Arsenic Lullaby has been around for awhile and is independently published (by me), and seeking out back issues and figuring out the order of them something people torture themselves with.
So…I have laid out every cover (not including reprints or collections) in the order they came out!
Follow along and I’ll throw in some info, which will explain why it is a bit confusing trying to be a completest with your A.L. collection.
To start with…some of these scans aren’t the best. Many were sent to me by fans at my request, since I myself don’t have a lot of these. Seems strange, but keep in mind that for most of the beginning I was worried about survival not archiving. Sell copies until they are gone, make another issue, repeat.
Also, the first 17 or so issues I wasn’t coloring them with a computer. I’d print the line work out on a transparency and paint the back. Sort of like an animation cell or something. I got mixed results. Some looked good, others got all f*cked up by the printer, issue no.2 for example. To try to get a weird supernatural effect, I actually had the fetus on a transparency that I stuck to the top of a really thick spiral of red and blue acrylic paint. It’s looked fantastic in person…but the dumbass printer pealed it apart and took a shot of each and re-layerd it after trying to color correct it. The published version looked…not as good.
Issue 3 is another instance of a different printer jacking around with the colors. The spray out of the trunk is blood…it was supposed to be red. Why did they tone it down to orange? Because they were morons. and when you are a moron you do stuff like that.
Issue 5 was colored at the last minute in the middle of me having pneumonia. My fever was 103 and I was more or less delirious. If you look real close at the top left corner of the logo you’ll see a discolored blotch. That was where a drop of sweat fell from my forehead…onto the paint. No time to fix it.
Issue 7 is a RARE case of a printer actually helping. I had misspelled “anniversary”. They caught it and corrected it.
You met the Clot in the last post. He first appeared in issue 9. The Clot has always been good luck in a way. Every issue he was in had a nice increase in sales. Even if he wasn’t on the cover or mentioned in the promo. Weird.
No.14 was a real limited run, and every issue was signed and numbered. I don’t recall why I decided to do that. But going forward from here…it starts to get confusing. I re-titled the book “The Arsenic Lullabies”. As I recall this was a cheap ploy to increase sales by putting out a no.1 (it worked)
At this point I started a spin off series , Laughter of the Damned” which was half stories done by me and half done My Randy Crider and Mark Crinolatas. It ran on the opposite months of A.L. but it stopped after 3 issues.
After Laughter of the Damned stopped. Mark and Randy started their own book and I went back to the old title “Arsenic Lullaby” and back to the old numbering
I had a one shot spin off called “the Thousand Deaths of Baron Von Donut”. Don’t remember why I decided to do that.
At this point I had been also working for Mad Magazine and was used to drawing pages in a wider format. So I stopped putting out single issues and instead put out big magazine sized collections of new material.
That’s all of them ( I think) not counting the ash can reprints, alternative covers, or the many trade paperback reprint collections. I reprinted these issues A LOT. What can I say? People like them, they tell their friends, their friends want their own copies. Also not included are the Greek versions done By Jemma Press!….that’s a tale and pics for another day. All in all…and my math could be a bit off, there’s a bout 200,000 copies of A.L. out there. But good luck finding any! People keep them…or destroy them.
As I went through this…it dawned on me that the issue about to come out contains the 1000th page of Aesenic Lullaby that I have both written and illustrated!
I’m not sure which page it is because I don’t have the back issues and can only estimate. SO…if you have any back issues bring them to a convention so I can piece this all together.
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