Got invited to record an off the record episode of Textual Healing. I read a short story of mine called “State Line Limbo” and chose the Tom Waits song “Burma Shave” to accompany the selection. Next weekend a full interview with Mallory Smart will be available. You can listen to my public restroom reading (keeping it classy) of “State Line Limbo” here.
Last week, it was my pleasure to have a long conversation with one of my oldest friends, Billy McCall, on the very first episode of Behind The Zines Podcast. We chatted about my “career” of zines and DIY publishing over the last 25+ years.
Rare live appearance August 31st in Lawrence, Kansas. I’ll be tabling at Paper Plains zine festival.
Temporarily closing my Etsy storefront in favor of selling my zines on this website this September.
“We Should Close”
88-page long, quarter sized zine about working in a record store. Complete with silly good times and tales of weirdo collectors of vinyl. Comes with its own playlist on YouTube or Spotify. Only $3!
It’ll be available soon, and I’m STILL sorting out an online store-front. So if you want a copy right away, shoot me an email. weirdodujour@ proton.me
“Make All Our Dreams Come True: 3 Years in Milwaukee”
A 2-buck chucklefuck. Written and assembled in under 5 days, this quarter size zine is 40 pages long. A bitter stream-of-consciousness-like rant about the foibles of moving to Milwaukee from Chicago. Highlighting memories of jobs, apartments, and neighborhoods with a slowly imploding marriage in the background. I wrote this in a flashflood of memories that wouldn’t recede in hopes of being able to finally let some stuff go so I could move on.
I’m sorting out an online store-front at the moment so if you’re wanting a copy right away, shoot me an email. weirdodujour@ proton.me
After a couple rye & sodas, I had the pleasure of yapping about my life of art and zines with Dmitry Samarov on hu u no. If you’re interested in listening to a variety of silly voices and over the top swearing, this is for you.
A few weeks prior, I appeared on Let’s Take a Moment with Billy McCall and Liz Mason to talk about the zine, Secret Picnic Spot.
Restock on Weirdo Du Jour, Ornery Cuss, and Cathode Ray Mission 1-3 over on etsy. But of course, if you just email me about purchasing a copy, you can get it a lot cheaper. weirdodujour@proton.me
Cult-comedy, Repo Man, celebrated its 40th anniversary in March of 2024. This science-fiction road film, written and directed by Alex Cox, is postmodern pastiche and a seminal entry in punksploitation. A tongue in cheek critique of Reagan’s America with a protagonist that doesn’t fit in the straight world during troubled times. Where everyone is fighting over scraps and crime seems to be the secret ingredient, but choosing to walk the seamy side could get you mixed up with space aliens.
After graduating from UCLA in the early 80s, Alex Cox and a few friends formed Edge City Productions to create low-budget feature films. He wrote the script for Repo Man as a satirical commentary on Reaganomics and a culture of excess and conformity. Essentially the beginning of our modern day ending. The film highlights the malaise of an 18-year-old punk in 1984, Otto Maddox. A young man that keeps getting in his own way while trying to forge his path. Otto’s parents are stoned hippies that sold out his future and are hypnotized by televangelists. He struggles to hold a regular 9-5, has a bum love life, and delinquent friends doomed to end up in jail or dead. Played by Emilio Estevez, Otto gets recruited by Harry Dean Stanton’s character, Bud, a repo agent playing by his own rules in the intense world of repossession. Cox once said in an interview that the movie “was based on my own personal Los Angeles horrors and the tutelage of Mark Lewis, a car repossessor and my neighbour in Venice.” Soon Otto is entangled in a hunt for a 1964 Chevy Malibu with a UFO cult, a lobotomized mad scientist, and a secret government agency.
Perhaps one reason the film is so beloved in the cult sense is because of how brutally relatable it can be even while having such a wacky plot. You watch Otto get hit with a devastating wave of existentialism, realizing how mundane the game of life is. Of course you’re gonna hop in the spaceship when the aliens arrive! Who doesn’t wanna be saved from the milquetoast roles of liminal suburbia?
In the mid-90s, Alex Cox created a script for a Repo Man sequel titled “Otto’s Hawaiian Holiday”. Universal Pictures owned the rights to any official sequel, so the lead character’s name had to be changed to “Waldo”. Cox was finalizing a deal to begin filming in 1997, but it collapsed when Emilio Estevez pulled out of the project, saying that the script did not make sense. The script remained on Alex’s website where Christopher Bones of Gestalt Publishing stumbled across it and reached out about a graphic novel adaptation. Illustrated by Bones and Justin Randall, Waldo’s Hawaiian Holiday was published as a quasi-sequel in 2008.
The story picks up 10-13 years where the Repo Man film left off. Otto Waldo returns from his space travels in the 64’ Chevy Malibu with no memory of where he’s been. It’s now the grimy Clinton-era, a culture choked with hotline scams and chain emails. His parents’ home in Edge City is now a rundown boarding house. Everything is different but still kind of the same? No longer a disaffected youth, Waldo is just another lost soul in the welfare-to-workfare 90s and gets a job in telemarketing flimflams. A cog in the machine is doomed to become a mark, and it doesn’t take long for Waldo to receive a sketchy call offering him a free holiday in Hawaii. But every attempt made to get away to paradise is thwarted by spam-artist bureaucracy and bizarre events. Eventually Waldo realizes that Los Angeles is an experimental self-maintaining prison constructed by Martians.
Though the illustrations are ambiguous, the reader will recognize the supporting characters as they were meant to be played by the original actors of Repo Man. From his girlfriends to his coworkers and even his fellow boarders. The faces are familiar, but they are different people, including Waldo himself. Rather than trying to make sense of it all, he holds onto the hope of going on that Hawaiian vacation.
You can purchase a PDF of Waldo’s Hawaiian Holiday on globalcomix.com.
As mentioned before, the Waldo script had been left untouched on the director’s website for years, prior to the graphic novel adaptation. In the early Aughts, a group of old punks from Texas reached out to Cox with the idea of making a low-to-no budget version of Waldo’s Hawaiian Holiday. With Alex’s permission, the motorcycle mechanic Stuart Kincaid with his team of Antstuie Productions, set out to honor the beloved 84’ cult film with a DIY sequel made by punks for the punks. Over the course of 3 years of filming, anything that could go wrong did go wrong. Beyond the crew being hassled by cops and blue-collar scheduling conflicts, delays crop up from dodging hurricanes Rita and Katrina. There are casting setbacks, and actors are paying their own way as a labor of love. Kincaid was selling off rare motorcycle parts to continue funding the project and even destroyed part of his own house to build the sets for his vision of Waldo. But Antstuie Productions soldiered on with their collective passion until issues between Kincaid and Cox reached a boiling point. Waldo’s Hawaiian Holiday was a hair shy of being completed when Cox rescinded the rights to his script, and the film is to never see the light of day.
That’s when Antstuie decided to make a documentary out of their tumultuous experience to salvage something from their effort. A Texas Tale of Treason -or- How I Learned to HATE the Bomb with a tagline that reads “The ALMOST Making of Waldo…” Featuring clips from the film and interviews from cast and crew, it seems as if Antstuie’s Waldo were to play out exactly as Gestalt Publishing’s graphic novel later would. Several members of punk bands like The Hickoids, Angry Samoans, and The Rhythm Pigs give their accounts of the roller coaster ride that was the filming of Waldo. Kincaid lays the documentary out as a cautionary tale to diehard Repo Man fans and anyone with interest in micro-budget filmmaking. Hopefully inspiring a renewed disgust for the nature of the Hollywood beast and its demi-gorgons of entertainment. Perhaps the biggest takeaway is not to meet your heroes and to think outside the standard definitions of punk rock. Alex Cox declined to be interviewed for the documentary and never publicly gave his side of the story. A Texas Tale is an honest representation of the blood, sweat, and guts that the crew put into this project and the devastation of being left hanging out to dry.
In 2024, there doesn’t seem to be any simple way to view the documentary. No online video, no downloading, streaming or purchasing. It seems as if A Texas Tale of Treason has become just as lost of a film as Antstuie’s Waldo’s Hawaiian Holiday. The trailer for the documentary can still be found online and the YouTube user “ant stuie” seems to be the only online presence of the original production company. But the account offers several clips from the documentary and raw footage of Waldo.
While Alex Cox shares the rights to Repo Man with Universal Pictures, neither can produce a true sequel without the other’s consent. Twenty-four years after the original film, he writes and directs a “spiritual sequel” in 2009 called Repo Chick. A cynical exacerbation of the 2008 economic crisis. In an interview with ScreenDaily, Cox admitted to being inspired by how things had gotten worse.
“The repo business has expanded to everything from boats, houses, aeroplanes, small nations … children.”
Repo Chick utilizes surreal green screen backgrounds and animations. An aesthetic reminiscent of Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly that gives the post-apocalyptic satire a gritty, contrast blown appeal. It may have even inspired the art direction of 2023’s popular Barbie movie. Though Repo Chick makes no references to Repo Man, Cox was able to recruit a lot of the same actors from the 1984 movie. Olivia Barash, Zander Schloss, Jennifer Balgobin, Del Zamora, Tom Finnegan, Eddie Velez, Biff Yeager, and Miguel Sandoval return in Repo Chick, but in completely different roles. Any fan of the original will find these familiar faces in the corners of the film a real treat. The goofy brute in Duke’s punk gang, Archie, now plays repo management that idolizes John Wayne and has the cool attitude of the character Bud. Once again, familiar faces but very different people.
The plot follows Pixxi, a spoiled heiress of a wealthy family in LA. After yet another tabloid scandal, her family disinherits her. To reclaim her fortune, Pixxi is expected to get a real job on the same day her car is repossessed, and her entourage begins to fall away. That’s when Pixxi learns what a booming and intense industry repossession can be during times of widespread credit collapse. As a thrill-seeker, she is immediately successful as a repossession agent. Now gainfully employed, she tries to reconcile with her family, only to find they have given her inheritance to televangelists. Determined to rebuild her wealth, Pixxi finds a wanted poster promising a $1,000,000 reward for the successful return of an antique train with a glowing caboose. She tracks the elusive California Zephyr with several prominent figures aboard and joins them on a tour of a proposed energy pipeline–but actually, they’re eco-terrorists! Threatening to use weapons of mass destruction unless the sport of golf is banned nationwide (I fully support this) , and all members of the federal government become vegan.
Repo Chick references with a sneering humor the cult-like figures of organized religion, local politics, and the prioritizing of luxury for the elite over sustainability for the masses. Like a snake biting its own tail, everybody repeats the cycle of just doing what they think they’re supposed to be doing. Simulacrum trapped in a tabletop experiment, it’s the same story just a different dimension.
Alex Cox returns for another plate of shrimp by announcing in early 2024 that he’s directing yet another sequel. Repo Man 2: The Wages of Beer is considered a reimagining and a continuation of the original 1984 film. Backed by Buffalo 8 Productions, it’ll star Kiowa Gordon as the lead role of Otto. Returning from his 40-year-long intergalactic joyride, Otto finds himself in a modern timeline ruled by internet, social media, and hi-tech scamming. The film promises to “deliver an enthralling mix of punk energy, existential comedy, and unconventional storytelling, navigating the chaotic world of repo men into a new age of nuclear brinkmanship and driverless cars.” Filming is set to begin in the summer of 2024.
Alex Cox’s Repo Man and the trilogy of “non sequels” fit together perfectly 40 years later. They contain running gags and themes within themselves and relating to each other. When paralleled to reality, everything is vaguely familiar but a slightly different flavor as society really is just that boring and predictable. Yet they find the absurd humor of being doomed to repeat history, which I suppose is the punchline to the cosmic joke. Lastly, the Repo Man multiverse is a credit to the desperation of the malcontents and the endless search for meaning. We can all only hope to be offered a ride in a time machine shaped like a 64’ Chevy Malibu.
– K. Ratticus
*Originally printed in Cathode Ray Mission #3 Fall of 2024
I’d recently uncovered a time capsule in my storage unit. A dusty shoebox containing the master copies of Lucille Brawl #1, a cut & paste comic created in May/June of 2006. Not knowing what I was doing at the time, I just started drawing my little cartoons with grey watercolors and pen nibs. It was glue stick versus packing tape, and I fumbled over layouts, texts, and dialog bubbles drawn with a ballpoint pen. Then I made the mistake of printing copies at Staples. So many details of the water-colored art were lost in washed out in photocopy toner.
What remains after all these years is an embarrassing and grimy as hell DIY comic book.
What’s more cringe is that for a while I would LARP/cosplay my own character out in the electric Chicago nightlife of the early aughts. Yikes.
There are a few copies currently for sale at Chicago Comics on Clark Street.
I wrote a zine, and it’s not about horror movies, but it does have a lot of monsters.
Ornery Cuss is a dark humored perzine with 11 short stories about mental illness, addiction, and grief.
Locally, it is available at Quimby’s Book Store & Chicago Comics. Soon, it’ll be available at Atomic Books in Baltimore, MD, and other distros across the U.S.
If you’re not in Chicago and can’t wait, Venmo $4 (+$1 s&h) to ‘weirdodujour’ and put your mailing address in the notes. I’ll even throw some little stickers in.
TW: drug and alcohol use, domestic violence, sexual assault, and death
Punks of a certain age are nostalgia junkies in spite of what they may tell you. Fond of orating personal experiences of formative years regardless of creative inclinations. Others are record keepers, documenting their scene through a camera lens, fuzzy tape recorder, or Xeroxed fanzine. At the turn of the millennium, the manner of capturing these moments was transformed seemingly overnight as the internet became more common. The DIY community had to evolve with the rise of social media, YouTube, and Bandcamp. 4-track recorders were replaced with laptops, cut n’paste became photoshop, and Facebook invites were favored over street teams posting show fliers. Even though punk remains a highly debated Schrodinger’s Cat, the scene continues to thrive through adaptation.
“Punk is never past tense,” writes British author and UK punk veteran, Ian Glasper. Sometimes known as “Slug”, Glasper has played bass for numerous bands such as Decadence Within, Stampin’ Ground, Human Error, A Flux of Pink Indians, and Suicide Watch– just to name a few. Glasper is also an ambitious historian of the UK punk scene, referring to himself as a “docu-mentalist”. Appropriately so as he started with Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984, published in 2003. Another 4 books followed to cover the mid 80s to present, ending the series with The Scene That Would Not Die: Twenty years of Post-Millennial Punk in the UK. Written factually as an encyclopedia but reading as comfortably as a fanzine, the book delivers 650 pages of 111 bands, 350 photos, and over 200 fliers. Glasper lets the personalities of the musicians he interviews shine through in a comfortable setting. The bands respond by sharing their stories of origin, the impact of social media, and classic drunk-punk anecdotes that come with the territory of playing gigs and touring.
I was initially intimidated by the size of the book, right out the gate. Knowing nothing of the UK’s hardcore scene aside from a few classic staples. Yet I embraced my education and read The Scene That Would Not Die from cover to cover instead of picking and choosing. At the end of every chapter, Glasper provides a select discography of each band and even links where you can learn more and listen to the featured musicians. Perhaps it took me longer than it should have to finish, but I used these provided resources to properly familiarize myself with each group. Engineer Records and Earth Island Books just announced the release of a 56-track compilation album to accompany the second run of the book, which I snapped up pretty quickly.
Being in awe of his creative gumption, I reached out to Ian to pick his brain about his writing process and bookshelf. He welcomed the opportunity with incredible warmth, just like any old friend from your own local scene.
KR: Everybody sort of has a story of where their creativity first bloomed. How did you get started writing? How did that evolve into your start for Terrorizer back in 1993?
Ian: Well, I always liked reading, and writing seemed to come relatively easily (compared to maths, haha!) I used to love all the James Bond books when I was a pre-teen, and remember writing a story for English class which involved a quite gratuitous torture scene, that prompted questions to be asked about what I was being allowed to read at home. If only they knew… but more on my love for horror later!
Anyway, I got into punk, which was very empowering, and you were encouraged/inspired to pick up a guitar or a pen – or both, in my case – and create your own art. I started doing a xeroxed fanzine in about 1985, called Little Things Please Little Minds, writing off to bands with generic questionnaires and stuff. My friend’s mum would photocopy them where she worked when the boss was out for lunch! I did five issues, before I got too busy with the band and stuff, but it planted the seed, for sure.
Then I was ordering lots of records from Rob Clymo, who ran a CD distribution out of Cornwall in the early Nineties, and I was always asking him for obscure hardcore and metal imports, so he knew I was into the scene. When he started up Terrorizer magazine, he asked me if I wanted to do a hardcore column, and the first “Hardcore Holocaust” ran in # 3. I did my first full interview the following issue, and then contributed to every single issue until it folded a few years back.
KR: Your first book was published in 2003 and there have been 5 other titles that followed in the next 17 years. That’s no small feat, considering your music career and personal life. What kind of writing process or disciplines do you utilize? Do you have a strict writing schedule daily?
Ian: Well, they were all pretty big books, and each took about two years to write, and I had a year off here and there. But you’re right, I have a full-time job, and only write – and play music – in my spare time. As well as the six books since 2003, I’ve recorded six albums and six EPs… the number of the beast, right? On average I probably do two hours a day writing, or thereabouts. Although back in the Noughties, I would get insomnia quite frequently, so I’d be up really early and/or late, and did a lot more than that. But I don’t have a writing schedule as such, yet even when I don’t write anything, I always try to do something every day towards whatever I’m working on, even if it’s firing off emails, chasing up photos… it helps to know you’ve done something positive to progress your project every day.
KR: So what do you have sitting on your bookshelf? What do you like to read regularly or what are some of your influential favorite reads?
Ian: I’ve always read horror fiction, since as long as I can remember, and a lot of my favourite books are from that genre – but I’ll save that for the next question, haha! I’ve kind of grown up with Stephen King though, and his books have evolved away from straight horror, and I’ve followed him on that journey. I pretty much pick his stuff up as and when it’s released and devour that; I love his work because it’s really easy to read – he doesn’t make everything convoluted for the sake of it – and he fleshes out such believable characters. But right now, I’m reading a non-fiction book, Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall, which I like to do now and again, just to feed my head a bit, and after that I’ve got NOS4A2 to read, by Joe Hill, who is of course Stephen King’s son. I also really love to read musical biographies/autobiographies, and have recently finished books on Sick Of It All and Therapy?
KR: I had read that you were a big fan of horror and sci-fi comics as a kid, do you still partake in the genre? Care to name some favorites that stick out in memory?
Ian: Yes! This is pure escapism for me. I love horror films, and I love horror books. I got into horror fiction when I was a kid, devouring all the works by pulp novelist Guy N. Smith, who sadly died very recently. From there, I moved to James Herbert and Shaun Hutson… I was reading a couple of books a week all through my teens, probably hooked in as much by the graphic sex as the gore and violence, truth be told. A few times I would stay up all night reading if I was really engrossed in a book. I’ve already mentioned Stephen King, who is a master story-teller, but some of my other favourites were Graham Masterton, whose early books especially were wildly imaginative, Robert McCammon, H.P. Lovecraft, Brian Lumley, Whitley Streiber, Clive Barker… the list is endless. As far as sci-fi comics go, well, I’m not a massive comic fan, truth be told, but as a kid I consumed 2000AD and Action… gratuitous violence and escapism was my calling, I think.
KR: Considering that 2020 was a lost year for many around the globe, it did provide ample time to reflect and freedom to create. How did you keep yourself occupied during quarantine? Did you work on any new projects, writing or musical?
Ian: Well, the new book, The Scene That Would Not Die: Twenty Years of Post-Millennial Punk In The UK, really came together after COVID kicked in. It gave me something to focus on, and seemed a great way of reminding people why we love underground music so much when there were no gigs… I say that as if it’s past tense, but at the time of writing, there are still no gigs, and I just hope we get back to interacting in that way soon. But needless to say, I had a bit of extra time for editing and proofing and everything, and I got it over the line just the right side of the deadline (I wanted it out before the end of 2020 – so the title actually made sense, haha!)
I also kept myself sane by writing lots of music and lyrics, and a lot of that ended up being used by Zero Again, the new band I’m in, that basically coalesced during lockdown. We bounced ideas back and forth and we were chomping at the bit as soon as the rehearsal studios opened to play together. We did two months of hard jamming and then recorded a dozen songs just before they shut everything back down again. Which was great timing really, because we’ve since released all those songs, as two EPs and a track for a compilation, whilst we’ve been unable to get back together to play. Having that material recorded has helped keep the band ‘active’ whilst we’ve been unavoidably inactive.
KR: The past 20 years saw rapidly advancing technology, forcing DIY scenes to adapt and evolve. What do you think the face of punk is going to look like post-pandemic?
Ian: Hopefully much like it was before, but we’ll cherish local gigs and bands just a little bit more. The thing that’s really in question is whether we’ll be able to gig internationally the way we used to… and that’s partly due to the pandemic, and partly due to Brexit, I suppose. But mainly the pandemic. We’ll have to wait and see, but I hope that upcoming young musicians are still going to be able to drag themselves around the world on a wing and a prayer like we’ve enjoyed doing these last three or four decades.
KR: What advice would you give to novice writers out there looking to evolve their craft?
Ian: I would just say: be yourself, and let your personality shine through, because a few honest words are worth a thousand that are less so. And keep chipping away at it – if you’ve got a book in you, don’t stop until you’ve got it out, because if the last year has shown us anything, it’s to make your own ‘luck’, because you can’t take anything for granted, and you certainly can’t sit back and wait for opportunity to knock. As Nasty Ronnie from Nasty Savage once said, “Life is short at its longest…”
You can get your own copy of Ian Glasper’s latest book at Earth Island Books.