FLUKE Mini-Comics & Zine Festival!

I drew this week’s Flagpole Magazine cover!

The cover celebrates FLUKE, the mini-comics/zines/independent publishing festival held every year in Athens, GA, which is this Saturday, March 24! I’ll be there with Mermin graphic novels, my mini-comics Haunt & Release and Tales of Unusual Circumstance Non-Annual Special #1, and more!

FLUKE has a ton of great comics and zine makers every year, and this year is no different! Flagpole this week features a great article by Hillary Brown highlighting some of the people who will be at the show. David Mack drew a comic about it as well!

If you’re in the Athens/Atlanta area, you have just got to come by FLUKE! It’s a great show, filled to the brim with excellent work!  See you Saturday!

The FLUKE Mini-Comics & Zine Festival turned me into a FLUKE groupie

Laura Taylor had just broken up with her boyfriend of many years and was feeling rotten. Not to mention that Athens was just hit by an ice storm—no fun!

Meanwhile, a ragtag group of cartoonists and zinesters were bummed out that the mother ship festival of indie comics, SPX, was canceled in 2001 due to 9-11. So, the original FLUKE organizer, whose name I didn’t catch, told the others that they should have their own comics fest right there in Athens, Georgia, since everybody already had work to sell.

Fast-forward 15 years, and Laura stopped near my table at the FLUKE Mini-Comics & Zine Festival on Saturday, April 23, 2016. On that cold, heartbroken day in 2002, she said she was determined “to get out of bed” and go to FLUKE, which she had heard about. Laura has continued the ritual ever since to commemorate the power to overcome. (By the way, that’s Laura in the first picture, followed by a close-up of her tattoo of Johnny Cash.)

For those of you who haven’t been to FLUKE that’s now held at the 40 Watt Club:

1) The club venue in Athens makes an alternative wannabe like me feel like he’s arrived. Did REM play here?

2) I’m not a drinker but love the presence of the old fashiony-looking bar that runs and the length of one of the walls and the lights that drape crisscrossed from the ceiling.

3) There are many other unique details in the 40 Watt like the pig art behind Fried Pickle Noir creator J.R. Mounts in that selfie I took of us.

4) The highlight of my time was rappin with FLUKE co-director Patrick Dean, my latest favorite cartoonist; I love his veteran drawing hand and readable writing style. I hope he’ll add on to this blog to supply the key names I missed in this post about FLUKE. Patrick is the guy in front of the t-shirts without the glasses; the other dude is the other director, Robert Newsome. 

5) There was a delicious cake served at FLUKE, which seems like a tradition.

I drew a comic for Flagpole Magazine as their “article” about FLUKE!

Here is an illustration I did for the cover of Flagpole Magazine!

Then in 1942 this intense windstorm came and knocked the tree over. And people were bummed. But someone had saved an acorn from the original tree, so they planted that and now Son of the Tree That Owns Itself is over 50 feet tall.

And since this new tree is technically the offspring of the original tree it’s considered to have legally inherited the plot of land it’s inhabiting.

This is Fluke. (Image stolen from Fluke.)