David Chelsea Talks WELCOME TO THE ZONE on WORDS & PICTURES

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A week ago I dropped by the alternative radio station KBOO-FM to talk comics with host S.W. Conser on the long-running comics talk show WORDS & PICTURES. On previous shows I’ve promoted my 24 Hour Comics collections SLEEPLESS and EVERYBODY GETS IT WRONG!, the documentary 24 HOUR COMIC, and my instructional books on perspective, but this time I was there to talk about the new digital version of my 1995 graphic novel WELCOME TO THE ZONE, which I have been serializing on my Patreon page. Our discussion also touched on my time illustrating for the New York Times and The New York Observer (where I cashed checks from Presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner), 24 Hour Comics, and the uselessness of clients who insist on paying artists in the Coin Of Exposure. Since my appearance was on short notice, I didn’t have time to blog about it in advance, but the audio is archived here

David Chelsea is reading: Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway Revolution
by Todd S. Purdum

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It’s been a while since I’ve blogged about WELCOME TO THE ZONE, but I have been putting up pages steadily week after week, and am now only 6 pages from the end!

WELCOME TO THE ZONE is a sprawling, multicharacter story taking place over two days and nights in a bohemian neighborhood based on the East Village. In one scene, a group of Japanese tourists visit a museum to learn about some of the Zone’s colorful history:

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The trip does not end well for them:

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Elsewhere a pot-delivering robot undergoes a series of transformations:

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. . .which culminate in this scene of human-machine amour. It is scenes like this one that led the prudes at Patreon to classify my page as adult material:

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Later, at a benefit for The Homeless, poet/rapper Tasha Tigerbaum unleashes her inner Karen Finley (if you don’t know who Karen Finley is, she was a 90s performance artist who liked to use foodstuffs like chocolate and yams as body paint):

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Meanwhile, aliens from the Planet Borgon with a taste for human meat are delighted to discover that the local soup kitchen cook has used the soup to dispose of his murdered girlfriend:

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Everything culminates in a police riot, in which Mugg (later the art pupil in my perspective books), temporarily loses his handle:

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Real Estate developer Ronald Duck has been offstage for a while, but I promise he comes back in the next few pages! Want to know what it’s all about? Here are links to all the installments posted so far:

Pages 1-9

Pages 10-11

Pages 12-13

Pages 14-15

Pages 16-17

Pages 18-19

Pages 20-21

Pages 22-23

Pages 24-25

Pages 26-27

Pages 28-29

Pages 30-31

Pages 32-33

Pages 34-35

Pages 36-37

Page 38

Page 39

Page 40

Page 41

Page 42

Page 43

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Page 49

Page 50

Page 51

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Page 53

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Page 55

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Patreon is a reader-supported site, but all comics content (except for a couple raunchy pages I’ve put behind a paywall) is free. If you like what you see, tell your friends, and $how Your $upport!