WALKING MAN COMICS

WALKING MAN COMICS are mini comics by Matt Levin. He has been producing these little poetic comics with stamps for years! This is from a press release he sent me: Walking Man Comics Celebrates 10 years of Monthly Mini-Comics. This February, Walking Man Comics celebrated 10 years worth of mini-comics publishing, a new twelve-page issue every month since February, 2006. Walking Man publishes two titles, usually alternating months, WMC PRESENTS SPECIAL, observations and speculations on life, including death and magic, and MUSICOMICS original songs concerned with life, love, and loss, the world, and its ecology.

The goals of WALKING MAN COMICS have always been "imagination, elegance and wit," but the hallmark of the mini-comics has always been that the artwork is most often created with the use and manipulation of rubber-stamp images, sometimes enlarged or reduced to create the effects of perspective, long-shots, close-ups, and movement; sometimes integrated to create new images from two or more stamps used together; sometimes reversed, just to have an image travel the proper direction.

I found this interesting: Of the hundreds of rubber-stamp companies, only two dozen have been able to grant me permission to "reproduce their images electronically" (i.e., print them--), which has put a tight limitation on the images I have to work with --approximately 180 stamps with which to picture the universe. An additional challenge the past two or three years is to keep it interesting, at a point where it no longer matters how these are composed, they're just good comics. (I'm surprised that the other stamp companies didn't want to be promoted for free like the other stamps he does use. Or even hire Matt to do some advertising mini comics to help promote them, etc...)

Matt puts out: MUSICOMICS (#1-56) and WALKING MAN COMICS PRESENTS SPECIAL(#'s 1-57). Matt claims to be "comics' hardest-working poet."

Matt sent me WALKING MAN COMICS PRESENTS SPECIAL #38, and MUSICOMICS #13 and #45. I've always loved Matt's unique work, I find it takes you to another place for a while, a nice floating world all its own. Send him$3.00 for 4 of his mini's to: Walking Man Comics, 123 Elm St., Hatfield, MA 01038. (These are the best poetic stamp mini's I've ever seen, since no one else is doing this to my knowledge! *** 3 stars out of 5. Ok, I'd prefer to see artwork but you must admit this is original!)