The long and winding road to publication

This certainly isn't the trilogy of books I thought I'd write when I first dreamt of writing books, but April 2nd will see the completion of a trilogy of sorts. No, not a trilogy, more of a set of matryoshka books—each one nested in the other. You see, the book being published in April—“I’m Just a Comic book Boy” Essays on the Intersection of Comics and Punk—was the first one we pitched and is the last one being published. (You can order it on: Amazon or McFarland now.)

Here’s that story—it’s a bit of a long and winding road. If you know me, you know that’s just how I roll. Hang with me.

January 25, 2011, I had an idea for a Humanities class. The focus would be the Cold War and the Punk movement. Why those two? Mainly because my memory of 80s punk bands—really more hardcore—were the anti-politically charged bands like Bad Religion, Minor Threat, Dead Kennedys, and, later, Fugazi. I also realized that most of my students had no living memory of the Cold War and figured it would be an opportunity to expose them to something new through music, art, film, and literature. I knew about the underground comix of the 60s/70s, and wanted to include one, but didn’t know enough to wisely select one. So, I emailed my comic-expert friends: Anthony, Chris, and Keegan.

Thus began an interesting Facebook thread where we bandied about a number of possibilities. The most obvious fit with the punk movement would have been Love and Rockets, but the question was, which issue or issues, and how would students obtain the books? Four years later, in 2015, Fantagraphics would be creating beautiful collections of the Palomar series, but that wouldn’t help me in the here and now. In the quest for a self-contained, not super long, but relevant to the comix movement or the punk movement, Chris suggested Justin Green’s “Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary.” His message said the work as, being “about a teenager who is trying to reconcile his neuroses (later diagnosed as OCD) and his Catholic upbringing. It has some of the same themes as found in punk (i.e. outsider status and rejection of religious belief systems) and it has a memorable scene where Binky (a stand-in for the author) hallucinates that his fingers have turned into penises.” Sold!

By March, the class was coming together quite nicely. I created a zine-style syllabus (complete with cut-out letters, typographical errors, and sloppily pasted art) and pitched the following works: Allen Ginsberg's Howl, Justin Green's Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, William Gibson's Neuromancer, Jim Carroll’s The Basketball Diaries, and Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. In addition to the texts, we’d also watch a few films in class: A Clockwork Orange (1971), Surburbia (1983), and The Basketball Diaries (1995). The class was accepted, put on the books, I promoted it with posters around Armstrong Hall, and, August 2012, I stepped into a class with five too many students that I allowed to hang around in case anyone dropped. No one did.

Chris and Keegan continued to be my experts that helped me figure out how to teach comics. I remember debriefing with Chris after day 1 of Binky Brown (October 10, 2012) and thanking him for suggesting the book. Not only did it serve the desired purpose of talking about the DIY production of the undergrounds and addressing a number of important issues, it caught all the students by surprise and everyone wanted to talk about it. Some great discussions came out of those classes. So, Chris, I thank you again.

Those students told their friends and some of them wanted to visit class, and I let them. Why not? Hard to deny a little anarchy in a class on punk. Then those students wanted to know when I was going to teach the class again. As much as I enjoyed the class as it was happening, I was always thinking about how to improve it. I don’t know any instructors who kid themselves into thinking there wasn’t something better they could have done. And I definitely would have loved a chance to offer the class again to take advantage of the improvements I would have made, but realistically knew this was a topics class and it was unlikely to happen. I would go on to teach comics in other classes, but never quite the same line-up of texts or the same subject matter.

But, there was something about Binky Brown that really stuck with me long after the class was over. Chris and Keegan and I continued to talk about the punk movement and comics, and Chris suggested that maybe we pitch something to the Comics Arts Conference at the Comic Con in San Diego. Keegan had presented there before, so he took point on the proposal, and we looped Christopher Douglas into the mix to round out our panel.

April 25, 2013, our panel was accepted at Comic Con, and on July 21 at 1PM we presented to a wonderful room of people. It was by far the largest audience for any presentation I had done at conferences to that point, and we received wonderful questions from people wearing cat ears and cosplaying in general. It was fabulous. Audience members came up to chat afterwards and offered suggestions, and eventually the conversation spilled into the hallway so the next panel could go without interruption. While at the conference, Chris and I swung by the McFarland booth to gaze at Comic Books and the Cold War, which had just been published including an essay he wrote on Harvey Kurtzman and the “Yellow Peril.”

I don’t remember the exact words, but Chris said something along the lines of, “I wonder if we could put together a collection of essays based on our panel.” We talked about it a bit, and then worked on drafting an email to the editor that had worked with Chris on the Cold War book. That email was sent 9/3/2013, and 2/3/2014 we got word that it's going to happen. Which meant, now we actually had to write essay versions of our presentations so we have sample chapters and create a call for papers to see if we could solicit enough other essays to fill a book.

The CFP for essays went live: 2/20/2014.

In the process of writing the essay-version of my presentation, I ended up reaching out to a number of my heroes. Justin Green answered all my ridiculous questions, pointed me in various directions to find other answers, and ultimately ended up just being a wonderful resource and friend. I also reached out to RaymondPettibon (if you don’t recognize the name, he was a short-lived member of the band Black Flag, he designed their Black Flag logo, almost all of their flyers/posters—not to mention the cover to my favorite Sonic Youth album and a long list of art I admire). Anyway, I wanted to use some of his Black Flag poster-art in my essay. Like Justin, he was wonderfully friendly, helpful, and generous. Similarly, EdwardSanders (from the band The Fugs, which played a bit part in my presentation) proved to be wonderful to talk with, generous with his time, and willing to share stories and talk about living through the experiences I had only been reading about.

By December 4, 2014, a draft of the introduction was being kicked around. Each of us adding bits and pieces.

On January 14, 2014—Anthony, Chris, and I proposed a panel to the NCTE conference happening in DC. The topic had nothing to do with comics, but we liked working together and DC was in Anthony’s backyard. Seemed like a fun opportunity to get together. The focus was going to be “using narratives in the first-year composition classroom.”

Responses to our CFP began rolling in. The four of—Douglas, Field, Keegan, and I—met via Google Hangout, and hashed out our favorites.

June 20, 2014 our NCTE conference presentation is accepted, and Saturday, November 25, 2014 we presented. As we were packing up, an editor from Rowman & Littlefield approached us. “You three really work well together and your topic is very interesting, have you ever considered writing a book about it? Here’s my card…” Honestly, we hadn’t thought about it, but now we were… and pretty quickly we reached out to her and said we were definitely interested. Now we had to write essay-versions of these presentations, and figure out how we’d flesh out the rest of the book with more of our ideas.

Meanwhile, Heidi Burns and I were talking about the Multigenre ResearchProject (MGRP) and we pitched a proposal to a local MN conference (MNWE). It was accepted. No one approached us afterward asking us to write a book, but Heidi and I just clicked. We had similar work ethic and interests, and figured maybe we’d ask the R&L editor to see if she’d be interested in another book. Anthony, Chris, and I were making headway with the R&L proposal gave ourselves until July to finish up our sample essays and submit the final proposal.

March 10, 2015, Douglas, Field, Keegan, and I sat down to review the actual punk-essay submissions. We worked through them over the next week or two, made final decisions, and notified the authors by May.

With everything else on hold, Heidi and I pitched a book on the MGRP to Sarah on April 1, 2015. She seemed interested, and we put together the proposal and sample chapters. On July 17, 2015, the MGRP book proposal was accepted. In November, Heidi and I (and Colin) presented at NCTE in Minneapolis, and had a chance to actual sit down with Sarah from R&L. We chatted a bit and finalized some details.

The Spring of 2016, Heidi and I co-taught a section of English 101. It seemed like the natural extension of our collaboration, and it was one of my favorite experiences in the classroom. So nice to be able to lean on one another’s strengths, and to learn from each other. Meanwhile, we were swapping drafts of chapters back and forth on the MGRP project. By April, most of it was done. By May we had some edits back from R&L, and by the end of May the link went up for pre-orders.

One of the other pieces of finishing this project, was reaching out for people to blurb the book. So, on May 4, 2016, we reached out to a bunch of MGRP gurus. Almost everyone responded and was willing, and interested in reading our book... including Tom Romano and Nancy Mack. They were wonderfully supportive and helpful.

October 12, 2016, the MGRP book is published (find it on R&L or Amazon) 

Meanwhile, work continued on both the punk-project and the narratives book. Final edits on Tell Me a Story (the narrative book) were sent to Sarah on 8/15/2017, and it was published a month later. Find it on R&L or Amazon. 

Which leaves only the punk-book left to finish. Edits from the authors took longer than expected, but the biggest ordeal was really obtaining the rights to publish the images we needed. Some of those rights were easily and readily obtained—for example Raymond Pettibon tweeted me his permissions—but others required some diggin. For example: the images I wanted to include from the Dutch edition of the out-of-print An ABZ of Love. The artist had passed, the publisher had gone out of business, and the on-demand publishing companies that were reprinting the book didn’t return my phone calls or emails.

And, there was also the matter of what to call the book. Originally, we really liked the idea of calling the book “America is Killing its Youth”: An Intersection of Comics and Punk. The “America is Killing its Youth” part is a lyric from the song “Ghost Rider” by the band Suicide. (If you didn’t know, in 1970, Suicide printed flyers for their shows using the phrase “punk music” on them, and as near as anyone can tell… this is the first use of that phrase.) Chris ended up pursuing obtaining the rights to use the lyrics, and had conversations with Alan Vega and Marty Rev—both were happy to let use the title and just asked to receive a copy of the book. There was one obvious problem with using the lyric as a title, and that was that nearly half of the essays in the book dealt with comics outside of America—so, “America is Killing its Youth” didn’t really represent what was in the book, even though I liked the sound of it. Also, McFarland really wanted a more obvious connection to the punk movement.

Enter: the Ramones. Their song “Come on Now” had a great line that would work: “I’m just a comic book boy.” Chris explored how to obtain those rights, spoke to people, and ended up with a number. McFarland liked this option better, but it was up to us to front the bill for the lyric-usage. Fortunately, that number reflected the fact it came from a lesser known song, from what’s pretty universally accepted as the least-popular Ramones album. We divvied the amount and called it a day.

Finally, after chasing down comics arts everywhere and revising and revising, on December 11, 2018, the final edits were in. Shortly after, digital proofs were sent and Chris went to work doing a final round of edits and updating the pagination for the index that he had constructed.

And now, finally, April 2, 2019, eight years after the very first conversation that would lead to the production of this book and five years after the proposal was actually accepted and two other books later, you can find this baby in print. So, without further ado (although, really, you got through 2,312 words of ado so who am I kidding?), find it here on: McFarland or Amazon. 

And, as an added bonus for getting all the way to the bottom of this long message—or at least scrolling to the bottom—here is a Spotify playlist with songs that are referenced within the book, or are thematically relevant, or inspired by, or simply that the authors and editors liked for one reason or another. Music----> here.