IHYS aka Frank A. Diaz presents “I got this shit in a discount bin.”

I love comics. That’s probably not hard to figure out considering Billy Purgatory and the kinda stuff that I post on here all the time – I guess you can call me a comic-geek or whatever, I’ve never been offended by the terminology. If you gotta drop me into a category as something, I’d rather it be that then names that my ex’s have for me or something like, “He really drinks a lot of Mt. Dew. He’s a Dewist.”

As much as I love comics, I do not even come close to the level of immense-fandomosity that Frank A. Diaz has achieved in his lifetime.

A fixture of the comics scene online and all-about town in his native Miami – Frank lives the dream. Being an amazing artist himself, nothing gets Frank as excited like great comic book art and artists. He’s all into story too, but it’s the art that really sparks up his Light-Brite.

For those of you who aren’t so into comics – there’s a place in every comic book store in America that aficionados like us love to mine like a bunch’a Dwarves singing Hi-Ho – the treasure chest which is The Discount Bin:

In anticipation of the upcoming Billy2, Billy Purgatory is .99 on Amazon – so, “You could got that shit in a discount bin!” Click!

Author Jesse James Freeman delivers a comic book for the ages in novel form with this wild, tongue-in-cheek, imaginative creation that will suspend your disbelief. Jump in if you’re looking to immerse yourself in a unique and original fantasy tale with a sick twist….Billy Purgatory dares you to join him.

Walter Penko’s “The Onion Psychiatrist” [Graphic Novel]

Walter Penko produces an indie comic out of his garage in Sylvania, Illinois – it’s called The Onion Psychiatrist. Just as the title states, it’s about an onion that is also a psychiatrist.

The premise of the book is that people come in to talk about their fears, their lives, their phobias – and the onion psychiatrist sits quietly listening. Invariably, just as his patients will start to feel better about their problems, the drifting lines that Penko draws to indicate the odor of the onion psychiatrist will reach the patient’s nose and they will begin tearing up and crying uncontrollably.

The onion psychiatrist only listens, Penko never employs talk bubbles with the character. The silent dialogue from the onion psychiatrist is handled by the swirling odor-lines eminating from his spherical frame. In this way, the onion is a silent observor of life’s happenings, trapped within some self imposed solitary confinement and unable to effectively interact with those people who desperately need him the most.

His patients are shown panel by panel pouring out their souls about life’s tragic circumstances while the onion sits there, quietly, stewing in his own stench. It’s as if this stench is actually a pervading anti-noise that cuts the patients down panel per panel, until they can no longer keep their composure, and in an explosive mess of tears and Kleenex, they let it all go.

Onion Psychiatrist is a tale of life in our time.  Detached from the closeness of other humans and retreating further and further into stinky personal hells. The book employs this metaphor as its core theme – the pushing away from society until the stink of it all breaks us down and exposes the fragile souls within the armor we wear day to day. As tears are purged and emotions well to the surface we are all, inevitably, gasping for clean air.

Penko himself is one who has been gasping his entire life – reaching out, but not really knowing how or who to reach to. Comics were never his life’s ambition, and even now as a sort of cult figure in the indie comics world, he seems uneasy with the whole affair. He began Onion Psychiatrist after he was laid off from the computer manufacturing industry (The Intellivision crash of ’83).

He could only find odd jobs to sustain himself and his family (eleven cats, all named Whiskers). He began his comics career after becoming obsessed with the newspaper staple The Family Circus, but also credits Hi and Lois as a huge inspiration. Never into the idea of superheroes, he decided that if he was going to venture into the comics world he’d have to create something real and that spoke to people just like me.

Penko took the plunge, investing in materials and given the luxury of free time to work on the book after a successful appearance on the game show The Price is Right allowed him to win a Showcase Showdown. Selling off his prizes for cash (a new dishwasher, a grandfather clock, and a Chevy Cavalier), …

…he purchased art supplies and began working on what would become Onion Psychiatrist. Disheveled and walking around his house in a dirty bathrobe, he drank nothing but Sanka and obsessively chewed nicotine gum for inspiration.

His compulsions paid off eventually.

Even now with his cult status and his awards he still doesn’t feel he’s arrived. Something seems to still naw at him – as if he’s the subject of his own comic. The book, he admits, has been cathartic for him.  He ventures out more, joining a square dancing class recently as well as participating in war re-enactments of the US occupation of Grenada.

“I guess…” as he ends our talk through his locked screen door, “I guess I just haven’t smelt that stank yet – that stinked.  You know? I guess I ain’t got a good enough snitched of my own stink, that which comes from my own onion. It ain’t made them teardrops flow.”

As the front door proper closed, I heard the rhythmn of many locks snapping into place and I left there feeling I had learned something about the human condition. I hummed a tune, as I lazily made my way to the next house on the block, still trying to give away all those copies of Watchtower that weighed me down so – but with a little more spring in my step.

* * * * *

I am not the genius that Walter Penko is, and I have never written a comic about Sanka or Onions, but…

Billy Purgatory happens to be the most badass skateboarder and sweet talker any broad can meet–even at the age of ten. He is also the target of supernatural forces he can’t understand, and doesn’t want to.

Billy just can’t seem to avoid all things Monster. Growing up, he encounters Devil Birds, gypsies, Time Zombies and vampires (and not the kind you want to bring home to your Pop, either). He tries to convince himself they’re not real by joining the army, fixes cars and even goes to Vegas. But whenever Billy thinks he’s put it all behind him, a monster shows up, and it’s usually in the form of the beautiful Anastasia…

Click for Time Zombie Transportation to Amazon!

Billy Purgatory is Jesse James Freeman’s first novel. He’s also studied psychology and film and scripted comics. When he’s not writing books, Jesse James trains falcons to kill Leprechaun Robots, and will continue to do so until the world is relatively safe.

Tales of Nerd: The History of Dungeons & Dragons

When I was in the 7th grade I was not yet a fully realized badass. Girls were suddenly very interesting, but they were not however interested in me. I realize, looking back now, that I had not yet grown into my suave and debonair personae which would provide me with smatter’d realtionship wonder-times in later years.

Apple IIE's didn't have stuff like this to click on back in the day.

I had not learned how to navigate in the realm of interpersonal goings on between two human beings that begins with that look across a crowded room and the raised eyebrow, followed with Shakespearean heart-a-fluttering haiku language (“I noticed you looking my way – you into Tequila and stolen cars?”). Boom! Love-magic! Ultimately resulting in a co-habitative Nirvana that finally brings you and that special someone to a higher state of transcendental being.  Where you really understand that other person in ways that you never thought possible (“I packed all your things and left them for you at Goodwill. I’ve run off to live in Chile with my karate instructor. He gets me.”).

7th grade girls were still dreaming about being Rapunzeled off with Dragon-slaying Princes with a flair for martial arts. I was learning a little something about Dragon-ass-kicking too – but not on anything that resembled a date. That was the year that my new friend Mike moved to town and helped me through the long semester of my discontent.

Mike was a genius who would go on to study nuclear physics or something smart and top-secret like that. He got accepted to college and rolled out when the rest of us were only starting our junior year of high school. The guy was bootlegging anime tapes and chasing college girls before any of the rest of us knew either of those things even existed.

"Student loan money well spent at Hot Topic."

Mike was what many would consider a nerd. He was, if I might be so bold, the King of Nerd Mountain! He wore that big brain like a badge of honor, and rightfully so, he’s probably saved all our asses in some war-game bullshit that none of us even have the security clearance to know about. He has reason to be proud, in the world of physics and computers the guy is a rockstar and from what I’ve heard lives with a Brazillian supermodel now in a hidden fortress below the streets of Dallas.

"Mikey, are you and Matthew Broderick done saving the planet yet?"

Why was Mike so crucial to me, a lost junior-badass in training, when I couldn’t talk even the 4H girls into giving up the digits? Because Mike helped me pass the time, in a land before whiskey took over that job, by introducing me to The Devil’s Game itself!

Dungeons & Dragons.

"Yeah, you're never getting laid."

Yes, Satan’s game – or so we were led to believe in my youth. A wild and dangerous ride which would lead to things like pot smoking and sacrificing woodchucks over altars so you might invoke the power of evil spirits like Azathoth and Carrot-Top to do your bidding.

Hadn’t I seen that movie with Tom Hanks where he dressed in women’s clothes to sneak in and out of his apartment? Hopelessly lost to the demonic mind-bending of those hexagonal dice and believing he was in love with a volleyball?

The only reasons to pretend you're talking to a volleyball.

Didn’t I hear the stories about how that kid in the Michael Jackson Pepsi commercial had been co-erced to break dance with such fervor by the powers of a Beholder that he broke his neck?

Surely, this game of evil had been an instrumental tool of the Illuminati and had taken down many great men on their way up the power-ladder. Gary Hart and Donna Rice had been engaged in a particularly tricky campaign to re-take the Keep On The Borderlands when his Kennedy’esque political career had taken a tumble for the worst. He’d been a 9th Level Barbarian called Urgloth and she a 5th level Thief named Morganna Glittersnitch.

They never made it into the Temple of Ultimate Evil - or that's what he told his wife.

Let’s not even get into how many times Bill Clinton had to roll a savings throw against comeliness.

"I see you, baby - shakin' that ass. Shakin' that ass."

This game was ruining America back in those days. That was the popular word beneath the revival tent anyhow.

Dragon Dice, before they are crushed and arranged into multi-colored lines to be snorted by America's youth.

It wasn’t that way at all though. It had been started as a war strategy game by a nerd just like us, a pre-Zuckerberg wunderkind named Gary Gygax. He and his buddies had trouble getting girls to pay attention to them too and they read the Hobbit one too many times.

Thus, a nerd-revolution was born. Spawned from their inability to get laid they would launch a multi-billion dollar industry which would pack nerd’dom together in vast Valhalla like meeting halls where they would congregate with other nerds and would trade collectibles with one another. They would all lie about how much strange they were getting after the convention and THEY would raise together chalices of red Kool-aid, mixed far too strongly to resemble the blood of the fallen, and they would call to the fake gods of the Monster Manual to bless them one and all.

"There's tons of hot girls, right here! Look how big they draw their boobs."

At the close of the 1980′s, Star Trek conventions, a hybridization of the above stated phenomenon, would be in full swing and nerd girls would begin to intermingle with their ranks – and finally, they’d get their shot at getting their Tri-Corders calibrated. This unsightly, but necessary, union would spawn many Klingon children and thus, the race of nerds would be saved to form important institutions like Comic-Con, Facebook, Michael Bay’s career, and Olivia Munn nudez.

"Don't hate me because I'm beautiful."

Thank you Mike, Moritz, John, Chris, Lee, and Stringer for going on Dungeon-Crawls with me and for yelling, “I call MOST powerful magic item in the room!”, and for opening up the imagination of a young impressionable writer.

Everything you need to know about how to pick up a half-elf chick in a tavern.

Oh, and for any girls reading this, I’m totally roguish’ly good looking now and I like to party, but I’m also responsible and sensitive and love kids, fondue, and your cat, Mr. Jinkles.

And DUNGEONS & DRAGONS did that for me too!

Click for Time Zombie transportation to Amazon!

Billy Purgatory: I am the Devil Bird is Jesse James Freeman’s first novel.  When he is not trying to convince women that Batman comics are cool he is drinking Tequila alone and working on a sequel, Billy Purgatory and the Curse of the Satanic Five.