And just like that, lost media has become digital archive; the music, comics, and counterculture free newspaper Arthur magazine has entered the chat. Free PDFs to view or download are hosted on their website, which you can get to right here. It’s a very Internet Archive entry vibing preservation, with creased and weathered pages in some (cough) of the scans. But! Where else are you going to read Alan Moore’s thoughts on 9/11 and/or the Eno catalog? See Poor Sailor cut into single rows and woven between blocks of an article on the Polyphonic Spree? Full of surprises for anyone who was around at the time and a fascinating satisfying chunk of lost media for those of y’all who weren’t.
So what is Arthur? Oh brother. Magic, politics, drugs. Everyday life and secret histories. Heavy metal music and comic books. An alt-weekly I suppose. Bimonthly, actually. Free and initially set on broadsheet newsprint. The kind of paper you’d get from the floor next to the door of a really cool bookstore or record shop circa twenty years ago.
Without being for sale, it wasn’t really clocked and cataloged the way stuff that goes on the shelves at stores is recorded and preserved. Digitizing the surviving hard copy (and presenting them without paywall or ads) was done by co-founder Jay Babcock. So I strongly encourage donating to Jay as compensation for the labor of preserving this resource.
The cover interview for Alan Moore is Arthur #4 (2003), though he also contributed the aforementioned essay on 9/11 in #5, his Eno appreciation in #17, a manifesto on pornography in #24, and reminisces in the Veitch issue (#33). Grant Morrison’s interview is Arthur #12 (2004) and Rick Veitch Arthur #33 (2013). In addition to the time that has passed casting what these singular folks had to say in new, contemporary context, Arthur was as interested in the magical aspects of creation as they were the comics through which these artists cast their spells. So the interviews are about uh not what most people talk to them about these days.
Arthur ran comics by Kevin Huizenga, Jordan Crane (early excerpts from his long-running and recently collected Keeping Two), Sammy Harkham, Anders Nilsen (who has a new graphic novel out this year called Tongues), Ron Regé Jr, Marc Bell, Martin Cendreda, Gary Panter, Gabrielle Bell, Vanessa Davis, Tom Gauld, Ben Katchor, (Cartoonist Laureate) James Kochalka, Tom Hart, John Hankiewicz, Plastic Crimewave, and many others. The Midwest USS Catastrophe scene, the kind of artists who featured in the sheet-cake-sized Kramer’s Ergot anthologies, a bunch of cartoonists who would soon move on to Vice. Sometimes comics grouped and highlighted as curated collections, presented by underground publishers like Highwater Books and Buenaventura Press. Sometimes they shared the page with articles and ads, not unlike more mainstream alt-weekly publications, and sometimes they were cut into lines and posted in the margins like Mad Magazine. A mix of comics from comic books, but in pieces broken up over the Arthur issue, and comics like comic strips, single panel gags and other self-contained narratives. But/and also sometimes abstract illustrations instead of comics, because hippies.
Music cover features include Kim Gordon, Katrina Ford, Gavilán Rayna Russom, Iggy Pop, Brian Eno, Dolly Parton, Animal Collective, Sun O))), Sparks, Joanna Newsom, and Joe Strummer among many others. Paul Pope art on the cover of the issue with Sublime Frequencies‘ Alan Bishop depicts a girl in a niqab with a jam box the size of Radio Raheem’s. Deerhoof writes about all-ages venues. Thurston Moore reviews media. T-Model Ford gives life advice. Ian Svenonius writes your horoscope. A predilection towards heavy metal, zoners, hippie stuff, and stoner music in general. Arthur really wants you to listen to the Grateful Dead.
To say nothing of the advertisements. A house ad for Shrimpy and Paul. American Apparel back when it was about positive body image and not cultivating an atmosphere of sexual assault. Hipster record label seasonal release slate smorgasbord. The time capsule’s raw feed. The people who kept Arthur free for its readers by treating the ad section as an opportunity are a strange group indeed. But it is cool to imagine comics publishers who were actively trying to reach an audience of Lightning Bolt and Will Oldham fans and not just readers of other comics. Really, Arthur being an ahem multidisciplinary crossroads, where comics and music and history are all given equal cultural standing, is a model I think we all want to see more widely adopted.
So again enjoy the restoration of what was in danger of being forgotten and support the cause. And to all my readers who are major publishers: where the fuck is the book version at??
SDCC COVERAGE SPONSORED BY MAD CAVE
