From the Vaults: NoPants #4

Eight and a half years after I released NoPants #3, I began work on a glorious resurrection that resulted in NoPants #4.

You can download a PDF of NoPants #4. And if you dare to care, here's the story of how NoPants returned from the grave:

In the summer of 2011, I joined the planning committee of the inaugural Pittsburgh Zine Fair. I was an active self-publisher at the time and hungry to help craft an event that would do zinesters and local comics creators justice.

I wanted to have at least one purebred zine on my table along with my minicomics, and I instantly thought of NoPants. I scanned in all of the old pages and began collecting them into a NoPants Anthology:

But I didn't stop there. Inspired by my old handiwork, I set about crafting a new issue of NoPants that would fill out the end of the NoPants Anthology. And thus NoPants #4 was born from my brain!

Desiring to stick to the loose format I'd developed over the first three issues, I mixed guerrilla collage with raw cartoons and some oddball prose pieces, including a fake confessional like this:

I had a blast putting this new issue together. I'd always used whatever magazines I could find lying around to supply the images and this time was no different. An unknown benefactor had purchased a year's subscription of Ebony for me and so I had a stack of unread issues sitting in my apartment.

Frankly, I think this issue of NoPants might be my best. With the older zines, I used at least one page per issue to communicate personal information about myself, be it music reviews or memories or something about my friends. 

But this time around I had my blog and my podcasts satiating my desire to represent my true self to the world. And that freed me up to focus on putting together the most bizarre magazine satire that I could muster.

Will there ever be a NoPants #5? Maybe, but I don't know when.

I'd love to put the zine together now and end this trip down memory lane with a real bang. However, I've got my hands full with the AudioShocker and my new Nik Furious album (out on 11/12/13!) and much more.

So until the time comes when I can dedicate my brain to crafting the weirdest and most subversive magazine parody possible, NoPants will have to remain a distant memory... FROM THE VAULTS!!!