(Tip o' the hat to Art Guru Alex Johns for the beautiful logos he designs for us......)Rat's Tooth is an old story. Older than I care to think about, for if I think about how old it is, I must necessarily be reminded of the fact of how old I am. Rat's Tooth began when we were all in college, indigent, ignorant, and probably likeable in that way that a stupid but basically good natured dog is likeable. These were the days when Logan fantasized, (in a positive way, mind you,) about what it would be like to live your whole life in a closet, and Jeremy courted death by climbing across the roofs of cars as his friends drove at 80 mph down the freeway and swerved wildly trying to throw him off...it was when I couldn't decide whether I wanted to become a rock star or an army officer, before I ended up studying literature and becoming not much of anything. We all liked trashy literature. I was a big enthusiast of Poe, Tolkien, Howard and Lovecraft, and Jeremy shared my affection for the works of most of these writers. Logan tended to read a lot of Sci-fi novels which Jeremy and I sniffed at...They looked Star Trek and Cookie Cutter to us.
At some point, I can't remember exactly when, we found an economical way of entertaining ourselves in off hours...it involved a lot of top ramen and killer wine and the invention of weird stories that interconnected with one another in odd and spontaneous ways. Logan, always the closet-dwelling minimalist, was fascinated by the concept of an anthropomorphic Rat-hero who had no posessions but rags and a rusty knife, and who could survive by eating trash. Jeremy, who first introduced me to the exciting hobby of sitting around in a dark room loading guns, drinking bourbon and talking about whether snuff films were real or not, invented a mad necromancer named Lennard Cromkow. (Where he got that name, I do not know.) The best thing about Lennard was that he really thought he was death incarnate, clothed in a temporary flesh, come to earth on a mission to claim the living. Whether he was right or not, we never got clear on...we did know that every other character in the story just went on the assumption that Lennard was just some weirdow who happened to be crazier than an outhouse rat.
The story went on for a long time, and ended up involving a lot of people, including my friends Jason Boesiger and John Ford. Others drifted in and out of the group, some staying for only a session or two...we have lost touch with most of them....
Jeremy and I, however, never lost touch, and it was a funny thing that through the many years which followed, the characters of the story we had invented way the hell back in the mists of ancient days remained near the surface in so many conversations. Thier lust for gross, stupid violence was all too perfect a metaphor for the essential retardation which is youth. Their sick-humor deeds and attitudes represented us in better fashion than we could ever hope to represent ourselves in moral or in serious terms....I think we were all fascinated by evil, which we thought of then, as potential...
There is an evil woman who wears many faces, and she got to every one of us eventually...there were sojurns on Alaskan islands. There were horrific near deaths at sea. There were mail-order Chinese brides and dominatrices...There were panicky Hungarian border guards with armfulls of death and sweet old Hungarian women with armfulls of bread. There was some dumb guy who got so busted-hearted, he joined the paratroopers looking for death and almost got what he went looking for...and then, with a rude abruptness, it seemed, we got kinda old, and Jeremy and I were sitting around making a batch of beer one day in a haze of old fuck anger, and I started talking about some guys I'd seen online building what looked like a hell of a comic called Brom-Kah, and we thought of Lennard and Ravvin and in some weird way, life suddenly snapped back into focus and got interesting again...
We went back to the old story and tried to remember and commit to ink everything we could...weirdly, we have ended up being blessed enough to work with two simply amazing artists, Stefano Cardoselli, and Orlando Baez...and so, if you're interested, we will bring the old story of warm-hearted depravity which is Rat's Tooth to you sometime this year, in the shape of Rat's Tooth issue #1...
Look for it...................
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