a big hit in the comics/zine department at HBML has been the first three issues of BULLSHIT FRANK AND GORILLA JOE, a zine by the inimitable MICKEY ZACHILLI. unlike a lot of “independent” comics / zines you find nowadays, this comic is neither a bunch of telephone doodles you’re trying to pass off as spirtuality, or just a non-story about a tiny dude walking around in a weird land. gorilla joe is a beard with sunglasses, and bullshit frank is an excitable nouveau hairstyle with st:tng bumps on his nose. together they form a friendship full of quips and funny ideas, and then there’s another character that is akin to the holy ghost. all of this is drawn in a great scribbly style with screen printed covers (in truly disgusting color combos).

despite the zine format, BSF&GJ is a newspaper-style comic strip- each page is it’s own standalone piece, sometimes playing into a larger narrative, sometimes not. not to be over-analyzing here, but all together, the effect is a good look at a great friendship, told over a long time, in infinitesimal glimpses. and like all good comic strips, there is the wonderful constancy: as dagwood still collides with the mailman, gorilla joe smokes endless cigarettes, bullshit frank continues to low-level pester, and the path of the hurricane can be charted by the location of birdeyes (currently in the kitchen). oh, and even though it’s obnoxious to make references all the time, check out the cameo in that last link by kazuo umezu’s cat-eyed boy, aka the best comic book character ever!!! mickey doesn’t quite go the horror route, but there is a satisfying menace to it all, or animal-like ambivalence.

visit mickey’s webiste, read her comics online, buy the comics from your stupid desk, sleep over at her house and wake up with a drooly cat sitting on your actual wig.

our old pal frostbeard stopped in yesterday, but he cut off his beard and looks like a fresh. but he’s not a fresh, he’s a grown man. anyway, he just returned from abroad, and totally serious, he had to come home because he was accused of being a sorcerer and was days if not hours away from getting, uh, tested. i accused matt of being a sorcerer last year when he brought in all those awesome toys, because everyone knows that sorcerer = awesome toys.

this is yesterday’s register. i got in the habit of writing down little stuff about each customer, but mostly it only ever says “a nice lady” or “cool dude” or “street dad” or “dressed like susan b anthony” or “dry wit”.

hey EAB, what time is it?

summer time!

also:
full text of walden on project gutenberg
free walden audiobook from librivox

john cage reads from “mureau”, an “i ching determined mix of letters, syllables, words, phrases and sentences from the journals of thoreau” concerning music.

every week or so i paint everything on this shelf a different color, trying to figure out which is the color that sells the best. so far it isn’t lavender, bright green, sky blue, or mint. the shoes look pretty sweet though– right after i painted these i painted my own:

that’s tite, rite?

i just got back from seeing erick “scam” lyle and cindy “doris” crabb read from their awesome new books, and i brought back a big stack of printed matter to totally change a bunch of people’s lives. scam and doris are two of the best zines ever, really inspiring personal / universal stuff about living in a city, living in the country, being a person, being young, being old, everything. highly recommended. i got a few copies of some of the more recent zines, plus a few copies of nicely printed book collections from both of them. so good!

webiste for erick’s book

cindy’s doris page

this is a zine from our pal jim drain: famous artist (and art basel award winner), miami resident, hot tub lounger, kaleidoscope engineer, noisician, power knitter, and maker of good bad jokes in a quiet voice. it is printed in purple on purple paper, and is about weird feelings and colonialization, just like EVERYTHING ELSE :) . me and MT went down to florda early last winter to hang out with jim in a pretty crazy “art mall” where he helps run a gallery with naomi fischer, it was AWESOME!!!!!!!!! jim donated a stack of these mags and other books, plus a bunch of he man toys, weird sponges, and some other stuff i’m not allowed to talk about, PLUS we got huge pizza slices in the fancy style and watched expensive people.

jim’s the blow-uppiest of all the fort thunder folks, but zines are still $3 and god bless any attendant mess.

oh yeah, and jim totally moved from providence to miami in the hopes of meeting iggy pop. he never said this explicitly but you know it’s totally true.

aiden duffy is froma famous clan of red heads here in worcester, he came in a while ago and unloaded a mess of marvel new universe and planet terry comics, then a few weeks ago he came in with this, which we were, needless to say, way more psyched on. in this first issue anger man fights the skirmisher. i guess in the second issue (which is still in progress, says aiden), he fights satan. going directly to satan on only the second issue is a pretty ballsy move, but i’m pretty excited to see where it’ll go.

anger man #1 — $1.50

mike t is a good guy with an occasional beard and colorful permanent tattoos that are curious and mysterious and not ha ha funny. scenery is the zine he has published for over 10 years, it’s always good and the past few issues have had a lot of contributors, but it works out because mike has only good friends. he also publishes a best-of-sketchbook zine called “monkey vision” which is the best of it’s type no contest, always funny and mean and confusing. mike doesn’t have a page on wikipedia (yet) but his old band is mentioned in the article about the joke-turned-real genre “emo violence“, which brings it back to cameo! word up, mike t!

scenery 19 - $2

scam is one of our favorite zines of all time and recently we had the honor of hanging out with author erick lyle aka iggy scam for a few days here in croWtown. this issue is all about a donut shop in san francisco (”hunt’s”), which is open “25 hours a day” and comes across like a true-life late-nite “interzone”, replete with gray-area crime and dusty eyeballs. erick, i forgot to tell you that one time i was waiting for the commuter rail here in worcester and i saw your wasted caricature on the side of a grainer and it made me really happy.

scam 5 1/2 - i forget, it’s like 2 or 3 dollars

onion flavored rings website with mp3s and everything!

i feel kind of weird having these evangelical comic book tracts in the store- for one, they are supposed to be free and i sell them, but much more importantly, they communicate ideas about how the world is organized that i not only disagree with, but find objectionable. but… they do it in a fun way, and they are little curiousities, and it is interesting and educational to see the power of a good package, and to be aware of someone trying to push your buttons. additionally i really like when there is a series of things that all have the same graphic design, like cliff notes, or man is the bastard records, and chick tracts not only share the same look, but the look is weird. also i like when the devil goes “haw haw haw!”. hi there.

chick tracts $.50