The touristy picture par excellence. But it is where we live.

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Winter 2005.

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

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.

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

Yeti sez: drink of me and live forever.

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.)

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.