August 29th, 2023
The Weirdos is about being a part of something that gives you meaning, something that could save your life.
Once I was solidly standing on sober feet, I wanted to be a member of the artistic community as soon as I possibly could.
It’s the reason I decided to produce The Weirdos one black & white issue at a time; it would give me a thing to put on my table so I could get started immediately.
At this point, in 2018, I had only released three novellas, and they were all out of print. I was starting over.
I had been attending local conventions, meeting other writers and artists, and I knew I wanted to print my comics locally. So I asked my new friend Dave if he knew a guy who could help me, and he did, and that guy helped me publish The Flying Squirrel #1, which was released in August of 2018 (exactly five years ago!). It was that same month I did my first convention behind my own table: Fan Fusion at the Xcel Energy Center in downtown St. Paul.
In February of 2019, I put out The Sketch #1 & The Blue-Ringer #1; realizing that comic shops had limited space, and I had five books planned, I started releasing two-in-one issues. You could read one story, and then flip the book around to read the other. It was a rad idea, and people were starting to dig my books.
Well, not the people who were printing them.
This is when the real life story gets real weird.
I got an email from the guy who was helping me publish, and it said to call him. This message got my heart pounding, if only because I had never actually talked to the guy the entire time we had been working together. I was anxious over the impending conversation.
It turns out, the local printer was not happy with the content of my comic, after they had already printed and delivered it. The reasons given to me were vague, but there was a consequence for their distaste of my work: going forward, they would be closely monitoring any further books I submitted for print.
I was a little shaken, stirred maybe, but not deterred.
When I was ready to print The Wait #1 & The Weirdos #1, the final two issues of the first volume, I emailed my guy and waited.
I couldn’t quite comprehend it when I got an email back, and it said no.
The local printers were refusing to print my work.
He apologized (it wasn’t his fault, and he was a really nice guy), and I didn’t really know where to turn. I started telling people about the situation, and many were plenty mad for me.
They said I should sue and it was a violation of my First Amendment rights (oh my gosh, did I get canceled before it was cool?) and how dare they, how DARE they, HOW dare THEY?!
My feelings about this, still, are very complicated, because it’s a very complicated situation.
On one hand, these printers were not my publishers. I did not work for them, nor did they pay me. Meaning, we had no contract together, and they had no right to tell me if my work was or was not acceptable to them. They had a product — ink and paper — and I paid them money to put my work on that paper with that ink.
On the other hand, people have the right to refuse service, as it is.
Understanding this discrimination didn’t give me any solutions, however.
My friend Eric at Mind’s Eye Comics heard my story, and, to be honest, he didn’t really believe me entirely at first. So he said he would reach out to those printers and see if he could make a deal.
He could not. They all said no, and he told me he wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t have heard them say it themselves.
Even though I don’t feature nudity or gore or excessive violence on any of my pages, my words were apparently powerful enough to make me an enemy of the Minnesota printing elite; anyone here, from the future, who has read The Weirdos in its entirety, can be a judge of whether my outlaw status is warranted.
In any case, Eric himself decided to do a small print run of my last issue so I could finish the first series of black & white issues, for which I am eternally grateful. And we got a lot of mileage out of the “banned” comics story and my bizarre experience of being a blacklisted nobody.
The black & white issues were my whole plan. I was hoping, somewhere down the line, someone would want to take the series, colorize it for me, and publish it as a graphic novel. That did not happen.
So my friend Steve did that stupid thing that friends do and bought me a gift: a Wacom tablet, so I could learn how to draw digitally. He said something dumb about believing in me or some bullshit and I knew he was right. This was something that would take more work, but I could make it happen.
I went back and colored every issue, corrected every error, and then collected it into a single book called The Weirdos Volume I: From Sand, To Glass.
I raised money through Kickstarter to publish the initial run (and had no problems with Comix Well Spring, who handled printing duties on the graphic novel and love my money), and have since moved hundreds of copies of my little banned book that could.
A book about people who just want to be a part of something that gives them meaning, something that could save their lives. The fact that real life people tried to prevent them from doing so is a terrible, ironic tragedy that I, am happy to report, did everything to overcome.
The Den 