Drunks, Power Poles, and Salmon

What a strange and unusual weekend it was.

I’ve been talking to a guy named Darren from Low Transit Industries (an Australian indie label) online here and there for about a year now. When LTI announced they’d be releasing a record by Kim Salmon And The Surrealists, bells rang.

Kim Salmon is an Aussie musical legend. For good or for ill, Salmon is credited with creating the term grunge back in the early eighties, and he and one of his earlier bands, The Scientists, are often cited as having been a critical influence on Seattle’s early nineties sound. Darren (awful upcoming pun warning!) had caught himself a big fish.

In the spring of this year, I told Darren I’d be interested in doing a strip for the new record. Other things and other music came up, and I put it off. Last weekend, he sent me a message again, as Salmon and the band will be playing a show in New York City soon as well as other stateside biz. In a case of perfect timing (I had nothing especially exciting to work on last weekend and had an open spot) I started work on the strip.

This is where drunk meets power pole.

Friday morning I came into a house with no electricity. Friday morning is my send deadline for Stripwax. The Salmon strip was a hostage in a non-operational Mactintosh holding pen. In a few hours I was able to get the power company on the phone, and what apparently happened was some power pole got in the way of some Thursday-night drunk behind the wheel. We did not get the power back until Saturday afternoon, and then found out that the Mac would not start up and the monitor for the PC was blown. Additionally, (but unrelated) the DVR was wiped clean of all past episodes of Breaking Bad, Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends, and The Monty Python bio series.

I sincerely hope the offending driver wasn’t hurt or killed, because I’d like do hurt or kill him/her/it myself.

Anyway, thanks to my charming and lovely wife Val’s champion Mac trouble-shooting skills, here is the Stripwax comic for Kim Salmon And The Surrealists.

Better late than never, y’all.