Wred Fright's Blog

Free Emu!

2012-02-20T22:33:00.005-05:00

And, now, the latest installment in our continuing series of "Emus In The News" (read the rest 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, though it appears about half the links have expired; emus news is pretty ephemeral, alas). We haven't had any of these since 2010, so I'm pretty excited. In this case, it's an escaped emu who has so exasperated its owner that he's giving the big bird away for free to anyone who can catch him.

I bet it's Funnybear.

Who buys an emu for a pet anyway? Did the guy think it was like a parrot? Emus are huge. Take a look below at this fellow I met in Australia. He was taller than me. A word of advice, kids, if your pet is taller or heavier than you, it's a good chance that you're its pet!

YIP!*: Submedia.Tv

2012-01-24T22:19:00.002-05:00

The news can be pretty depressing these days. I always find it goes down easier when delivered by an anarchist who likes to swear a lot.

*Yips are good things.

Why Americans Like To Vote For Rich Jerks

2012-01-10T20:13:00.003-05:00

"Americans don't see the rich as their enemies; they see them as their future selves."*

*Found in an old notebook of mine (maybe I even said it, but I doubt it) and as applicable in 2012 as in 1995.

Blog Love Omega Glee 2012 Countdown Calendar!

2011-12-27T12:37:00.003-05:00

Well, 2012, the year my novel Blog Love Omega Glee is set in will soon be here, which means a perfect opportunity for reading it is also here. Each chapter of the novel is set on a different day in 2012, so this will be the one time ever that a reader can read along day by day during the same year in which the novel is set. So if anyone out there is looking for a New Year's resolution, then please make it to read B.L.O.G. in 2012! But, whatever you end up doing, I hope you have a Happy New Year!

A Tale Of Two Giftcards

2011-12-26T21:06:00.006-05:00

I received two giftcards for Christmas and decided to knock them out today before I forgot about them. I went to J.C. Penney and checked out, and the cashier said "Do you have one of the coupons?" I said, "No, what coupon?" She said, "I'll find one for you," and took $10 off the price. I thanked her and then bought some more stuff with the remainder on the giftcard.

Then I went to Kohl's. I didn't see anything that I particularly liked, so I just picked up a Barnes & Noble giftcard for the same amount and tried to check out (I had done this a couple of years ago), but the cashier and the assistant manager said the system wouldn't take the transaction because it wasn't for "merchandise". Call me old-fashioned, but if you're selling a product in your store, it's "merchandise." I left without buying anything. I guess one should beware of Kohl's gift cards. One never knows when they'll slap a "can only be redeemed for pants on the third Thursday of May" into the giftcard fine print either.

Guess which store I'll continue to shop at?

Have A Cool Yule!

2011-12-21T21:55:00.002-05:00

Where's Ginsberg?

2011-11-28T20:51:00.002-05:00

Q: What's worse? A big corporate publisher demanding outrageous licensing fees to publish a poem it controls or going ahead and publishing an anthology that purports to be of 20th century American poetry but doesn't include work by Allen Ginsberg (or Sylvia Plath, or Lorine Niedecker, and so forth) anyway?

A: Going ahead and publishing an anthology that purports to be of 20th century American poetry but doesn't include work by Allen Ginsberg (or Sylvia Plath, or Lorine Niedecker, and so forth) anyway.

What I Did On My Summer Vacation In Hell

2011-11-14T22:00:00.002-05:00

My zine pal from Canada, Justin Chatwin, occasionally takes time out from running for parliament to run a cool blog called Message All. Recently, he asked me if I had any writing to share, and I dug around in the archives and found an unpublished short story. I had originally written it in 2001, but then September 11th happened and the world changed . . . er . . . maybe not. Actually I'm not sure how the little story ended up an orphan or why it wasn't published before. There's a good chance someone asked me for a story for their zine or something and then as often happens the zine never got published and by that point I had forgotten about the story. I stumbled across it a couple of years ago and liked it. Readers of The Pornographic Flabbergasted Emus will recognize the plot of the story since it covers events also referenced in the novel. That's likely why the story never appeared before. It was written prior to the novel, but since the story covered similar events and the novel was published in 2002 in zine form, I shelved the story. It stands on its own though, which is why I offered it to Justin. I'm happy to see it finally be published. It's been waiting, enduring a decade of hibernation in my computer. When the story was initially posted on MessageAll, there were a couple of typos (the title was missing "Vacation" and the last line "hell"), but I expect Justin will take care of them. If you've noticed the weather getting nippy, then warm up with "What I Did On My Summer Vacation In Hell"!

Yeah, I Told You So

2011-10-06T23:24:00.002-04:00

And, once again, as predicted, an American didn't win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer did. I am unfamiliar with his work, but that's one of the things I love about the Swedish Academy. They turn me on to new writers who are usually quite great (well, new to me anyway, Transtromer is 80 years old) such as Dario Fo. Congratulations, Mr. Transtromer! I look forward to reading your work. And, let's hope that one of these days, an American author proves me wrong, so that articles I wrote last decade still won't be relevant and American literature will once again be world class.

Cheer Up Hacks! There’s Always Next Year!

2011-10-05T21:50:00.003-04:00

As a followup to the essay that I wrote about about the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004, I wrote the following for the now defunct Underground Literary Alliance website in 2005. After I wrote this essay, it got depressing to write basically the same essay every year so I stopped doing it until the Horace Engdahl kerfuffle broke out and I revisited the subject in 2009. Sadly, I suspect that it might be some time before these essays are irrelevant. We'll find out this year's winner tomorrow.

Last year, I wrote a Monday Report for the Underground Literary Alliance entitled “No Nobel For You, Yankee Doodler!” which argued that no American author should expect to win the world’s most prestigious literary prize since American literature was no longer worthy of world class consideration. In the face of British playwright Harold Pinter winning this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, we could pretty much rerun that article again. But we won’t. We don’t want anyone to think we’re happy that contemporary American literature isn’t worthy of attention by anyone outside the USA anymore (hell, most of it isn’t even worthy of attention by anyone inside the USA anymore either--what we have is a regional literature, Manhattan literature, passed off as a national literature and that’s the crux of the problem). Instead, we want to propose a solution.

This year, things looked up for the Americans initially. Ladbrokes and literary bloggers had Joyce Carol Oates at 7-1 odds to win, Phillip Roth at 9-1, and Don DeLillo in the running as a White Noise dark horse. Alas, it was not to be. Those wacky 15 Swedes (there should be 18 in the Swedish Academy that decides the award but three members have quit in protest over the years, including this year’s well-publicized departure of Knut Ahnlund, who thought last year’s winner Elfriede Jelinek to be undeserving of the prize) apparently decided the matter based on literary quality instead of prolificacy (sorry, Oates), kicking historical figures in the nuts when they’re long dead and can’t defend their reputations (as Roth did to Charles Lindbergh in his last novel), and hype based on past glories (ah, DeLillo). But cheer up red, white, and blue hacks! You might not need ideas or have to be interesting or be able to tell a good story after all. It might be a good bet that the criticism that this year’s Nobels have a tinge of anti-Americanism (for example, Pinter correctly views the Iraq War essentially as an armed robbery/confidence scheme), may incline those Swedes to throw a mercy award to an American next year.

However, the Underground Literary Alliance would suggest that whining about Eurocentricism and anti-Americanism is not the best way to bring the Nobel Prize in Literature back to the land of the free (at least as free as the Patriot Act lets us be). Instead, we suggest that a better approach is for American writers to stop worrying about academic careers and pleasing corporate masters and instead start writing imaginative works full of interesting ideas that are socially relevant beyond the borders of New York City. I mean I like New York City and rich people as much as most Americans but that doesn’t mean our national literature has to be exclusively devoted to such topics (leave them to Bret Easton Ellis). Why not a novel about a plumber in Iowa? A grocery store clerk in Montana? A garage band in Ohio? (O.k., I already wrote a novel about the last topic but the first two suggestions remain unwritten as far as I know). Of course, one might have to leave an MFA program to experience life beyond the academy, but that’s all right. It’ll be good for you. And American literature.

Alas, until American literature becomes relevant again (even to fellow Americans), we might have to forego competing for the Nobels and leave them to more deserving writers such as Indonesian master Pramoedya Ananta Toer or Vietnamese novelist Duong Thu Huong. So, my fellow Americans eligible to nominate writers for the Prize, such as past laureate Toni Morrison and professors of literature, please don’t keep nominating our current crap writers. It’s embarrassing. Instead, just like in baseball--our national pastime remember?-- let’s focus on rebuilding for a few seasons instead. Let’s clear away the cutesy creeps like the McSweeneyites (at least to the margins of American literature from the center they currently occupy, presumably due to the intellectual bankruptcy of corporate publishers)! Let’s put the old fossils like Updike out to pasture (if they want to keep writing, that’s fine, but let’s stop pretending they still matter)! Let’s pay attention to the good academic writers such as Mark Winegardner even when they aren’t writing sequels to past classics (The Godfather Returns)! Let’s put the Beats, Kathy Acker, and other deserving writers into our official literary histories and anthologies! Let’s publish great writers from the underground and elsewhere, and not people whose only qualification is that they know (usually in the biblical sense) people in the publishing industry! Let’s tear our critics away from the corporate promo trough and have them look beyond what Rupert Murdoch and other beancounters think is good literature! And for Uncle Sam’s sake, instead of the great “hopes” of American literature bragging about never having read Don Quixote or Moby Dick, let’s take them out of the writing workshop and have them spend a few years reading the classics! O, yankee doodler dandy, let us be worthy of the great tradition of Poe and Melville, Dickinson and Twain, Whitman and Hughes, Hemingway and Faulkner, O’Connor and Wright, Miller and Wilson (R.I.P.), to just name a few, again!

No Nobel For You, Yankee Doodler!

2011-10-04T23:05:00.002-04:00

I wrote the following little essay for the now defunct Underground Literary Alliance website in 2004. Unfortunately, the essay is not as dated as it should be. This year's Nobel Prize in Literature announcement is scheduled for Thursday, so we'll see if this essay yet again holds true. Tomorrow I'll run another article, this one from 2005.

Every fall, literati worldwide look forward to the announcement of the winner of the prestigious Nobel Prize in Literature. This year’s laureate is Elfriede Jelinek, an Austrian novelist. It’s been over a decade since an American won the prize. The last was Toni Morrison in 1993. Now, seeing as how Americans are constantly reminded by their domestic media that the United States of America is the “world’s lone superpower” and that our culture “dominates the globe,” it may strike the remaining Americans who can think (apparently not a large number seeing as about half the voting population still holds the wrongheaded notion that George W. Bush is doing a good job as president--memo to morons, the only “good job” he’s doing is of ruining the country) that it is odd that more of our writers (since our American literature, like the rest of our culture, is surely the best in the world!) haven’t been chosen as worthy of the Nobel Prize, world-class authors, winners of the most prestigious prize in literature. Among those who ponder the situation, three likely explanations arise:

(1) The kinder, gentler hypothesis. There’s a lot of countries in the world, and a lot of writers in each country, so it’s reasonable that even the best country in the world (U! S! A! USA! USA!) can only hog so many awards. One a decade is the best we can hope for.

(2) The it’s a conspiracy hypothesis. The Swedish Academy, like the rest of “old Europe,” hates us Americans because we kick so much arse worldwide (why look what we did to Saddam, we’d eat Stockholm for lunch), so they unfairly promote European writers such as Jelinek and other riff-raffish cultural inferiors over the likes of such American supergeniuses as Don DeLillo, John Updike, Philip Roth, Louise Erdrich, and so on (even with the odds stacked against him, Thomas Pynchon’s still got money on him in Vegas to be the next American laureate though).

(3) The American literature sucks hypothesis. In a society where such influential and important authors as Kathy Acker, Charles Bukowski, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Henry Miller usually are missing entirely from the standard literary canon (e.g., The Norton Anthology of American Literature taught in college courses) in favor of blander, less interesting writers culled from pyramid scheme/academic welfare Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing programs (out of politeness, just like our esteemed leader W., we won’t name names but take a look at some of the writers who appear in those anthologies where the aforementioned authors should), and where contemporary writers of similar merit are almost completely ignored by large, creepy corporations who’d rather sign the latest reality television star (o.k., fuck it, we will name names here, Paris Hilton anyone?) to a book contract in order to make a quick, shortsighted buck (and then it’s decades in the remainders bin, with the next stop the landfill) rather than nurture quality writers whose works would continue to sell and make profits (and whose early editions would end up preserved in libraries and rare and used bookstores) for decades, what the fuck do you Americans expect? You get a literary culture completely bankrupt of world class work, and the Nobel Committees recognize that fact and go looking elsewhere.

The Underground Literary Alliance favors the third explanation. So much for the Great American Novel, eh? At this stage, we’d bloody settle for a good one, and even that’s not too likely, except in the underground, far beneath the average reader’s and the Nobel Committee’s notice.

2011 Nobel Prize In Literature

2011-10-03T21:18:00.002-04:00

It's Nobel season again! The British bookies are calculating the odds for the literature prize. As usual, it probably won't be an American author. What I wrote a couple of years ago continues to be true. In fact, what I wrote back in 2004 and 2005 continues to be true so this week I'll be rerunning a couple of articles I wrote for the now defunct Underground Literary Alliance website. Pynchon's last novel was a hoot, but I doubt the Swedes will go for him and he's the USA's best shot. Sadly, this state of affairs likely will remain until American literature deals with some of the issues I pointed out. My pick for whom the Swedes will go for is Haruki Murakami, who I think is great, but I'd love to see Alan Moore or Duong Thu Huong win. We'll find out in a week or so!

Polish Zines

2011-08-21T00:12:00.003-04:00

Polish zinester Michal Schneck has posted a chapter from my master's thesis on zines at his website which archives Polish zines. I don't know Polish but the site seems very cool! My chapter is in English currently but he's planning on translating it when he gets some free time. The master's thesis has been translated into Portuguese so it seems to have a knack for getting translated into languages that begin with P. Can Punjabi be far behind?

Blog Love Omega Glee Ebook!

2011-08-10T18:59:00.006-04:00

Blog Love Omega Glee eBook

It's out! The .epub and .pdf versions of Blog Love Omega Glee are done! I'm releasing them into the wild of the Internet. You can download them, share them, and, most of all, read them! You can download the files for free here. I'm leaving the serialized version up on the blog, but I've made minor changes (and hope I've caught all the typos) in the collected version and regard it as the definitive version of the novel. One fun way to read it is a chapter a day during the course of a year (especially 2012), or go for reading all 230,000 words or so in one lump! The files should work on most computers, ereaders, and tablets. If you like it, then please send me a donation at the PayPal link on the sidebar (or, in the zine tradition, trade books with me, or, if you live in a country that has such delicious candy bars as Topic, Big Turk, Lion, Fry's Turkish Delight, or Coffee Crisp, you can mail me one of those --email me for the current postal address). Enjoy! And please feel free to let me know what you think!

Zygote In My Fez Wrapup!

2011-08-08T19:31:00.003-04:00

The poetry festival in Toldeo was a lot of fun! Thanks to everyone who put it together! The Toledo Blade wrote a nice article about it and published some photos from it.

Blog Love Omega Glee Live!

2011-08-05T18:03:00.006-04:00

You've probably never said to yourself, "Why, goshdarnit, I'd love to have Wred Fright read to me some Blog Love Omega Glee live!", but admit it, it's a deep-buried desire of yours, and tomorrow in Toledo at the Zygote In My Fez Poetry Feztival your wish will come true! To celebrate the impending ebook release, I'll be reading a few chapters of the novel live. It's free! See you there!*

*If you can't make it to Toledo, then you can catch the action on Internet radio (see the Zygote link above for details).

The Future Of Publishing?

2011-08-03T13:48:00.002-04:00

After The Pornographic Flabbergasted Emus's initial publication as a series of seven zines, the novel was collected in a book by Out Your Backdoor/Underground Literary Alliance Press. After serializing Blog Love Omega Glee, I want to collect it as well. Since it was serialized electronically, it's fitting to have the collection be an ebook. It'll be out in a few days, and I'll be releasing it myself. I'm just going through the novel and fixing a few typos and whatnot (one nice thing about electronic publishing is that even if I or a reader find a typo down the road, I can still fix it by updating the file). I hadn't planned on self-publishing the collected version (I do enough of that with the serialized versions of my novels, or so I had thought), but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense.

The way I'm doing it might be a bit unusual though. I've cut out all the middlemen between writer and reader (ok, there's still the alphabet, the English language, and the computer and its software, so it isn't a perfect mindmeld). I'm releasing .epub and .pdf versions of the novel as freeware. Anyone can download them and anyone can pass them on to others. If someone likes what they've read, then I do ask for a donation (see the PayPal Donate button on the sidebar for how). I also ask that the novel not be adapted or transformed without my permission. People can even print it out but I ask that no copies be sold. By doing this, I'm hoping that the novel remains in circulation as long as people are interested in it, and I don't have to deal with the hassle of filling publication orders or working with an outside publisher. Instead, I can focus on writing.

Remembering that most experiments fail, we'll see how this experiment goes.

Blog Love Omega Glee Ebook On The Way!

2011-08-03T01:07:00.002-04:00

Though the serialized version of my novel Blog Love Omega Glee is available on this site, I know that some people have been waiting for the collected edition. Well, it's in the works (in fact, if you are on my email list then you have access to a galley already)! I'll be publishing it as an ebook in .epub and .pdf formats so people should be able to read it on an iPad, Kindle, Nook, or even an old-fashioned computer! I'll discuss my publishing strategy (or lack thereof) in an upcoming post.

Zygote In My Fez Poetry Feztival

2011-08-02T01:21:00.002-04:00

More details about the Zygote In My Fez Poetry Feztival in Toledo, Ohio USA this Saturday have emerged. I'm scheduled to read at 7:15 but given how underground lit events usually go it could be anytime between 4 and 10 p.m. If you're attending, best just to settle in and enjoy a plethora of poets!

Jelly Boy The Clown Needs Help!

2011-07-14T19:30:00.009-04:00

Jelly Boy The Clown performed at The F Independent Literary Festival that I put together in the Cleveland, Ohio USA area back in 2006. He's kept clowning around in subsequent years, most recently appearing in sideshows at Coney Island and Time's Square in New York City. Sadly, he was burned and apparently suffered smoke inhalation in a housefire on July 2nd. He's in the hospital and expected to recover (a man that can swallow a sword is quite hardy), but he's going to need some help with his medical bills. Friends of his in the sideshow community have set up a donation fund. I wish Jelly a speedy recovery! Thanks to King Wenclas for spreading the word!

Big Toledo Reading Shindig!

2011-05-31T20:44:00.003-04:00

The details are still sketchy, but I'll be participating in a big underground lit reading in Toledo, Ohio USA on August 6, 2011. It's sponsored by Red Fez and Zygote In My Coffee and at Collingwood Arts Center. It will start at 4 p.m. and, if it's like any other large reading I've attended, end when the last poet passes out from drinking. I'll pass on the details as they arrive, but so far the lineup looks good with Leopold McGinnis, Pat Simonelli, Lynn Alexander, Karl Koweski, and many more. Maybe we'll even get New Castle, Pennsylvania's second greatest contribution to the culture of the world (after Jack Cole, creator of Plastic Man), Ron Androla, to sail over from Pennsylvania to Ohio on Lake Erie for the event!

Rest In Peace Steve Kostecke

2011-04-24T15:04:00.012-04:00

This week the world became a less interesting place.

Steve Kostecke is dead.

I don't know the details but I know it was too soon. Steve couldn't have been older than 45 or so. I met Steve a decade ago at The Underground Literary Alliance's Amato Opera House Show in New York City. It was one of his rare times on his native country's soil. He spent most of his adult life overseas, usually in Asia, seeking a freedom that he thought was extinguished in the USA. His travel adventures were documented in a series of travel zines. Over the years, I have read thousands of zines. Most of them I donated to libraries or gave away to other people. A select few I kept because I wanted to read them again someday.

I kept Steve's zines.

I hold in my hand a copy of Auslanders Raus!, which tells the story of Steve's time living in a tent in the woods in Germany while working at Burger King on an American military base.

Steve didn't write fiction. He didn't have to. His life was a novel.

It was a good read too for those of us who got to experience it secondhand through his zines. In addition to Auslanders Raus!, I also have Destination: Absolutely and Third World Blues, chronicles of his adventures in Asia and the South Pacific.

I was looking forward to reading more of Steve's zines someday.

Steve would probably say in response to that something like "That's what you get for looking forward instead of looking at where you are."

In any case, I'm glad I got to read the ones I did, and that I got to know Steve.

Most of my correspondence with Steve was via email, usually in the context of planning some Underground Literary Alliance (ULA) event or other undertaking. It was always interesting to see which Asian country Steve would be emailing from this time. He taught English and used the language as his ticket to explore Asia.

Steve was the editor of the ULA's group zine The Slush Pile and was hoping to publish a greatest hits collection from it as a book. The project was continually getting shelved due to infighting in the ULA (I lost track of Steve when I quit the group a few years back, though my exit had nothing to do with Steve; in fact, one member even accused Steve and I of being in league against him, something Steve and I had a good laugh over via email since we both liked that member and weren't in league against anybody), publisher difficulties, and even Steve's conscience (he pulled the book from one publisher because he thought the ULA and the publisher were a bad combination). With Steve's death, the long-delayed book is probably dead as well, since if he couldn't shepherd it through to publication, no one else could likely come close (arguments within the ULA could literally become barroom brawls--thank goodness, most were conducted safely via distant email).

I love self publishing but one hazard is that when the zinester or self-publisher dies, without an ongoing publisher to keep the work available, her or his work often passes as well. It would be great is Steve's zines could be more available, but at least some of his work is available on the blog Pat King and I edited for the ULA. You can read "Hi, I'm Jack" and "Decades Of Debauchery And The Human Animal", both by Steve to get a feel for his writing.

I'm sorry there will be no more of it, but at least his last work, a translation of Plato, is available (in fact, it just came out and I wondered if the news of Steve's death was just a hoax to help promote it, but that's just vain hope).

I was also happy to be published alongside Steve in the ULA's Books line, but Steve's zines are a better read than that book, so please don't judge his work based on it.

Steve, I'm sorry I never got to drink another beer with you, and to hear more of your wonderful stories in person. The next beer I drink will be raised in your honor. Cheers!

An Interview With Cartoonist Mark Justice

2011-03-22T21:49:00.003-04:00

I've known Mark Justice since 1988 and I have enjoyed discussing cartoons and comics, among other things, with him over the years. In the past few years, Mark has started creating his own comics, at first employing his writing skills to create Grammar Man and Fanboy, and now expanding to drawing with his mini-comic Fun With Diabetes! from Eureka Comics!. I interviewed him recently about his cartooning.

1) What inspired you to make a comic about diabetes (besides the obvious catalyst of discovering you had the condition)? Why a comic though?

To answer, Fun With Diabetes first started as an idea I had for a stand-up routine. I was doing the Advanced Placement College Board reading last year, and the essays I read were about humorists, their roles, and how they were valued. I began thinking about what I would do if I were to make a stand-up routine. I thought, "begin with what you know," and since I became diabetic two years ago, I thought, "this might be fun."

What made the idea truly fun was that it was taboo, as most diseases are, but as SO many comics do politics and sex and gender roles, blah, blah, blah, I simply wanted to talk about having diabetes in a fun, biting way.

How it turned into a comic book started with my trip to SPACE (Small Press And Comics Expo) last year. I was amazed by the sheer amount of mini-comics out there, the creativity, the fun, at all levels of ability, from simple shapes to fully-painted pages. I can't draw to save my life, but I was inspired from SPACE that even I could draw simple shapes and tell a story. I can write. That's my ability. I knew that if I made a comic, the words would have to carry the brunt of the load, so I thought, "maybe it would be fun to do part of my stand-up routine about diabetes," and the idea was born.

I had a few really good punchlines, so I created the panels around a strong visual to go with those punchlines. "Strong" is a relative term, artistically, but when you see a panel of my pancreas in a wheelchair along with the line "I prefer pancreatic cripple," well, the reaction that I was shooting for is generally what I get.

This is my first mini-comic, and I'm happy with it. I'm working on more now, which is fun. I hope that my artwork improves with time, but I think I'll just have to be content to draw simple shapes and let my humor come through my writing.

2) You've written comics before though, right?

Yes, I've written comics before. I've created a whole comics universe that I would love to see actualized some day. It's an homage to the Golden and Silver Age eras called The Golden Agers. I've got a large cast of characters and would really love to flesh them out into full stories.

I'm probably most proud of a comic I did that was published in 2005, called The Adventures of Grammar Man and Fanboy. It's really a grammar-teaching tool in the form of a comic book. I wrote the scripts, and an artists named Linda Ayala did the art. It covers four big issues with grammar with a lot of humor. It was inspired by the Adam West Batman series. When I wrote the dialogue for Grammar Man, I kept hearing it as if Adam West were saying it, which made it easy to capture that era and style. Fanboy was a smart-alecky me but sounded a lot more like Joe Pesci, haha!

Grammar Man has been very successful in helping kids learn grammar. Kids take a set of quizzes before reading Grammar Man and take the same set after reading. In an assessment of over 1000 quiz sets, scores went up 22% after reading Grammar Man. That's over 2 letter grades' worth of improvement, which is fantastic. I'd get notes from the kids, saying things like "I wish all my books were like this!" and "Grammar Man makes learning fun!" That makes me feel very proud.

3) Did comics interest you in reading when you were a kid?

Oh, yeah, I've loved comics for as long as I can remember. I've had them literally all my life. On the day I was born, my dad bought me issues of The Phantom, Mandrake the Magician, and Flash Gordon. I still have those very issues!

I've always been a reader, and I cannot separate my childhood from comics. I used to go every week and buy whatever I could with my allowance. I can't know for sure how many comics I've read, but it's got to be in the thousands, for sure.

Comics are wonderful in that they transport me to being a kid all over again. I can't help but feel like I'm 8 or 10 or 12 when I'm reading stuff from the 70s and early 80s. They're inextricably a part of my childhood and my life. I fantasize about not having to do anything but read comics all day. If I could read 15 comics a day, that be about 450 a month, almost 6000 a year. I can SO see myself doing just that for the rest of my life, hahaha!

4) Today's comics seem to be less accessible to kids. Most of them are sold in comic book stores and to enter one of those one usually has to be into reading comics already. Indeed, the average comic shop patron seems to be a middle-aged man. One of the fears of the comic book industry is that their customers are getting older and older and they don't look likely to be replaced. Perhaps online comics or graphic novels might change that, but I know that you're involved in an organization that connects kids with comics. Can you tell us a little about the organization?

Before I answer your question, I'd like to chime in on your first point. I agree that comics are slowly getting to the point of "elite" culture in that you have only a few special places to get access to them. When I was a kid, every drug and convenience store had a spinning rack or two of comics. I'd go to two or three stores every week to buy my allowance's worth of comics. The way comics are distributed now, with only one or two major distributors--is it one, Diamond?-- well, that stranglehold is destroying readership. If comics are to see a resurgence in young readership, kids have to have easy access. Bring the comics back to the local stores. I bet sales would go up 15% in the first year.

Now, on to the ECBI. The Elyria Comic Book Initiative is a non-profit organization whose mission is threefold: get comics into kids' hands, promote literacy and creativity by teaching kids how to make their own comics, and create opportunities for writers and artists to be able to take their talent further--sort of a "comic book academy."

We do programs for after-school, during-school, library, and other settings. The ECBI will be two years old this Free Comic Book Day. We've done dozens of programs in grade, middle, and high schools; in libraries; and in alternative educational centers. Hundreds of kids have gone through our program.

Our program is designed to teach both story telling and art. We cover the whole story arc, beginning-middle-end, setting, character, plot, rising action, climax, conclusion, etc. We help them understand why they need to have all of these elements to tell a good story, and we also help them as they create their characters, as well, so we give them the tools to develop their characters' background, motivation, their powers and abilities, their weaknesses, and personality traits that make the characters seem like real people.

The art lessons help them understand that all comics are drawn from simple shapes and that no matter what level of their drawing ability, they can create a great comic. It's all very hands on.

Our first pilot programs were at a local middle school. We did three programs there. We had 20 kids start the first program. About 12 of those kids stayed for the second and third programs, all wanting to do more on their books, tell more stories, all of them becoming better artists and storytellers. It was wonderful to see how they grew not only in ability but in confidence.

One of the coolest things about all of this is that kids get excited about comics. We always bring a few long boxes of comics into whatever program we're doing so that the kids can look at and read them while they work on their comics. Most of the kids we've worked with have never read comic books, so a whole new world is opened to them. What is the greatest joy is in letting the kids take a few comics for themselves, to keep. They are so excited, and we are thrilled to share our love of comics with them. I'd like to think that we are helping create the next generation of comic readers, writers, and artists. Hello, Marvel, DC, Image? We'd love to work with you.

We are really excited with a few projects we have going on now. I'm not sure how much I can tell you, so all I'll say is that we're working with some local comic book industry professionals and will be creating a project together. It's all very cool, and I'm really thrilled to see where this goes over the next few years.

I have to conclude with letting everyone know that as the ECBI is a non-profit organization, any donations they make are tax-deductible. We gladly take comic books, art supplies, financial donations, and donations of time. If you'd like more information, please contact me at mark AT elyriacomicbookinitiative.org.

5) Any last words of wisdom?

I don't know about words of wisdom, but I did want to thank you for the opportunity to talk about Eureka!, the ECBI, and about comics, in general. I LOVE comic books. What I'd really like to see is for comics to come down in price, for them to be distributed in more places, for more and more kids to get into comics and fall in love with the medium. The love of comics can last a lifetime. Life wouldn't be as sweet without comics.

An Interview With Artist Michael Dee

2011-03-11T13:11:00.003-05:00

I've known Mike Dee for a long time and he's been making art for as long as I've known him. I interviewed him about the sculpture I showed a picture of last week, as well as what else he's been up to lately.

1) What inspired your latest sculpture?
Following the Melted Hearts And Deadly Force show in September 2009, I became interested in increasing the scale of the Heartsmelt series and employing elements of architecture. Last summer, Plastics Make It Possible contacted me about doing a plastic Eiffel Tower or arc for the Philadelphia International Flower Show, which was really cool, because I had just started a new series of drawings of St. John's Wort flowers to go along with the ongoing Jacketed Hollow Point series. I am always excited to do more accessible public projects that will be viewed outside of the standard gallery setting such as gardens, store windows, building facades, and rooftops.

2) Where will the sculpture end up after the show?
The multi colored Lexan tubes and the PVC pipe connectors will be recycled locally in Philadelphia, while the neon will be shipped back to Los Angeles for future projects.

3) Do you like the finite nature of such sculptures? Is that part of their beauty that they don't last long? Do you approach such sculptures differently than more longer-lasting works?
I like the finite nature of these types of projects, because it becomes more about the experience, like seeing a band live, or going to watch an eclipse or meteor shower. You were there and you were engaged with the lights, sounds, and movements for a limited amount of time. People remember where they were and their enthusiasm. Longer lasting works of mine are generally produced at more of a human or home-related scale and don't involve complex interactive or hardware components. I've recently found that I like the immediacy of photography and drawing for producing archival works which reference the concepts and materials used in the installations and large sculptures

4) What are you working on now?
Right now I am working on a suite of drawings, a suite of photographs, and two interactive sculptures, as well as doing freelance photography of bands and playing fuzz bass in a new "punk rock" project. The newer art and music has taken on more of darker tone and recalls the earlier work that was produced in New York and Ohio. Between my job as a vis com professor and being a new homeowner I have been very busy since November.

5) That's a wrap! Any last words of wisdom?
I guess in the words of Augustus St. Gaudens and Jeff Koons: "To the beauty in simple things." But then again there is always Oscar Wilde and The Jesus And Mary Chain, "We may have been in the gutter, but we were looking up at the stars."

Watch Mike make a sculpture on this video!

Mike Dee's New Sculpture

2011-03-02T21:12:00.002-05:00

My pal Mike Dee has graciously allowed me to post a pic of one of his new sculptures. It's pretty cool!