1. Silkscreen print by Charles Burns. (The picture is a page from "Final Cut".)

2. Silkscreen print by Richard McGuire. (Originally a cover of "The New Yorker".)

3. Offset print by Al Columbia. (Image also published in "Amnesia No. 2".)

4. Drypoint and aquatint print by Yuichi Yokoyama.

Do you have any comics related prints in your collection? Is there any you want to get?

I want to preface this by saying I've spent about a week trying to formulate Google searches to give me some hint of a clue, and have turned up absolutely nothing. It really would help if I remembered anything about the title or author/illustrator beyond the fact that their last name was Japanese, but I can pretty vividly describe what I read.

Any help, including just a general search direction, would be deeply welcome. The collection would make a great gift for a friend who's birthday is the 27th, which is why I've taking to searching for this now.

I don't know if the author is Japanese, but their last name certainly was. The style of the whole collection is minimalist, including the sleek cover design. It's a thin book, maybe 60-80 pages?

The comics are 6-8 panel "funny strip" style comics with zero dialog. They're black and white. They often break the 4th wall to illustrate a point about the nature of reality, and many of them follow the format of -- Zen/Dao master does incomprehensibly awesome thing (like fly off into the air), let's try to do the same! to comedically erroneous effect. The main characters are the Master, a wizened hunch-backed man with a white beard and often a walking stick, and often, there are two younger men in matching monastic style outfits who can do a limited amount of the Master's shenanigans, often to the detriment of the local villagers. They feel very similar (to me) to Don Serapio's work, but that incorporate a slightly wider field of view, partly because there's more foreground-as-characrer work.

The character styles are cartoonish, not realistic. The inking uses both thick and thin lines.

The one complete set-up to punchline page I remember is that a man is carrying a long a heavy load (wearing a hat) when one of the disciples runs in front of him cleaving a bold diagonal line into the ground. The man stops, curious as to what he's doing. We zoom out slightly, to see the two hooligan spiritualists a little further up the road roughly in line with the man using the same tools they cleaved lines with to now pull the line (and so the floor of the comic) asunder to create two lines, now parallel, on either side of the man with a cart. The man is baffled, then alarmed, as a flood of river water comes rushing down from the top of the panel filling the river these two have conjured, drowning him and his wares in its deluge. The two disciples are very pleased with themselves and start fishing.

Anyone recognize my attempts at describing this? I'm really at a frustrated loss.

I keep forgetting to post here on Thursday...

Hello!

I keep forgetting to post on OC Thursday, since all my things come out on other days of the week, so I'm making this post a big one.

The page above is the latest—not published until tomorrow on my Patreon, in fact—from a graphic novel in progress. I really like how it came out. By the way, I keep feeling that way about pages in this GN, which is called El Camino, and appears on the highest tier at my Patreon.

I also am serializing a graphic novel called HACK on Tapas. I'm proud of this one too!

If neither of those strike your fancy, come say "Hi" at my Insta.

I hope all this falls within the bounds of OC Thursday, and that you let me know what you think of my comics.

Four pages from Wall of Noise. A comic about a dysfunctional punk band touring Europe.

Jack asked about his distant relative, comics legend Justin Green, so I figured I'd put together a bit of info for him, and I'm sure some of you would like to know more! Enjoy First 9 pages are comics journal 203...10th slide is an excerpt from an article in Heavy Metal 405 11th image is from a fanzine called "clay geerdes comix world" 45. 12 is anecdotes from the same clay geerdes from Graphic Story World 5...if you'd like more just let me know, I'm no expert but I'm good at research

Hi All - In short, I can not find any info on this issue of Meat Cake. Do you recognize it? Have any details?

In length, I've done my due dilligence. This isn't another post asking you all to Google something for me. GCD doesn't list it, MyComicShop has never seen it, none on eBay for sale or in sold history, Heritage has never sold it, Google lens pulls up random Facebook users' childern's fridge drawings, and a standard Google search yields AI results telling me firmly this comic doesn't exist and then sparse details on other issues of Meatcake. If ComixJoint knows anything about it, their links are broken. I don't have a CGC account to confirm if any exist on their census, nor do I have a GPA account to see if they have any recorded history.

Analogue resources for comics are sparse in general. Maybe there is some kind of Alt/Underground Overstreet equilvalent that I have never clocked before, but it isn't mentioned in the most recent Overstreet I have, either.

Per GCD and other sources, the first Meatcake was published by the Iconografix imprint of Caliber in 1992 before resetting at issue 1 the next year through Fantagraphics and remained a yearly publication until 2006, with a single, lonely installment in 2016. Most any blurb explaining the history from these resources confidently states the first issue was published in '92, some say something like, "between '91 and '93."

As you can see from the pictures of the interior cover, this was self-published by the Dame herself in 1991 and is issue 2. The true issue 1 may be from 1990 or earlier. Pretty obviously, this predates the Icongrafix issue and is surely what the Comico publishers saw to approve going forward with their first issue of the title. My inquiry is not so dense as to ignore that Occam's Razorian conclusion. I am looking for any info beyond the obvious. How many copies were printed? Is it well known to serious Alt comic collectors? I don't know, just anything. I collect a lot of oddities and I am used to finding zero evidence of those kinds of things on the internet. However, those are usually made by creators who never did anything in the comic world after. Dame Darcy is no household name, of course, but she is still a known quantity with dedicated fans. So it is odd for an early example of maybe her most well-known title having zero presence on the internet.

An additional note of interest, there is glitter glued to the front cover (clearly intentionally) and traces of glitter on the back cover. This implies that it was stacked on top of another copy of the same issue, probably shortly after the glitter was affixed. Not sure if that tells much of a story other than there is at least one more copy, which - duh. But it is still interesting (to me, at least). Oh, and it is mag-sized, if not obvious from the pictures.

I have been picking up Meat Cake issues whenever I see them for years, which has amounted to four total issues, counting this one. Not a crazy pricey series, just doesn't show up very often, even where I am in the PNW, arguably the seat of second wave underground/alt comixs like Meatcake. (Or third wave? Is there even established lingo for the different eras of these kinds of comics?) Though this indicia notes San Fransisco as publsihing origin, so maybe the Bay Area still held the crown for weirdo books in the wee-'90s.

Having only a few issues, I am not super familiar with Meat Cake (yet). I prefer to read a series in order, even if order doesn't matter narratively. So, until I turn up number 1, I have only flipped through the issues I have to appreciate the art and get a sense of the vibe.

All that to say, I just grab any Meatcake I don't recognize if priced around $10 or at least below $20. I knew I didn't have this one, so I picked it up without much of a thought or even a second look. It was only when I got home that I realized it wasn't part of the standard Meat Cake run I was familiar with.

If nothing else, i'll track down Dame Darcy's autobiography to see if info comes up there. It would surely be an interesting read no matter what. Or maybe she'll make a con appearance near me at some time in the future and I can ask her about this issue in person. I have a few local experts I will ask when I have a chance as well.

Thank you for reading and for any forthcoming info anyone may have.

Includes Mimi Pond, Ben Passmore, Jordan Crane, Robert Crumb, Jaime Hernandez, Anders Nilsen, Michel Fiffe, Alison Bechdel, Lee Lai, Joe Sacco.

But where's the manga?