NoPants was my college zine. It featured pop culture satire, fake news, music reviews, and absurd collage packaged together as a ludicrous lo-fi magazine parody.

You can download a PDF of NoPants #0. And if you wanna know more about this issue of NoPants, here's how it came to be:

In the fall of 2002, I moved into a dilapidated house with six other people that I barely knew. I lived in a closet. Not metaphorically, but literally... my room was three feet wide and maybe five or six feet long.

I'd recently left my tight group of friends, quit my raunchy college rock band (Dirty Weekend), and my parents were on the verge of divorce.

I hated Carnegie Mellon University and I desperately needed new outlets to keep my mind off of everything else. That meant new music, new classes, new friends, and -- to a large degree -- even a new identity.

One of those outlets came in the form of a new zine series, NoPants.

I was no stranger to mixing lo-fi collage with goofy text and handing it out to people. The Lockeroom was my high school zine that basically got me into college.

Eager to reconnect with a defining moment of my high school years, NoPants exited my brain at top speed in October 2002. The content of this first issue was a natural extension of the humor I created years earlier for The Lockeroom.

My conscious goal was to create an art product that was relatively simple to reproduce. My subconscious goal was to rebel against principles of "good clean design" that I was constantly hearing about my first two years of college. That's probably why I handed out most of them to my friends studying graphic design.

Its reception was lukewarm at best. My roommates sort of ignored it and I barely got any feedback from my friends. While I would've loved a warm response, this didn't deter me. I was making it for myself.

I dig certain aspects of #0, but I think it was only a starting point. This issue doesn't have nearly as much pathos or poignancy as subsequent installments, which were packed full of more personal content and bigger ideas.

Next: Shit gets twisted in NoPants #1.

On Thursday, September 1st from 5-10 PM I'll be at AIR peddling my minicomics and zines at the mega-awesome super-bodacious PITTSBURGH ZINE FAIR!!!

Here are my new releases created especially for this year's debut show:

Tales for a New Gen

I'm thrilled to present this zine of three short sci-fi tales by Justique Woolridge. I did a few illustrations and the book design for TFANG, but make no mistake -- Justique is the star here, writing the kickass tales and designing the gorgeous cover.

NoPants Zine Anthology

NoPants was my early 00s satire of corporate magazine culture, full of nonsense and cheeky ignorance. I've decided to collect the three original NoPants issues and create a new one just for the Pittsburgh Zine Fair. But instead of printing them individually, I'm collected them into a 48-page anthology of insanity.

Along with these two new releases, I'll also have issues of Time Log, some Super Haters ashcans, my sci-fi minicomic Passage, Poetree (which was randomly featured on the front page of Pop City today (see below for a screen cap), and more.

Still not convinced? Check out this video ad for the Zine Fair:

You might recognize the music -- it's my song Essential from Brilliant Shower. I'll be playing my Nik Furious music at the Fair from 8-9:30 PM, tearing it up with some of my mixtape mixes, original instrumentals, and favorites from other musicians.

So that's it. That's all I've got. That's my best sales pitch. Hope to see you there!!!