|
|
|
FAMOUS FIGHTERS Issue One: Situation: Armegeddalypse! (2006 - 52 pp)
THE BLURB: 52 pages of evil-fighting mayhem! Incredibly stupid! Culled from the past 10 or 15 years of dumb collaboration between Tom Pappalardo and Matt Smith. You got yourself some zombies and some barbarians and a couple of headbangers and Satan. Sweet!
BEHIND THE BLACK VEIL OF MYSTERY: Matt and I have been drawing dumb cartoons together since 92? 93? I dunno. Mostly these really terrible yet tear-inducing scribbles were created in Caslon sketchbooks, passed back and forth between us in the dark, book-lined cellar of the Haymarket Cafe in Northampton, Mass. Anyway, at some point we decided some of these somewhat incomprehensible scribbles should be cleaned up art-wise, but we really wanted to preserve the initial bursts of stupidity of the original "scripts". Lo, Famous Fighters was born.
Most of the examples represented here are truly collaborative, both of us sharing the writing duties (often switching off every one or two panels, hence the odd pacing) and also the artwork itself. On "Once Upon a Time...", "Mysterious Dojo" and maybe a few others, I laid down my simplistic Sharpie drawings and Matt went directly over them with technical pens. I handled all of the crunchy art on "Eclipso", Matt handled all of the slick art on the "Barbarian Lord"s. "Zombie Uprising!" is an evolution of our collaborative process, with me scanning in bare-bones Sharpie drawings, I email those to Matt, Matt draws fully over them in Flash, emails 'em back, I lay out the type, etc and set it up in InDesign. We're all futuristic and shit now.
As with most of my other work, all of this stuff was previously unpublished. The Alec Dear story was cobbled together from our never-finished sequel to Through the Wood... (Matt was sick of crosshatching. I can't blame him, but Lord he was good at it). Mysterious Dojo was in an art show in Northampton, Mass. and "Zombie Uprising!" was created specifically to be submitted to a zombie-related zine, but we missed the deadline by about a year and a half.
We have gotten very mixed reviews on this material, some reviewers expecting a straight parody, and therefore confused when we sort of veer off track. Others praise us a little too much, which makes us uneasy and suspicious. Perhaps you should purchase a copy and read it yourself! Oh, my!
The first print run was a limited edition of 100 copies. A very small number of copies made it into circulation with a glitchy computer error on one of the last pages of the book. If you have one of those, you are either in possession of a highly collectible rarity, or a defective piece of merchandise. Only time will tell.
"...one of the most original books available" - Broken Frontier
"Buy it and laugh" - Optical Sloth
"I cannot recommend this indy" - Comics Waiting Room
"Better luck next time, guys" - The Comics Journal
"...see how good a self-published comic can and should look" - Comic Book Resources
full reviews, sample pages, silly scribbles: HERE
purchase a copy of Famous Fighters HERE
|
|
|
|
FAILURE, INCOMPETENCE ABORTED JOKES & ABANDONED STORIES, 1995-2005 (2005 - 60pp)
THE BLURB: A collection of unpublished comics & stories spanning the last decade. Jam-packed with fantastic mediocrity. Sixty pages of immense time-killing. Hated by many, loved by few.
COMMENTZ: After having spent so much time working on various attempts at comic strips, comic books, short stories, and illustrations, it was really depressing to me when I realized how few people had ever actually seen 'em. Practically none of this stuff was ever previously published; most of my friends had never even read this material. I don't even think I've ever told my family I even draw. So, though I was concentrating on my big "real" comic project Broken Lines, in late 2004 I decided to start "cleaning out" my proverbial "closet" of old material. But as it happened, most of this stuff really was in my closet, in portfolios next to my sweaters. It took about a year of occasional scanning, cleaning up, and text-replacing before Failure, Incompetence took shape.
This collection represents several failed (though by no means bad) attempts at full comic book stories, many single panel comic strips (I didn't even include em all), some straight prose, some stuff previously published in zines like VMAG (Northampton, Mass) and Lollipop (Boston, Mass), and then bits from an attempt at previously making a collection project back in 2002. (so sad!). There are clear Chris Ware ripoffs, an abundance of Far Side wannabes, and a lil' bit o' originality smeared over the whole mess. It's totally a vanity project and I know it. But I don't care what anyone says, I think this book rocks. I am so emotionally removed from the material at this point, I don't even feel biased. heh.
"he's full of wilderness muffin mix" - POOPSHEET
"$5 is a bit much for a comic" - OPTICAL SLOTH
"gags by the pound" - QUIMBY'S
"The inconsistency here is enough to drive you insane" - COMICS WAITING ROOM
"forced vociferousness" - POPMATTERS
Full reviews HERE
Failure, Incompetence is currently out-of print
|
|
|
|
THROUGH THE WOOD, BENEATH THE MOON (1998)
and ALEC DEAR: A DARK POME (1996)
Artwork: Matt Smith - Story: Tom Pappalardo
THE BLURB: Through the Wood... is a re-written, partially redrawn & expanded version of our xeric grant-funded indie release Alec Dear. Find out what Alec Dear, the mischevious gasmask-wearing dead guy does when he finds himself in the burn victim unit of a secluded children's hospital! Zowie fun times!
BACKGROUND: Alec Dear was written by me, mostly while sitting behind the cash register at an All For A Dollar store in a mall in Salem NH in the early nineties. A perfect setting to write grotesque horror, if you ask me. I tried drawing it, but knew my good buddy Matt Smith had more talent and vision than I did, so he took on the art side of things. He worked on it in Massachusetts, New York, and maybe New Orleans. He applied for a Xeric grant and scored a little money for printing. Between the original self-published Alec Dear story (1996) and this Caliber Comics release (1998) I must've rewritten the damned rhymes a gazabillion times. Paul Jenkins helped out a lot the second time around, and also provided Guinness, which is always swell. Caliber had plans to make this some sort of holiday release, promoting it every Halloween or something. This was our first time ever being published "for real" and for reasons I cannot recall, we never saw a proof copy. I was sort of crushed when we saw the finished product and there were a few lines missing (somewhat critical in a rhyming poem book) and I think one of the main character's name is misspelled once. Now, I was certainly NOT a computer guru at that point, but I can't believe Caliber was incapable of cutting and pasting from an email I sent them into the final layout document. Instead, they re-typed it and botched it a little. Ah, well. We should've asked for a proof. Lesson learned.
PERHAPS YOU WERE NOT AWARE: As this was our almost-no-computer-skill era, we delivered the final art for the cover of TTWBTM with acetate overlays for the logo and text, which I had hand cut from photocopies of an old Letraset book. Matt laid a blackline overlay of his drawing over a gluesticked'n'scissored pile of nice colored paper. Man oh man, we had no idea what we were doing.
SEE ALSO:
reviews here
both books are available in the standard design store
|
|
|
|
From 1992 to 1994, I was the editor of this fine, lo-fi school-funded collection. It was nightmarish and sort of fun. I was a commuter kid and lacked the energy required to go around trying to get people's entries. And then of course, there was an appalling lack of quality material (apparently people think they can draw comics simply because they are attending an art school. not the case.) I made a few friends and a few enemies and squeezed out 4 issues I was proud of and one I was not. After that, the talented Mister Reusch took over. The name "FORTY-3" apparently lived on until maybe 1998, which is shocking and sort of funny.
The five issues I put out included contributions from Mister Reusch, Paul Alix, Jack Purcell, Matt Smith, and lots of dudes submitting under assumed names.
As for my personal contributions to the issues, I had a recurring storyline comic called Bughouse (later renamed to BUGHAUS after some dude put out a "real" comic called BugHouse). It was a long sci-fi humor thing that was a continuation of my contributions to the previous incarnation of the MassArt comic anthology, Don't Shoot It's Only Comics, helmed by Jeff Taylor. Hell, even then I was referring back to earlier work, as the main character was a variation on a character I'd been drawing in high school.
I think I still have all of the original bristol boards of this terrible-looking but occasionally funny comic. Hopefully - though I apparently feel that everything I've ever drawn is worthy of a retrospective collection - I pray that I will never be tempted to reprint BUGHAUS in a retrospective collection. I could not draw for poo, and I ended up reusing the three funny jokes anyway.
SEE ALSO:
the forty-3 cover gallery
|
