The great Skip Williamson lost his home in the Vermont floods recently. He's suggesting that readers who might be interested in helping should buying a copy of his autobiography. I consider Williamson to be one of the greatest of the underground comics artists, up there in the same company as Crumb and Justin Green. As a stylist, he has no peer, with his cartoony and psychedelic drawings having influenced dozens of other cartoonists and animators. He's been both political (with his own work and illustrating stuff like Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Book) and earthy (working in porn for years). Please consider helping him in his time of need.
Artist, critic, raconteur and all-around great guy Frank Santoro has moved from Pittsburgh to New Mexico and needs to raise funds to support himself so he can draw his next comic. Rather than go to Kickstarter, he's decided to sell off his collection of weird comics. Anyone who's gone through his curated back issue boxes at a show will know he always sells some gems. In addition to selling comics (and this time around, it's weird examples from the 80s black & white explosion), he's also selling a sketch he's made of that comic's cover. Fans of Santoro and weird comics should check it out.
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Spontaneous Combustion is excellent. It's more of a series of remembrances than a full-fledged autobiography, and is a zippy, amusing read. Williamson here is taking advantage of Amazon's Kindle self-publishing capability. One thing that's interesting is it's length. Too short to be a standard book, too long to be a magazine article--the Kindle format is allowing writers to bring back the pamphlet or novella-length work in a commercial format. Spontaneous Combustion makes excellent use of this length. I'd like to see other writers on comics use it as well. It might be a nice format for bloggers to create "instant anthologies" of their own work.
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