COMING SOON: GRUNK MAGAZINE!

 

RECORD STORE DAY 2022

 

We are super-excited to share our poster for RSD this year by the great Jay Stephens! Jay is an Emmy-winning cartoonist who created the tv shows Jetcat, Tutenstein, and The Secret Saturdays. His scary new comic book series Dwellings is out now! 

Record Store Day is Saturday April 23 in Guelph.

Charles Mingus, Comic Strip Writer

CHARLIE MINGUS FINGERS THE RECORD HIJACKERS

Bootleg records have been a part of the music business almost since recorded music began, and every record shop has had to deal with the dreaded issue of "pirate" pressings. Fans of everyone from Bob Dylan to The Grateful Dead, from the most obscure jazz, punk, and even classical musicians, have long coveted live recording or illicit copies of rare records by their favourite performers. Just like the fight against illegal downloading, once upon a time musicians used to be very involved in policing pirated recordings. Jazz legend Charles Mingus was one of these pirate-fighters. In the 1960s Mingus started his own mail-order label to sell live recordings he made and saw the bootleggers as competition. As part of his marketing campaign, he offered cash rewards to fans in ads for his own records. Mingus even created a comic strip where he hires a woman detective to buy some bootlegs from a jazz record shop!

The strip was drawn by Gene Bilbrew, a black cartoonist with a very interesting bio. Bilbrew was the lead singer of a jazz vocal group (The Mellow-Tones/The Basin Street Boys) who also worked as a cartoonist. Legend has it Bilbrew created the first black superhero, the Bronze Bomber, in 1949, before moving to New York and taking over "Clifford", a comic strip created by Jules Feiffer. Bilbrew moved on to drawing underground fetish comics and book covers for porn publisher Irving Klaw, the man who discovered Bettie Page and, being both a jazzman and a heroin addict, somehow hooked up with Charles Mingus!

The comic strip appeared in The Village Voice in December 1966, and includes an order form for Mingus at Monterey, “the latest Mingus Town Hall 1964 album,” and/or Music Written for Monterey. Mingus placed another ad in The Village Voice, a “Legal Notice” offering a “$500.00 Reward for evidence which secures conviction of any person selling these records.”

Now in stock: Tales of a Guelphite

Now in stock: Tales of a Guelphite! Check out issue #1 of this new Guelph-centric zine series. This issue covers the history of comic book culture in Guelph, including a celebration of the last 20 years of The Dragon comics shop and an article about the secret history of Guelph's forgotten comic book company of the Grunge-era 1990s, Tragedy Strikes Press. Check out the awesome cover by Emmy-winning cartoonist Jay Stephens, who got his start publishing his punk comic book SIN here back in the day.

The cover is a great homage to a bygone era and the old Apollo 11 Restaurant (now Brothers Brewing). Limited copies available at Royal Cat Records.

New Book: Dirty Dishes by Amy Lockhart

New at Chat Noir:

We just received a small number of copies of Amy Lockhart's Dirty Dishes!

Let's all go voyageur-ing inside the unusual mental landscape of this very original artist.

Published by Montreal's Drawn and Quarterly Books, this selection of the comics and plastic art of Guelph-based animator and cartoonist Amy Lockhart is a delightful gem of a book.

Originally published at $16.95, we now have copies available at the bargain price of $12!

About the author: Amy Lockhart is part of a new generation of independant animators. Her artwork and award winning films have been exhibited internationally. She studied at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, completing an artist residency at the Quickdraw Animation Society and completing a fellowship at the National Film Board. She has exhibited at The California Institute of the Arts and the Adam Baumgold Gallery in New York. She currently works and studies at the University of Guelph and is preparing a new film, "Dizzler in MASKHERAID."



From the publisher:

This PETIT LIVRE is a first class ticket into the creepy cute and totally absurd world of Straw-Baby, and the mind of its creator Amy Lockhart. It chronicles the various facets of her process/thinking from her paintings and drawings to cardboard sculpture of objects from her everyday life. Also included are stills from her animations and photos of costumes used in her videos. Amy works in a variety of mediums, including animation, film and video making, acrylic painting, drawing, costume making, comics and small press books and combines the various mediums as much as possible and let them feed into each other and out of each other.

Full Color, 96 pages, 4 3/4 by 7 1/2 inches

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