Stickboy #4

by Dennis Worden

Stickboy #4 is subtitled “Victims Of Our Own Mental Abstraction”. Mainly it’s about how our mind, fears, and desires torture us. Yeah, yuck it up on that. Marshmallow Head comes back as Floating Charred Marshmallow Head. A pig takes a dump. Blockhead sings a song. There’s a mysterious slug creature, and a smug urine sample. Shitspewing Inc. gets blown up. There’s some time in a jail cell with some lovely “excrement art”. It’s the feel bad hit of the 1990’s, though it never was a hit, and feeling bad is optional. Originally this was published with added computer color and the art stretched to fit comic proportions, so rather messed with. Now for the first time it can be seen in it’s original black and white, magazine sized format. Joy to the world. It also has some of the author’s personal photos added to the “letters” section, which I’m sure no one gives a rats scrotum about.

34 pages, Paperback

Published May 11, 2017

About the author

Dennis Worden started out doing underground comics in 1981, appearing in Robert Crumb’s “Weirdo” magazine and a few punk rock fanzines, such as Flipside. In 1982 he met a guy with an old printing press in his garage and published his first book, “SLUR”. Throughout the 1980’s and 90’s he appeared in various underground/alternative comics, and punk publications, but most importantly, got his own title, “Stickboy”, published by Fantagraphics Books in 1988. In all there would be eight Stickboy books through four different publishers, and several other books, such as Bongo Dick, Pedestrian Vulgarity, Suburban Teens On Acid, and Cruel And Unusual Punishment. Recently Dennis republished most of the old Stickboy books, as well as combining them into an anthology, “The Stickboy Saga”. He also did an expanded version of his 1992 auto-bio comic, “Suburban Teens On Acid“, and compiled a bunch of his early comic work, and other obscenities, into the anthology, “The Floating Skull and Friends”.
Worden had been selling paintings directly to fans of his comics since the mid 1980's, then in 1994 got his first gallery show of paintings at La Luz de Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles, the premier “lowbrow” art purveyor and all around cool-as-hell place. He’d show there many more times, and in several other venues around the country. Recently he published a book of his paintings, wood carvings, block prints, and other art, called "Worden - Loser Art". It covers the entire 37 year span of his art career to date, and some earlier work as well.
He also wrote a non-fiction book (not a comic), “The Way Of The Good Hedonist”. It’s a book of philosophy, not a book about hedonism. Similar to what some of the Stickboy books were up to, just way more so, and not quite as funny (though funnier than some realize).