Cheap Thrills, Incorporated
side hustle thoughts
Have you ever seen Nate McDonough’s comic Long Boxes? He publishes it online and in his comix/zine GRIXLY.
It’s an ongoing comic strip about McDonough’s day job, flipping comics. He buys them cheap, spends hours going through the boxes at comic stores far and wide, and then sells them.
It’s a great slice-of-life/autofiction comic; the mundane, often socially awkward situations enhanced by McDonough’s ink-heavy, grotesque figures.
I love hanging around comic shops. Digging through the dollar bins. Eavesdropping on the banter. I don’t necessarily want to join in on the banter, I just want to absorb it.
Imbuing garbage with value is a big part of my whole creative jam, always has been. It’s not a big leap from Garbage Delight to Hot Dog Code. I read an old interview with Walter Mosley a while back where they asked him his influences, and he said, you know, as a crime writer he should probably say Chester Himes and Ross Macdonald, but really it’s Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, comic books. The stuff that gets you as a kid, when you’re discovering words and books, that’s what shapes you. “I love comic books, Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Marvel comics. That’s really where I began to be brought into story lines. Later on I read all kinds of crime writers. But really, I think the influences begin when you’re a child and they’re always the strongest influences.”
Over the summer I wrote a really messy and loose first draft of something different from anything else I’ve written before. It’s a short novel full of the stuff I’ve always been obsessed with and particularly informed by the punk covers of “serious” rock songs I really liked growing up.