Wednesday, December 03, 2008

Quality Control (1987)

Michael Dowers of Brownfield press, an old comix colleague, invited me to have some of my old self-published minicomix reprinted in his upcoming anthology Newave.

Michael's request prompted me to take a look at the two dozen (give or take a few) minis I published back in the all-analog days, and this issue of Mondo Howie caught my eye. There were 6 issues of this title. For each issue, I did the cover and guest artists provided their interpretations of my character Howie "The Hat" Patterson.

Most of my minis were offset printed at a local shop, and they ran a weekly special for a free color of ink. This week in October 1987, the free color was orange. Just in time for Halloween, I suppose. I can't remember if I decided to reject this edition because of the way the orange ink turned out, or if I hated my cover, but I destroyed half of the print run, and gave away the rejected edition for free.

Today, I kind of like the way it looks. And I remember being pleased to have a chance to use my primitive rubber stamp typesetting kit (long gone).

The cover of the subsequent "official" edition is shown below.



Artists appearing in this issue were: Steve Willis, J. L. Hart, Mark Martin, Dennis Worden, Scott Nickel, Peter Bagge and Andy Nukes.


Newave is scheduled to be published in 2009 by Fantagraphics Books.

3 comments:

  1. Mondo Howie -- still one of my all-time favorite minis! I like that orange cover too..

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  2. Yeah, I don't know what I was thinking. Twenty-plus years later I prefer the original cover.

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  3. Looks like a decent line up. I've always liked Dennis Worden's comics. Of course I haven't seen much out of him since the days of STICKBOY.

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