A legion of comics creators whose work has rarely entered the spotlight are mourning the May 7, 2024, death of Michael Dowers, due to complications from advanced rheumatoid arthritis and Crohn's disease. The publisher/founder of Starhead Comix and Brownfield Press was a friend and colleague to every cartoonist who was motivated more by self-expression than by any glimmer of hope for financial reward. At Starhead, throughout the 1990s, Dowers was a kind of Moses for independent cartoonists, especially in the Northwest, helping to introduce the world to Peter Kuper, Roberta Gregory, Dennis Worden, Jim Woodring, Doug Allen, Ed Brubaker, Rick Geary, Pat Moriarity, J. R. Williams, Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, Jim Blanchard, Ellen Forney, Ron Regé, R. L. Crabbe, Dennis Eichhorn, Steve Willis, Triangle-Slash (Ashleigh Talbot), R. K. Sloane, Fiona Smyth, Maggie Resch, David Lasky and countless others. Many also had found or went on to find Fantagraphics and such success as alternative comics afford, and Dowers himself transitioned to an editorial position overseeing that publisher’s Eros Comix line from 2000 to 2009. At Eros, he was again a champion of cartoonists working far outside the mainstream. His Eros titles were sometimes generic (Head, Dildo) but they were always a product of a creator’s hunger to draw mixed with other desires.
Dowers was born in 1950 and lived all his life in the Pacific Northwest. His childhood interest in comics was stimulated by the generosity of neighbors, from whom he received hand-me-down boxes of DCs and Harveys. The 1970s found him living without running water or electricity on an isolated island in the San Juans off the coast of Washington, poring over stacks of Marvel comics. In 1982, an article in Jay Kennedy’s Underground price guide inspired him to make and sell his own comics. It’s safe to say that more comics were made by Dowers than ever reached the marketplace. By 2013, according to his own count, he had drawn more than 47,000 comics stories, printing and distributing most of them on his own under the name Nessie Productions. In the early 1990s, 15 mini comics by Dowers were distributed through Diamond. By that time, Dowers had become a focal point for other just-starting-out comics creators with the formation of Starhead Comix in 1986. By the 1990s, Starhead had become the place to go if you liked to draw eccentric, edgy stuff and wanted to see your work in print. Starting out with mostly mini comics — like Steve Willis’ Morty the Dog and J. R. Williams’ Stickboy Fights Back — Starhead soon added full-size, B&W, comic-book-format titles, including Pat Moriarity’s Big Mouth, Roberta Gregory’s Artistic Licentiousness, Colin Upton’s Big Black Thing, and many, many more.
Dowers closed Starhead in 1999, taking the opportunity to get an Associate of Arts Degree from Seattle Central Community College in 2001, but continued to be a conduit for aspiring comics creators through the even-smaller-scale Brownfield Press and in his role as editor for Fantagraphics’ Eros line. While at Eros, he editorially selected and oversaw more than 185 comics. A project begun at Starhead, a nine-volume collection of “Tijuana Bibles” (early to mid-20th-century porn comics, often parodying popular culture) was completed and given wider distribution by Eros. The raunchy, anonymous eight-pagers went back as far as the 1930s, making them some of the first mini comics. Mini comics were never far from Dowers’ thoughts. With Fantagraphics in 2010, he put together Newave: The Underground Mini Comix of the 1980s, a 900-page collection including many of the cartoonists he had launched at Starhead. At a book release party for Newave, he produced and distributed a mini comic on the spot. Newave was followed in 2013 and 2015 by two enormous (720 pages and 800 pages, respectively) volumes of Treasury of Mini Comics, also edited by Dowers for Fantagraphics.
In his publishing choices, quality and polish were not high on his list of criteria. It wouldn’t be fair to call him a gatekeeper, because his gate was always open. Marginality was what it was all about. In a 2013 interview on Readersvoice.com, Dowers told Simon Sandall, “I like all kinds of mini comics. If they are good that makes them even better.”
Those who worked with Dowers knew him as an archetypal, long-haired, laid-back hippie. Sharply intelligent, funny, a patient listener and reader, he was also unflappable. All attributes you want to have in someone occupying a rock in a river of enthusiastic mini comix and porn.
Having done all he could do to shine a light into those dim DIY corners of the comics universe, he was by all accounts happy to recede back into the margins himself. Returning to the woods — another island, this time in the Columbia River on the border between Washington and Oregon — he took on fewer and fewer small publishing projects through the ongoing Brownfield Press. Among them was Tarot of the Holy Light, a deck of Tarot cards created with his partner Christina Payne-Towler, in 2006. He also acted as art director for Tarot University, a course of studies conducted through the Witch Bitch Thrift Shop in New Haven, Connecticut.
He was bedridden in the months before he passed away, but until illness incapacitated him, he had settled into a contented semi-retirement. He told Sandall, “I enjoy my new life … Am basically semi-retired now and get to work on projects that I want to work on. Also I have been a guitar player most of my life and have recently rediscovered the acoustic guitar (acoustic/electric), and spend a lot of time with my tune-writing and performing in our rural southwest region in the state of Washington and stroking my beautiful 1954 Gibson Southern Jumbo dreadnaught.”
Of his lifelong commitment to self-expression through comics, he told Tim O’Shea in a 2010 Comic Book Resources interview, “I want people to see that if you believe in something hard enough and never give up that you can get somewhere in life. Here is a group of creative types who couldn’t take no for an answer and made their own world of comics. Just by sheer determination a lot of these creators were able to make their lives much more abundant and fulfilling just by the sheer audacity of doing it themselves.”
Dowers is survived by his partner, Payne-Towler, his brother, Patrick Dowers, and his daughter, Keenan.
*Tributes to Michael Dowers
The post Champion of Mini Comics Michael Dowers Dies at the age of 73 appeared first on The Comics Journal.
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