Image courtesy of Brian Hughes. More of the same here.

Happy 145th Birthday to Arthur Machen!

Front image of The Berkeley Barb, Volume 3, Number 21, Issue 119, 1966. Taken from Free Press: Underground and Alternative Publications, 1965-1975, edited by Jean-Francois Bizot.

Note the date. Possibly the last time that any underground freak would draw Gandalf without the SF Family Dog/Fillmore poster influence. A real relic.

A Late Nite Sojourn to The Old Stone Mill/Viking Tower of Newport, Rhode Island.

From the recent archives of the black magic wielder.

(Some say a witch.)

From Batman #113, February 1958.

A brief question posed to those noble souls who think fondly on the years when comics were a medium of mass communication: what ever were they communicating?

Good times. Good times.

4:37pm. June 23rd, 2008. Eugene, Oregon. Train station. Bootleg wireless.

Yeti sez: drink of me and live forever.

A killer example of late 70s/early 80s comic art– courtesy of an unsung journeymen, the great Walt Simonson.

I often find that my tastes in 20th Century mass culture run not to The Stewards & The Highly Acclaimed, but rather the work-a-day dudes who were just churning it out, sometimes getting it right, sometimes not-so-right and sometimes killing that shit.

Simonson– and maybe someone like Herb Trimpe– is best understood as a comics analogue to directors like the profoundly underrated Don Siegel (is there any better American film from the 1970s than Dirty Harry?) or Robert Wise or even home-team favorite Robert Aldrich.

(Future Foreshadowing for the Stans: Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly basically ruined my life.)

Huzzah.

Winter 2005.

Worst year of my life. Arafat Kazi and the girl who worked at the Fluevog store in Boston.