Stumptown Comics Fest this weekend!

Hello Drop Target readers!  This is a reminder that I will be tabling this weekend (April 27th and 28th) at the Stumptown Comics Festival in Portland, Oregon.

I will be at table A-03 and I will have all five issues of Drop Target Zine available.  If you are in the Portland area this weekend, please swing by!  There will be a lot of other cool stuff there as well.

It's always nice to have an excuse to visit Portland because there are like a trillion pinball machines.  I will play as many of them as I can...  And I'll report back here with some photos and stories from the trip!

P.S. I will be out of town and therefore unable to fill Drop Target orders while I am on the road.  I'll be back in Oakland on Monday though, so all weekend orders will go out early next week.  Thanks in advance for your patience!

PAPA Livestream Kickstarter

Faithful pinballers, I cannot...CANNOT stress how exciting a time this is for pinball!  PAPA, the Professional Amateur Pinball Association has started a kickstarter to raise money for livestreaming equipment.  They tested this model of live pinball broadcast for their recent Pinburgh tournament and it was an out-of-control success!  So much fun!  Now, it has been one day...I repeat...ONE DAY since they started the kickstarter, and they have already hit their $20,000 goal.  YOU SHOULD STILL CONTRIBUTE!  The more money they get, the more programming they'll be able to add such as pinball repair videos, interviews, etc.  If you donate at the $50 level, you get a t-shirt by me, but there are a lot of really cool incentives out there!  Do it for pinball!  CONTRIBUTE HERE

PAPA Pinburgh Shirt

As promised, here's an image of the shirt I did from Pinburgh 2013!  Mark Steinman, the cool cat that I've been working with on these projects, was really taken with the gnomes-running-a-pinball-machine-motif, so we tried to make that a unifying theme with the various projects.  The little guys are pretty cute, and really grew on me.  The one on the poster with the eyepatch is too cute for words!

 

Even though I used to work as a screen-printer, making shirts, and I TEACH screen-printing at the Center for Cartoon Studies, I always have a hard time narrowing down my color palettes!  This is four colors printed on a red shirt, and even narrowing it down to four was haaaaaaaaarrrrrrrd.

Safecracker tokens

My comics pal Andy Jewett sent me this awesome photo of some Safecracker tokens he found in the bottom of his change jar.  Andy was lucky enough to have one of these machines in a lounge back during his college days.  I know that cartoonist Evan Dorkin has at least one of these as well...

"In Pinball We Trust" - I love it!  The idea of having a bunch of custom tokens that were rewards for reaching certain goals is so cool.  I love the idea of having a physical reward that you can show other pinball players, to prove that you beat a game, or got to a wizard mode.  I wonder if anyone collected all 20 tokens...

Drop Target Issue 5 is available for ordering!

Two big boxes full of Drop Target #5 arrived in the mail from Vermont today, so they are finally available for ordering!  Jon did a great job printing them, and now it is my task to mail them out to everyone.  I'm ready to take your orders now!  Below is a breakdown of what you'll find in this issue:

DROP TARGET #5 - The Community Issue
64 pages! - 5.5" x 8.5" - B&W printing
First Printing: 8.5" x 14" full-color centerfold, screenprinted cover

FEATURING:
- 6TH ANNUAL PACIFIC PINBALL EXPOSITION: A written account (with illustrations) of Alec's first trip to a pinball expo.
- PINHALLS: Reciprocal Skateboards - New York, NY
- OBSERVATIONS ON A COMPETITION: A comic about Jon's first trip to a pinball competition: Pinferno 2012!
- THE REPLAY REVIEW: Addams Family (Bally, 1992)

- VIDEO MODE: Pinball Archive Videos

- SPECIAL WHEN LITERATURE: Pinball, 1973 by Haruki Murakami
- DREAM MACHINES: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by Alec Longstreth, Groo the Wanderer by Ryan Claytor, Inspector Gadget by Jon Chad

- TILT TALK: Interview with PAPA director Mark Steinman

- MY DAY WITH THE CRAZY FLIPPER FINGERS: a comic by Alec Longstreth!
- BANG BACKS: www.pinballmap.com & App

If you would rather pick up a copy of Drop Target #5 in person, you will have two opportunities to do so this month:  1) Our amazing center spread artist Ryan Claytor will be at the Small Press and Comics Expo this weekend (April 13th and 14th) in Columbus, Ohio.  2) I will be at the Stumptown Comics Festival on April 27th and 28th in Portland, Oregon.  I will have all five issues of Drop Target available, so swing on by!

Also, a heads up for those of you who are collector-types...  There are only about 25 copies left of the first printing of Drop Target #2 (with the full-color center spread and a screenprinted cover on colored paper).  After those are gone, they're gone!  We will then make a second printing, similar to the second printing of DTZ #1 with a grayscale center spread and a black and white cover, with a $4 cover price.  You have been forewarned!

Okay, well, we know this issue took a long time to make, but we really think it is going to be worth the wait.  At 64 pages, it is our longest issue yet!

Mugged

This was a Dream Machine that I posted on the Stern Blog a couple months ago.  I have been on an obsessive kick with cocktail pinball tables.  I see this as an obvious solution to not enough private pinball owners.  There are a lot of pinball enthusiasts who, like me, rent an apartment.  Space is a premium.  Not only does a cocktail pinball table take up less space, but it doubles as a piece of (level) furniture that every apartment needs.  So, when I thought about drawing up a cocktail pinball table, the first thing I thought of, was, "what would be the most AWKWARD-themed pinball machine to have to show a date when they came over for the first time?"  My answer was, "crime/mugging/robbery".  It turned out to be a pretty rad table, but it is a little too creepy!

 Whoa whoa whoa!  Let's get our stories straight!  That is a mug of ROOT BEER on the machine!  ROOT BEER!

Pinball Violence: Benoit Brisefer

Our Belgian pinball correspondant, Max de Radiguès sent us yet another example of pinball violence.  He writes:

I stumbled on this page in a old Benoit Brisefer comics.It's a comic by Peyo, the guy who did the smurfs...

What is it about throwing people into pinball machines?  Is it just that this sort of thing is usually going down at a bar, and of the many things in a bar to be smashed, a pinball machine is the best prop?  I like to think it causes the most visceral reaction from the reader/viewer not only because you can imagine the pain of being thrown into all that glass and wood and metal, but also because it's an instant bummer to know that there would be one less pinball machine in the world, and that bar would instantly be that much lamer.  Or who knows, maybe it's just so storytellers can use the "TILT" gag.

PAPA Pinburgh Poster

Phew, my "p" key really got a workout from that title!  A couple of weeks ago I posted about the shirt I did for PAPA back in August.  Not this weekend, but NEXT weekend PAPA will be holding the official kick-off to their championship circuit with Pinburgh 2013!  Super exciting!  I'm beyond luck to have had the chance to work with these guys for a while.  I love art, I love pinball, and working on these posters, shirts, etc. has made me a very happy Chad!  Here is the poster that I did for Pinburgh!  After the tournament I'll show off some other stuff I did ;)

 

Since the time I did this poster, there are (over?) 400 players registered, and OVER $60,000 in prizes!?!  I went to Pinferno 7 in NYC last January, and was COMPLETELY overwhelmed.  I can't even imagine what a 400 player match-play tournament is like!