str 13 special edition #1
str 13 special edition #1
White Buffaloe 1997
Pages from Strips (Rip Off Press, 1989 series) #2 & the unfinished Pirhana 1st issue of Strips.
Chuck Austen front cover inner: a word or two
Recently I pulled out the first nine issues of Strips and an odd thing happened. I found myself drawn in, absorbed by the setting, the char-acters and the story. It had been so long, I actually felt as though I were reading someone else’s work. I did cringe at the mistakes, at the, at times weak and experimental drawing, or that scene that took too damn long to find a point. But on the whole, I was pleased, and proud. Slowly, I began to like my own work and characters again, enough that I wanted to get back into this world and resolve things for them, and for me. I wanted to do this comic, to finish this story … and others like it, and I wondered why I had given it up in the first place.
It had been such a personal-project … one that I had loved so much. Strips began as a one shot short story that never saw print and eventually metamorphosed into issue #2. It was a quick bit about a young man first learning that he could be attract-ive to a woman he liked rather than just to a woman who wanted him. I thought it was something we could all relate to, settling for someone who isn’t our ideal, only to learn that someone who really was our ideal wanted us, and we wanted them. The short was intended for a one-shot book, I forget the title just now, that was going to be published by Slave Labor. I- turned the story in and Dan Vado, Slave Labor’s pub-lisher, became instantly uncomfortable. Not because it contained graphic sex, but because it suggested it and talked about it openly.