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!!!

There is no NoPants #2. I went straight from NoPants #1 to NoPants #3. Why? Because I enjoy being obtuse.

You can download a PDF of NoPants #3. And if you wanna find out how I made this zine happen, here's the tale:

Before I get into the backstory, I want to gush about how much I love this cover. I fucking love this cover. There. Got it out of my system. Gushing over.

I tried to get personal in different ways with #3. Instead sharing music reviews like the previous issues, I opted for an in depth description of my favorite childhood game. Do kids even play Butts Up anymore?

There are some undertones of misogyny going on throughout NoPants #3 and that makes me sad when I look back on it. It's not oppressive or anything. Hell, you might not even notice. But I do.

By December 2002, my group of friends was changing significantly and I was becoming increasingly surrounded by a bunch of boys-will-be-boys type of guys who drank a lot and had a bunch of latent hostility towards women.

Stuff like this fake editorial was really funny to me at the time. But now it's not my sense of humor. I mean, I think the first few sentences are a decent setup. But then it gets very conventional and begins spinning the humor at the expense of the woman with no real payoff or satire. It's just kind of bitter and awkward.

Sadly, NoPants #3 was the unintentional end of the series. Following the 2002-2003 winter break, I returned to college with a serious hunger for partying and recording music. And I just forgot about making more issues of NoPants...

...until it was time for my senior thesis! Seriously. My senior thesis at Carnegie Mellon University was a zine. And so was my first post-college resume. I'd share them with you but I threw them away by mistake when I moved to Long Beach.

Next: Like a phoenix from the ashes, NoPants returns for the 2011 Pittsburgh Zine Fair with a fourth issue.

With NoPants #0, I reignited the flame in my belly to make zines. With NoPants #1, I took that flame and lit a bunch of shit on fire.

You can download a PDF of NoPants #1. And if you wanna know more about the creation of this issue, here's how it went down:

I'm not sure when I made this issue. But it says 2002 on it, so I'm gonna assume that it came out in November since #0 was released in October.

This entire fall 2002 college semester was a lonely and confusing one for me. I think the angst I was feeling began to spill out in the odd "insert" which takes up the majority of this issue.

I took a bunch of loose doodles from my notebooks and turned them into a pathos-riddled coloring book in the middle of NoPants. While it's pretty common to see homemade coloring books at zine fairs and small press expos nowadays, I thought I was really breaking some new ground at the time!

The coloring book pages are filled with hyperbole like "I hate my life" and creepy scenes like a bleeding couch, but there's still some truth and vulnerability to all of it. I think this page captures that dynamic best:

I don't actually hate my family. Well, not all of the time! But sometimes they drive me crazy. Especially back then when my parents were splitting up and my sister was starting to raise her own family. I was an irresponsible 20-year-old who was annoyed by the mature issues they were dealing with.

I also continued my storytelling feature with "New Juice". It's not groundbreaking or anything. But these little first person stories were always a ton of fun for me to write and my most nostalgia-inducing moments in NoPants. This page is sideways in the zine, forcing readers to spin it to read my tale of minibar horror.

If, after reading this zine, you're asking yourself "But, Nick... why?!?" I think it's worth noting that NoPants didn't cost me a penny.

Now it's standard practice to charge college students for copies and keep track of how much they print from the computer. But at the time, my school didn't do that. Plus, I had a part-time job at the school's copy center. So I could basically make any copies I wanted any time I wanted.

Next: NoPants #3 because NoPants #2 doesn't exist.