Barefootz debuted in the University of Alabama’s Tuscaloosa campus student newspaper, the Crimson-White, in 1971. For a while thereafter it bounced around the pages of Birmingham-based underground newspapers. Then Denis Kitchen, publisher of Kitchen Sink Comix, took an interest in the feature based on a packet of samples I sent him and gave it space in two of the comix he published in 1972: Snarf #4 and Commies From Mars #1.

I won’t go on about the checkered history that followed, since an account of the highs and lows of Barefootz’s underground run is available elsewhere on this web site under the title "Through the Swinging ’70s with Barefootz." I’ll just remark that no comics series I’ve ever created has elicited such extreme reactions. It was viewed with total disdain by many of the "big name" underground cartoonists, and at the same time it has retained for several decades now a small core of enthusiasts. Denis, bless his heart, remained loyal to me and my pointy-yellow-haired creation despite much criticism who found my work inadequately "underground," and his decision to include Barefootz as a regular feature in all five issues of the mid-’70s Marvel-underground hybrid Comix Book introduced my character to a new audience of mainstream magazine-rack perusers.

Barefootz is on my mind this week because the creator of the aforemention Nemo’s Kat blog (who is so self-effacing that he resisted my suggestion that I refer to him by name) asked whether pagers of original art from some of those early Barefootz strips and comix were still available for purchase.

Collectors have picked over much of the Barefootz run, I told him, but a few installments still remain in my hands. But how to convey which pages are still in my flat files?

It’s harder to answer that question than it is when collectors inquire about original artwork from Stuck Rubber Baby or Wendel. With those features I can cite particular page numbers in books that remain easy to access. Not so simple with Barefootz. Early Barefootz, the 1990 Fantagraphics compilation, has been out of print for years now, as are most of the underground comic books in which the character appeared.

So to get past this hurdle I’ve created a catalog of available Barefootz art that can be downloaded. If anyone would like to see that catalog and can handle a 2MB download, just click here.

If you click on her link you’ll find that the informative and entertaining Melissa Sue is stingy with hard information in her Blogger Profile but she sports a great hat that’s worth a looksee. Joe’s knit cap isn’t chopped liver, either.

Anyway, Joe and I recorded our "video conference" with iChat. It was my first chance to learn what the blue-word-balloon-with-a-video-camera-in-it icon in my iMac’s dock is all about. Another cool program from Apple!

As you can see from the screen shot above, I didn’t go so far as to dress up for the interview. But Joe’s a laid-back guy who doesn’t go for formality, so we meshed well and had a good time gabbing about my books and his videoblogging adventures.

The interview itself came out well, but I’m going to have to have a word with my barber about his well-intended but unrequested effort at masking my advancing baldness with an ineffectual combover.

I was informed by Joe today that editing has been completed and that our conversation can now be viewed at his blog as a YouTube video. This marks my first incarnation as a YouTube presence, on top of being an iChat virgin. I can feel myself become a late-arriving Time magazine "Person of the Year." If you stil have that issue of Time lying around, take a look at that mirror on the front cover and let me know if you see my face in it.

Brief Health Update

I seem almost finished with my recent ear infection, although the assurances in my last blog post that I was "clearly on the upswing" at that time turned out to be premature. Never jinx a recovery with optimism, I should have instructed myself before composing that last cheery post. Fast on its heels came a truly wretched night of sleeplessness, feverishness, and pounding headaches.

My doctor decided that I was on the wrong antibiotic and phoned in a substitute prescription to our pharmacy. The new one is named sulfamethoxazole-trimethoprim. Since it has either 180% or 190% more letters in its name than amoxicillin (depending on whether or not you count the hyphen), it stands to reason that it must be either 180% or 190% more beneficial.

Relief has come swiftly, I’m happy to report. With the change of prescriptions I was quickly freed from the headaches, although debilitating fatigue continued to dog me until last weekend. With five more days to go on the new regimen, I’m now allowing myself to be cautiously obtimistic that I’m actually getting well.

But only cautiously optimistic, please note. No full-fledged optimism for me; no sir! I’ve learned my lesson.

Nothing to write home about, or even to write a blog post about, except I already brought up the subject last week so I figure I shouldn’t stay silent for too long or somebody will think I’ve lapsed into a coma.

The good news is that I’m clearly on the upswing since going on antibiotics. I currently can muster four to six hours of clear-headedness a day, which is allowing me to plug away at my backed-up workload at slightly better than a snail’s pace even as I grind my teeth in frustration at how quickly the productivity clock winds down and fatigue takes over again.

I’m not certain, actually, whether it’s the infection that’s making me tire so quickly or the amoxicillin. Either way, I’m anxious to be done with pill-popping and back to 100% again. Meanwhile, I offer sincere thanks to those of you who’ve wished me a speedy recovery in the blog’s comments section and in personal email.

While waiting for my full brainpower to return, I’m compensating today for my recent stretch of blah blog content with some pictorial entertainment. North Adams is in the middle of a blizzard at the moment, our portion of the one that’s been burying the whole country this week, and Eddie and I couldn’t resist bundling up and grabbing a few snapshots of us, Lulu, and the white stuff.

At first I thought I was catching a cold. Not a welcome development. An annoying one, in fact. I’ve become spoiled after a long stretch of pretty good health lately.

But the grosser symptoms of a cold didn’t follow, so I revised my self-diagnosis, deciding I was just being thrown temporarily off-kilter by allergies.

Allergy attacks hit me more frequently than colds and indeed can feel a lot like colds in their early stages. But they don’t daunt me as much because they usually beat a retreat in a day or two once I summon Clariton (or its generic equivalent) into battle.

The first thing to go when I have either a cold or allergy attack is my ability to think creatively. I become a dullard with a brain made of styrofoam. A stranger to myself. An imposter at the drawing board. A talentless wannabe whose illusions of mental accuity suddenly lie exposed as pathetically unfounded.

Sure, I can type a blog entry like this one even when I’m woozy. It doesn’t take much energy to complain and act pitiful. In truth, there’s not much sympathy to be wrung out of a malady like today’s. I’m not in real pain; my throat’s not sore; I’m not coughing; I can’t even identify any intimations of life-threatening illnesses to get paranoid over. All I’ve got is mild vertigo, bleariness unrelieved by hours on end of sleep, and fatigue.

I’m going to the doctor this afternoon. I suspect that the diagnosis will be a mild infection caused by impacted ear wax. That wouldn’t be without precedent. Ear wax and my left ear do not always play well together.

Being sick, even mildly so, is really boring. There’s interesting work to be done. Deadlines to meet. Mark the Art Guy wants his new episode to be finished. (Thank you, Adobe, for being lenient about this, but missing a deadline still offends every ounce of professionalism in my being.)

I’m lucid and all, but creative finesse is beyond me. Now that I’ve been out of bed for a while half-hour, I’m ready for more shut-eye.

Do you want to know what a pathetic bag of ineffectuality I can be transformed into by a little errant ear wax? This morning I dozed intermittently through three installments running of Project Runway! Me, who feels entirely comfortable wearing ten-year-old flannel shirts. And I even cared slightly who got eliminated! How sick is that?!

Before giving up on reading this morning I thumbed through the current issue of New Yorker, where I came upon R. Crumb and Aline being typically scintillating for two pages. They always hit bullseyes. There was a time when I aspired to be counted among the trailblazers of the comix underground. Now I stare blankly at whatever Bravo chooses to offer.

I clicked past PBS on my way to Bravo and noticed that Sesame Street was playing. I could have stopped there and learned a few new letters of the alphabet. But it was just too intellectually demanding.