“Print as the dominant form of mass media is dying. That was precipitated by TV and is obviously being driven further home by the Internet and assorted gadgets.

“That said, reading print is such a particular and visceral experience, that print will never completely go away. Instead, it's going to become more of a boutique item, something done in smaller quantities. It's why Fantagraphics will continue to thrive, and why print-on-demand services like Lulu will become even more prominent.”

“The good news about recent technology is that it will democratize the dissemination of information
even further—everyone will have a chance to have their say. This will take the flow of information out of the hands of the corporate interests that have strangled it for nearly 150 years in this country.”

Looking to the future, I return to Jesse Reklaw, with his finger on the pulse of grassroots/DIY comics publishing. Jesse believes that the heart and soul, the true innovation in comics, rests in that grassroots/DIY world, and how can anyone deny that self-evident truth? He cites the emergence of several annual awards for mini-comics as symbolic of the durability of print based comics:

“The minicomics awards (this year we're offering a cash prize of $300 to the best mini!). I think the fact that people are rewarding mini-comics makers, and encouraging them, shows that there will always be an interest in print and the art of making books.”

For my own part, I'm inclined to agree with the sentiments expressed by Brett Warnock, co-publisher of Top Shelf Productions and one of the most charismatic figures in the art comics movement, “You know how I feel about print vs. digital media... I'll die with ink-stained fingers and a rolled-up comic book in my back pocket, baby!”

NOTE: Here is an interesting twist--I've been plunging into the world of Web Comics lately with my Tuff Toddler strip. The issue of print vs. "new media" remains foremost in my mind. Indeed, I have a couple comic book projects in the can, so I'm hardly ditching print media. Each project has a publisher interested, but I have no signed contracts for either as of this writing.

So it is that I wonder, are the existing revenue models for print media still viable? I've seen my income from print related projects shrink over the past couple years. How are these traditional models working for others?

The real question here, what are the revenue models (let alone the production models) for the "new media"? Sure, I'm pulling some modest income from AdSense ads from Google, but how is a cartoonist going to pull a living from the "new media"?

I'll be sure to post more about this. This article may or may not appear in an upcoming issue of Alarm magazine, I'll be sure to note if & when it appears.

Comic Book Entrepreneur at the Dawn of the Indie Age

As the Seventies stumbled to a close, I found myself at a Ramones concert just before Christmas with an ascendant case of the flu, which my girlfriend attempted to nurse with a few tiny tiny spoonfuls of cocaine. Never liked that awful stuff too much, the flu had it's way with me, yet somehow I survived the show and made it through the next week and a half to the Eighties with my newly minted Bachelor of Fine Arts degree (and perhaps enough money to last two weeks if I stuck to beans & rice).

This was something of a comedown from where I'd parked my psychological living space for my undergraduate years. Fact is, getting my art degree (with a focus on painting) was a bit of a dodge, a pleasant enough way to be “going to college” while I pursued my real education, which was comprised of writing & drawing a daily comic strip for the school newspaper. The Massachusetts Daily Collegian offered four or five much coveted slots to students to work out their chops on the comics page. By my second semester, I talked my way into grabbing a spot there, and held it for the next four years until graduating.

Luckily, my strip Aluminum Foil captured the zeitgeist of the moment, and the strip was widely appreciated at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, a diploma factory of gargantuan proportions, that once earned the dubious distinction of being Playboy magazine's party school of the year. Aluminum Foil chronicled the adventures of Gerald (a stoner foilhead/everyman) and his sidekick Benb (a dapper, overweight, mute smiling scarecrow).

The highlight of the UMass social calendar was of course Halloween. At UMass in the late Seventies, Halloween was nothing less than a weekend long, full on psychedelic pagan bacchanal. Hordes of tripping, costumed students would converge on the concourse of the campus center building for a convivial mass celebration of All Hallows Eve. It was something to behold, especially for me, as many of the party goers would be dressed as Benb & Gerald (Gerald in particular being the easy costume—just fashion a helmet of Aluminum Foil, poke some eye holes in it, roll a fat doobie for a prop, and there you are!).

Which brings us back to January 1980. There I am, ego inflated beyond all reasonable proportion after four years of basking in the glow of the successful run of comics, with barely enough money for a six pack of beer. What to do? I tried a standard forty hour job for all of six weeks, working on the loading dock of a down market department store for minimum wage. This was depressing (in the dead of a freezing ass cold western Massachusetts winter, no less), and the final straw came when the boss instructed me to drown a cute little mole that had invaded the warm store during one particularly nasty freeze. Not willing to whack a mole for minimum wage, I released the little guy into the frozen tundra and resigned.

Having some experience with screen printing T Shirts, I started freelancing wholesale shirt jobs (always a popular product when it's twenty degrees outside!). This took care of keeping food in my belly and a roof overhead, but how to sweep the world of cartooning with my (obviously) unparalleled genius?!

In retrospect, it's clear to me now that I came pre-installed with the “publishing gene”. This is a genetic quirk whereby an artist or writer can (by some mysterious alchemy) justify shoveling pots and pots of money into the never ending project of publishing their precious works. To say I was burning up to get started in the field is an understatement. It was pretty much all I could think about.

I'd managed to save $150.00 from my heroic efforts on the loading dock. Armed with the idea of collecting the best of my college strips into a one hundred page volume, I dropped by a local printer to get an estimate on having books produced. Turns out they wanted nine hundred bucks to do a run of five hundred, a bit beyond my means. Just about then, an important adjunct to the publisher gene kicked in, and I became a financier as well.

Turns out one of my housemates, Betsy Hilborn, an amiable, fun loving & somewhat cynical nursing student, has been listening to me chatter about my plans and offered to pony up most of the funds for my initial publishing effort. So with $600.00 from Betsy, my paltry $150.00 is savings and another $150.00 coaxed out of my dubious parents, I threw my hat into the ring as a comics publisher.

I had penned some four hundred plus daily strips during the run of Aluminum Foil. I figured I'd publish them over two volumes, with the first one hundred page volume featuring two strips per page. I hauled my strips down to the print shop, and within a couple weeks I had five hundred copies of Benb & Gerald in hand!

Although I was a completely naive amateur, I left no stone unturned over the next several weeks in an effort to sell the books. As I'd promised Betsy that I would pay her back within a couple months, I sprung into action like a man sitting on a hot stove—I was determined to be as good as my word.

The first step was to stage a publishing party. It was my good fortune to be friends with Carl Mayfield, lead guitarist and vocalist for Martian Highway, a local party band with a strong following. Carl was an accomplished illustrator as well, and we jammed on an 11” x 17” poster for a Martian Highway gig that would double as a costume ball / publishing party.

Given the tenor of the times, Carl hit on the clever idea that we would print the poster in silver ink on black paper. Why? To make it look like a giant hit of blotter acid, of course! Sitting down with our drawing gear and a stack of late Seventies punk rock and Grateful Dead records (go figure), we created a gorgeous drawing featuring Benb & Gerald driving a late model Ford with an electric, glowing Martian in the back seat. Carl added the requisite typography, and we scribbled a manic cast of characters over every square inch of the art, including the first image of my future lead character, Dog Boy (although I did not name him in this drawing, the fully formed image was there).

One wag suggested that we were quite bold to produce a silver on black poster that was “virtually unreadable”; I had no problem reading the poster myself! We papered the UMass campus and local towns with the poster. It stood out like a beacon to those in the know, and the party was well attended by costumed, tripping revelers.

Green kid that I was, I felt disappointment with selling 33 books at the party, and another 40 or so from my prepublication advertising and marketing. In retrospect, I recognize that it was a pretty good first day as a small time publisher, making a nice dent in the money I owed Betsy. The following month saw me hawking books in front of the UMass campus center building dressed as Gerald, replete with Aluminum Foil mask (but only once—too embarrassing!), making a critical connection with the book buyer at the campus bookstore, and placing books in every local book & record shop that would take a few.

With the unrelenting verve & energy of youth, I managed to make the whole thing work and somehow sold enough copies to pay back the loan to Betsy ahead of time. Other key breaks came along, for example I received a positive review from cartoonist Jay Kinney in a column he was then writing about underground comix for Heavy Metal magazine—this one review alone sold a good thirty books via mail order.

By the time mid summer rolled around, I'd sold all but a handful of my run of five hundred books, turning a modest profit. Considering I'd had a near captive audience of 20,000 daily for four years in the Amherst – Northampton area, it wasn't unreasonable for me to assume I could pull it off. In any case, it was a remarkable initiation into the rough & tumble world of comics publishing for me, making a profit my first time out despite being almost completely ignorant of the biz. It whetted my taste for further adventures into the world of indie comics publishing at the dawn of the Eighties.

Warehouse Artist Studios

An artist/bohemian type working for themselves is perceived in a variety of ways by the general public. A lot of the perception actually has to do with a combination of the artist's cashflow and apparel strategy, as opposed to the stirrings of their soul. Strangely, as a young man, people often saw me as a responsible, solid guy. Ha!

In the early eighties I ran my screen printing operation out of a funky old warehouse by the railroad tracks in Eugene, Oregon. Enormous pastry and coffee in hand, I’d get to my shop a bit past nine and dig in for the day. Usually I'd run out of work between 1:00 and 3:00 pm, leaving the rest of the day to run, draw comics and hang out.

Being that the economy had had the shit kicked out of it just then, I was moderately proud that I’d been able to scape up enough business to keep a roof over my head… ultimately I turned enough of a profit to embark on my checkered career publishing my own wacky comic books, but that’s not the subject of this rant.

Warehouse Artists Studios was the literal name of the co-op warehouse wherein I rented space. The studio took up the second floor of a truly dilapidated old funkster warehouse that had most recently been used to store spices. Add to that the gay girls who illegally lived in the space next to mine, burning patchouli oil night and day. This place had a certain bouquet! I’d been printing T-Shirt jobs out of my flat, and it was getting a bit ridiculous.

At an opening in a local gallery, I saw a flyer for “Warehouse Artist Studios”, a 5000 square foot space that magically divided up the floor into 170 square foot units that rented for forty bucks a month. I went down the next day and rented two adjacent spaces, which apparently I’d be paying $75 or $80 a month for. A slight, nervous man named Lynn rented my space to me. He was the manager, he had a chair upholstering business in the studio. Straight away, I could see ‘ol Lynn was a duck seriously out of water.

This impression was dramatically confirmed like three days later when Lynn informed me that the Warehouse was failing economically, and that he was resigning as manager. He handed me the studio ledger and checkbook saying “you seem like an astute fellow, why don’t you manage this dump?”. I was rather taken aback at this, but sure enough at the next meeting of the co-op, the members all but begged me to save their studio. I had my serious doubts, but figured there wasn’t much to lose, so why not? It wasn't lost on me either that as manager my rent for my 340 square foot space dipped to $35.00 per month!

The co-op had about 12 members. We were several hundred dollars in the hole. We could pay rent, but couldn’t pay the heating bill. We were required to carry basic liability insurance, which had gone unpaid and lapsed, for starters. I sat down and did a bit of math. I figured if we raised the rent on the basic space about $10.00 a month for five months, and attracted a couple new members, we’d squeak by and could continue renting the dump.

The measure passed at the next meeting. At least with the eight or nine people who decided to stick it out, as a couple dropped out with the news of the temporary rent increase; we did indeed need to attract new members straight away. We papered the town with flyers for the warehouse, and got free listings in any newspaper we could. Miraculously, the plan worked. We lowered the basic rent back to $40.00 per month ahead of schedule and got an infusion of fresh blood. I can’t take too much credit for it, as the place snapped to with an esprit de corps I’ve rarely encountered… I’d say it was goddamn grassroots socialism is action, almost.

Now here comes the fun part, the personalities that made the place click, the swashbucklers, crackpots, con men, assholes and outright brilliant geniuses I encountered in my stint at Warehouse Artist Studios. First comes a woman named Kathy Caprario. She was a dramatic beauty from New York of Italian descent, the best known painter in Eugene, an “older woman” to me of maybe 33-35 years (I was all of 24 at the time). Kathy is the person who was singlehandedly most responsible for the survival of Warehouse Artist Studios at the time of the financial crises.

To say she was resourceful and a bit of an aggressive shark is an understatement. For starters, she marched me down to see the owner of the owner of the building when the lease came up. The guy was a real estate money grubbing slum lord type who claimed an artistic background. Right. Our rent was $650.00 per month. Kathy figured that Jeff, the slum lord, was lucky that anyone at all was renting this dump in a crappy ecomomy. She advises me to offer the guy $450.00 per month. No problem! It was an invaluable early lesson in having brass balls.

So we’re in this real estate lizard’s office, and I make the rent offer. Jeff, the lizard in question, completely ignores me and starts this serious, near lecherous flirt with Kathy. She plays this guy like a fiddle, and we walk out of there with a lease for the next year of $550.00 per month, a hundred per month rent reduction. Yes folks, in 1982 in Eugene, you could rent a 5000 square foot studio for that low price. I should mention too, the year after that, Kathy had moved on to a private studio space, but I’d learned well and got that damn rent down to $475.00 per month!

Kathy also had us apply for City of Eugene room tax grants. Turns out there was actual civic supports for the arts afoot! We hastily threw together grant applications to run a gallery in our common space, such as it was, and to offer figure drawing sessions to the public. Given the level of initial interest in these projects, we all saw it as a way to get the city to help pay our rent with minimal execution of said projects.

But who knew! The figure drawing sessions maintained a core of attendance for a couple years. The gallery stared off as nothing—an unrented space was hung with art. But before long, a 22 year old painter of promise named Mike Perkin rented a space and started doing some pretty cool work in his cubicle. He tried his best to ape Francis Bacon, but the works looked a bit like Francis was a werewolf Mexican wrestler or something.

When it came Mike’s turn to show his work, he turned a critical eye at the tiny room where I asked him to hang his paintings. He asked me if I had the studio checkbook. What do you have in mind, Mike? He directed me to the Eugene Planing Mill, a massive lumber yard across the street from us. “Let’s stud up couple walls so I can hang my big paintings”. Outragous! Here’s this wild kid, plays the same tapes over and over (Scarey Monsters by Bowie, anything by Lou Reed) and yells at his paintings. At the drop of a hat, we get some lumber and flail away for a couple hours with hammers. Before you know it, instant gallery!

We build some pretty decent walls in a jiffy (other studio members drifted in a pitched in) and whitewashed them. Mike’s paintings for that show were terrific. They were done in ruddy reds, earthtones and orangey yellows, with wood and burlap assemblage fastened to the canvases. The average size was maybe 3’ across by almost 5’ tall. My favorite was called “The Inside of Lou Reed’s Stomach”. If I wasn’t blowing every cent on publishing comic books, I woulda bought it. The opening was a revelation.

Mike’s family showed up and they were the most amazing bunch of open minded art, theatre, film and literature lovers you could imagine. A lotta beer went down. I remember late at night, Mike’s mom was wrestling on the studio floor with one of her four sons. From there on in, our little gallery stood a few decent shows, and even better parties. And through it all, the city kept the checks coming!

Keith the retired Air Force colonel is next in our cast of characters. Bald, prim, post heart attack, gentle former Texan Keith. A late life painter, an ultra practical man. Ruled by logic on the outside, soft as a grape inside, he had a good heart even if it was failing him, he did his share to keep the warehouse afloat. He painted small landscapes that revealed a luminous take on Oregon’s rainy colors. Nothin’ amazing, but nice. Fluid, painterly, sea foam light permeating the canvas with a bit of warm ochre and alizarin crimson, tacking it to the surface of the earth.

Keith enjoyed regaling the Warehouse crew over beers with stories of flying B-52’s through mushroom clouds after bomb tests in the Pacific back in the day. Knowing that I was involved in the anti-nuke movement of the day, he teased me “I did H-Bomb tests all day long, and I’m not glowing yet”. Although he had a son who was around forty, Keith took a fatherly interest in me, and used to take me to lunch in his enourmous four door GM pickup truck with one of those worthless diesel engines they tried to manufacture for a couple years. He’d take us to the local Lions clubhouse. The food sucked. He’d insist we have a beer with lunch, which I didn’t like as I usually would go for a run later in the day. Hell Steve, have a beer, indulge the old boy!

Unbidden, he told me his life story. Before retirement, had risen as an assistant to one of the joint cheifs of staff. After retiring from the military, he’d been a ROTC instructor on the University of Oregon campus in the sixties. He’d have run ins with various rag-tag groups of pseudo Maoist college kids. Then one summer, Keith and his wife were vacationing in the Cascade mountains east of Eugene. Hiking in the foothills, they came upon an encampment where some of these same youths were enacting a military training drill with assault rifles! They were indeed serious about the revolution bit. After a tense momentary face off with no word exchanged, Keith and his wife turned on their heel and hiked out. “I felt like I had a target on my back”, he said, adding that he never saw those kids again.

There was another older painter at the studio, one Nick Nickolds. He was maybe 60-65 at the time. He was the real deal, a life long bohemian, painter and philosopher dedicated to the pursuit of his art. He’d been an orphan from Denver who lived the middle decades of his life in Mexico.

Nick scored the studio to the right at the top of the stairs. It was the best studio there as it had a separate private entrance. He painted in a style that at once reminded me of William Blake and Titian. His color was rich, saturated and full of light, yet he built up layers of delicate glazes that gave body and air to his figures. He was painting the figure, and faces and the natural world, yet it was semi abstract. It was as if Blake had decided to lapse into abstraction and gotten about 73% there before deciding he still had to have a face here, an eye or a breast there.

This work was technically masterful and evoked images and emotion like a skeleton key. It alluded to everything while putting it’s finger on nothing, like a Robert Hunter lyric. Nick was so consistently true, dignified and full of heart that you had to love him. He was a slightly rotund, dapper little man with ample sparkle in his eye.

He once showed me a vial full of crystalline dust, claiming that it was a sort of emulsified, crystal LSD. He stuck a pin in it, putting a miniscule amount on the head of the pin. “That’s enough”, he said. He claimed he’d had the vial for years, had been in San Francisco in the sixties with it (it was full back then). He asserted he’d provided hundreds and hundreds of trips from his little vial. Today, I almost wonder if I made that part of the story up! It just sounds too good to be true.

Nick was a guy who was always fascinating, who revealed himself to me a little bit at a time as we became friends. He approved of my comic books, and my attempts to explain the nature of reality, time, the singularity of the eternal now in cartoon form, and all that jazz. Nick told me I was on the right track as an artist. “All you have to do is be careful about the beer”, he advised me, and boy was he right, as I developed enough of a drinking habit that I ultimately had to stop altogether for my own good.

Nick eventually moved back into what he considered the morass of Marin County, as he had money connections down in California. I never saw him again, don’t know if he’s still around or not. I often reflect on what Nick taught me about maintaining integrity as an artist, and about having respect for every human being regardless of anything. I consider it immense good fortune to have known Nick and been his friend, albeit for only a couple of years.

copyright 2005 Steve Lafler all rights reserved