Yesterday’s post reminded me that I’d read an article about Rory Hayes in The Comics Journal. This lead to digging through back issues and old books. Eventually I found it: issue 250, February 2003. I was living in a basement outside Detroit. This was much earlier than I’d thought.

The article was written by Bob Levin, author of the Air Pirates book, and has since been reprinted in another of his books. I haven’t read the latter, but I’m sure that like everything by Levin, it’s fascinating, informative, and poorly written. I wouldn’t mention the quality of writing if Levin hadn’t himself poked fun at Hayes’s supposed grammatical errors. Glass houses, kids.

Another resource for much of Hayes’s art is this site. There’s about five pages of 15 scans each, but no complete stories. Still it gives one a taste of the artwork. The cover of Hayes’s first comic, Bogeyman #1, pretty much sums up the distance between he & his contemporaries:

Is there any other early underground cover as stark?

And for the hell of it, here’s a few more images:

(The promotional flyer for Bogeyman #1.)

(The Bogeyman hisself.)

(I assume this is the front page of CUNT #1.)

I’m mystified that Fantagraphics has yet to issue a collection of Hayes’s work– from Levin’s article, it seems that the entire output totals less than 150 page. If they’ll give Victor Moscoso his own book (where the posters are great but the comics kind of boring), why not Hayes?

Thanks in advance!

(P.S. I was wrong in the last post. More than 100 copies of Cunt were sold.)