1985: It is seven years before Art?Alternatives debuts full colour lowbrow kustom hijinks on better stocked newsstands (nevermind an additional two years before the inauguration of Juxtapoz). You can’t order your favorite indy ZINE off the nascent Internet as Amazon wouldn’t get up and running until 1994 either. Thankfully Mike Gunderloy’s Factsheet Five served that purpose in print, and as some of us would argue, with a more sychronitic and pleasing aesthetic.
Pre-DeviantArt, when you had to hit the street corner to get your underground art fix, Weirdo is one of the few suppliers in town, already in it’s fourth year of publication.
I first picked up a copy of the magazine at Ziesing Bros’ Book Emporium which could best if inadequately be described as a lovingly missed Magick Theatre for The Literate. One of my favorite covers was for #3, heavily riffing on a Humbug-inspired border layout including among other kultural icons, William Burroughs and Sue Catwoman. I forget what issue announced The Ugly Art Contest but I was ALL IN.
2018: It is thirty-three years after Weirdo #15 came out, with my offering, reproduced at a ninth of a page, accepted by cranky indy GOD and then current editor Peter Bagge. It played on the same level as an artist whose work I love, XNO (Chet Daumstaedter). The Grand Comics Database details that section of the issue as “Twenty-five illustrations featuring “ugly artmanship,” some of them quite influenced by Basil Wolverton.” And they would be correct! at least in my case (Wolverton, then Roth, then Williams, then XNO, then…). Underneath some optically exuberant slacker in engineer boots (Bagge[?] notes: “Them boots are made for walkin’, Joe!”) has a reverie (probably after falling asleep to NANCY & LEE on the Victrola) and drops a copy of the zine Damp in the process. Earwax from burning it at both ends no doubt.
Weirdo was one of the first publications to validate my work and that of others in varying degrees of proficiency and talent.
In the 1980s, a ‘web presence’ didn’t mechanically communicate that talent or your art, some editor who believed in you did. When the going got Weird, The Weirdos…got published. Baby we are fine artistes. And maybe we deserved to be kissed.
—The joey Zone