“all of the wick-wack, that wanna be abstract, but they lack the new knack that’s coming from way, way back”
—Smooth B of Nice & Smooth
I got some pellets (not to be confused with flowers) from publications Exacting Clam and Apocalypse Confidential who published some of my art. The above cartoon “Sometimes Y” was in the Winter 2023 issue of Exacting Clam. It’s rare to get something in print.
Subscribe to them to get a copy. It’s put out by publishers Sagging Meniscus and I’d like to try to get in there again with some recurring characters a la The New Yorker…or Mad Magazine.
Then psy-op sleaze rag Apocalypse Confidential just this past Saturday put up a painting and a cartoon of mine on their website which I recreate here.
Having gotten these encouragements from places for my art, I wanted to share with my subscribers here a thing I worked on years ago that was probably my most focused project in terms of drawing and constructing something in comic form. For a while I wanted to be a comic artist, a cartoonist. I still do that but this was at a time I was more serious about it. I had a series of primitive eight-page comic books that were modeled on Tijuana bibles (Google the term). My book series was called Titty Sombreros. At one point some escaped convicts in Texas were making ready to make a run for the border to escape pursuing police and one says “If we make it to the border we’ll be wearing titty sombreros.” Hookers will be all over us and it will be a good time, in other words. Not very PG rated nor PC I guess! The books were all about crime in a surreal old time Mexico City in the 1930s and had lots of murder, nudity, and wretchedness. I still have one copy of each of the four Titty Sombreros. They were mass produced by another comics artist named Jason Allen Walter who I think lives in South Carolina somewhere. It was a little shady, he wanted my book to include with his comic No Funnies in a package deal that he was charging for but he never gave me any money, he just gave me a ton of copies he’d printed out at some less than scrupulous location. I sold mine myself and came out with hardly any profit. Later they were reprinted at a St Louis MO outfit called Shitty River Comics that likewise stiffed me. They were completely unreliable assholes which the art world is just full of. I know that because I’m one of them. I’m drowning in book reviews I can’t seem to keep up with and I’m sure some people are angry.
Anyway! I’m reproducing here for you number 6 of the series retitled FATAL SOMBREROS because I couldn’t face my daughter with an albatross publication like Titty Sombreros hanging around my neck. Don’t know what happened to number 5, I think I never drew it.
Fatal Sombreros #6 is about a homeless man who finds a mysterious mask in a junk pile, puts it on — and it makes him a movie star in the Mexican film industry. But stardom has costs. It makes people hate you. In a certain way I wanted these comics to be translatable to other languages so there is a minimum of words in them, and what words there are, are my clumsy attempts at Spanish in Google translate.