A native Central New Yorker who arrived in 1965, and grew up in the awesome 70's. On the days I was bored I watched Sesame Street from '69-72 and my favorites were Oscar, Cookie Monster and Roosevelt Franklin. In '71 it was actually exciting for S.S. to end though 'cuz then the wild original Electric Co. would begin, which was like graduating from the Sesame 'hood. My faves were Mel Mounds, Easy Reader and Millie the Helper 'nachurly. Although it's true, that back then with our limited channel selections prior to cable, on most days I was most likely building stuff out of Legos, one of the best toys ever designed [with 'Giant Tinker Toys' a good 2nd]. The mid 70's brought a small community of Mennonites to our area, living off the land with only windmill-generated electricity. It was a pretty common sight to see their horse-drawn carriages on the country roadsides. The men folk even wore jazzy straw hats and preferred riding bikes, very hep.
      The coolest guy in our family was our Grandpa Fowler. He was a professional carpenter and later a popular local architect who always made neat stuff and toys for us in his free time out of wood in his basement shop. While in retirement he started making painted woodcuts mostly of his favorite birds and birdhouses that he gave away for free, usually distributed into the community thru his wife's bingo attendence. He also quite impressively hand made a violin from a photo in a magazine that he scaled up to size (see left). I gave my friend Ron Rege Jr a couple woodcuts and he mentioned him in his Drawn & Quarterly #4 story, which is fitting cuz Grandpa grew up on a little farm near Quebec, Canada. A couple of the woodcuts he did were cartoons from the New Yorker magazine that he read while going to night school in Manhattan and still remembered 'em 40 years later. more wood crafts Once I showed him a color book of Howard Finster's painted wood pieces because they're somewhat similar, and after reading the book he told me he thought that guy was cuckoo! Pretty funny. He musta' inspired me to want to make art, I guess. His pious wife wigged me out in October of 1974 when out of nowhere she bought me my first issue of Mad (the Exorcist barf bag issue!), inscribing it to me in sharpie on the front cover. My favorite things to read in the 1970's besides Snoopy & R.Scarry books, were MAD, Ranger Rick, Cricket, Famous Monsters of Filmland and Count Morbidas in Dynamite magazine. One Fall day my brothers found a stack of magazines with centerfolds lurking within them at the back of our Dad's closet.
      Preferring comic strips, I wasn't interested much in comic books for many years. But my first exposure to reading comic books was after I began hanging out with a natural born troublemaker from my elementary class, who convinced me to check out his collection. Luckily through it all, I discoved that it was still the old newspaper comics that could eclipse my boredom from reading too many of his favorite super-fighting fantasy publications. And it's true, the experience was worth discovering the few of them with the most amazingly grotesque heavy black inks that of course featured the work of Jack Kirby. Kirby as everyone knows, was an immediately recognizable comic storyteller and whose books were heaped in excess profusion at our seedy used magazine peddlers back then. It was here and in the cheapo comic bins that I began finding old beat-up copies of the "good Duck artist" Carl Barks, who I had been reading was quite good. This was a big step for me, because I absolutely repel most disney trash, but my eagerness to go beyond the supernatural fantasy stuff I was seeing was an extremely easy decision.
      Reading a Barks interview exposed me to the inimitable Winsor McCay whose work stunned me 3 weeks later when his massive foreign published 'Little Nemo in Slumberland' collection came in from an far-away inter-library loan. Not long after that, I was able to order McCay's 'Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend' from our town's only bookstore and had my mind bent open as to a comic strip's potential for surreal humor. I soon drifted into the underground comics realm after meeting D.Sim on a frigidly cold night at an early 80's Con in Rochester, NY. I was drawn to his table because he had a cool looking stack of original art and early Cerebus for sale. It was a good choice to hang out and talk to him cuz he was friendly and I liked what he was doing was different. It's sort of funny I was first exposed to Cerebus at this con, because I distinctly remember going to it searching only for Barks and Gerber's Howard the Duck, as well as vintage Not Brand Echh! ...um, cuz I somehow imagined it was similar to MAD [it's not!]. Then I began reading Cerebus with #19 and it was a good transition into Crumb's Weirdo mag that I went off the deep end and bought soon afterwards.
      I primarily like comics by the old comic strip masters who created the expansive full-page Sunday broadsheets prior to 1936. Like Popeye who is THE original American Comic super hero debuting in 1929 (compared to super-man in 1938). Except of course, Segar's matchless newspaper strongman was a brilliant and bonafide comic. Because of the impractical reasons of collecting comic books for their monetary value I balk on keeping mine collectibly preserved. My small stack of used & well-read, dog-eared original Barks comic books with their rolled, flaking spines and acidic, yellowing pages are highly enjoyable artifacts. To illustrate my viewpoint, once in the mid 1980's I was digging thru dollar boxes at an Ithaca, NY con when a guy walked up to the dealer's table I was searching at and handed him a box to inquire what he would pay for its contents. He was calmly quoted with indifference, "Twenty bucks" [the typical rip-off!] wisely the man reclaimed his box and paused briefly to coincidentally watch me sifting used Barks comics from the cheapo bins. He then asked me if I was interested in buying any of the books he had while handing me the box. Inside were about 30 primary Carl Barks comic books, consisting mostly of his longer format Four-Color one shots from the 40's & 50's that the seller had kept since his childhood. Stunned, I realized I had the chance to instantly acquire highly sought after Barks collectibles from this completely unaware and atypical comic con attendee at probably a significant non-collector sum. But realistically, there's no way I could've done that, because that's precisely the cliched superhero fantasy fanboy conquest that always made me wince. I decided it was far more interesting to hear from him about his Barks appreciation, as we left the dealers room toward some hotel chairs in the hall just outside, where I got to leaf through that beautiful stack of seminal comics. He was selling them because his wife didn't want him to hold on to them any longer, even though he confessed that reading Barks was his most cherished childhood memory! So anyway, who could take a guy's comics with that kind of baggage? I dunno, I guess I shoulda at least bought one, but I didn't. I'd rather collect biological and geological fossils cuz you don't have to be so fussy taking care of them, cuz they're rocks! Sculpted rocks.
      The Underground arena of course also revealed the great visionaries in Weirdo & Raw, etc. and soon the influence of their finer offerings was concrete. Luckily around '86, I uncovered a slew of greats like Panter, Segar, Herriman, Addams and Wolverton [the latter's appreciation was rekindled from memories of the old MAD reprints years earlier]. Eventually, I was selling and trading my self published early attempts thru the 80's counterculture zine network. As my confidence grew, 'nachurly I realized that to focus on my direction, I should adopt a humorous pen name that was an assembled anagram of my inspirational faves. Around 1988 the first aspiring comic scribbles to get published by the ethereally trained ink smudger Pshaw were unleashed into the tiny world of under the radar comics.
     Although I can draw better than I can play music, my record collection has influenced me considerably and probably deserves some recognition here. A short list of my all time favorites are as follows: Hasil Adkins, Paul Pena, Roky Erickson, Peter Laughner, Dennis & Jimmy Flemion, Ramones, Skip Spence, Mark Perretta, Marc Bolan, Mark E. Smith, Vivian Stanshall, Billy Childish, John Fahey, Raymond Scott, Sun Ra, Son House, Muddy Waters, Ravi Shankar, Lee Scratch Perry, James Brown, Miles Davis, Akira Ifukube [yeah Zatoichi!], Devo, Big Boys, Run DMC, Minutemen, Meat Pups, Monks, Melvins, Motorhead, Swell Maps, Sonics, and The Stooges. As well as all the great bands involved around the mid 1990's Cambridge, MA 100% Breakfast & Chimp Rock Scene. Especially a few bands that all lived a stone's throw from me: Trollin' Withdrawal , Fat Day and Gerty Farish. Years later I followed Jeremy Harris, Eloe Omoe, Goat of Arms, Dr Doo, and Dreamhouse.
      Because of my interpretation of Winsor McCay's advice to artists, I started carrying around low budget blue-lined memo books in my back pocket to sketch in whenever I felt like it and to record all the gags I thought of during the day. These lousy memo books turned out to be so perfect, I still use them exclusively even today. Although don't use the brand pictured here, because they've switched from the old nice & thick chipboard back, to some really flimsy backing that is garbage. Usually I'll carry 'em around in my back pocket and let the pages and covers get all messed-up, but that's OK cuz it's the perfect tool because it opens flat on your drafting table. go to SKETCH BOOKS