BLOOD MAGAZINE
down to a very small handful of copies that I think I'm gonna hold onto. Not sure if I have it in me to reprint this one so here's a pdf if you wanna read for free
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KguGioSOQ0_4SVaAXtuNo7sepGhnEeXn/view?usp=sharing
Originally labeled this a "Horror Comic" everywhere online cause A) lying on the internet gives me a huge rush. B) was feeling conflicted about the book/misanthropic in general and enjoyed the image of someone's face as they realized they were actually reading a bunch of a guy's diary strips. I think self-proclaimed Horror Fans have some of the lowest artistic standards I've ever seen and didn't feel bad about taking 5 dollars from them. Fuck it. C) it sort of WAS one -- about the horrors of.... substance abuse. The form of it I mean-- sort of seemed like the same as an "elevated" horror movie where nothing happens until the character's "trauma" gets literalized at the end as a Babbadook, etc. The way I started drawing myself started veering into body horror at the end and drifted in and out of a Freddy Krueger-like dream world... I dunno, if you read it you'll see what I'm talking about. Also realized once it was printed it was kinda like reading The Exorcist with but no exorcist character.
The exorcism I guess was making the book, to be corny about it. I was drinking all the time during the 2.5 years the diary entries cover and shrinking my life down to a tiny nub. I'd get confused really easily when I wasn't high on alcohol and didn't know what to do... I drew most of these comics on the verge of blacking out. So deep down when I decided to publish them I guess the hope was to put enough of the bad pieces of my life together and if I stuck them in a 2 dimensional vessel they'd be trapped there and I could move on. This makes me sound like a moron but I was using the Superman movie as a guide for this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2u3eQc_rx54
The thing is that kinda worked, I stopped drinking altogether 4 months after the book was done. Comics worked their magic and a rotten fragment of my spirit is stuck inside the book. Kinda neat that I was right about that, because was a pretty desperate shot in the dark. The whole project I dubbed "Blood Magazine" because that was the dumbest most juvenile title I could come up with, and "caused me to laugh bitterly through the 10,000 nights I spent alone." But sometimes drawing cartoons works the same as drawing blood, eh? And if one definition of magazine is a container for something, what better container is there for a bunch of blood... than the human heart :')
