Every journey has a beginning, every story has a start and every record store has a Pretentious Record Store Guy. This is his story!

When you’re Pretentious Record Store Guy, you’re life is pretty much made in the shade right? You get to see all the cool shows, pick through all the good music and take home all the latest promos. Life is pretty good, right? A pretentious existential crisis, with jokes about music.

The key to being in a scene is to be seen, and nowhere is more important than in a record store, where the employees are cooler than you and know every big band a year before anyone else does; welcome to the world of Pretentious Record Store Guy.

You’ve seen his adventures monthly in the pages of Playback:STL and online at pretentiousrecordstoreguy.com and now Pretentious Record Store Guy is going on his biggest journey yet. Issue #1 of the epic Pretentious Record Store Guy story hits the web like underground single from your favorite band, only instead of being sonic delicious goodness for your ear holes it’s music for your eyes and your cerebral cortex. If you have never read any Pretentious Record Store Guy comic, than do yourself a favor and read the first 10 pages for free at the Pretentious Record Store Guy website.

It’s a Hipster BaTTTle happening (3Ts like XXX only TTT)!!!

Available now at IndyPlanet: http://www.indyplanet.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=1076

The parade is hitting the road, folks! June 27th-29th we setting up shop at Wizard World Chicago. We are extremely excited since this is our first official convention outing. We will also have the very first issue of Pretentious Record Store Guy miniseries for sale as well as the Wizard World Parade of Freaks Special Edition which has the much anticipated Agent of C.H.A.N.G.E. 5 page story as a bonus. It’s going to be amazing and we can’t wait to see you there. So if you’re in Chicago and are attending WizardWorld, come look me up. Enjoy.

How many times have you found yourself trapped on a broken down bus going nowhere fast, completely surrounded by a smörgåsbord of the craziest freaks, geeks, weirdos, aliens, robots, cavemen, megalomaniacal midgets, dinosaurs, buddy cops, giant mutant monsters, dysfunctional couples, depressed artists, ninjas for hire, poli-sci majors, sit down comics and one messed up kid with a head full of LSD and only Jesus and His pet goat to help him through his trip?

If you have, then it’s just another Tuesday in your so called life. Congratulations, friend, that means that you’re already a big Freak!

If you have never had the luxury to find yourself in such a position, then it’s about time for you to expand your horizons a bit and venture outside your comfortable little sphere of normalcy; it’s time for you to experience first hand the depravity, humility, misadventures and downright oddness of how the other half lives!

So what are you waiting for: tune in, turn on and join the parade… Purchase the limited edition Parade of Freaks WizardWorldChicago Special now at IndyPlanet.com.

Sometimes my friends and I get together and draw stupid stuff over a few beers.  Mixing art and alcohol: always a good time. Here is a Killer Robots From the Future sketch I did that I thought turned out pretty nifty. Check it out.

More sketchy times and neolithic people. You know what your parents said about hanging out with cavemen, right? They said not to. Especially when they look like Brendan Fraiser. Here is an Ugh sketch. Enjoy.

Mega-huge local weekly Riverfront Times acknowledge the greatness of the comic Pangaea , produced by Kevin Wolf on PLAYBACK:stl.  Here is what they had to say:

“A self-published, warts-and-all collection of comic strips banged out while the artist was at his day job couldn’t possibly be this entertaining…could it? Wolf’s drawing is a little rough at times, and he could really use the aid of a letterer or at least some handwriting practice, but it’s the feeling of the work that carries the day. And reading Pangaea feels good. Returning the comic strip to its roots — three panels and a joke, like clockwork — Wolf succeeds where the legion of Far Side/Calvin & Hobbes rip-offs that populate St. Louis’ Only Daily fail. It helps that his main characters (Zephyr the kindly monkey, Henry the selfish koala and Kyle the childlike alligator) are well-developed enough that their interactions generate laughs without seeming like obvious setups, but there’s more than merely a sense of humor at work here. Some strips deal with a very adult sense of disappointment: Zephyr isn’t succeeding as a writer and Kyle’s beloved vegetable garden doesn’t win the award he craves. But the two are still friends, encouraging one another to believe that someday they will make it. And so they go on dreaming. It’s this humanity that makes Wolf’s work worth picking up again and again — although sometimes you are just picking it up to laugh at Kyle and his battles with the tape gun.”

Congratulations Kevin and congratulations to the RFT for recognizing greatness outside your pages.  In honor of Pangaea’s selection, here is a Pangaea comic I did for Kevin Wolf as a tribute to his awesomeness.  Enjoy and be sure to check out Kevin Wolf’s Pangaea appearing every Wednesday on Playback:STL.

Consider the zombies. The zombies represent the id, the uncontrolled part of man that is driven on instinct and impulse and only seeks immediate satisfaction of its primal urges and desires. In the case of the zombie, they are driven by the need to eat in order to survive, feasting on human flesh and brains. Thus the zombies become “brain-dead automatons and rotting reminders of man’s hubris!” It is of great irony that the collective, unconscious mass of zombies do not think, yet are driven to destroy—and gain nutritional sustenance by—brains. Intelligence is something to be feared, so they destroy the root of intelligence because they are afraid of what they cannot understand.

Conversely, you have the robots, man’s ego in full effect—the pinnacle of human scientific achievement, controlled only by rational thought and a desire to achieve consciousness. Robots are “brainless automatons and constructed remainders of man’s potential.” The robots, by questioning their programming, free themselves from man’s control and flock together to form a society to serve their prime directive to “protect all robotkind.” But the robot society is separated by roles based on robot model type, and in doing so, have formed a class based society that divides robotkind into distinct classes based on make and model. In essence, the perfect robot world ruled by logic and programming becomes a world built on human jealousy and insecurity, forcing class hierarchy on the robots and thus reinforcing their human makers’ own attitudes

How does the whole debacle ensue? Three scientists discover a wormhole/gateway into the future. They bring the zombies back and the world becomes infected by the zombie disease. Robots are the only thing left standing to defend the earth. Fighting ensues.

Yeah, sometimes I get deep about nothing.

To check out the rest of the review,go to Playback:STL.