Our intrepid group of plucky young punk rock artists arrived at the 2005 Philly Zine Fest with a wide assortment of indie comix & art, ready to introduce ourselves to a wider world, that we optimistically assumed would welcome us with open arms and wallets. I mean, why wouldn’t they?

We’d worked so hard, published so many comix, and were so gd excited, that the idea of failure had never really crossed our minds. I mean, why would it?

But after about 2 hours of complete invisibility to the passing crowd of festival attendees a desperate idea occurred to me. Give the comix out for free. It was clear we weren’t going to make any money from this event, and as poverty stricken as I was at the time, the point of the comix weren’t to make money anyway, it was to communicate. So I called out the audible, maybe much to the chagrin of some of my more business savvy collaborators, all of the comix on the table were now free.

And the momentum of the day swung rapidly in our favor! Our once desolate corner was now mobbed with people, we were in the mix! We were meeting the world and the world was meeting us and it was joyous and awesome.

At the end of the day we had put several hundred comix into circulation. It felt great. It felt like we’d taken a loss and turned it into a win. It felt like this was the thing that was going to lead to the next thing, and we’d look back on this day as a pivotal turning point.

As we left the venue, feeling entirely elated, I beheld a wild spectacle! The courtyard of the venue, in lovely West Philadelphia, covered in our discarded comix, blowing in the wind. Overflowing trashcans stuffed with our comix, spilling out into an indifferent universe. Our comix were literal garbage. In light of such dramatic evidence it would have been tough to deny that I’d made a tactical blunder, but I did it anyway, and with a tightly balled fist raised to sky, defiantly declared, “THEN WE’LL CHOKE THEIR RIVERS WITH OUR DEAD!”