The “byproduct” is a photoset containing a decent percentage of the covers to Chicago’s “NewCity” (A free arts weekly) published from 1992ish through 1997ish (Actually: the oldest cover is from 1991, and the most recent is from November 18th, 1999 – but there are gaps throughout). A wealth of 90′s design!

Why do I have these? Comic artist Chris Ware published much of his “Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth” graphic novel serially in the pages of NewCity throughout the 90′s, and I’ve been steadily accumulating issues for awhile now. The bulk of these issues were handed off by Steve Dalber, who will probably be shocked to see I’m finally doing something with them.

Some “highlights,” from my skewed perspective:

• 12/26/1991 – I think this cover is Ware’s first’s published work in Chicago?
• 5/21/1992 – “Acme Cartoons” officially starts running – teaser on the cover in vibrant magenta!
• 12/31/1992 – Ben Katchor cover.
• 7/29/1993 – The Liz Phair backlash begins…
• 9/30/1993 – Ware’s “Best of Chicago” cover.
• 4/14/1994 – Chicago weighs in on Kurt Cobain’s Suicide.
• 12/29/1994 – Ware / Walt Holcombe cover collaboration.
• 9/28/1995 – Mitch O’Connell’s “Best of Chicago” cover.
• 1/18/1996 – Tortoise grace the cover.
• 3/7/1996 – Another Mitch O’Connell cover.
• 10/24/1996 – A young-looking Wilco on the cover.
• 12/25/1997 – Another Ware cover – this one’s a wraparound.

If you should have any desire to own ~230 issues of “NewCity” minus the comics, get in touch – you can have them for the cost of shipping.

I spent a few minutes Googling the fragments of an address that appear in Tomine’s panels before giving up and checking the comments to see if anyone had figured it out (The address is that of The New Yorker’s Offices). An eagle-eyed reader of The Beat almost immediately identified that placing the four covers together creates a large image of New Yorker mascot Eustace Tilley, but even knowing that the image is there, it’s very subtle.

I’ve rigged an image of Eustace Tilley to overlay the four covers whenever you mouseover the image below. Switching back and forth between the overlay and the covers reveals some of the finer details of the disguised image: I particularly like how the scattered papers in Ware’s cover become fingers.

All told, we get a nice double fake:

• An apparent break from the anniversary tradition of a reimagined Tilley illustration, instead offering an imagined ‘origin story’ for the first Tilley cover.
• The whole of the story itself ends up being the Tilley cover.

Ware wrote up a nice appreciation of Rea Irvin (Creator of the original Eustace Tilley image) here.

Update: I’ve created a higher res version with opacity capability here.

Below is an example of the Ware strips I’m referring to, taken from the cover to a recent Penguin edition of ‘Candide.’

There is a long history of Conan’s bumper art paying homage to disparate pieces of visual inspiration. Awhile back, there was a great website collecting all of these homage images here, but it looks like it’s fallen off the web. In a Metafilter discussion of that site, the name Kevin Frank is floated as the mastermind of all this, and following up on that lead brought me to his Flickr account, which has a gallery of all the bumpers with commentary. In case any are missing there, it looks like the content from the first site is also up here. The internet.

An homage to Ware’s work previously surfaced in the background to a piece of Conan’s bumper art in November of 2005. If you don’t see it, Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan is the ‘Non-Conan’ drawing. Thanks to Ted Miller for originally pointing it out!

     After I expressed interest in seeing what the book contained, Chris Rice pointed out that Mile High Comics had a copy in stock for just over cover price, so I went ahead and ordered it. The book is of the ‘Garfield’ size and shape, and contains all the fascinating developmental beginnings that I’d hoped to find in ‘Floyd Farland.’

     Included are several strips bearing the title ‘Comick Strip,’ presumably published in the Daily Texan. Four of these, which bear separate titles and appear to have been published on consecutive days, can be cut out and joined together to form a circular, infinite comic strip. There’s a brief Floyd Farland strip, an oddly postmodern page-sized lettering of the word ‘Joke,’ and an interesting precursor to the faux-advertising style that Ware became known for when The Acme Novelty Library was publishing regularly.

     This one is an interesting combination of advertising imagery and linear narrative, a disconnect that echoes another of Ware’s early works – ‘I Guess,’ which is available online here.

     I love seeing the early work of cartoonists, as it adds the extra dimension of the craftsman’s learning curve to the narrative. A great example of what I’m poorly explaining can be found in the earliest volumes of Fantagraphics’ Complete Peanuts, and less-familiarly in “‘Lil Folks” and “It’s Only a Game” – collections of Charles Schulz’ pre-Peanuts and parrallel-to-Peanuts work, respectively.

     Unfortunately, my communications with the staff at the Daily Texan never really went anywhere. One of the weird perks of writing about something on the internet, however, is that every so often, someone will read it and send you glimpses of exactly what you wanted to see in the first place. Such is the case with an anonymous gentleman who sent me the following scan of the original art for one of Mr. Ware’s Daily Texan strips.

     ”Here’s a scan of a strip Chris Ware did for the Daily Texan back in 1988. Sorry about the quality of the scan, but it was done through glass and in two parts. I’m not going to unmount it in order to scan it.”

     ”I’m pretty sure that “Bande” was the name of many of those Daily Texan strips, all of which featured the semi-circle head guy. Chris didn’t always put the word Bande as the title though. I have others with no title, and one that has the title “Komix”, but they all feature that same character.”

     A huge thanks goes to David Pouchard for recording the program and sending me the tape (You can view David’s bibliography of Ware’s work in French publications here). I got the PAL videotape transferred to DVD (Expensive!), and am seeding a torrent of a small (but watchable) quicktime file containing the entire episode. Click here if you don’t know what a torrent is and follow the directions. Otherwise, you can grab the torrent file here. The show is mostly in English with french subtitles, so don’t worry too much about the language barrier!

     Also – why the hell don’t we have Art TV here in the US? I’d happily watch it in french if it were available to me.

UPDATE!

     You can download the whole file the old-fashioned way here (it’s being used in a college course, so take advantage of the educational institution-sized bandwidth!), or view it in three parts here, here, and here.

     Cartoonist Chris Ware and ‘This American Life‘ Host Ira Glass have collaborated on a DVD which is only available to those who donate to public radio. The DVD contains the narrated slideshow that Glass and Ware were presenting at various speaking engagements during the past year. I’ve pasted some background on the story below, taken from the official website for the DVD.

     ”Ira Glass and cartoonist Chris Ware decided to co-report a story together. Ira does the sound. Chris does hundreds of drawings. The result is a 22-minute story, with sound and images, now on DVD for the first time.”

     ”This story has never been on the radio. It was presented in pieces – as it was completed – on This American Life’s May 2003 “Lost in America” tour, and at Royce Hall in Los Angeles. It’s the true story of a boy named Tim Samuelson, who became obsessed with old buildings, especially the buildings of Louis Sullivan in Chicago, during the 1960′s and 70′s when they were being torn down.”

     ”At one point, hearing that a favorite building at Clark and Adams is being demolished, a thirteen-year-old Tim demands to meet with the architect who’s designing the glass-and-steel building that’ll take its place: Mies van der Rohe, one of the most famous architects in the world. Tim finds van der Rohe’s office. The legendary architect meets with the teenager.”

     ”Much more happens. It’s a very sad story, drawn with beautiful pictures.”

     The DVD is only available in exchange for making a hefty pledge to your local public radio station. If you’re interested, but your local ‘This American Life’ station doesn’t appear to be offering the DVD, they can probably still get it for you.

     A bit more on the DVD and packaging:

     ”Audiences who saw the work presented onstage saw huge projections of Chris Ware’s drawings. The cartoon buildings were tall as buildings.”

     ”To accompany the DVD, Chris has designed a 96-page book, full of never-before-published photographs of Louis Sullivan buildings, in their glory and in various states of demolition. Also, there are DVD extras: audio outtakes, a look at Chris’s pencil sketches, a high-resolution version of the movie that plays on PCs and Macs. “

     ”As he worked on this, Chris said he wanted it to be the most beautiful thank you gift public radio has ever offered listeners. The whole package is this gorgeous little book, filled with photos, with the DVD tucked inside. It’s being released first and exclusively through public radio pledge drives, and not available anywhere else.”

     There’s a quicktime preview of the DVD available for viewing here.

Ira Glass: One of the things I find myself – as somebody who does radio – always responding to and really aware of in, in your comics, in a way, in fact, I’ve never really noticed in other comics is um, that there are pauses built in. Like in the thing you just read, the guy will say something in one panel and then there will be a panel where nobody says anything and Jimmy just sits there, and then the next thing will happen. It’s like you’re building in, you’re building in a moment in between, like you’re building in pauses, you’re controlling time and the speed of the reading.

Chris Ware: I think that just comes from, from drawing – first of all without using words, and then trying to give it a real sense of the rhythm of life. And I can’t use any other word to describe it, but there’s a certain – when I’m drawing a strip, it has to have a certain rhythm to it and I basically play through it while I’m reading it, almost like a piano roll, and if I read through it and that there’s a pause in it or there’s a rhythm in it that seems wrong, I’ll subdivide a panel to put in a space, or -

Ira Glass: You’ll actually put in a panel, which is, which will space it out?

Chris Ware: Yeah. I mean, I would think it would be analogous to what you’re doing when you’re editing an interview so that it sounds natural and if somebody, you know, coughs or burps or whatever, or they say something embarrassing -

Ira Glass: Well then, well actually, well actually, like – somebody will talk and be making their big point and you just feel like – as a producer, you feel like, “Oh, I want to slow them down.” Because, because the point will have more emotion and will come across to the listener with the emotion that the person’s feeling more if you slow them down. And so, we’re constantly taking, like, these tiny little pieces of – of blank time and inserting it between words to change the pacing.

Chris Ware: Wow.

Ira Glass: Yeah. [audience laughter]

Chris Ware: That sounds – wow – [audience laughter] Is that legal, though? [audience laughter] I mean, it almost seems like that would be -

Ira Glass: It’s lying.

Chris Ware: – prosecutable, you know.

Ira Glass: Well, we had the quote the same. I mean, one of the things about audio – [audience laughter and applause] – one of the things about audio that’s um, particular and different than other media is that you can edit, you can edit those, you can edit out a phrase, you can move a phrase to another place – as long as, like, they keep a certain, sort of, pitch and speed of their voice. Like, there’s so much manipulation you can do. And so the version of – like sometimes people will say, “Well, how come the people on public radio just seem so much more articulate than people you meet?” And it’s because, man, we have edited out everything extraneous. You know, they’re talking better than they’ve ever talked in their lives. You know? And, and uh, you know, we’re making a more perfect version of them than could ever exist in nature. And – [audience laughter] And my feeling about it is like, it’s, it’s, it’s such an artificial, um, it’s such an artificial thing to sit down and tape somebody to start with. Like, you’re already not getting the real person; do you know what I mean? You’re already getting this weird approximation of parts of their personality that they feel comfortable saying in the presence of a near stranger with a tape going for an audience of a million people. Like, already – like, that’s such a weird thing that, um, to get at something where it seems like that, that they’re talking about something that means something to them and to make it come across right, putting in a pause here and there doesn’t seem like that much more manipulative than the act of recording itself. Suddenly I sound like Michel Foucault. Do you know what I mean? Like, it’s already so artificial. So I go, pshaw, a pause. They’re not ever gonna know. They just gonna think, “God, I am such, I am so expressive. Like, I left that interview, and I knew – I knew I nailed that interview with that boy, but I really nailed it. And when you put the music underneath, man, it just -.” You know? If there could be music underneath all the time…you know what the music is in the radio story? Music is like the frames on the page. Like the music actually takes it and makes it – the music takes it and makes it into something, which is larger than itself. It’s like it puts a frame around the picture, suddenly you see it as – as a cinematic thing, or you hear it as a cinematic thing when the music comes in.

Chris Ware: Well, you’re the first person I’ve ever noticed that’s ever done that – basically, where you can tell where somebody is actually about to start to tell a story, where there might be an introductory line, and then the music starts and you know that, “OK, this is the – this is where it begins.” It almost – it feels cinematic, but I’ve never heard anyone else do that before.

Ira Glass: Yeah, if you put the music in at a certain place it just creates this feeling of motion, “OK, now we’re going somewhere.” And then one of the tricks we use a lot is that if there’s music playing underneath somebody and you pull it out, whatever they say next, over the silence, sounds more important, and you pay more attention to unconsciously. And so, as a producer, if you want to be sure that people get this point, like this is the point, they must get this, or the rest of this isn’t going to work, or this is the really – like this is the most surprising thing they said, and you want to be sure that it comes across with the power that you’re feeling it, as the person putting it together, you totally pull out the music and maybe put in a little extra pause here or there. Because you’ve only got your sound and your silence, you know, it’s like – a pretty primitive medium, you’ve got your sound, you’ve got your silence, and so you’ve got to encase the sound around..

Chris Ware: That’s true. Gee! You sound like aesthetic fascists up here, or something.

     This is just a giant pull quote – you really should read the whole thing.

Double Takes

     Comic-book fans have been buzzing about a certain familiarity they’ve noticed recently: namely, that Stewie, the football-shaped-headed child who loathes his mother and invents diabolical weapons on Fox’s Family Guy, bears a striking resemblance to a comic-strip character: Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth (right), a football-shaped-headed child who fears his mother and invents things to escape from her. Chris Ware has been drawing Jimmy since 1991, creating a series of comic books called the Acme Novelty Library. A collection of Jimmy’s adventures will be published by Pantheon next spring. Says Ware, “I don’t want a book of seven years’ worth of my stuff to become available and then be accused of being a rip-off of Family Guy.”

     Guy creator Seth MacFarlane has no comment, but his production company, Twentieth Century Fox, issued this statement: “[We] maintain that Stewie is an entirely original, independently created character.” Ware says the similarities are “a little too coincidental to be simply, well, coincidental” but adds that he’ll try his best to shrug it off. “If I let it get the better of me, I wouldn’t get any work done,” notes Ware. “I’d just sit around and stew about it.” – Ken Tucker

     Reading this and then going back and reviewing some older, uncollected Jimmy Corrigan strips only make these coincidental similarities more suspicious. I offer as an example the sequence below, which appeared in Zero Zero #16 (published in 1996 – The Family Guy premiered in 1999). Click the image to see more of the strip.

     It’s all there – the character design, the extensive vocabulary and verbose tendancies, the mother issues and scientific proclivities… I’m a fan of The Family Guy, but it does begin to seem a little too coincidental. Crazy.

     Many fans of the work of Chris Ware are already aware of the href=”http://quimby.gnus.org/warehouse/”>Acme Novelty Warehouse – an earlier site that set out to keep track of where Mr. Ware’s works appeared.

     The Warehouse hasn’t been updated in ages, so I plan on keeping an unofficial, updated record here. I’ve imposed a loose order on my findings thus far, but i’m open to suggestions in that department. In addition to the sources listed above, I’ve borrowed liberally from the original Warehouse site which was put together by Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen, with help from Gus Mastrapa, Anthony Perna, Todd Morman; Michael Rhode’s href=”http://www.rpi.edu/~bulloj/comxbib.html”>Comics Research Bibliography; the Fantagraphics Website; and various listings that appeared in the newsgroups years ago.

     I don’t claim to own even 20% of the material listed here, so I have no doubt that the listings are rife with errors. I’ll be keeping the comments on this post open indefinately so that anyone who has further details, an addition, a correction, a clarification, a link, or an image can simply post a comment below. If you have images to send, you can email me here. I’ve bought a domain to make it easier for people to navigate to this bibliography: acmenoveltyarchive.org (should redirect here in the next few days), and I’ll probably come up with some dopey little icon to denote that the information has been confirmed with an actual copy of the item in question.

     A technical side-note: I know I went about coding this in a backwards sort of way, from a usability standpoint, at least. If anyone out there is knowledgable in some sort of database protocol that would make this easier to maintain, and wants to help out, by all means, let me know.

All images (unless otherwise noted) are copyright 1987-2004 Chris Ware.

Thanks: Chris Hope, Chris Merritt, Ken Parille, Alvin Buenaventura.

     Records with lockgrooves are cut like any other record until the beginning of the loop is reached. At this point, instead of spiraling inward, the radius of the groove becomes fixed, producing a perfectly circular loop that ends where it began.

     The most familiar example of this amongst record collecter types is Lou Reed’s infamous ‘Metal Machine Music.’ Recorded as a ‘Fuck You’ to Reed’s record label, the album is often described as ‘Unlistenable.’ The AMG review sums up the sentiment nicely:

“One would be hard-pressed to name a major artist who ever released an album as thoroughly alienating as Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music.”

     The the end of side four is a lock groove that extends the cacaphony to a length only limited by the listener. Reed himself has said of the album: “Well, anyone who gets to side four is dumber than I am.”

     Given the Monty Python troupe’s previous history with clever vinyl mastering, it should come as no surprise that they’ve already covered this territory:

     ”…on another Monty Python record, the Pirannha Bros. sketch at the end of one side finished with a lockgroove of “Sorry squire, I scratched the record I scratched the record I scratched the record… ad infinitum (or the next power cut). Hours of fun.”

     The album in question appears to be ‘Another Monty Python Record,’ but I haven’t yet confirmed this.

     A few ‘serious’ artists have used a final lockgroove to include jokes, and in the case of English band Heaven 17, a perpetual pun. The final track on their ‘Penthouse & Pavement’ album – ‘We’re Going to Live for a Very Long Time’ – builds to a never-ending groove repeating the phrase ‘For a very long time.’ The James Gang’s “Yer Album” features messages in the lockgrooves that end each side. At the end of side one, the lockgroove repeats “turn me over, turn me over, turn me over…”; and on side two it plays “play me again, play me again, play me again…”.

     Other artists have used the repetition of a lockgroove loop to exaggerate the duration of certain sounds. At the end of side two of Abba’s ‘Super Trouper,’ after the final song – “Like Old Friends Do” – the audience’s applause continues into a locked groove (From a NG posting on the topic: “Wow, must have been a great performance, they’re giving them a neverending standing ovation…”). Side two of Pink Floyd’s ‘Atom Heart Mother’ ends with ‘Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast,’ and the dripping tap continues until you lift the needle.

     Of note to crazy record collector types is “Loop,” a flexidisc by the Velvet Underground which was included in the December 1966 issue of Aspen Magazine (Edited by Andy Warhol). Details, from a VU discography site:

     ”Loop is the B-side. The label says “Guitar and feedback”, “First half of a 15-minute recording made with two monaural tape recorders” and “Final groove purposely left open”. The credits went to John Cale who is supposedly the only person playing on Loop. The flexi has a closed-groove ending so the last groove repeats itself ad infinitum.”

     Moving beyond the novelty of the loop, some artists have creatively used lockgrooves to hide extra tracks, creating a ‘false ending’ to the record before the hidden track’s grooves. The listener could hear the ‘hidden’ music only by manually placing the needle beyond the lock groove. This technique was used on the Pale Saints’ “Half-Life” 12,” which had a lock-groove after the second song on the second side, ‘hiding’ an unlisted third song; and in similar fashion on the split 12″ by Nurse With Wound / Sol Invictus / Current 93.

     The 1968 Moby Grape album ‘WOW’ has a lockgroove that seperates the song “Just Like Gene Autry: A Foxtrot,” which unlike the rest of the album, is mastered at 78 RPM. The track is also said to be ‘mixed to sound like an old 78.’

     My interest in lockgrooves has led me to do something I NEVER would have guessed I’d ever do: I got into an eBay bidding war over a Lee Ranaldo record. Ranaldo’s 1987 SST release ‘From Here to Infinity’ consists entirely of songs that end in lock grooves. Each song builds to a perpetual 2-second loop which continues until you get up and advance to the next track manually. In the middle of one side is an etching of a flaming serpent chasing its tail around the record. Apparently SST also released this on CD, which seems to defeat the purpose. At any rate, I lost the auction, so if a vinyl copy pops up on eBay again anytime soon you’re not allowed to bid against me, I hereby decree.

     A legend amongst lockgroove enthusiasts is Boyd Rice, an avant garde electronic experimentalist who is “notable for being one of the first avant-garde rock artists to use turntables in his work,” according to his AMG bio. He records under the name ‘Non,’ and his most influential work appears to be 1978′s ‘Pagan Muzak.’

     Mute Records reissued ‘Pagan Music’ at some point, and they’ve got a great article on the album here:

     ”Pagan Muzak is a 7″ vinyl long playing record housed in a 12″ sleeve. It consists of 17 locked/looped grooves, each of them containing a different noise. A second axis hole drilled off-centre doubles the number of tracks; and as it can be played back at up to four speeds – 16, 33, 45 or 78rpm – working out just how many tracks Pagan Muzak effectively offers the listener involves complicated calculations of all the different playback combinations of axis choice, turntable speeds and the grooves themselves. The mind boggles, yet when it was sold as a long playing record, some buyers thought they’d been short-changed by at least five inches. Boyd recalls, “Because it came out as a 7″ record in an album sleeve, people used to go,[in a whining voice] ‘It says LP on here. . .’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘LP means long player, and this is the longest player you are ever going to find’.”

     ”Between the record’s peculiar format and the noises contained in its locked grooves, Pagan Muzak clearly anticipated the sound and shape of many music practices to come. Rice’s radicalisation of vinyl reversed the listener’s usual passive relationship with the record as a sound carrier. To listen to it meant first of all making ‘musical’ choices regarding pitch and tempo, dependent on playback axis and turntable speed. In this sense, putting on Pagan Muzak was a kind of rehearsal of a near future, when DJs and turntablists would play records as a musical instrument.”

…

     ”Getting the idea was the relatively easy part. Getting the record manufactured presented a formidable logistical challenge. Boyd continues, “Well, because they always lock off a groove at the end of a record, it seemed reasonable to me that they would be able to do it at any mastering plant. But everyone I spoke to said, ‘No, you can’t do this, it’s impossible, the technology doesn’t exist’. Then these people in Virginia said, ‘Oh yeah, we should be able to do that, I don’t see why not’. But a couple of months later the tapes came back with a letter saying it is not possible. Finally I went to this mastering plant in LA, and talked to its president, and he said, ‘Well, yeah, I think we could do that’. He kind of took it on as a personal challenge and did it himself. . . Always go to the top!”

     Rice has also released the ‘Rangnock Rune’ 12″, with four locked groves and and etching on orange/reddish vinyl. Other career highlights include 1984′s ‘Easy Listening for the Hard of Hearing,’ an album of percussion sounds produced by everyday objects. Mute maintains a fairly comprehensive Non page with a discography. It’s worth noting that a history of questionable politics has marred his reputation. The AMG bio touches on some of these unflattering associations:

     ”His career moved towards a bizarre mix of a cocktail lounge sounds, avant garde noise, and misanthropic folk music as it went along, bringing him a mild cult audience. But anti-Jewish and anti-Christian statements that sprung from his association with a cult and his friendship with Charlie Manson did severe damage to any momentum his career could have had and left him fairly obscure by the mid-90′s.”

     There are several newsgroup threads discussing his various ambiguous political connections. Most of the information is pretty vague, but there are threads here, here, and here.

     The taj mahals of lockgroove ridiculousness are the RRR 100 and RRR 500 compilations, a 7″ and 12″ consisting of nothing but lock grooves by various artists. RRR 100 was released first and contains, as the title suggests, 100 lock grooves – 50 to a side. The RRR 500 LP features a ridiculous 250 lock grooves per side, each running 1 to 2 seconds. A good thread on the staggering impracticality of the LP is here:

Sean Casey: “quick question about these locked groove records: i assume you have to pick up the needle to get to the next groove, right? but with 500 people, how do you tell one groove from the next? are the grooves spaced out more than on a normal record?”

‘Skincrime’: “Let’s see, we’ve got 33 1/3 RPM multiplied by 20 Minutes (say for an average LP side, could be alot more, or less……) and we get 666 grooves, so, the grooves are a SLIGHT bit further apart then on a Normal record…… As far as FINDING a particular groove that you want to listen to…….well, have fun………”

Erik Hoffman: “I have a Technics 1200 turntable and it just so happens that when I lift the stylus arm and then put it back down it advances one groove. Of course if I wanted to listen to lock groove # 224 I would have to do this 223 times!! This was not a problem with the 100 lock groove 7″. I can’t imagine doing this witht the LP.”

‘Voice & Salt’: “A nice side effect of the fact it’s difficult to find a particular groove is that they’re anonymous — oh well, I guess we’ll just have to listen (over and over and over again….) “

     A second pressing of RRR 500 is available here from forced exposure.

     Blake Edwards, the man behind recording project Vertonen released a 7″ called ‘Lock Up‘ in the early 90′s. The A-side consists of 15 lock grooves. Blake has posted the story of his experience getting the 7″ pressed on his own, and it’s an interesting read if you’re into that end of music production / label business. There are few bits about the nature of manufacturing lock grooves within the epic tale:

     ”…when the lock groove locks, you usually get a click. However, some of the loops I recorded were single pitch loops, so when the groove locked there was a fuzzy pitch shift. Not heinous, but somewhat annoying nonetheless. There was nothing I could do about it anyway, since apparently that’s just the nature of the beast of lock grooves.”

     Also: ‘The Lock Grooves’ is a good name for a funk band.

     Another interesting thing she found was that another George Wilson did the cover interior illustrations for a handful of Hardy Boys novels. Initially I hypothosized that this was where the pseudonym came from, but on further investigation I’m less sure. Worth mentioning, though.

     Supposedly there are two more Chris Ware works floating around credited to George Wilson, so if you happen to stumble upon one, let me know! In the meantime, we have this to look forward to:

McSWEENEY’S ISSUE 13

Edited by Chris Ware
$24 US, hardcover
Coming in April

     Issue 13 is a Very Special Issue. We might say that a lot, and we mean it every time, but this time we really really mean it. This issue is all comics. It is edited by Chris Ware (author of Jimmy Corrigan: Smartest Kid on Earth), and features so many artists to know and love: R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Daniel Clowes, Lynda Barry, Los Bros Hernandez, Adrian Tomine, Julie Doucet, and on and on. The issue also includes essays from Michael Chabon, Ira Glass, John Updike, Chip Kidd, and others. Hardcover, clothbound, with an enormous dust jacket that does much more than guard against dust. This one makes our throats go tight.

“A few weekends ago, I went to our local library’s book sale. There, amongst the gently used hardcovers, I spotted the spine of a book bearing some hand-lettering that looked very similar to the hand-lettering that cartoonist extraordinaire Chris Ware did on the spine of The Comics Journal #200 (I swear to god I am not making that part up – that’s actually how I found it). A comparison:

     I picked it up, and the cover had all sorts of little Ware-ian illustrations and trademark techniques. So I open the back cover and the jacket design is credited to George Wilson! A Mystery! Photos of the jacket artwork are here, here and here. The book is a first edition hardcover copy of ‘Anything Considered’ by Peter Mayle, and my best googling has turned up no reference to this particular mystery on the Internet. I did turn up a George Wilson who appears to be employed in the publishing industry, but anyone who is even mildly familiar with Ware can just TELL it’s his work. If you know Chris Ware, you should tell him that the jig is up: his cover’s blown and I therefore deserve the original artwork for the cover. “

And now… the resolution:

Dear Mr. Kempa,

     Yes, “George Wilson” is a pseudonym I use for crass hackery which I feel was altered enough from my orginal “idea” (if there was one) that I don’t want my name on it; I’ve used it four times now in a variety of circumstances only to indicate that whatever it impugns should in no way ever be considered “art” or be confused with what I normally do, even though it’s all probably virtually indistinguishable to the layman.

     Thanks for asking, however, and while it’s no secret really, I’m sort of amazed at the number of queries I receive about the name; guess I’ll never be able to smuggle arms or anything as I don’t really seem to be the “undercover” type.

Best wishes, thanks again, and regards,

C. Ware.

     This obviously means I have three more ‘George Wilson’ works to track down. And I have no idea what they might be. If you have any info, let me know.