I’m still plugging away at the Outlaw Comics history series. The “prehistory” section — which covers things like EC, underground comix, Warren magazines, the rise of the direct market and more — is taking quite a long time. I already jumped ahead once with the Avatar Press history. Below I’m sharing a timeline I assembled for the Bad Girls … Read more
So you want to read some Outlaw Comics and don’t know where to start. Don’t worry, your friendly neighborhood Sewer Mutant has you covered. For better or worse, building an Outlaw Comics collection generally means haunting your local quarter bins or shelling out for back issues on sites like Lone Star Comics or eBay. But … Read more
The Amateur Creator’s Union Part 2: Empire Building Part 1: My Internet Before the Internet Part 2: Empire Building Part 3: The End While I was yacking with my new-found friends, the Amateur Creator’s Union was building its own little publishing empire. It started with a series of photocopied “ashcan” comics. Here the ACU played … Read more
The Secret Origins of Avatar Press, The Last Outlaw Publisher I’ve long been puzzled by Avatar Press’s origins. It appeared seemingly out of nowhere in the mid-90s to publish a staggering number of titles that had previously been published elsewhere. Most of these were “Bad Girl” comics, like Widow (London Night Studios), NiraX (Entity), Hellina … Read more
Part 1: My Internet Before the Internet Part 2: Empire Building Part 3: The End One of the most important moments of my youth came one October day in 1993 when I spotted the following news story in Wizard magazine # 27: The Amateur Creator’s Union, a new non-profit organization dedicated to [helping inexperienced comic … Read more
The Outlaw Comics community lost one of its most important figures when Glen Hammonds passed away on February 13, 2020 after a three and a half year battle with pancreatic cancer. Hammonds founded the comics mail order, wholesale, and publishing company Raw Comics. He coined the term “Outlaw Comics” in the early 1990s and popularized … Read more
Content warning: this article discusses comic books that portray violence, including sexual violence, in a graphic manner. I don’t describe these things in detail in this article (though might discuss them in more detail in future articles) and have tried to keep the illustrations relatively tame, but some do contain gore and sexually suggestive images. … Read more