WRITER PARTIES / THE OLDEN AGE OF COMIX

I'm mining material from a stack of eleven journals on my desk. Out of one fell this folded scrap of paper with notes from a party while I was at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. I think it was at the Farmhouse. (A huge beautiful four-square out in the middle of a cornfield.)

WRITER PARTIES, THEY'RE ALL THE SAME!
or, FIND YOUR NICHE!
• non-ambient lighting
• Brie rinds w/crust of baguette
• lame music, three people dancing
• a sofa full of people facing forward, watching in silence
• no non-writers
• except S.O.'s, looking uncomfortable
• discussion--celery engineered to taste like a Snickers bar
• drunk Irish guy, confessing too much, accent thickening
• Chris Cook in pirate sleeves lying on the floor
• wild card: someone's crappy date
• lack of gays (severe)
• someone shows up w/a 19-year-old student
("This is Katie. She was in my rhetoric class last semester.")
• cluster still bitterly workshopping that week's story
("I don't know why Frank liked it so much.")

The Foxhead was generally a safer bet.

UPDATE: I realized later that this must have been something I'd planned to draw a comic of. That makes more sense.

I used to draw sloppy little comix a lot, often in bars, on the backs of flyers, ink smudged with beer or coffee. I had a bunch of them up on my long-gone site Chelsey Hotel. One was a series, initiated at my then-Oslo haunt Paragrafen in 1997 (!), about the depressed turtle Skilpadde.


Another was an anticipatory postcard I made in 2000 for my lady at the time, before I even moved to Iowa. It turned out to be fairly accurate, except that pigs don't much live in cute little barnyards anymore.


Yes, I had baby bangs then.