About this issue's contributors...
About this issue's contributors...
Randall Hugh Crawford asked his mother to read him the word balloons in the Nancy comic strip. Later she acquired some used DC comics and Dell 4-Colors leading ‘Randy’ to tell people that Superman, Batman and Bugs Bunny taught him to read. At age seven, while staying at his aunt’s cottage, she sat him down with pencils, paper, crayons and toy soldiers and told him to draw. She later provided him with Speedball pens and a set of the Famous Artist Course lessons.
By 12th grade (class of ’71) he was a regular contributor of cartoons and filler art to his school paper, The Unionite, as well as three ‘alternative’ competitors, The Union Times, Vara and Roach. A few years later, he provided a similar function for the counter-culture freebie OM. At the end of 1975, he was approached by the publisher of Free Books, Inc to illustrate his first full length comic book, Man Unleashed Upon The Universe. He was approached by another writer in 1978, and co-created Nice Day. He then self-published a sketchbook of his early work under the title Charmaugagogmanchaugagcharbunagungamaug. Those two titles were listed in The Official Underground and Newave Comix Price Guide.
During his seven-year tenure as a clerk at The Book Stop, he collaborated with a coworker on Bolt, a mini-comic. Soon after that, he launched the Nice Day Mini-Comix series, which is still published (very infrequently) to this day. Other series published by Nice Day Comix include Your Dirty Li’l Comic, Bonus Mystery Comix and Swipe File. He also did work for several other small press publishers.
During this period (around 1986), he wrote a comic-book review column, Off The Rack, for a local tabloid, The Music Revue. After the Book Stop was evicted from its premises, he produced 75 issues of a monthly comic shop newsletter for Between The Covers (after that store changed owners, he did the final year or so’s worth of newsletters independently for subscribers as the Nice Day Comix Newsletter). At some point he also barely managed to almost marginally turn ‘pro’ with three pages of inking in an issue of Palliard Press’s Xxxenophile, some illustrations and a story for Jabberwocky’s Goodies, cartoons in two issues of Fantagraphics’ Amazing Heroes Swimsuit Special and a fan mail sketch published in the letters page of Kitchen Sink’s Omaha. This led to his being listed in the reference books Comic Book Superstars and ProMotion.
In the internet era he rose from frequent contributor to volunteer assistant moderator of the Yahoo group Jump The Shark, a spin off of the then-popular website. He was also given the adults only Bound_To_Please Yahoo group, and tried to launch his own media discussion group, Napoleon Park. He is currently an active participant in a number of Facebook groups and pages.
Michael French grew up on Indiana Jones, Ghostbusters and Huey Lewis. He has degrees in film and journalism, and spent most of college investigating where George Lucas’s talent went to die. French was closely involved with the development of Star Wars: Revisited and ESB: the Reconstruction. He also served as a staff writer for TheRaider.net and IndyGear.com. Between the discovery that Voltron was actually an ultra-violent Japanese cartoon and his scathing oratory on his dislike of the ThunderCats, French launched RetroBlasting on YouTube. Recently, RetroBlasting has been featured on the Official Voltron Facebook page. It is also showcased regularly on igrewupstarwars.com, and once a month hosts a dedicated podcast on Mike Alonzo’s Clobberin’ Time on BlogTalkRadio. One can visit French and his partner Melinda at RetroBlasting! and youtube.com/retroblasting.
Dennis Hyer is the New Jersey artist behind the comic strips Inhuman Relations and Mullein Fields. He doesn’t have a lot to write about himself except that he loves old movies and television shows. He is also an amateur curmudgeon, with no patience for anime, rap music, modern newspaper comics, asphalt driveways, or anything produced by the Disney Channel (in that order). Aside from classic cartoons and comic strips, his other areas of interest include billiards, anthropology, girls, Indians, and agriculture. His two comic strips have been collected in the volumes Inhuman Relations (the original series; out of print), Greetings from Mullein Fields and the recent Inhuman Relations (A Cartoon Collection). The latter has been replaced in recent months with The Complete Mullein Fields, which is available in paperback from CreateSpace and Amazon, and in a digital edition from Gumroad. Hyer’s more current comics can be found at his website.
Bill Harvey was one of the students at John Buscema’s original Workshop For Comic Book Art, in NYC. He has published the DangerWorld comic book and publishes THE ODDs comic strip. Michigan born and bred, he lives in the Detroit suburbs, and when not laid off, works as a computer technician. He generally considers himself a penciller/plotter in the arena of comic books. He does inking and lettering out of necessity. His favourite comic book was The Fantastic Four with art by Jack Kirby. At age 63, he would love to be part of a documentary on the life and works of Jack Kirby, mostly centred on his theatrical approach to comic books, his unfettered imagination and glorious artwork. Mr. Harvey’s website is www.BeholdComics.com. Copies of DangerWorld can be ordered from there.
Gordon Lindholm is a typically debt-burdened American student. He’s been producing The Trivial Tales of Luna Lesser webcomic now for some five years. His contributions to the FreakAnimes site can be found here.
Grant Snider’s interests have changed drastically since he was four years old — with the exception of dragons, dinosaurs, and drawing. Snider’s first published cartoons appeared in the University of Kansas student newspaper, followed by a weekly strip called ‘Delayed Karma’ for the Kansas City Star. His comics and illustrations now appear in newspapers, books, magazines, and across the internet. He lives in Wichita, Kansas with his family, where he practises orthodontics and webcomics. More of his work can be found at his Incidental Comics website.
Chris Tolworthy was born in England on the fourth of July, but now resides in a small cottage in the woods in the Highlands of Scotland. He has a longtime interest in Marvel Comics in general and The Fantastic Four in particular. He also devotes a large amount of his leisure time to something called ‘Zak McCracken and the Alien Mindbenders’, which we believe to be some sort of video game or something. His two essays – written, for the most part, in the American spelling and punctuation style, which has left him totally confused (confuzed?) – included in this issue of The Comics Decoder are the first in a series; so stay tuned, O true believers, and keep thy webs untangled!
Jessica Tremblay currently lives in Vancouver, BC, where she creates her weekly haiku comic strip Old Pond. As a winner of the Best BC Poem of the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival Haiku Invitational 2008, her poem was sculpted in a stone at the VanDusen botanical garden. More of Jessica’s poetically insightful strips can be found at her Old Pond Comics website.
R. W. Watkins is the author of two chapbooks of haiku and related verse, October Twilight and New England Country Farmhouse, and the co-author (with Robin Tilley) of a third, In The Grip of Sirens. His poetry and literary essays have been published in various journals throughout Canada and the US, and he was the only Canadian included in Agha Shahid Ali’s Ravishing DisUnities. Inspired by Ali’s vision, he published the first issue of Contemporary Ghazals in 2003. In more recent years he has turned his attention to the Internet, editing poetry at Red Fez and launching The Comics Decoder site. His latest major works are View From The Cellar: A Critical Analysis of Laird Koenig’s The Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane, Contemporary Ghazals: An Anthology (Ed.), and Trinity, which collects his three aforementioned chapbooks. These and other publications by the author are available at Amazon. Watkins holds a bachelor’s degree in Religious Studies and English Literature, but invests very little faith in contemporary formal education. Outspoken on many issues, he resides in Newfoundland, Canada.
