@rare asked me to contribute to the throwback. I dont have many pictures of myself, so I had to go to a record labels website to find some old pictures. More on that record label in a minute.
THE GRUNGE YEARS!
Spring of 1990, grunge was in full bloom, Mudhoney, Tad, the Fluid, the Chemistry Set, and all the bands you don't know about, because you weren't there.
The next summer I'll be in Chicago.
Chicago Comicon 1990. Straight Edge was now a thing of the past for me (Left with a 40 Oz beer) Jeff, Cody, and Paul. I don't know who the guy between my legs is.
THE CHICAGO NOISE ROCK YEARS
1991, I started attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I thought I'd be the worst comics artist among many, turns out Paul, Mark Fischer and I were the only serous comic artists at the school, so that made me #3 among the SAIC's comic artists.
Something VERY ODD happened to Mark and I that year. Returning to our apartmemt drunk one night, we found we had a message on our answering machine (this was 1991, everyone had an answer machine) from a new editor at Caliber Comics. Caliber, the publisher of the Crow, was launching a new imprint to compete with Fantagraphics, and they wanted to publish our comic fanzine Skin Graft Comix as a full fledged comic on that imprint "Iconographics." We decided to wait til we sobered up and said YES the next morning. We grabbed our friends Paul and Jeff and two issues of Sking Graft Comics was printed over the next year.
Me (left) and my oldest friend Mark had a conversation one night, we were both tired of comics, neither of us had bought one in ages, all we did was buy music and talk about bands. That night Skin Graft Comics died, and our record label, Skin Graft Records was born. This is a promo pic we took that we never used. We released some GOOD FUCKING MUSIC right out of the gate (the Dazzling Killmen, Shorty, Mount Shasta, Zeni Geva) and the label is running hot to this day. If you like fucked up music, you'll like Skin Graft.
Oops, this turned into an add! Anyway that was the early part of the 90's, I left the label after a while and have been cartooning ever since.
