l i z * b a i l l i e

Another day, another page of travels through the gate with our most recent keeper-pair, Wrigley and Chewbie, in today’s Freewheel!

So I know I already told you this on Friday, but it bears repeating that my upcoming book RELEASE THE BATS! is now available for preorder for only ten bucks! RELEASE THE BATS! is a collection of over 100 pages of comics you probably have not seen from the past ten years, mostly anthology pieces, random things I only put on the internet, and stories from the Minicomic of the Month Club. I sent the files to the printer on Friday so will probably get the bill soon, and hopefully have the books in time for SPX in September. Every preorder gets me that much closer to being able to pay the bill so if you plan to buy it anyway, why not consider preordering? Each preordered copy will come signed with a sketch inside!

In other news, my friends Paul and Joe have a musical combo/band/project thing called Zelda and the Unibrows and they just came out with this really hilarious short film starring themselves and set to their own music called Unreason. I highly recommend watching it! If you like it, you can also vote for it on Funny or Die! (I recommend voting “funny”) Knowing them even slightly in real life, it’s pretty funny to watch them act out these exaggerated versions of their own real-life personalities, especially Paul’s naturally misanthropic personality. Check it out!

Zelda and the Unibrows — Unreason from Zelda and the Unibrows on Vimeo.

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We are THROUGH THE GATE in today’s Freewheel! I thought this time I’d let you see a little more of what it’s like to pass through the gate instead of being lazy with all black panels. I think it helps convey the whole craziness of going through the gate pretty well.

Moderately big news! I’m hopefully sending the files for Release the Bats! to the printers today to HOPEFULLY get it in time for SPX in September and I finally have a cover image to show you!

AND! It’s available for preorder! Just click here and for ten bucks, it’ll be yours around mid-September! The advantages of preordering are, other than helping me pay to get it printed, your copy will be signed with a small sketch inside! I’m printing a very, VERY small print run of these using POD but it would still be a big help to get some preorders if you know you’re going to buy it anyway.

Release the Bats! is just over 100 pages of rare and unpublished work from the past ten years (mostly the last five) including work that was only seen in small minicomic print runs, or on the internet, or through the Minicomic of the Month Club, and the like. Preorder it today!

And ALSO! There were two new Raids of ’65 pages posted this week! Check em out here and if you want to see more, I’m only about $32 away from the next page!

My comic about record collecting was also just posted on If You Make It this week! If you didn’t see it the first time I posted it here, you can read it for free there!

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The keepers are getting Jamie ready to travel through the gate! Does any of this seem familiar? It should; the Tony’s Twins from way back in Chapter Three took Jamie through a gate of sorts.

There’s a new page of the Raids of ’65 side story up right here! There’ll be another one up later today! Yee-haw! If you want to see more pages of the Raids of ’65, you can donate right there on the story page!

I’ve been working on a new book collection of a bunch of my older contributions to random anthologies and various unpublished work called Release the Bats! set to come out at SPX this year. For various reasons, I couldn’t post everything that I had, so I put some of it online. Like this old one-pager called Dear Crimpshrine, which you can click to read bigger. It originally appeared in (I think) My Brain Hurts #0.5, which came out in 2001 I think.

It’s pretty hard to read small, which is why I didn’t include it in the book. What can I say, I was just starting out and I didn’t really understand the concept of shrinking pages yet!

Hopefully Release the Bats! will be available at SPX but if not, it’ll be there for NYCC!

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Aaaand we’re back to the waking world! They’re gonna let Jamie use the super secret gate! Awesome! In today’s Freewheel!

So I went to the Philadelphia Alternative Comic Con yesterday (also known as PACC) and it was pretty rad! It was easy to get down to Philly from NYC so I was able to just drive down with some friends and drive back right after. No hotel room costs or major expenditures! I gave away a ton of hobo names and sold a ton of books! Well, not a TON, but enough that I covered my expenses and turned enough of a profit that it was worth a day’s work for me. Which is great!

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Today in Freewheel I present to you the last of the dream sequence pages! On Monday our hero shall arise!

Don’t forget – this weekend I’ll be at the Philadelphia Alternative Comic Con at the Rotunda (4014 Walnut St) in Philly on Sunday from 12-6pm! Come and get some comics, prints, buttons, what have yous! I will try my best to have my Hobo Name Generator available as well but I’m not making any promises because I have a lot of other stuff to get done in between now and PACC!

I also may have mentioned that I have a two-page comic in the PACC anthology that will be for sale at the show!

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More dream sequence, in today’s Freewheel! I don’t have much to comment on, I mean it’s a dream sequence! How much can I really say?

Just the other day I received a package in the mail from my buds at Microcosm Publishing, and inside was the brand spankin’ new gigantic SCAM Anthology they just put out! When I was a teenage punk kid in the 90s I used to hear about the SCAM zine all the time; it was the stuff of legend! I’m not sure when it stopped being produced but I know it was hard enough to find in the mid 90′s (at least for me, I never found it) that you would hear tell of it, like it was the Boo Radley of zines or something.

People would refer to the scams told of in SCAM, tell how they worked or didn’t work, and believe me, if it’s one thing punk kids like doing it’s finding new ways to scam free stuff. When I was younger (I don’t do this anymore) my favorite thing was to order a pizza from this local Domino’s downtown (notorious donators to some questionable organizations, so I never would have bought anything from them anyway) and get it with a ton of ridiculous toppings on it that no one would ever order. We would have it sent to an imaginary apartment across the street from a stoop where we could watch the attempted delivery, and at the end of the day after the shop closed, we would go in and ask if they had any extra pizzas. Lo and behold, the pizza with the crazy toppings would be sitting there for us to consume! The people who worked there were always really nice and gave it to us without any hassle. We would usually eat our fill and then share it with friends or random homeless people we found. Everybody wins!

(Actually, I drew a short two-page “My Brain Hurts” story for the Microcosm anthology 13 Years of Good Luck based around the pizza scam! You can get it for only a BUCK from Microcosm as well!)

Anyway, SCAM was a zine full of stories like that, and now I’m finally getting to read some of them in this great anthology! It’s HUGE and only $13 if you get it from Microcosm. I’ve only read through the first issue’s worth so far, but it’s totally worth it already.

Also awesome: I got this adorable note from my bud Sparky with the package, she works for Microcosm and undoubtedly packed the order (I helped fund their Kickstarter to publish the SCAM antho):

Don’t forget, Philly folks – I’ll be at the Philadelphia Alternative Comic Con this Sunday and I have a two page comic in the PACC anthology, which will be for sale at the con!

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Welcome to Chapter Seven and welcome to the DREAM SEQUENCE. I probably shouldn’t even mention that it is a dream sequence because there is a chance that some people did not figure it out and feel like now I have spoiled it for them. Oh well. Sorry. I will leave it a mystery as to who is doing the talking, though. I’ll let you figure that one out on your own.

In today’s Freewheel!

There’s a new Raids of ’65 page up today, by the way! Read it here! Another page is in the queue to be posted next Monday, and then after that I will need to get some more donations to post the following page. Currently I am $32 away from adding another page to the queue! Donate here!

I’ve probably already mentioned that this Sunday is the Philadelphia Alternative Comic Con and that I’ll be there, but it doesn’t hurt to mention it again! It will be held at the Rotunda (4014 Walnut st.) on August 8 from 12-6pm. The entry fee is a sliding scale from $3-10 depending on what you want to give or can afford.

I am also in the PACC anthology! I have a two page comic in it about record collecting (I posted it here before at some point recently). It will also have comics from the likes of Box Brown, Sally Bloodbath, Matt Wiegle and L. Nichols, among other. Here is what the cover looks like:

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It’s the very last page of Chapter Six! On Monday we’ll begin Chapter Seven, and with it a TOTALLY INSANE DREAM SEQUENCE. Well okay it’s not “totally insane” but it is kind of funky. I hope that’s not a spoiler… in today’s Freewheel!

This weekend is the very first Pete’s Mini Zine Fest in Brooklyn, and I might go. I was thinking about it, and though I have a crap ton of work to get done… they DO have $2 pints of Yuengling, which is probably my most favorite beer, soooo I might go after all! I didn’t even realize until last fall when I was in the midwest that Yuengling is kind of a regional beer of the northeast area of the U.S. Someone asked me what kind of beer I wanted and when I said “Yuengling” they laughed at me and told me I wasn’t in Pennsylvania!

“Yuengling” is pronounced “ying-ling.” Just an FYI if you are thinking of trying to order it at your local bar or neighborhood pub this evening.

Yuengling was the first beer I ever tasted that made me realize beer could actually taste good and wasn’t necessarily just there to get me drunk, like the Midnight Dragon (RIP) and assorted flavored malt beverages I frequently imbibed as a youth.

The other favorite was St. Ides Special Brew, which was (I’m guessing) as close as the company could come to marketing to kids and teenagers without crossing over into the infamous flavored malt beverage ice pops territory. Yup, back when I was a teenager there existed frozen ice pops that had booze in them. Of course, we only heard tell of them – the neighborhood delis that sold alcohol to minors did not keep these things in stock (and smartly so – it seems the few stores that did stock them were swiftly reprimanded for selling to minors). But believe me, among my friends, these boozey pops were the stuff of legend. They were the holy grail of hootch.

ANYWAY. Yuengling is a very tasty beer, and now that I am too old to give a shit about getting wasted on candy flavored booze, I can appreciate the merit of such a thing. And only $2 a pint at Pete’s Mini Zine Fest this Saturday!

OH! I almost forgot - the big 50% off sale is still going on in the store! It’s going until Sunday! Just enter the code BIG100 at checkout to get 50% off your entire order! GO GO GO!

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Today we learn more about the nature of fragments! Apparently they are supposed to be broken? Well, according to Wrigley, anyway… in today’s Freewheel!

The big 50% off sale is still going on in my store for the rest of the week to celebrate the 100th update of Freewheel this past Monday! Everything is 50% with the code BIG100 at checkout! I feel like Crazy Eddie, who you may remember if you grew up in the New York area in the 80′s, like I did. His prices are….IIIINSAAAAANE!

Apparently there was a big scandal that put the original Crazy Eddie’s out of business because of all kinds of fraudulent business practices and the real-life “Crazy” Eddie Antar fled the country using a fake passport! IIIIINSAAAAANE! According to the internet, somebody re-started it in some form in 2009, but it’s just not the same without those corny TV ads!

Do you know what I haven’t seen a commercial for in ages? Douches.

No, not THAT kind of douche! And not the French word for “shower,” either! This kind, where a mom and her daughter have a very vague talk whilst on a boat sailing nowhere in particular:

I guess it probably helps that it’s long since been proven that douching is bad for women, kind of like how you never see commercials on TV for cigarettes. Actually I don’t think I remember EVER seeing a commercial for cigarettes… but YouTube has naturally bestowed on me evidence to the contrary. For example, did you know that the Flintstones original sponsor was Winston cigarettes? Yup, and I offer this ad as proof. Crazy, insane, almost unbelievably ridiculous proof:

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Welcome to the official 100th update of Freewheel! Let’s celebrate with more tunnel action with Jamie and these two keepers!

But more than that, let’s celebrate with a nice big SALE in the ol’ store! Use the code BIG100 to get a big 50% off everything in the store! The sale will continue throughout the week to celebrate 100 updates of Freewheel! Also, as a bonus incentive, every order will get something extra thrown in the envelope! It might be a screenprinted card, it might be a button pack, it might be a minicomic… order something and find out!

ALSO: a new page of the Raids of ’65 side story has gone up! Check it out here! I received some very generous donations recently due to my dog’s skyrocketing vet bills (short version: she’s very sick and they can’t quite figure out what’s wrong, one vet told us she definitely had terminal cancer while over the weekend another said it might be something else) and since for every $50 I get, I post another page of the story, there are two more pages left in the queue. Only $32 to add another page to the queue! I’ll post the new pages on Mondays! Donate here!

I’ll be at the Philadelphia Alternative Comic Con on August 11th! If you’re in the area I hope you’ll come say hi! I’ll be selling all my regular stuff, plus an assortment of $1 and $2 minicomics I’ve been trying to get rid of!

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