2019+
In middle 2017 I was sleeping on couches or in a 2001 Honda Accord, by Echo Park Lake or sometimes the Santa Monica Pier. Blaise had just finished a build of 2001 and scrolled through it for me as a pdf on his phone, at the cafe in Stories Books.
When we said goodbye he asked if he could transcribe a voice memo I’d recently sent him; this ended up in Altcomics Magazine 4; the one with a cover by Maggie Umber, sitting next to writing by Morgan Vogel. He sent me an email address and password, which worked as a login for tumblr.
I started posting in tandem with Blaise; who’d transitioned into posting about 2dcloud. its Kickstarters and Altcomics events, with kind of designed short video clips of cartoonists in front of projectors at readings, and luxurious photography of 2dcloud's various new print publications, including Altcomics Magazine-- a series of pamphlets mostly made up of transcribed conversations between artists. The person was the thing. “From a Moodboard to a Movement”.
I felt like I’d maintain what I thought the tumblr classically did before it aligned with a publisher — Feed images through a slick semiotic trick. under the altcomics banner we can flip a lot of images into being read as comics, or at least of relevance to a kind of comics modernist project. From theory, to fragmented paintings, medieval manuscripts, advertising, etc. Attribution opens up doors for some serious joking. Consider the cartoonist Marilyn Monroe. Or The CIA.
Drawing by Marilyn Monroe
Declassified CIA document titled Resonant Breathing Exercise
Steve Grove
And otherwise, it’d post comics imagery from current cartoonists, and as they come to appear again and again, forms a roster the blog can be said to advocate for. The blog looked corporate and its editor seemed anonymous. In its early days (2011) when asked who ran it, Altcomics would claim to be run by the illustrator Jillian Tamaki. It was only in the later half of the decade that Larmee would be linked publicly, on a press tour for a Best American Comics volume.
Often, when I mention the blog to a new acquaintance who is connected to a scene or two, there’s a flash of recognition. Sometimes pride at having been reblogged there themselves. Sometimes the suggestion that Altcomics is what comics is — is understood truly as what comics understands itself to be, somewhere. And there’s a kind of awe about the state of that art.
By the time Raighne reached out in 2019, I’d been running it for a year and half. He wanted to revive the magazine and reading series. I hadn’t really realized the label had whittled down to just him. He was living in Bridgeport, Chicago, on the northern tip of the Southside with the cartoonist Ash H.G. I’d moved to an apartment in East Hollywood on Hollywood Blvd. Actually the abandoned studio of a painter.
recent drawing by Raighne
I didn’t think the name worked anymore. There’d been an online alt-lit when the blog started, which seems to have re-organized more recently under the more descriptive auto-fiction — some of the people are the same. And there’d emerge an alt-right, which had memed Matt Furie’s stoner comics character Pepe the Frog.
I suggested our new project be called Compact. I’d been struck by the silhouette of a Korean girl checking her makeup with a compact mirror, her image was made just as much by her bob and thick New Balances as by her powder box. But a pocket mirror, would recall 2dcloud’s flagship anthology Mirror Mirror. And as an adjective; it meant that whatever it was would make the most of the space it has. The mirror itself, open in an outstretched hand, looks like a phone, without being one.
Ad for a reading event cancelled by the first week of lockdowns. (2020)
“I don’t care so much what we call it, so much as I care about what it does” said Raighne, as a voice on the phone.
Teaser (2019)
Later, in tech, in the middle of laying out Compact Magazine #1, I’d see banner ads for compact mirror-style phones in Chicago train stations. Foldable glass.
Altcomics Magazine 2 feat. Kristina Tzekova ( 2016, Out of Print )
Steve Grove in Compact Magazine #1 ( 2023, New )
Raighne also sent along some work to do preparing that season's books for print -- at first he wanted me to lay out Kyung-Me's Copy Kitty but working with the very large TIFF files would crash my computer. So instead I 'naturalized' the English of Max Baitinger's translation of his graphic novel Röhner; originally published in German by Rotopol. Making colloquialisms go more smoothly and slightly nudging placements of text within the comic.
Röhner by Max Baitinger (2020)
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