Hi, welcome! This is Tom Hart. We're really honored to feature Craig Thompson.

Craig is arguably one of the best cartoonists of his generation. In addition to having sold tons of books, he's also got a beautiful way with words and pictures and has garnered the appreciation of hundreds and thousands of people, including a lot of artists.

So, it's wonderful to sit down with him, and it was really kind of a shock to hear him name me as one of his early inspirations; that's very kind. And Craig also expands the web by mentioning some other people at the end of this interview that we should be contacting.

But more importantly, I want to talk about how that web expanded, because we went to a little, not only out of the way, but sort of secret cafe in Providence, Rhode Island to film this interview. It's surrounded by artist lofts, and we hadn't even started yet, and we're filming outside, and a woman, Claire, came up to us and we had her ask the questions because she was interested in what we were doing.

By the tail end of this interview, and especially after the interview, we realized that Claire was deeply interested in these values. So much so that she was probably living them more than Craig or I. She and her partner, Femi, who also appeared for a few moments in the interview, have an art studio nearby where they host events and have art shows, and Claire, for instance, hates Instagram had some things to say about the soothing scrolling that is hurting her generation.

And way more interestingly., the way you find out about events in their art studio is, you have to call their landline, which is a rotary phone. And so we were really happy to connect with artists almost half our age, who really believed in the value of face-to-face contact and walking across town or walking from town to town, and reaching out the slow way, and the the mindful way and also the cumbersome way.

We were really honored to to be speaking with them. It's in the interest of connecting all these generations that these oral histories have been started and preserved.

So, I want to thank Claire and Femi, and I also want to thank Craig for sitting down with us, and thank what's left of the really interesting parts of Providence, Rhode Island for being there, and the secret cafe and everything else have a listen. Thanks!

Andrew Coltrin is a writer, comics artist, and disabilities advocate when not at the day job as a paraeducator for a large urban school district.

For decades Andrew thought he was just weird, anxious and unexplainably broken until the DSM finally had an update that caught up with lived experience. Andrew was diagnosed as autistic at the age of 37, and informally diagnosed with ADHD by his brother in 2023 (“your DHD is Advanced”).

Andrew’s previous works include the glossary zine A is for Autistic, and the zine Ability: Emerging from the Social Constraints on Neurodivergence and Disability. Andrew has also led staff trainings about neurodiversity and has spoken on panels at the Interdisciplinary Autism Research Festival (2021) and the Tucson Zine Fest (2023).

Thanks for listening!

Sam Henderson is an American cartoonist, writer, storyboard director, and expert on American comedy history.

From Sam:

“Technically, I started doing [mini-comics] at 12 in 1982. When I went to art school in the late eighties I got other students (including a young Tom Hart) into doing them. But I guess for this you'd say 1991. I did a bunch with different titles but did MAGIC WHISTLE as a regular series in 1993. All the while I was starting to sell work professionally and had an alt-weekly strip for a few years, doing MW as a minicomic until 1998 when it became a "real" comic (i.e. a minicomic with a slightly higher circulation and better production values). Most of my 90s minicomics were collected in a book called HUMOR CAN BE FUNNY.”

Saša Rakezić (born 1963 in Pančevo, Serbia), better known by his pen name Aleksandar Zograf, is a Serbian cartoonist, who was working in the former Yugoslavia in the 80s and 90s.

His was the main and sometimes only cartooning voice that many in the United States knew of from that region, and was very active in American mini-comics and underground publishing. Chris Lanier, on Zograf's website, writes, "Zograf's email dispatches (later collected in a book titled "Bulletins from Serbia," published by Slab-O-Concrete), ... talked about the images on Serbian TV, which mixed together old Yugoslavian war movies, Disney films, and news footage of gypsies taking scrap metal from a downed F-117 NATO plane. He mentioned the email battle of insults which took place after some Italians got hold of the email addresses of American bomber pilots, and forwarded them to Serbian friends living in towns that were slated for attack. He told how a refinery near his home was bombed, and released a cloud of steam that engulfed the area. He and his wife looked out the window of their flat, and "we saw just white fog, as if the whole world had disappeared..."

His many works include books about this time, Life Under Sanctions and Bulletins from Serbia, but he also created many dream comics, notably Psychonaut, and Dream Watcher.

His website is http://www.aleksandarzograf.com/http:...

We're very honored he spoke with us.

Thanks for listening!

Enjoy this interview with Tom Motley who treated us to page by page review of an issue of the Fandom House catalog from the early 90s and showing us so many of the things that were available in the catalog. Giving us stories, giving us context and finding a few really interesting cultural threads in there too.

I'm really happy Tom could come on and share with us. Tom is a kind soul and a really interesting creative thinker-- someone who's going to be experimenting and looking for how the medium works, but also celebrating the stranger more marginal ways in which people have made comics, and celebrating the stranger and more marginal creators.

It's great to have him as our guide, through this, walk through 80s and 90s mini-comics. Enjoy.

Thanks for listening!

Joe Chiappetta is the creator of the much loved comic series, Silly Daddy. From his Wikipedia: Chiappetta began publishing Silly Daddy in 1991. A graphic novel collection of his work came out in 1994, featuring a decade of art. Chiappetta began posting Silly Daddy as a webcomic in 2004, and moved it to Blogger in early 2007.

https://joechiappetta.blogspot.com/p/books.html

Peter S. Conrad is a cartoonist best known for Attempted Not Known, Vidrio Cafe, and This Was 2020. He has been making comics from the San Jose, California area for decades. You can find his online work at https://attemptednotknown.com/ and http://www.vidriocafe.com/