Screwjob Presents: Major Bummer

Hidden Fortress is debuting a new anthology series at CAKE : Screwjob Presents! Each mini-sized issue will focus on the work of one SCREWJOB artist, and we're psyched to have Peter Faecke's Major Bummer as the inaugural book! 

 

I met Peter at last year's CAKE, he was wearing a repulsive shirt he'd made depicting the Iron Sheik doing terrible things to the Million Dollar man's manservant Virgil, and was psyched about what we were doing with SCREWJOB. I got him to do a comic for the next issue (which is only now coming out), and we started talking about working on another project. I think he had most of Major Bummer already drawn, I loved it and jumped at the chance to print it under the Screwjob Presents banner!  

Major Bummer is a top military operative, a true One Man Army Corps, tasked with smashing a South American Nazi enclave. No easy task, especially when the Nazi commander has turned himself into some kind of acid-spewing wolf/beastman! 

I'll have a big stack of Screwjob Presents at CAKE, after which they'll be available for purchase in the Hidden Fortress store!

SCREWJOB #4!

The Hidden Fortress has been buzzing with activity the last couple of weeks, madly printing SCREWJOB 4s for CAKE next weekend in Chicago! Look at this insane cover from my favorite mad genius, Tony Astone:

SCREWJOB 4 Cover by Tony Astone

SCREWJOB 4 offers another fifty pages of pro wrestling debauchery, lovingly illustrated by the likes of Peter Faecke, Bunny Bisoux, Box Brown, Pat Aulisio, Tom Toye, Hiromi Ueyoshi, Blake Sims and more!

From Pat Aulisio's Bull Nakano comic

Bi-valves engaged in a deadly ballet, by Hiromi Ueyoshi

Young Bucks superkicking their way through history, by Blake Sims

Dudley Boyz, about to get murdered, by Peter Faecke

Look for this book at CAKE, and then soon after in the Hidden Fortress store, and other fine retailers!

SCREWJOB debuts at CAKE!

This past weekend the Hidden Fortress relocated to Chicago for CAKE, and debuted the new issue of SCREWJOB to the unsuspecting masses there. If you missed the show, that's ok, SCREWJOB #2 is now available in the Hidden Fortress store!

CAKE was a great success, and I was psyched to meet a lot of other folks making wrestling comics! Check out Hiromi Ueyoshi's WWWF book for some amazing panther vs gator wrestling action

Matt Reints made some dreamy mini-comics about the American Dream, Dusty Rhodes, Aaron Poliwoda gave me some of his intense Ultimate Warrior and Chris Benoit comics, and JB Roe's Suplex Superstars Volume 1 is a thing of beauty!

Tom Toye was also at CAKE with a prototype of the Illogical Comics/Hidden Fortress Press collaboration, Entering a Room Full of People, which he's been working on for the past year, and it's mind-numbingly beautiful!! I'm psyched to get started printing this book, it's incredible!

CAKE 2015

SCREWJOB 2 back cover by Jimmy Giegerich

This weekend we'll be at CAKE in Chicago! You can find us at table 63, right next to dear friends Jo Dery, Walker Mettling and Michael DeForge. Here's a handy map to find your way:

SCREWJOB #2

Well, it's been an uncomfortably humid, and at times torrential, week down at the Hidden Fortress Press, which is not an ideal situation for printing in. The ink takes forever to dry, paper sticks together, and the machine is constantly barfing out paper jams and ink clots. But without a moment to spare, the second issue of SCREWJOB is FINALLY DONE!

Look at this amazing cover by Jimmy Giegerich:

Remember that time Stan Hansen stuck his finger in Vader's socket and just flicked that eyeball out of there? And Vader had to push it back in and keep wrestling for like another 15 minutes?! That moment in time has never looked more beautiful.

This issue features 10 sinister tales of the squared circle, from the warped minds of Blake Sims, Paul Lyons, Melissa Mendes, Box Brown, Guy Benoit and Rick Altergott, Walker Mettling, Josh Bayer, Beaver, Pat Aulisio and Clark Jackson, with endpages featuring portraits of some of the most Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling by Julia Gualtieri.

More scenes from the past two week's blitz of printing:

after the printing comes the cutting, folding, collating, stapling and trimming

Stan Hansen's handiwork ad infinitum

 I love this detail from Beaver's Great Muta vs Kabuki comic

Sugar Cane Diaz by Guy Benoit and Rick Altergott

Bret "the Hitman" Hart, doing what he does best, by Pat Aulisio

If you're in Chicago this weekend, come find the Hidden Fortress table at CAKE for first shot at getting your hands on this book, otherwise you'll have to wait a week or so until I put it up in the Hidden Fortress store

CAKE 2014

The car is packed, and I'm preparing to take the long way to CAKE, the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo. CAKE has been around now for 3 glorious years, and we've been there since it's inception. It's a great show, so many talented and wonderful people gathered together under one roof!

We'll be setting up shop at table 25, surrounded by some of the best people in the biz: Jo Dery will be holding down the Pegacorn Press table to our right, and Walker and Julia will have the full power of the Providence Comics Consortium on display to our left.

Come visit us, Chicago!

Showtimes

I'm starting to fill out the Hidden Fortress travel plan for 2014, and it's shaping up to be a pretty exciting year...

April 12th we'll be making our west coast debut at Linework NW in Portland, OR. I think this is the inaugural year for this show; it's being organized by Zack Soto and Francois Vigneault, and I get the sense that it's going to be one of the really good ones. Plus I've never been to Portland! I've heard that I will dine like a vegan prince while there...

On the weekend of May 10-11 we'll be making our triumphant return to TCAF in Toronto ON. Last year was my first visit to TCAF, and I was blown away! Such a good show, with fantastic programming, and a huge turnout. And Toronto is absolutely beautiful.

We'll be traveling to Chicago on the weekend of May 31 - June 1 for CAKE. This will be CAKE's 3rd year, and I'm proud to say that we've been with them from the beginning. It's always one of the most fun shows of the year; so many good, talented folks in Chicago!

September 13-14 is SPX weekend. Small Press Expo in Bethesda, MD is the premier indy comics show on the east coast, maybe in the whole country, and I'm psyched that we'll be participating in it once again. SPX is so important to our scene, on so many levels, it's hard to imagine a world without it... I'm looking forward to being a part of this show for a long, long time.

There are a couple more shows on the horizon that I'm hoping to add to my calendar, like the Rhode Island Indy Publishing Expo this summer and Comic Arts Brooklyn in the fall, but they both seem to be in a developmental stage right now. I'll have more information about them in the future.

The Hidden Fortress is working on a number of projects for release in 2014, which we'll be rolling out over the course of the year at these shows. Here's a preview of one of those new books, an anthology honoring those glorious combatants of the squared circle:

Box Brown has been slaving away on a highly anticipated Andre the Giant biography which will finally be seeing the light of day sometime this year. I'm thrilled that he drew this harrowing tale of Abdullah the Butcher (the greatest blader in wrestling history) for our book! He has a number of beautiful portraits of wrestling superstars for sale at his store, go check em out

CAKE 2013

the Hidden Fortress Press is thrilled to be returning to the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo on June 15-16th! Walker Mettling, of the Providence Comics Consortium, has been kind enough to provide this Providence comics family cheat-sheet for finding us all out there on the floor:

just looking at that map, and without even knowing who's at the rest of those tables, it's easy to tell that this show will be a tour de force. Leif Goldberg is one of the most talented folks i know, i'm sure he'll be bringing some wondrous wares to Chicago; i know that Cybele and Olivia will both have amazing new books; Walker has a talent for getting some of the best cartoonists alive to work on the PCC anthologies with him; Mike T and Mickey Z are two of my favorite people, and favorite artists. i'm sure they'll have new comics too, possibly a RAV8 from Mickey?; Caroline Paquita and her Pegacorn Press can work wonders with a Risograph; and Jo Dery is one of the greatest and most talented people i've ever met. oh, and she did all the promotional art for CAKE this year too.

i'm sad to say that i won't be able to make it this year; the show looks to be a great one, with so many wonderful people under one roof! in my absence, Roby Newton will be there to run the Hidden Fortress table. you should stop by and see her, she's the bee's knees

CAKE - Chicago Alternative Comics Expo

Hidden Fortress Press, representing at the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo this past weekend.

Roby and I issued each other a challenge: to create a new comic for Chicago on the Ryobi press, as part of the learning/breaking in process. I would say we had mixed success, but success none the less. Her comic, Fantasmancer #0, came out a lot cleaner than mine, and I had to supplement my pages with some help from Mickey Z's Risograph.

CAKE was a good time, with the greatest people. let's do it again next year