Artistic success isn’t measured in money; it’s measured in eyeballs. As in, how many land on your artwork.
Part of it’s luck, part is talent, and part is timing. Not just the timing of your output, but that of your birth, and the period in which you exist. The quality of stimuli available during your receptive phase. For example, growing up reading comic books drawn by gifted inkers, like Jack Kirby and Neal Adams. Continue reading
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Filed under Bad Influences, Comix Classic & Current, Late To The Party, Nostalgic Obsessions, Thousand Listen Club
If you’re still reminiscing about a high school field trip almost 30 years after your permission slip was signed, it was probably a pretty sweet field trip.
My Sociology class got to go to Rahway State Prison, circa 1989. It was so awesome, I went again the next year, when I wasn’t even in the proper class.
I’m still surprised whenever I see this actor walking.
In the late 1990s, the grittiest show on cable television was Oz; HBO’s first one-hour drama. Continue reading
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Filed under Bad Influences, Don't Know Don't Care, Faint Signals, Nostalgic Obsessions, Uncategorized
From BIUL #2.
It’s no secret that I’m an enigma wrapped in a riddle inside a burrito or some such. Wrap your head around this:
I like to smoke. I have a psychotic aversion to burning tobacco.
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Filed under Bad Influences, Comix Classic & Current, Don't Know Don't Care, Magazine Rack, Worst Of All
I’m not going to bore you with more boasting about how I can draw better than any contemporary “web comic” artist out there. I’m going to bore you with an explanation why.
From INVISIBLE LEGENDS (unpublished)
I’ve got The Jizz.
You could set out right now to be the greatest cartoonist in the world, spend billions of dollars, and you’d still never top me. You don’t have The Jizz. I do. Continue reading
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Filed under Bad Influences, Comix Classic & Current, Uncategorized
“The sedative for coughs”, until 1913.
Here in Atlanta’s Little Five Points neighborhood, we lost another local musician to heroin. I won’t write his name here, because I don’t want to inextricably link him with the drug that killed him. But there’s an anguished frustration every time this happens, when the needle takes yet one more.
Junk has been a cancer on music since before Charlie Parker played a note. It has taken too many casualties to list here. It seeps into cinema and art like toxic groundwater. No one does better work while on heroin. It improves no experience; it only makes one atrophy. What it does, is put your soul in terrible pain, and then dulls it. Nothing it does helps you or anyone else in any legitimate way. Continue reading
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Filed under Bad Influences, Don't Know Don't Care, Idiot's Delight, Worst Of All
The greatest concept album of all time is Frank Zappa’s Joe’s Garage.
That’s not my opinion. It’s fact. Joe’s Garage is superior to any rock concept album you could offer in comparison. And I tell you this emphatically; mankind will never produce anything in the future that surpasses it.
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Filed under Faint Signals, Thousand Listen Club, Zappalogy
Michelle Shocked is an American alternative folk singer/songwriter from Dallas, Texas. Her 1988 debut album, Short Sharp Shocked, featured a cover photo taken by Chris Hardy, for the San Francisco Examiner in 1984. Shocked had been protesting during the Democratic National Convention.
Mercury Records issue
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Filed under Don't Know Don't Care, Girls of BIUL, Idiot's Delight, Nostalgic Obsessions, Worst Of All
Sampling in hip-hop is important because it can send you backward in time, when it’s done well. It’s crate-digging shared on wax. The best samples offer a window into the mind of the producer, and a peek at the most obscure records in their vault. Since legally all sources must be credited, you can check the liners and draw up a shopping list. The torch of the turntable is carried on.
And oftentimes, forgotten geniuses of the past get their due.
There’s an unspoken rule in hip-hop culture; it’s based in appropriation, so it’s all about forging something fresh out of a juxtaposition of elements. A sample is looped over a beat by a DJ, before the MC begins to rap. The right samples are crucial; they provide the hook of tonal immortality.
The handsome gent in the photo above is David McCallum. He is the most widely-heard yet unknown dude in rap music.
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Filed under Comix Classic & Current, Faint Signals, Nostalgic Obsessions, Thousand Listen Club
If there’s one thing I’m certain of, more so than I am that the earth is round, it’s that you and I are different. I don’t know you personally, but I’d bet my bottom dollar we wouldn’t click. I know this from a life of experience. That, and every single person I encounter informs me of thus.
You might think I have a problem with being “different”. I don’t. You do. Out of some deluded sense of camaraderie you felt from one of my comics, you thought I was “like you”. Then, when you realized you were wrong, you attacked me. You all do this. On the internet, on Facebook, to my face. I’ve dealt with this shuck-and-jive routine my entire life. I’m not what you want me to be, so you decide you’re gonna give Big Bad Matty Boy a piece of your mind. Because I’m apparently your little toon-scribbling monkey. Time to bring me down a peg.
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Filed under Bad Influences, Don't Know Don't Care, Nostalgic Obsessions, Site Stuff
This is a project that will be previewed in the Bands I Useta Like Summer Super Special Spring Break Special. Expanded, it’ll be 48 pages- a page for every day I spent in Fulton County Jail. Doing these strips is sheer agony, so:
1. I’m looking into crowdfunding options, because not only would this require funds, I require motivation to do this instead of more fun things, like say anything else.
2. Individual pages will be for sale. Signed, whatever ya want.
Contact me for more information. I’ll let you see more if you’re nice to me.
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Filed under Comix Classic & Current, Magazine Rack, Site Stuff
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