Generation YECCCCHH!

Announcing the next mini-comic I will be producing as part of my Patreon zines-by-mail subscription offering: “Generation YECCCCHH!”, the title and logo fully appropriated as is appropriate for something aping the fine-arts ethos of the 1990’s.

This fellow here on the front is a drawing of a guy I once called “The Stereotypical Alternative” in this savage piece of satire I for-real had published in my High School literary magazine sometime around 1992 or 1993 (co-written with my friend Neil).

I was always a Corporate Rock apologist, and at that particular moment in the culture, bands like Pearl Jam, Nirvana and The Red Hot Chili-Peppers were considered the “alternative” to the Hair Bands and the Power Ballads. I wasn’t interested in any such alternative, and, I reasoned, how can they be described as such when there was no alternative to listening to them on the radio and everybody else at school was into them. Thus, I skewered them in pen and ink. Parenthetically, now that any kind of guitar-rock has practically ceased to be, it’s funny to think that we all saw such a massive difference back then between “alternative” and “mainstream” bands. It seemed like an important distinction at the time.

This old drawing is embarrassing, annoying in it’s smugness, and I would dare-say is “cringe”. We didn’t used to call things cringe in the 90’s, but acting or saying or believing something that we’d now describe as such was possibly one of the worst things a kid could do back then. Not caring about stuff was one of the main things we cared about.

I’ve recently been obsessing (slightly more than usual) over Generation X and what we’ve become in middle-age. Like everybody as old as me, I was annoyed for decades about being “overlooked”, then suddenly, the discourse remembered we existed, but only because we suck so bad. This is something I want to touch upon in the zine.

Generation ECCCCHH! will include some existing comic essays as well as new work. I don’t know yet the cost or the page count, but my loose plan is to have it finished and ready to ship in September/October. If you would be interested in obtaining a copy, again, back me here and you’ll receive one in the mail as soon as it’s done.