Image from Awakening #0

l recently got a package of comics in the mail, the collected works of Steve Peters. My favorite of the batch is Chemistry, an autobiographical tale of lost love cleverly told in backwards chronology. like the movie Memento. Of particular interest will be the jam comic Rabbit Hell, collected in Awakening Comics #0.  Yes, that’s my self-portrait yawning in church next to the Tick and Felix the Cat. Also appearing in this story are Shroom and an early version of Mugg from Welcome To The Zone. Other contributors to this eight-page opus include Pete Bagge, Dan Clowes, Evan Dorkin, Kevin Eastman, Howard Cruse and Sergio Aragones. Apparently it was drawn at the 1993 San Diego Comics Convention, but I have no memory of drawing it. One of the pages I contributed to is viewable here.

S. Clay Wilson's lady in distress

Comics fans have lately had distressing news about underground legend S. Clay Wilson, best known as one of the original Zap Comix artists. Last November Wilson suffered a severe brain injury after attending the Alternative Press Expo in San Francisco. He spent a week in intensive care and faces a long recovery.      Although he is not as well known as some of the other pioneer undergrounders like R. Crumb and Art Spiegelman, Wilson looms large in my own artistic development,. Despite its dangers (flying beer bottles, venomous snakes, penis-shaped cannons) Wilson’s world was in many ways a friendlier mirror to the one I navigated as an adolescent growing up in 70’s countercultural Portland- like mine, it was full of shaggy drunks and spiky lesbians in leather- (though in contrast to the real-life lesbians I knew who fully embraced the man-hating, buzz-cut stereotype, Wilson’s dykes were no more menacing than the biker gang in Frankie and Annette movies.)  … » more