Sean Äaberg

OLDEN TIMES

A long time ago (1996) this was the image I was best known for - published in Slug & Lettuce & made into patches by numerous crusty bootleggers! I drew it while visiting Danny Shoup at UC Santa Cruz.

THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 113

I have seen the creative act as channeling for a while. It became obvious to me when I was exploding with ideas & would spend at least 8 hours a day drawing that I was tapping into something. Especially when the creative well never went dry & I would get bored of new things frequently as soon as I devoted them to paper, frequently before the drawing was even done. The well still hasn’t gone dry, knock on… wood. The thing is, channeling typically evokes a picture of drawing down fr...

DUNGEON DEGENERATES LORE 01

Sorry about the delay in posting this, I just figured out how to write more lore without making this work so bulky & complex as to be unfun! That said here you go.

Mythologically, the Würstreich was founded by the twins Max & Moritz, who were sired by the god Tor & their virgin mother Lud & raised by a wild pig named Würst. This is a variation on an old Gütter tale that has been modified for consumption by all the children of the Würstreich & repeated endlessly i...

THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 112

It is so wild to see the whole set of cultural rules change over the last ten years. Things are obviously always changing & the last 100+ years have been marked by rapid change, but the change has really accelerated since the dawn of people having access to the internet in their pocket. I sometimes wonder if this change is as dramatic in more ancient societies, but I’m, as usual, speaking of my own limited, American, West Coast experience (I could dial down further but I’m not convinc...

ROCK&RULE

I used to DJ around PORKLAND all the time. At Star Bar, Club 21, the Sandy Hut & occasionally at the Lay Low. I had to drink a bunch in order to make it happen. I miss those nights & those drinks!

THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 111

We got a new puppy recently. She’s a mixed mutt, mostly black, extra medium & a total sweetheart. Our first dog Dee Dee is getting old & slowing down. Having to deal with a puppy is breathing new life into her. She’s having to play fight, compete for attention & food even. When old humans are isolated they deteriorate faster. I could see the same thing happening with my dog. The first day of Lolo (our new dog) arriving she was obviously not into having the order disturbed. She...

THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 110

I was an atheist growing up. I didn’t call myself an atheist, but I felt absolutely no spiritual presence in the world. Nothing at all. People seemed to believe in this entire world that I had no access to. I felt more empty about it than resentful, but I also, as I do now, feel that most people who make a big deal about their spirituality & religion or anti-religion are full of shit. It’s like opinions, so personal, so relative, that it doesn’t really matter for the interpersonal w...

BEHOLD!

Back in stock! Our Behold! t-shirt! For true Watchers. From GOBLINKO

THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 109

I love puppets. There is something primal about puppets. About humans bringing character to an inanimate object immediately, without stopping to animate the thing.  I grew up watching the Muppet Show. It was the most comfortable hour I spent whenever it was on when I was young. The Muppet Show had that “anything goes”, manic, eccentric, weird, post Vaudeville feeling that felt like home to me. My spiritual homeland. Watching the Muppet Show let me know that anything was possible, tha...

THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 108

Every year or so when we were doing PORK I’d think about how I’d feel with the magazine if I was dead. This kept me looking at the content for timeless qualities plus kept things fresh & vital. This way of looking at the world & myself got baked in when I had a stroke, died & have spent a part of every day for years now meditating on these sorts of things. One of these introspective moments gave birth to “THE GOBLIN’S RULES OF THE GAME” where I just wrote down the lesson...

THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 107

I used to work at the Oakland Public Library in the Children’s Room & later in the newly formed Teen Zone from 1999 to 2002. I had gone from being an alcoholic street Punk to Goth to art student, then mild-mannered Library employee & city of Oakland arts booster with Nonchalance & Oaklandish. I’m good with kids, I like kids. I’m very patient with kids & find them funny instead of a bother. When we moved to Eugene from Oakland I got a job teaching art classes for kids thr...

THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 106

We watched The Night of the Living Dead again at our local favorite theater: the Academy last night. I’ve seen this movie so many times…. It really got me thinking about doing things on a low budget & trying as hard as you can to produce something of lasting value. There are countless higher budget movies that are constantly churned out that no one remembers or cares about. But Night of the Living Dead came out 56 years ago & it still holds up & has inspired an entire genre of...

MY HALLOWEEN BOOK FLIP THROUGH

Katie did a flip through of my Halloween Book! I made this book to be book that would’ve cracked open my brain when I was in gradeschool & I would have checked it out from the library for half the year & then wondered if I had hallucinated it as an adult! Totally normal stuff. Available at the best book stores & direct from GOBLINKO!

https:...

THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 105

When I was a kid there was still a lot of stuff left over from the 60s & 70s floating around. The shadow of the past was heavy on the present. Stuff as old as Vaudeville was actively being dredged up in Looney Tunes & being kept alive on the Muppet Show. Hannah Barbera cartoons used the vocal styles of lots of classic radio & Vaudeville stars for their characters & even though these cartoons were already old, they lived on in reruns & then the reruns lived on further with ...

TIM & TIM

Katie caught the old Tim & Tim shack up for redevelopment, I would say “there goes the neighborhood” but this neighborhood has gone up & down & up & down & it’s slowly going up again, so yeah, but I miss Tim Root & Tim Goodyear on the regular & these photo funnies.

THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 104

From my Halloween book. More than a single day, the run up to Halloween has always been one of my favorite times of year. It is a gloriously ghoulish gala disrupting the bureaucratically morbid & depressive assembly-line return to school. Just as pigs are unceremoniously lined up for slaughter, schoolchildren are funneled into classrooms to slowly be processed into society’s sausages. Halloween is a goblin’s pumpkin bomb, rending the very fabric of reality apart & disrupting the p...

HALLOWEEN COMIC

The Halloween comic we gave to Trick or Treaters in Eugene, we really pushed for Halloween.

THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 103

I watched a show the other night about China having their own Jackson Hole, modeled after the city in America. In Chinese it is “Hometown, USA”. China has other cities modeled after places like Paris, a generic Germany, Orange County, Quebec & Thames Town. These are like gated communities or theme parks where you can live. China also has “Europe Streets” where European culture & shopping is to the fore. I’ve been heavy on the artifice for a while, knowing that culture would ...

ROCK&ROLL, WEIRDO ART & BAD IDEAS

Rock&Roll, Weirdo Art & Bad Ideas - the pillars of PORK magazine. I await someone who burns the candle at both ends & brings that spirit, that energy level to a magazine. Someone should take the sword!

THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 102

PORK magazine used to be the longest running & most successful project we had running from 2011-2018. By the time we decided to cease publication both of us were tired of it. I had gone through numerous changes in thinking on the magazine, the readership, what I wanted. I know Katie was tired of the cycle of the magazine & how I would get stressed out whenever a deadline approached. I was unable to keep my stress to myself. She would frequently get everyone out of the house to watch a...

THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 101

I decided to do DUNGEON DEGENERATES because in 2006, I really sat down & asked myself what I wanted to be working on. I wanted to get paid to do drawings for Fantasy Role Playing Games. I started to play a weekly roleplay adventure with some Eugene friends, did a lot of work on a game that wasn’t rules heavy but had a lot of concepts in it that I was exploring as far as lore goes. A lot of these ideas have made their way into DUNGEON DEGENERATES. I found that I wasn’t interested in pl...

THE FIGHTING FORTRESS

@masterofthetabletop did a great job on the Fighting Fortress mini. I’m getting guys together to paint DUNGEON DEGENERATES miniatures in my style for the upcoming all miniatures crowdfunding campaign we’re running in January. The results have been amazing thus far, I love seeing my style emulated in 3 dimensions!

DR. DEMENTO 20TH ANNIVERSARY SHOW

This is great, filmed in Pasadena, 1991. With Tiny Tim, Uncle Floyd & Weird Al. The weirdest things get me these days, crying that is.

THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 100

It’s Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. This is important because it also marks the first hundred GOBLIN NEWSLETTERS. I celebrate three New Years, Jewish, Western & Lunar. I end up thinking about the transition of years from the start of Fall until the start of Spring, a quarter of the year. There is a period between Rosh Hashanah & Yom Kippur, which are the High Holy Days when the book of life is said to be open. I understand this as the time to get right with the people in my lif...

THE DUNGEON DIVE LOOKS AT THE NEW STUFF FROM THE DUNGEON DEGENERATES FIFTH PRINTING KICKSTARTER

Daniel at The Dungeon Dive looks at the new DUNGEON DEGENERATES stuff from the 5th Printing Kickstarter! His views are always among the most appreciated.

THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 99

The further you went down 35th avenue, the dingier it got. The area probably had a boom in the mid sixties but it had declined over the years & Oakland, 1985 was like an overripe banana. The whole East Oakland area was fruit orchards before WWII & Oakland’s growth. It has a very suburban feeling to it. There were a lot of funny little businesses at 35th & MacArthur back then: an aquarium store, a video store, Donut Corner (with a huge clock proclaiming “Donut Time”, Glenn's ...

MY OLD STUDIO

My studio in Eugene probably around 2007. At that point I was having to build up so many of my own reference points because they weren’t in the city at all - or anywhere except for my brain & by extension my room. Nowadays things are similar but way less cluttered!

THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 98

I started doing zines in 1988 when I was 12. My best friend (who I’m not married to) Danny Shoup’s parents had got a photocopier for their work. Danny was the co-editor of my first zine “Goblin’s Armpit”. I got the Book of the SubGenius, an issue of Factsheet Five & saw the Return of the Living Dead all that year. I had an out, I had a formula. I was introduced to the idea of being an artist when I was 8, now I had a way to do it, through DIY Punk. Up until that point I was tryi...

MONSTER DRAWING CLUB

The Monster Drawing Club returns! For the month of October, there are 31 prompts to draw along with daily! Use the hashtag #monsterdrawingclub to be included in the stories at the @dungeondegenerates page on Instagram. But mostly, draw along & get the spooky mood for Halloween!

THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 97

I had a vivid dream a while ago. I was back in highschool, I attended a  Catholic Highschool in East Oakland. It was very Californian in that it wasn't very strict & it was trying to "be good" in the face of imposing some kind of Catholic education on top of where America was at. The students tended towards a doe-eyed liberalism masked with cynical humor & spiced with alcohol, weed & gangster rap. There was a dress code, but it wasn't anything too strict. I was able to dress ...