Tell us a little about yourself.
I am a huge dork. I like my music loud and angry, my movies weird, and my comedy dark and absurd. Lastly, one of my cats is scratching at my bedroom door and crying as I type this.
Who or what are your influences?
I am mostly influenced by real events in my personal life, and the wacky contents of my heart and brain. Both sources have, over the years, proven to be goldmines of ridiculous comics, or totally sad and dorky perzines, no matter how mundane and boring the actual event or thought may have been. The music I choose as the soundtrack to cutting and pasting and stapling my zines can be influential too. When it’s zine-making time, you will find me blasting Black Flag’s My War, or The Replacements’ Sorry Ma… as I paste a picture of a two-legged head getting excited about paying his electric bill online.
What subjects do you touch upon in your work?
When making a humor zine, I compile all of the silly and out there images and thoughts that I capture in a jar the moments that they occur to me. It doesn’t make sense most of the time, but I get belly laughs out if it. Like in a zine I did last year, This is Bullshit – I created a comic about a guy who can only get off when his sexual partners trade aphorisms with him. Nonsense, but silly enough to make me giggle. In my more personal work, I tend to spill my guts all over the place regarding my frustrations and anxieties. They are honest but hopefully humorous too, as I have a natural tendency to poke fun at myself frequently.
What is your most recent work?
Most recently, I completed a humor zine called You Are Clearly Not Amused. I completed it in literally 20 minutes on a Friday night at 3:00 AM. It’s one of those things that you just have to see for yourself and decide if it’s for you. Around the same time, I also put together a perzine called A Freak Among Freaks: Confessions of a Neurotic Outsider. It’s about how a staggering number of individual aspects of my social anxiety and my recurring frustration with my self-image went into making very minor decision on a Saturday night last summer. As with all of my perzines, I hope to reach other people who may be experiencing anxieties that may fuck up their social lives.
What are you looking forward to most at the fest?
I love wondering who I will be sharing a table with. I get lucky in that aspect – I have always shared tables with the most humble and friendly zinesters you would ever want to meet. Last year’s SZF was no exception. The people I meet at my table are also awesome, and I always look forward to sharing thoughts, hopes, fears, etc,. with people from all places (geographically, culturally, emotionally). Last but not least, coming away from a fest with all sorts of zine-loot – be it brand new zines from my favorite zinesters, or new and old work from someone whose zines I am discovering for the first time There is absolutely nothing like coming home from a zinefest with a bag full of new, personally-printed and bound expressions of radical politics, anxieties, enthusiastic declarations, etc. Viva la fucking zine, man!
