No sales.
But some experiences.
1.) Publisher reports sale of French rights to an interview I conducted with underground cartoonist legend Clay Wilson (“The Comics Journal” No. 293). True, the interest is in Wilson, one of the great interviewees of my lifetime, not my prose, but it means it will now be available in its third language (following English and Italian); and 68.01 euros (my cut) ain’t chopped liver. I mean, pate fois de gras.
2.) An underground comix scholar who says we met, oh, what-must-have-been 15-years ago, asked if I had any information about “Junk Comics,” by a cartoonist whose name he believed to be Kevin Barthelme. I found my presumed expertise flattering, but I didn’t have a clue, and Don Donohue, my go-to-guy for info on the UGs, had passed in 2010.
I looked up the book in one of Don’s old catalogues. No issue number, so that must have been the only one. No information but the price: $3.50.
The value of, perhaps, the artistic output of a lifetime.
3.) A middle-aged (I think) artist from Chester County (I think), Pennsylvania, found a copy of “Outlaws, Rebels…” (Fanta. 2005) in an art book store in Harrisburg. She was only up to “‘Yes, Yes,’ She Panted,” when my “vigorous and unapologetic defense” of transgressive art, of which she herself is a creator, spoke to her so personally and affirmatively that she felt moved to write. “I have never read anything quite like what you have done…,” she said.
Sometimes, when I have written something good, I sit back and think, Wow! I have never read anything like that.
To hear someone else say it…