My :Latest” — and I mean “latest”

Four years ago, I was asked to write for a new handsome, hardbound, oversize, quality ($25) quarterly, FULL BLEED. My contribution to its inaugural issue was to be “The Five Most Important Underground Cartoonists (Not Including Robert Crumb).” The idea was to familiarize FB’s readership, an anticipated younger demographic with the UG.

But though I ‘d been paid, my article was bumped, supposedly for the second issue, but by then I’d submitted a second article which FB ran instead. (That article had been sitting somewhere else, where I hadn’t been paid, with an editor who couldn’t tell me when or if he’d ever run it, so I’d pulled it and gave it to FB — who paid much better anyway.

Meanwhile, things had slowed at FB. The editor who’s recruited me left. Funding dried up. Time between issues grew. (Issue 3 appeared without me.) But Vol. 4 “The End” is out — and here I am.

It begins:

When I tell people I write about underground cartoonists, the best response I get is, “You mean like that guy in the movie with that weird family?”
Yeah, them.
But if even the fellows in the locker room have only a hazy knowledge of Crumb, he may have had enough ink already. How about, I thought, the others?
Remember, “Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it.”
Of course, with the fun the UG gang had, this warning may not scare anyone into the library. Still, let’s fill some of knowledge’s holes. And this can’t omit Crumb entirely.

Pride

My “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Andy Kaufman” will be published in a future Full Bleed. I feel good about this because it seemed a conceptual – maybe risky – stretch and the best piece I’d done in years. Also it means I have four different new pieces coming out in four different print or on-line magazines and another, older one being reprinted in a forthcoming collection. I don’t have any parents left to feel proud of me, so I will feel proud of myself.
And when I think of the hospital beds I was lying in a few years ago…
As my pal Wildwood Bob Ingram signs off his e-mails, “Keep punching.”