A Distant Soil by Colleen Doran

Jeff Smith hosted some guest blogs at Boneville, and Rick Veitch stepped in with an excellent post, as well as some Rarebit Fiend cartoons, dreams in comic art form he created around the self publishing movement.

And for kicks, a file cleaning binge yielded this: a letter from Dave Sim, dated 1991. There was a minor kerfluffle some year’s back as a few oddfellows tried to distance themselves from the self publishing movement by denying one ever existed. Letters like this tell another story. A number of creators banded together, traveled together, promoted together, and tried to change the face of comics together. No use denying it. There’s a paper trail, folks.

While Jeff remembers the movement getting going back in 1993 beginning with a jam print a bunch of us created, this October 1991 letter from Dave pushes that date back quite a bit. Its quite a bit earlier than I remember as well, so no knocks to Jeff. This is all so long ago, my memories are starting to get a bit muddled.

While I did start self publishing in 1991, as you can see by the date on this letter, my first issue did not come out until quite late in the year.

Some interesting things I do not recall at all: some self publishers were already dropping out by the time I got started. I also don’t remember Hepcats predating my self publishing A Distant Soil. Nifty.

I did not participate in most of this 21 city tour to which Dave Sim invited me. In January of 1992, I was felled with a terrible case of pneumonia that almost put me six feet under. Many cartoonists got knocked flat, and a few were hospitalized after this overcrowded January convention in New York City that was so mobbed by fans, the fire department shut it down.

My health did not recover for nearly a year, though I did – stupidly, I must admit – try to travel only a few months later. I convinced myself that staying at a friend’s beach house in March of that year would help my lungs. It did, but Karen Berger wondered (quite rightly) why I was able to travel to the beach to enjoy the sea air, and still not meet my deadlines.

I had chronic respiratory problems that kept me sick and tired, almost all of which disappeared when I moved to the country. Now, I glow with corn fed health.

I digress.

Anyway, before the end of 1992, I was on those self publisher tours and doing jam prints and the like. So, this letter seems to prove that the self publishing movement may be a little older than 15 years. Regardless, Jeff decided to build a self publishing celebration around certain events that were more than just a trickle of creators trying to get their comics into shops, and the self publishing tours of 1993 were significant milestones in that.

And for more snaps and giggles, do check out Steve Bissette’s blog for interesting remembrances of comics in the 1970′s and early 1980′s, particularly his work with Alan Moore in Swamp Thing. Steve has an uncanny memory, and I am very much looking forward to spending more time digging through his archives for his remembrances of the self publishing days which, for me at least, are starting to seem very distant.

It’s been years since we’ve spoken, and Steve has always impressed me with his decency, his honesty, and his charity.

Alas, for whatever reason, a lot of the images on his blog simply won’t load for me. Don’t know what that’s about.

c