The Believer - The Last Man For The Job
Your average letterpress-printing[1] enthusiast probably shares this earth with more than sixty thousand like-minded souls. For instance, Briar Press, a popular letterpress community on the web, has nearly sixty thousand registered users. In other words, you could populate a reasonably sized small city with letterpress enthusiasts.
"He’s working on a project that might be called All The Water Towers in America."
"While most in-class student doodles are toe-dips into the stream of consciousness, Neil Greenberg obsessively draws maps. Though these “eight-and-a-half-by-elevens” come straight from his imagination, they often include street names, transit systems—even elaborately conceived bus schedules. Greenberg now works as a transportation planner in the Detroit area. Fritz Swanson, his former English professor, talks to him about what maps do for him, why he makes them, and the deliberate shortcomings of Fake Omaha, one of Greenberg’s imaginary cities"
The Invisible Girl
by Fritz Swanson
(Originally Appeared in The Mid-American Review)
I've collected comics since I was little, when I would read Spider-Man without any sense of irony, and when I would get turned on by Gwen Stacy dying.
She was a pretty girl, Spider-Man's second girlfriend. She wore a big black plastic band that pulled her blond hair back. She wore minidresses and held her books up to her breasts. She wore black boots as she fell from the Brooklyn Bridge, her body like a supple bag of bones, the weight of her head and her shoulders pulling her riverward.