I’ve written all sorts of different things in my career, from your basic short stories and novels and comic books to marketing and licensing material in every shape and form. One of those marketing jobs was Weird Organic Tales for Stuart Gordon, the brains behind Chicago’s famed Organic Theater Company, whose productions included WARP!, Bleacher Bums, Ray Bradbury’s The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit, Huck Finn, and David Mamet’s first professional production, Sexual Perversity in Chicago.
The Organic depended on subscriptions to maintain itself, and in 1981 I wrote this 16-page self-covered promotional comic book that went out to all of the company’s subscribers, as well as appearing as an insert in the Chicago Reader. It was printed on standard old school comic book paper in Sparta, Illinois (below are scans of reduced b&w Xeroxes of the original art). The back page was designed so that the comic could be folded in half and mailed, with a mailing label on one side and the message “Here’s Your Collector’s Item Copy of Weird Organic Tales” on the other.
My frequent collaborator Joe Staton provided the wacky art — along with Chuck Fiala, artist of the “Don’t be Left Out!”, “The 1981 Organic Theater All-Stars,” and a (not included here) subscription page — with Bruce D. Patterson on letters and colors.
Tags: advertising comic books, Bleacher Bums, Bruce D. Batterson, Chicago, Chuck Fiala, comic books, custom comics, David Mamet, Huck Finn, Joe Staton, Organic Theater Company, Paul Kupperberg, Stuart Gordon, WARP, Weird Organic Tales
Cool! That was my first professional job for a real comic book company! Just seeing it again here sends chills down my spine!
That was a fun job! I don’t get too many of them to sign at conventions, though.
The only reason for that that I can image is that it’s rarer than Action #1.