Lafler & Beaupre on KPFA

On Monday April 2, I will be on KPFA 94.1 FM Berkeley at 3:00 p.m. talking with Denny Smithson on the Cover to Cover book show. Stephen Beaupre will be joining us by phone to chat about 40 Hour Man, which Mr. Beaupre wrote, and I drew.
You can listen live over the web at www.kpfa.org

Manx Media Mania this March 7th at Quimby's

It's all happening this coming Wednesday night, March 7th, at 8 p.m. at Quimby's in Chicago. I'll be there to flog 40 Hour Man, and Ben Tanzer will be our headliner, reading from his debut novel Lucky Man.

This should be a really fun, rollickin' evening, as Ben is a master ranconteur and he's on his home turf. I hope his fans don't rip his shorts right off him, but you just never know. Me, I've never been to Chicago (with the exception of the airports of course), so I look forward to checking it out.

In case anyone reading this hasn't heard, Manx Media released Lucky Man several weeks back. Hell, I guess the official publication date was yesterday (March 1), come to think of it.

Ben maintains his own inspired blog, so check it out.

Your money is not my money—it might not even be money!

Money does not exist. It’s a con game, an agreed upon illusion, a convenient conceit to chart the flow of power in our lives.

Where does money come from? How is it created? What do we mean when we say we “make money” or “time is money” ? And what the heck is “cash flow”—is money a liquid?

When you work at your job, you are indeed “making money”; for all intents and purposes, you are introducing new cash into your life where it did not exist before. But what about a bank that creates a $20,000 dollar loan for a car. Is that “making money” ? Did that 20K exist before the bank granted the loan? What about when the federal government expands the money supply? What about when Bush spends another several billion on his military misadventures? Is that “making money” ? It is certainly creating money almost literally out of thin air, aided by the stroke of a pen.

People tend to see money as an absolute, a measurable unit of, uh, measure. See how quick we get into the quicksand when attempting to define what money is?

I am interested in how money functions in the life of the self-employed person. It’s different for the self-employed than it is for the job holder, who can expect a predictable amount of cash per week, month, and year. The employee can handily measure income against expense, set up a budget and earmark an amount for saving and investing. They can become obsessed with their “magic number” as per the dictums of Money magazine in their quest for a comfortable retirement (Just thinking about the “magic number” concept reminds me why I consider holding a job a LIVING DEATH, where you mark time until you retire, close shop and drink or whatever).

Certainly it behooves the self-employed (bohemian or otherwise) to have a firm grasp of their numbers. How much do you take in during a typical month, what are your expenses, and what do you need to cover your nut? As I stated when I began blogging, an entrepreneur can set up a simple book keeping system, taking deductions allowed on the Schedule C and meticulously recording their income and expenses on a regular basis (and do explore all those lovely tax forms that help you keep more of your money—don’t be afraid of them, they are your friends!). Keep on those books on a daily, or at least weekly basis. Nothing will paint a more literal and accurate picture of the financial soul of your business than your financial ledger.

Armed with this information, you are in a position to make decisions about what your next moves. Are your profits enough to live on? That’s not bad, but what frugal things can you do to attract more clients, or make more per transaction? Are your profits far in excess of what you need to live? Good time to expand—create and execute a new marketing plan, acquire new equipment, take on an employee. Are you getting the crap kicked out of you? Rethink the entire business model RIGHT NOW! Do you have peak cash flow months and slow cash flow months like my T Shirt business? Then salt away some green in the flush months for the lean months.

The point is, money is not the end all - be all absolute measure of your success. In business, your cash flow, and in particular detailed information about your cash flow, is an accurate picture of the flow of power through your business effort, your business model and your business soul (business soul—that has to be an oxymoron!). This information will guide the combination of critical thinking and emotional thinking that you use to make the dozens of daily decisions about how to run your business life.

And isn’t that why someone becomes an entrepreneur, because they are passionate about the proposition of calling their own shots, nurturing their dreams into the real? Certainly the self-employed want to make a lot of money, but they are really in the business of manifesting their dreams. I’d argue that building the dream is the image in their mind’s eye first and foremost—the stack of cash is just a simple by product that naturally results when the fine tuned machine is hummin’ just right.

A Growing Boy Needs his Fun

I did not have a mid-life crisis when I turned forty, no, instead my gal Serena and I packed up our stuff and hauled off to Mexico for half a year. We traveled the country from the culture rich highlands to the fabulous beaches. I wrote and drew Jonk!, a graphic novella in my BugHouse saga. I picked up enough Spanish to get by. A very good time indeed was had by both of us.

To some, this will sound like the classic solution to the mid life crisis, running off on a grand adventure, but I was doing what I always did anyway: Writing and drawing comics. To say someone is having a mid-life crisis presupposes that they are desperate, melancholy, psychotic or otherwise in some dire straights. None of these conditions had befallen me at the moment of my fortieth birthday, I was a moderately happy camper getting a bit happier, a self realized individual continually following his bliss, as per the recommendations of the late Joseph Campbell.

Gotta admit things feel a bit different as my train pulls into the station marked FIFTY.

I still work for myself and I still create comics, both are fulfilling endeavors where I execute a portion of my dreams in real time. I have two children now and I love being a dad and all that implies. Serena and I are still a unit; I must have won the relationship lottery—all the ways our love has helped both of us grow into ourselves and each other has me convinced I’m the luckiest of men.

There are platitudes about middle age. One of them is “Life Begins at Forty”. It sort of did for me, I finally was in a great relationship. I finally figured out that bliss was not to be found at the bottom of a bottle of beer (let alone nine rapidly consumed beers). I found the success that comes to the self-employed by being too dogged to give up, give in or otherwise submit to the LIVING DEATH known as “a steady job”. Hell, I even bought real estate the moment before it got trendy, and I’m embarrassed to tell how well that worked out for me.

Another platitude about middle age is this: “Fifty is the New Forty”. Now what the fuck does that mean? It begs the question, what was the “Old Forty” like??? Did one walk to the mirror on their Fortieth birthday to see deep lines written in their slack face, the grim reaper peering over their shoulder? Or does it mean I am to try for eternal youth, deny middle age, and try to be young and fresh forever?

In my case, as I near the big birthday, here are some facts. Note that these are tied to ego, and youthful dreams.

1. I still do not make a living drawing comics.
2. I can no longer run a mile under five minutes, something I’ve been able to do since I was sixteen.

When I graduated college in December ’79, more than anything I was burning to make comics. All day, every day, I was literally consumed with the mission to sling ink and publish at all costs. That is literally what I have done since, always staying true to my vision, making no compromise to the concerns of commercial publishing. While I am thrilled to have chosen this path, have made some decent money along the way, and have near 100,000 comics and graphic novels in print, the basic fact remains: It has been necessary to maintain my T Shirt printing business in order to make a living. This hurts a lot, and there is no way to pretend it doesn’t.

The running thing, hell, it’s an illustration of the survival of my adolescent ego. I still want to conquer the world with my strength, my brute enthusiasm for life, while manifesting the joy of movement. At Forty, the aging athlete can still put it together; think of Kareem, of Robert Parish in the NBA finals, of Eamon Coughlan breaking four minutes in the mile at age forty.

Nobody plays in the NBA finals at fifty! Nor do they run the mile under four minutes. Thus it is incumbent upon me to accept my diminished physical powers, my softer middle age corporeal personage.

Where do I go from here? Do I amend my youthful dreams? Run off to Mexico again? (Hey, that sounds pretty good!). I’ll answer with my own near platitudes. It is necessary to keep growing and keep learning. It is necessary be eternally curious, and to embrace new experience. I will fan the flames of new creative endeavors.

As far a the model of continuously pumping out comic books and graphic novels in hopes that I hit the zeitgeist or otherwise catch on, it’s simply time for a new model. I sustained the old one for a long time because it was fun. If I am having fun I am doing something right. I’ve always been a process oriented artist. The process of creating my Bughouse comics was insanely fun, and then some. I’m not possessed of that burning passion to create comics come hell or high water at present.

If I was to continue pumping out comics under the same model, I then should not be surprised if the same modest, tepid response is the result. If you keep playing an out of tune guitar, don’t be surprised if it sounds off key! Time to tune that sucker up!

So I’m in search of fun. What will float my boat? What will work for me as an artist, an entrepreneur, a human being? I’ll be sure to report back on that.

Manx Media releases Lucky Man, the debut novel from Ben Tanzer

I am pleased to announce the publication of Lucky Man on my Manx Media imprint. Lucky Man is the debut novel by Chicago writer Ben Tanzer.

Ben has been a reliable purveyor of short stories and magazine pieces (he even profiled me for Punk Planet a couple years back!). Here he is with his heart wrenching coming of age story, focusing on a group of friends attempting to transition into adulthood. The book is harrowing and funny. It will resonate in particular with anyone who came of age in the Eighties.

I posted a Lucky Man page on the Manx Media site, but you can also go direct to Amazon and buy it there.

Mr. Tanzer and I will both be reading at Quimby's in Chicago on Wednesday, March 7th at 8 p.m., it should be a rollicking good time. We're working on some other appearances too and will post them when they are confirmed.

Lucky Man by Ben Tanzer, ISBN 13 978-0-9769690-1-3

Benb For Dummies--Wait, Benb is a Dummy!

At the tender age of nineteen, a strange and unpredictable entity appeared on my dorm wall: Benb.
He appeared there by virtue of the black magic marker that my good friend Tim Robinson wielded in his paw; Tim and I were immersed in a cannabis-inspired fit of graphitti. The best I could do was "The messenger from C.A.K.E.", but Tim, off the cuff poet and all around inspired genius that he was, hit one out of the park and introduced Benb to me, and to the world.

I've bring this up because I've posted a BENB page on my stevelafler.net website, for those interested in more Benb-ness.

The Monster of Rock

Frankenstein’s monster purchased Jerry Garcia’s legendary guitar “Tiger” at auction yesterday for an undisclosed amount. The custom axe was made for Garcia by guitar maker Doug Irwin.

The move comes two days after Frankenstein’s monster unloaded 55,000 shares of Google.

“I’ve loved string instruments ever since that hermit in the woods played his violin for me” quipped Frank, as the monster prefers to be called.

When this reporter mentioned that the encounter with the hermit ended badly, Frank quickly changed the subject. “I’ve been in love with “Tiger” ever since I saw the Dead in Oakland one Halloween back in the day—so I jumped at the chance to bid on it.”

The monster is currently in rehearsal with his new band “Frankenjerry”, which includes Wolfman on drums and Vampirella on bass. The Creature from the Black Lagoon has been mentioned as a possible keyboard player. No tour dates have been announced yet.

Illustration by Steve Lafler.

New Lafler Comics coming up in "Other" magazine

A ten page excerpt of my upcoming comic book called "Cat Suit" is scheduled to appear in the next issue of Other magazine.

A work in progress, Cat Suit asks:

Why would a grown man put on a skin tight suit and head out into the city after midnight? I mean, what is this guy really up to????

The guy is question is Manx, a costumed cat man. He can't figure it out either so he goes to Dr. Grippo, a sultry divorcee shrink from Eastern Europe.
All heck breaks loose when Manx reveals to Dr. Grippo that he has fallen for Delia, a hottie he picks up on one of his late night excursions.

The four pages above will be included in the piece in Other.

I freely admit that I don't know how long this piece will be, or when it will appear. Forty pages are drawn, about 60 are written. About 30 are inked.
This art and other recent stuff from me can be viewed at my stevelafler.net site.

I'm Painting -- I'm Painting Again

I'm cleaning -- I'm cleaning my brain.
Pretty soon now I will be bitter
Pretty soon now I'll be a quitter
You can't see it till it's finished.

My apologies to Talking Heads for quoting the preceding lyrics from Talking Heads '77 without consulting any lawyers!

In my previous post, I waxed darn near poetic about viewing Cezanne landscapes last week at MOMA in NYC. Damn if I didn't come home and get the paint right out!

Truth be told, it all dovetails with my central blog theme of Self Employment for Bohemians. I'd been thinking about my custom screen printing business; I've been a T-Shirt guy since December 1977. For those of you who can count, that's twenty nine f'ing years pulling a squeegee!

I love working for myself, but frankly never intended to spend my life as a T-Shirt printer. So, having put a toe in the editorial/commercial illustration worlds at varoius times in my work life and found it not too odious, I've decided to go ahead and jump in, test the waters as it were.

Whether I'm self employed in T-Shirts or in illustration, there is a constant imperative to attract new clients. Currently I have a sufficient clientele built up in Screen Printing to support me; I'm in a strong position to switch my marketing efforts to commercial illustration, looking for new clients there (In the course of business, there is an attrition of existing clients--thus the need to always be on the lookout for new accounts).

I'm painting, I'm painting again!

Note: Click on the above painting to see it bigger in a new browser window.

Let's Get Some Paint!

Sprinted to NYC and back earlier this week for an interview on the Joey Reynolds Show or WOR Radio 710, talking about my brilliant comix career, I suppose was the plan. Quite a ride, blasting out east and showing up at the WOR studios near Wall Street at 2 a.m, it’s sixteen degrees out. In for a few minutes with the resonant voice of Mr. Reynolds, then back into the sub freezing night, praying I can score a cab back to the hotel.

The highlight of my trip came the next day, as I visited the Museum of Modern Art—it was my first visit there since the Nineties, thus it was my first time in the new building. It’s spectacular. More of the collection is shown in a better space.

My brain was being happily crushed by the paintings on the fifth floor, four big Kandinsky’s making real inroads on my psyche, when I came upon a series of maybe four Cezanne landscapes. I’ve always loved Cezanne of course, but considered him a master who opened the door for the brilliance of Monet and the impressionists, of course Gauguin, but above all beloved Vincent, the beautiful tortured genius.

I saw Cezanne anew this time. He found a way to coax a profound truth out of his regimented yet diffuse brushstrokes. These landscapes reported accurately on the beauty of what Cezanne saw in the moment; the brushstrokes, angled and consistent, pull the world through the master’s senses and present it through the canvas. Of all the incredible stuff in MOMA, it was these few straightforward canvases from Cezanne that kicked my ass two days ago.

I’m gonna go out and buy me some goddamn paint (it’s been too long). Thank you Paul Cezanne for your warmth, your humanity, and your glorious chops.

Never Underestimate the Power of the Staple Gun

This piece recently appeared in my DIY column in Alarm magazine.

Long before the world went digital, before creative and marketing tasks were performed online, the DIY entrepreneur had one rough & tumble, indispensable piece of equipment: The Staple Gun!

Think about it. How do you get warm bodies to show up to see your band? How do you advertise a yard sale, massage services, a second hand store, a screen-printing business? You run off a couple hundred flyers, grab your trusty staple gun, and head out into the hood to spread the word. True, you will post to Craigslist (and other on line locations), you will email friends and send a stack of postcards. But don’t forget to paper the town with fliers if you want results.

Veterans of the postering trade know where the most productive forests of phone poles are found, they know what bulletin boards will yield the biggest crop of fresh faced college kids swilling cheap beer at the gig. They also know where the cops will chase you away, where the retailers will yell at you for defacing their precious avenue. Sure, every kid with a stack of posters and a staple gun knows they are, in fact, littering. An etiquette of sorts is observed. Most will pick up old, worn fliers that have fallen by the wayside and stick them in the trash, and most will not paper over an obviously new flier.

The fact is, it is necessary to be tough minded out there when postering, if not downright brazen. It’s normal to feel self-conscious about sticking fliers on every phone poll on a crowded street in a thickly packed urban neighborhood, or university enclave. Get over it! If you are trying to make a living, trying to drive a crowd to an event, trying to make the phone ring, recognize that you are a warrior on a mission. You are trying to stay alive; the fliers must go up! One note: try to avoid that hitter of stinky green bud before setting out on your mission—you’ll feel a lot less self conscious if your not laced to the gills on thunderfuck weed! And, you can reward your self by taking a little lift when you get home, if that’s your thing.

I came at my relationship with the staple gun and postering from an oblique angle. As a painting student at the University of Massachusetts on a budget, I purchased my first staple gun in order to stretch my own canvases. From the get go, I really liked the thing, an Arrow model painted industrial blue, it was a simple, elegant machine that perfectly executed the job it was designed for.

Upon graduation, faced with the horrid reality of working full time for minimum wage (the fate of many a painting student!), I turned to T Shirt printing to pony together the few bucks I needed to survive at the time. The T Shirt trade provided me with ample beer and date money as an undergraduate, so I dove back in. It was the path of least resistance between hunger and a burrito in my belly.

As I built up my clientele, I explored every avenue open to the low budget entrepreneur for getting the word out: Postcard mailings, postering, small ads in weekly or college papers, cold calling (yeccch!), and so on. Over time, I found postering to be one of the most reliable ways of attracting new clients—I actually got The Residents as a shirt client that way, as their merch person saw a flier on a phone pole near her house! I did their shirts for about nine years, and it was fun and challenging to produce their spectacular designs.

As a dedicated cartoonist, plying the T Shirt trade has always been a secondary concern for me. A cash cow, if you will. That being the case, I’ve had a tendency to do just enough commercial work to pay the bills, and spend most of my time making comics. There have been many times where, lifting my head from an obsessive bout of cartooning, I would notice I was down to about enough money for, say, two beers and clean laundry. In times like this I would dust off the trusty staple guy, grab a stack of my ever-present fliers, and head out to do battle.

I’d relocated by Oakland by then, and I knew my way around every nook and cranny of Oakland and Berkeley’s phone poles and bulletin boards. It would take most of a day and about 250 fliers to do the justice to the totality of the East Bay. Let me tell you, it is serious grunt work. But after making those rounds, I would feel relaxed enough about my economic prospects to quaff a cold one, nip a hit of bud, and uncork my ink bottle for another round of cartooning. In due time, the phone would ring, shirts would be printed, and more burritos would appear on my table!

These days, with the splendid power of Google Adwords and a million other digital and online tools at my disposal, the trusty staple gun rarely gets a workout. But I plan to dust it off soon, as I’ve lined up a couple punky power pop bands to play the publishing party for my new graphic novel. If I want to drive a crowd to the gig, I better head out to the streets with my staple gun and a stack of fliers.

The Road to Yagul

One fine hot summer afternoon in 1997, I found myself walking up the road to the ancient city of Yagul with Serena and Jenny. Yagul is one of the lesser known ruins in the Valley of Oaxaca in southern Mexico, less famous than the spectacular mountaintop ancient city of Monte Alban, or the mysterious palace at Mitla with its trippy geometric designs. No slouch of a ruin itself, Yagul boasts some super cool, creepy tombs you can climb down into. There’s also a virtual warren of multi-room buildings and the second largest ball court in all of Mesoamerica (after Chichen Itza).

As impressive as Yagul itself is, I really got a spooky thrill walking the road to the site. About a half-mile off the road on the right side, there were massive stone cliffs that appeared to be carved with some sort of art or hieroglyphs. I did a double take. Were we talking about some amazing natural rock formations? Or did the ancients of Yagul do this as their summer art project over the course of several decades? I don’t know! I took a picture of the cliffs, reproduced here, but it can’t do justice to what I saw.

That afternoon was one of those gorgeous deep blue sky days where every rock and cactus appears in super real, crystalline detail. A few billowy clouds gave depth and a timeless surreal quality to the sky. I gazed at the cliffs and a wash of impressions rolled over me. In the late afternoon sun they glowed with a sublime rosy orange presence. The sun was still high enough that the shadows were not deep, yet the forms stood out in hyper real relief. The jaunty presence of the rock, the color, the impact of their craggy statement, the actual fact of their existence in the immediate moment was overwhelming. I wondered if they were meant to be seen from a great distance, perhaps from the sky. Even as I was sure they were deliberately carved, part of me puzzled over whether they were natural formations. Deep in my skull, one voice assured me they were indeed shaped on purpose, only not by humans. What??? I snapped out of it! Take a picture, ya big dummy, we’ll figure it out later.

Checking my handy Lonely Planet guidebook, I see Yagul was built after A.D. 750, when nearby Monte Alban was on the decline. The book doesn’t have one word about my spectacular mystery rocks. In his book Oaxaca Journal, pop science writer Oliver Sacks mentions the rocks. He sees “…a cliff face with a huge pictograph painted in white over a red background, an abstract design, and above it a giant stick figure, a man. It looks remarkably fresh, almost new—who would guess it was a thousand years old? I wonder what the image means: Was it an icon, a religious symbol of some kind? A warning to evil spirits, or invaders, to keep away? A giant road sign perhaps, to orient travelers on their way to Yagul? Or a pure, for the love of it Pictographic doodle, a prehistoric piece of graffiti?”

I’m wicked happy that ol’ Oliver took the time to note this amazing piece of real estate, because I haven’t seen it mentioned elsewhere. I’m trying to remember the white paint over the red background part—I mostly recall the rock formations. But reading over his comments, I do remember part of my initial shock upon seeing the cliff pictograph: I had the distinct impression that I was already intimately familiar with it. It was almost as if I had done it myself! This was not a déjà vu, more like that feeling an artist gets when they are really pleased with a painting or drawing they have executed; they own it in their heart, they see it as no other possibly can because it belongs to them.

The Perfect Market

Just today I cam across this piece about Oakland's Bulky Trash Day. I'd written it for my wife Serena's zine "Have You Seen the Dog Lately" a few years back. It seems to belong here. I hope you enjoy it.

People, let me tell you: I love Bulky Trash Day. For its simplicity, its efficiency, its punchy elegance (such an ‘80s word), its seamless nocturnal logic. Whaddya mean, you never heard of Bulky Trash Day? Where you been living?

Okay, it’s an Oakland thing. Other towns no doubt have it, but I live in Oakland, so I’ll tell you about Oakland Bulky Trash day. Each neighborhood gets a crack at it once a year. The garbage company, Waste Management, sends out a postcard to notify residents when Bulky Trash Day happens in their neck of the woods. Each household can put up to three cubic yards of extra trash out for pickup. Man, think of it: 9 foot long by 3 foot wide by 3 foot high! Got a few caskets hanging around that you don’t need? No problem! Just stash them by the curb on Bulky Trash Eve!

Yes, there are rules…you can’t put stuff out days ahead of time (fines!), and you can’t put out toxic stuff or funky stinky ass moldy living stuff. It’s more for your run of the mill rusty old half bikes, scary loose wire microwaves, 1988 vintage electronics in a hopeless state of disrepair, and of course super ugly olive green ripped vinyl college couches with three legs. You get the picture. The spicy items are there too…all the knick knacks you no longer need can be handily stuffed in the odd spaces left after you move your big chunks into place.

Yes, you say, it’s nice to clean house and get all this crap hauled away for free, but why is this maroon so damn excited about taking the garbage out? Can’t you see? There is a primitive beauty in my new holiday of BULKY TRASH EVE. The City of Oakland, through its agent Waste Management, creates a perfect roving nocturnal market. Our garbage day is Thursday so, for us, Bulky Trash Eve comes on Wednesday night. The excitement builds in late afternoon as you and your neighbors start hauling the booty out to the curb. Let the scavenging begin! See anything you like? Hey, is that a one-of-a-kind Dog Boy lamp in Mr. Nagamoto’s Bulky Trash pile?? It’s mine! As darkness falls, the parade of funky 30-year-old Chevy and Ford pickup trucks with wooden slat payload bed extensions troll up and down the street. They are predators looking for prey… who are these people? Will they fix that old refrigerator and put it in their house? Will they sell that beat up (huge) TV for $17 to some bizarre storefront on San Pablo Avenue? Will they have a big yard sale? Who knows, but they are the real pros… they are in early. They are scoring items that will be traded, sold, refurbished or cherished. They work fast—the trucks are bulging, bursting with loot as dusk falls, and the waves of bohemians and college students begin in earnest. Not quite as practical, they arrive on foot or in 12-year-old Honda Accords that don’t quite fit that stereo console into the trunk. But they are savvy enough to avoid paying for dishes, frying pans, kiddie pools, bar-b-que tools and a host of other household and/or tiki-lifestyle essentials.

I’m hoping by now you see how efficient and cool this is. It works for everybody! You can get a lot of crap out of your house, basement, yard, attic. Anything remotely useful has about an 87% change of getting snapped up. The giddy energy and nocturnal revel nature of the whole thing lends a festive, surreal air, almost like an obscure fiesta day in Mexico—something cool, spontaneous and weird is going down that has its own sublime internal logic. It’s a bit like the expectant mystery of Christmas Eve I felt when I was nine. This instant market/free exchange of goods disappears completely the next morning complements of the city garbage trucks.

We had our Bulky Trash Day on my street this past fall. It was my best yet. Not only did we get rid of the reviled red scare chair (ancient vinyl ripped up dirty greasy uncomfortable handed-down-from-Greed-Pig-Boss menace), but I dumped 20 old frames from my screen print business. People snapped this stuff up! But listen, here’s the best part! Serena and I had been trying to pawn our old computer off on someone for six months. Maybe some readers know how that goes. NOBODY WANTS OLD COMPUTER! Tweren’t a bad rig in its day (1998), but a 266 MHz chip, 6 GB hard drive computer just doesn’t make it in this high-powered era. That sucker was loaded with Photoshop, Pagemaker, Flash, Illustrator and Microsoft Office for starters! Not bad for free. Well, I took a Sharpie and wrote a list of the software on top of the beast, then set it out on the sidewalk with the printer and manuals (sorry, still using the monitor). That sucker was gone in a matter of minutes! I felt good about that, I really hope someone is getting some good use out of it.

A final note, Bulky Trash Day is not without some tragic endings. Like a few years back, we put our old couch out. That’ll be the first thing to go, right? Sad to say, the cushions were snapped right up, and who wants a couch without the cushions? Thus it was with horror and revulsion (okay, maybe a bit of fascinated glee) that I watched as the dusty old thang was crunched to splinters in the maw of the merciless garbage truck!

What is Your Target Market?

How many times have I been asked this question? Usually it's when someone finds out I'm a cartoonist who creates graphic novels. Or maybe I'm trying to work some journalist or radio producer for an interview, and inevitably they ask the question, a sure indicator of how goddamn sharp and "with it" and savvy they are.

The question presumes I am creating a commodity rather than art. The question presumes that, naturally, my aim in creating comics is not self expression, rather it is to make a commodity and sell it for a profit. Period. Is not the ultimate motivation money? And are you not dumber than dirt if the motivation is not cold, hard cash?

It is true that I want to sell books. Lots of them. But for chrissakes, I do not now, nor have I ever had a target market! Besides myself, that is. Why the fuck would I spend my life drawing comics for some presumed audience for the sole purpose of making money? Where's the fun in that? Where is the ecstatic joy of discovery in that? If I want to make money, I'll have a real world job, or I'll create a real world business, like my custom T Shirt shop.

Anyone who asks that question wouldn't know real art if it came up to them and bit them in the ass. So... next time some unquestioning dupe of all encompassing consumer corporate commodification programming asks me: "What is your target market?", I'll have my answer ready:

"My target market is a group of free floating 100 foot long disembodied Moose peckers, hovering in the Maine woods just a few miles south of the Canadian border".

40 Hour Man to be reviewed in Boston Sunday Globe

Greetings Earthlings. My latest graphic novel, 40 Hour Man (with writer Stephen Beaupre) will be reviewed later this week in the Boston Sunday Globe on 11/26/06.

This means a lot to me; my comics work has been reviewed in any number of respectable weeklies (including the San Francisco Bay Guardian) and has even been written up in a feature article in the Boston Phoenix. 40 Hour Man itself has been reviewed in Booklist, which has certainly helped sales (library sales in particular). I've been both praised and slammed by The Comics Journal (this back in the day when that publication acknowledged my existence at all) a magazine that over it's history has provided a confusing mish-mash of egotistical rants as well as many glowing reviews of Fantagraphics titles (can you say "conflict of interest"?). Oh, and sometimes the Journal has produced some excellent, thoughtful writing on comics as an art form.

A Sunday Globe review is different, however. It's the first time I've had the singular distinction of being reviewed in a major daily newspaper. Only a handful of papers in the U.S. are more prestigious than the Globe--The NY Times and the Washington Post, of course. At this writing, the LA Times stands a bit tarnished from it's glory days under Otis Chandler, what with all the power struggles and budget busting there of late. The Chicago Tribune is maybe on a par with the Globe. The Wall Street Journal is up there with the Times and the Post, but it's a money rag, and a conservative bully pulpit. Still, please review 40 Hour Man, Wall Street Journal! USA Today? Don't make me laugh. That's not even a newspaper. I'm not sure what it is, no wait, I'm sure it's a bullshit propaganda rag, and it's big on sports. I'd love a review there too, by the way!

The Boston Globe is in a sense my home town rag. I never lived in Boston proper, but I did grow up in Massachusetts from the age of eight, until I split for the golden west at twenty three to seek my fortune. For all of New England, the Globe stands as the newspaper of record.

All in all, some few words will appear this Sunday in Boston about my latest book. I will sip coffee and smile. My good friend Beaupre and I will have a notch to add to our bonafides. Even if they deem to slam us, I'll glean something quoteable out of the piece to help me flog product!

James Baker: Senior Statesman and One Heck of an Experienced Election Thief.

Has anyone noticed of late, oil man/Republican operative James Baker, most recently seen slithering around the aftermath of the 2000 election (pulling strings for W.), has been making the talk show rounds lately? Must have a book out or something.

I guess the Republican image factory figures the electorate will see Baker lurching around, making pronouncements in his best election season corn-pone drawl, and they will forget to vote because they figure he’ll just help young W. and his gang of hoodlums steal another one?

Stay tuned to find out! And get your ass out and vote, at the very least.

The right likes to trot out old goons like Baker to lend their operation some patina of statesman like experience and probity and all that dark blue suit/red tye aura. But from where I sit, given his stumping for Bush in the aftermath of the 2000 election, James Baker is a fraud.

NPR: Don't Believe Your Ears

Good old NPR is at it again, fulfilling their function as the soft sell propaganda arm of the Bush junta. Yes folks, there is a reason why the thinking person refers to NPR as National Propaganda Radio.

The formerly creditable network wasn't always a font of disinformation and soft sell propaganda pointed at the mushy center on behalf of right wing idealogues; the slippery slope to propaganda tool for the government started back with Newt Gangreen's "Contract on America" in the '94 mid-term elections. Once the Republicans got control of congress, the message was sent to then-centrist NPR in no uncertain terms: You're too fucking liberal, get with the program or lose your funding!

In the current moment, as we approach the 2006 mid-term election, I hear daily on "Morning Edition" some soft feature that casts some issue or politician in a light favorable to the ruling creep farm. Each morning, I drop my son off at Kindergarten and listen to "Morning Edition" on the way home, and almost daily, I just want to pull over and hurl when I hear the horseshit spewing out of my radio.

Today it was a feature on new treasury secretary Hank Paulson, what a good even keel guy he is, above politics as it were, why he's not even campaigning for Republicans this election! He'd much rather serve the taxpayer than the political arm of the white house! The message? The Bush Administration is changing! We care about you! We're in tune with the American public and your needs! Vote for us!

This was a typical feature, part of a comprehensive effort to spin all aspects of the national debate in favor of Republicans during this election season. A bit less typical, you still get blatant flag waving and right wing pro-war propaganda on occasion.

NPR is not a complete waste of time. There are still great shows like This American Life and Fresh Air, among others. But buyer beware--for quite a while now, the news you hear over NPR is part of a propaganda effort by the scumbag Bushies to convince you that they are OK. We know they are not.

You can't fool all the people all of the time. Not even Karl Rove.

How Not to do Business

In the course of running my custom T Shirt printing business, I try to be honest and straightforward with my clients. This makes sense, as I can live with myself (for starters), but it engenders the true lifeblood of any business: New clients.

Here's how it works. You order T Shirts from me. I do a good job. You tell someone else who needs T Shirts, they come to me with confidence that I am not a schmuck who will rip them off. Recommendations bring in 75% of my new accounts, with marketing and advertising taking care of the rest. Any small business person will tell you a variation on this schema.

When I run into a business person who burns me, it upsets me. Yes, it pisses me off. But more important, I just want to slap them around and yell, "Can't you see you are just fucking yourself?" If someone burns me, I will not give them a recommendation. I may even do what I am about to do, tell the story of how they did it to me.

With good business communication, I generally can avoid rip offs. But I've run into a couple this summer. DHL (the shipping company) burned me by promising a refund after missing an overnight delivery. Then they refused the refund because "I had not notified them in writing within 14 days". Well, I did not know that was the policy until the refund was refused! Thanks DHL! You suck.

I'd been enthusiastically using DHL since last year when I moved my shop from Oakland to Portland. I recommended them to numerous friends. I was suckered by their marketing campaign promising great service.

Then, this June, they started missing shipping dates, and even held some shipments in their warehouses for no apparent reason. The bullshit about the refund was the last straw. What can I say? I switched back to Fed Ex ground. Works fine.

The sort of sleazy clay-footed corporate greed as exemplified by DHL is to be expected from big corporations. The lack of willingness to take responsibility for shitty work will add a few dollars here, a few pennies there to the bottom line; for many companies, this is the only measure of performance.

Within the corporate hierarchy, every cog is keen to cover their ass and do the bidding of their corporate overlords, who in turn are slave to the overarching corporate dictate to keep the stock price rising no matter who you fuck over. Again, the ultimate effect is that people do not trust big corporations, and are cynical about corporate public relations and advertising claims.

I expect better behavior than this from the small businesses I buy from, and sell to. Most of the time, if I hold up my end of the bargain, the other party does the same. Recently, I had an experience with a small business supplier that was pretty unfortunate. They ripped me off for about $1100.00 worth of their service, spoiling almost $500.00 of raw materials I supplied in the process.

Here’s the set up. I print thousands of T Shirts each year for a client who has a successful T Shirt store. About 1000 – 1200 of these are printed on Tye Dyed shirts. It is up to me to buy blank shirts, arrange for the tye dying, print the shirts and ship to the store.

I have used a variety of tye dyers over the past decade. One of the best I found, or so I thought, was Kerr’s Cotton Creations, located in Montana. I had used them four or five times for dying lots of about 300 shirts each time. Their colors were quite bright and vibrant, but I had to ride their asses a bit about my clients prime directive: “Bright, tight and no white”!

This meant that no white (the blank shirts were white before dying) could show through the dye job. Kerr’s had done OK on the “no white” request, but not great. Thus, I made a real point of emphasizing BRIGHT, TIGHT AND NO WHITE with each order. In truth, almost every tie dye shirt has a least a tiny bit of white showing through, and it is understood that it’s OK, as long as it’s kept to a minimum.

In June of 2006, I ordered a batch of 288 tie dyes from Kerr’s. I drop shipped white blank Ts to them. Just over a week later, the new shirts arrived. I was shocked when I opened the boxes. White streaks screamed through the dye job at me. I would say that 25 – 35% of the shirts were white. It was by a long shot the worst job Kerr’s had done for me.

I printed a batch and shipped them to my client, a mistake on my part. Looking back, I was a bit in shock about how bad the shirts looked, and I rationalized to myself something like this: “They can’t be that bad, I just have expectations that are too high.” But deep down, I knew—this was a batch of shitty tie dyes, and it was a bad decision on my part to try to pass them off on the store. I should have sent the shirts back immediately and asked that they replace the blanks and dye the job over. The store called me, pretty pissed off. I had to admit that I knew the shirts were not up to par. We worked out a solution where the batch of 90 or so shirts would be sold at a discount. I felt chagrined that I had attempted to use shirts that were clearly not up to par.

I called my contact at Kerr’s, to point out that this batch of tie dyes was not up to his usual standard of quality. The guy acted as if I was trying to sell him a shit sandwich, saying “no two batches are alike”. No shit, dude. I’ve been buying tie dyes for ten years. I know well that no two batches are alike. That is a very different matter than delivering shit work. What part of NO WHITE do you not understand? I asked for a refund, and was refused. I later email a request for a refund and got no reply.

I have learned over time in the shirt business to listen to complaints when they come in, and work to find a solution to client problems, even if it comes out of my pocket. Usually, a complaint has some reasonable aspect to it. Sure, I have had unreasonable complaints, but even then I prefer to communicate on a frank and honest level with the client.

Once I printed a process color job for a big regional baker of upscale breads. I thought it was one of the best process shirts I’d done. The owner called up and told me it was one of the worst shirts he’d ever seen. What could I say? He was entitled to his opinion, but I told him I thought it was a great shirt. This dude was a perfectionist, famous for driving people nuts with his demands. Lucky for me, that was the last I heard of him.

Back to Kerr’s, I was disheartened that this guy would hand me a line of bullshit like that. I’d given him at least 4 – 5,000 bucks worth of biz over maybe an eighteen month period, but he could not have cared less. Not only did he show me a complete lack of respect, but it’s just bad business. Can’t say I can recommend Kerr’s Cotton Creations at this juncture.

I'll let you know if that changes, you never know.

I Don't Whack Cute Little Moles for Minimum Wage

Having a Job From Hell is a universal right of passage, and Manx Media wants to hear about yours. We are putting out the call for essays running 400 words about lousy jobs, with an emphasis on humor. Entries may be emailed to Manx Media.

Starting this September 15, Manx Media will publish two “Job From Hell” entries per week on its web site over a six-week period. Successful entries will receive a $20.00 check and a copy of 40 Hour Man.

Our Hell Job essay contest dovetails with the publication of 40 Hour Man, the new graphic novel by Stephen Beaupre and Steve Lafler about one working stiff’s journey into the minimum wage heart of the American Dream.

My true Job From Hell was right out of college--with my newly minted art degree, I nailed down a prestigious gig working on a loading dock at a cut rate department store for minimum wage.
One of the sales girls noticed a tiny mole scurrying about the lingerie department one fine winter afternoon (it was cold out there), and I was drafted to capture the it.
Once I caught the cute little guy, I admired his funny star shaped nose for a moment or two before releasing him in the field behind the shanty town mall that my store was located in.
Later that day, the boss asked me if I'd taken care of the mole.
"Sure enough I did" says I.
"How did you do it, did you drown him in the toilet?" he replied.
That was the last straw.
"I don't whack cute little moles for minimum wage" was my indignant retort, then I gave my two week notice.

It's no wonder I ended up working for myself! But I digress...
Any bold soul interested in submitting a Job From Hell essay, take a peek at the contest info page at Manx Media. Have fun and good luck.

Steve Lafler
Manx Media proprietor

Manx Publishing party with the Wigbillies

Top: Wigbillies Paul Therrio and Mary Fleener get their groove on at the Casbah in San Diego on July 20.
Bottom: J.R. Williams plays his little electric and croons with the Wigbillies.

Thanks to all the bands who played our publishing party for 40 Hour Man at the Casbah on July 20 during Comic Con International: The Wigbillies, Thee Corsairs, The Creepy Creeps and Deadbolt.
A damn fine time was had by all! We got a few dozen alt comics geeks out there, and lots of stylish locals came out to see the great line up of talent.