HEJIRA

Another year in the bucket. Around here, things are cuspy. I mean, they're on the cusp of change. It's not always fun or exciting. It's that period when the old way has passed its time but the new way hasn't yet started. Limbo. Waiting, wondering.

In my case I'm talking about my future on this planet. As an artist, and as a person. The big news is I'm in the process of slowly backing away from the Spit and a Half distro.

When I restarted Spit and a Half, in 2009 or so, it was with the hope I could grow it into a part-time job... something to do a few days a week to bring in some extra income and lift the financial burden off trying to survive as an artist alone (which is tough, everybody knows). Then there was a point when things kept growing where I thought, "Wow. This is really filling a need in the comics community… this is a real business." It became a full-time job (but it didn't really pay like a full-time job). And then it became a six-and-a-half days a week job that paid like a full-time job. (Thank you!)

Now if you're working a six-and-a-half days a week job, packing comics in boxes, answering the endless parade of emails, texts, Facebook messages, Instagram messages, twitter messages, dealing with problems, headaches, setbacks, mistakes, first of all, one thing is clear -- you sure as hell aren't gonna be drawing your own comics. Second -- every tiny lapse compounds upon itself. Wait, you have a doctor's appointment? The pile of work grows higher. You have to take your dog to the vet? Higher. You're just so depressed and tired you can't get out of bed? Higher.

It was a case of bad timing. If only this had happened when I was 25... When I had a community around me (ie in the same town as me) to help out, hell, to hire... And when I had energy and nerve and youthful idealism. But I'm fifty years old now and I have none of those things.

So now I'm fucking up. Maybe not super bad, but the writing's on the wall. I'm hundreds of books behind on updating the website. I've got 1000 titles scattered throughout our house (and a storage unit!), spilling everywhere and messing with the Feng Shui. I'm misplacing people's books... which one of a dozen stacks of boxes are those twelve missing minicomics in? I DON'T KNOW.

Like Cometbus said, "I wish there was something I could quit." So I just kept getting deeper and deeper behind, and feeling worse and worse. And then I was listening to Joni Mitchell's Hejira album. I've listened to it many times and never wondered about the title. Turns out hejira is an Arabic word meaning "a journey, especially when undertaken to escape from a dangerous or undesirable situation." (Good ol' Merriam-Webster.) And it clicked. I need my hejira. My tactical retreat.

Like all of us I'm sure, I grow more and more alienated from the modern world with each new day. I'm broken down by the constant cycle of bad news, horror, stupidity, greed, anger. In the pre-Distro days, if I was overwhelmed like that, I'd be able to retreat for a while, hide for a bit, regroup. Draw, think, walk in the woods, heal. But with the Distro that's an impossibility. There's always another email, always another order. PLEASE don't get me wrong, I'm incredibly humbled by and grateful for the support the Distro has gotten from the community. It's an honor to serve you all! But the time has come for me to pass on this mantle to the next generation. It's just not a job one old dude can do on his own anymore.

As a survival instinct, I've started drawing more (from life), and playing music again... and in those acts I've begun to touch parts of my spirit that have been neglected for a long time. It feels like the start of a rebirth. I'm fifty, and I hate to talk about it, but men in my family don't live very long. Early sixties maybe. My Dad made it to 64 by a few weeks. I have a lot of work still to do in this life... personal work. Comics to draw, letters to write, birds to feed. So I'm beginning to break down the distro... culling old titles, returning books to publishers... in an effort to restore some balance. Knowing me, it will be a long slow process, but over the last few months I've begun taking the first steps.

More soon.

I love you all! Thank you,
John P.

PS: Thanks everyone for the well wishes I've received in response to this blogpost. To clarify, I'll (likely) continue to run the distro going forward, but it will be at a drastically reduced level, with a small, highly specific and rotating selection of books. Something that I really can take care of easily on a one or two day per week schedule.

2016: YEAR IN PREVIEW

Hi folks,

It's 2016, and things are set to really kick into gear... I have high hopes for a productive year. For a long time, the unpredictability of my living situations led to me getting less work done that I would have liked, but now I find myself in Domestic Bliss: two dogs, two cats, a backyard with lots of birdfeeders, a stable, loving relationship with a wonderful woman... it's been great! So I'm really hoping to get back to a two per year schedule with King-Cat. KC #76 is already well on its way to publication (likely in February sometime), and that will give me plenty of room to get #77 out in the fall. Additionally, I'm finally going to be publishing my South Beloit Journal, a three month span of daily diary strips from 2011 (a few were excerpted in King-Cat 72).

Even bigger news is that this summer will see the release of Spit and a Half's first book form publication, a 200+ page collection of Jenny Zervakis' seminal Strange Growths comics. This is something I've wanted to do since 1997, and the time is finally here!

I'll be travelling some in 2016 too, but truthfully, I'm hoping to wind down the amount of road time I've been putting in over the past seven years or so. As I get older, it's begun to really wear on me. With the upgraded Spit and a Half distro site, it's now easier than ever to get tons of great comics delivered to your doorstep, so I'm hoping that will pick up some of the slack from me not travelling as much.

And finally, after a lot of soul searching and hand wringing, I'd like to announce the debut of my Patreon page. Patreon is a web platform that allows fans of an artist's work to make small, regular, monthly donations to help support that work. Mine is set up with a number of levels, where contributors receive anything from a simple "thank you" to an ongoing subscription program. There will also be an exclusive monthly e-newsletter for Patreon supporters, The Boney Island Observer, featuring chit chat, comics, photos, samples of work in progress, and up to the minute Groundhog news, delivered straight to your inbox.

I realize times are tight, but if you find yourself in a situation where you can afford to donate something, it would be greatly appreciated. As you no doubt know, comics and underground publishing are still mostly labors of love. Your support goes a long way towards keeping all this going.

Thanks! I'll see you around...
LOVE John P.

2015 YEAR IN REVIEW

So, there is still plenty of time left in 2015 for wonderful, terrible stuff to happen, but in the world of comics, things every year start to wind down about now. CAB was a few weeks ago, Milwaukee Zine Fest was last weekend [historically my last (and favorite) show each year]. The publishers are dropping their final holiday-hoped releases on us. So, time to pause and reflect.

I feel like I was on the road non-stop this year, but actually I did a few less shows than usual. That goes to show you how many festivals there are now. Tom Spurgeon at The Comics Reporter reflected recently on the unavoidable scheduling conflicts coming up nowadays, with two, sometimes three competing shows all scheduled for the same weekend sometimes. C'est la guerre.

I LOVE shows. I rarely feel more alive than I do while behind the Spit and a Half table putting great comix directly into the hands of readers. But the ceaseless travelling wearies. In a practical sense an artist or a publisher travelling great distances, paying for a table, paying for lodging, food, gas etc all to sell a comic book to someone is not exactly the most efficient way of doing business. But what else do we have? Aside from our handful of generous, open-minded retail outlets, from Desert Island in Brooklyn, to Copacetic in Pittsburgh, to Quimby's in Chicago, to Seite Books in LA, the general comics shop market continues to remain ignorant or even downright hostile to "Art Comics." Most people looking for unusual or challenging or non-sexist comics fled the comics shops a generation or two ago, but nothing substantial has risen up since to cater to those folks. So the shows fill a gap in the market.

Let me pause to suggest that good old-fashioned mailorder is maybe the best way to get these comics if you can't make it to the shows, or don't want to wait for a show to pick up a new title. I'm biased of course. I've run the Spit and a Half distro off and on for over 20 years now. One of my biggest accomplishments this year was bringing the website into the 20th Century (!) (Thank you Fran López!) with a cart, automated postage calculator, online checkout, etc, and the results have been great. More customers come through all the time, but I would say my total business is still about a third of what it was in the 90's, when mailorder was generally the only way to get these comics. I think and hope the distro will continue to grow as more people find out about it. (And of course there are plenty of other comix mailorder distros out there-- see the sidebar on my site.)

Looking back I feel like I barely got anything done this year.  I'm STILL adding books to the distro site that I picked up at SPX or earlier, and all the travelling left little time or energy for drawing. When I really think about it though, over the course of the past year and a half I drew almost 300 pages of comics (producing both The Hospital Suite and King-Cat #75) -- still, the creative work seemed to get swallowed by the busy work this year.

I do have a head start on #76 and hope to have it out "early"-ish in 2016. I'll be travelling a bunch in 2016 too, but I'm trying to visit some of the shows and cities I've missed in recent years. We'll see how it all goes.

Anyhow, thanks to everyone who came out to signings, picked up a King-Cat somewhere along the line, visited my table at shows, and so on. Once the tired fog clears from my eyes, I realize what an amazing time for comics we live in. Here's to next year!

-John P.

HOME + AWAY

Hey Kids,

I got back from the Madison Print and Resist Festival last weekend, so that means only one more show of the year -- MKE Zine Fest Nov. 9.  John P. loves tabling, but he's getting old and tired, and he's chomping at the bit to find out whether he still knows how to make comics, so he's looking forward to a nice, long winter of STAYING PUT AND DRAWING.

Good ol' Spit and a Half table

Print and Resist was so good that afterwards I had that kind of shaky, is this real? kind of pure joy that makes me feel inevitably like when's it all going to come crashing down-- but I'll take what I can get.

I love the Midwest, I love zines, I love weirdos, so I loved Print and Resist.  It was held in the Helen C. White Library at UW-- I mean literally in the library -- my table faced the New Magazine Releases ( I read a great Discover article about OCD during down times).  Picked up some nice books and zines, a cool anti-Walker poster, talked to a lot of swell people and got a workout dragging my 100+ pounds of books eight blocks from the closest parking I could find (apparently, overnight, the library had become besieged by construction).  My arms and shoulders still hurt!   And I can feel muscles in my thighs I didn't know I had! But I sold lots of Kool Komix to awesome people, so that's why I was born.

Visit Art Is Dead Productions 

- - -

(Look for King-Cat 74 to go to press next week, if I can shake this depression...)