Crap Hound Explained, 2020
What a difference two years makes.
Last time I wrote about Sean Tejaratchi’s amazing Crap Hounds, it was to talk about how the numbering worked. How issue #6 was actually #1, how #9 contained both #2 and #3, and how, technically, issue #10 was a book and not an issue at all.
It was a mess, honestly, and so now I’m writing to tell you: There are no more numbers. There are also four new issues!
“But Pat,” you’re probably thinking, “How am I gonna be able to tell them apart without numbers? How do I tell if I have the latest and greatest?!”
Well, dear friends, let me explain.
Crap Hounds always had numbers, sure, but they also had subtitles, that little description of what’s actually inside the issue. Church & State, Sex & Kitchen Gadgets, Death, Telephones & Scissors, etc. From this point on, they’re just gonna be known by their subtitle. The subtitle is promoted. It’s full on “title” now, no inferiority comlex. And, of course no more numbers!
When Crap Hound #8: Superstition sold out this summer, it was reborn as simply Crap Hound: Superstition.
No more #8. Never again.
Same insides, sure, but now there is no number on the cover.
#5 is currently sold out, when it comes back this winter, it’ll just be Crap Hound: Hands, Hearts & Eyes. You can see what’s happening.
Sean Trapped At Home Was Great For All Of Us
When Sean was working on the The Crap Hound Big Book of Unhappiness, he found he had more content than would fit in its five-hundred-and-fourty-four pages.
So, what’d he do? He created the aptly titled, More Unhappiness.
But then he didn’t stop. The pandemic hit and he realized he had more of, well, more of basically everything.
Additions is the culmination of all previous issues all-new extra goods; bits of devils, bits of sex gadgets, and of course a cat and clown or two. It’s a mishmash, but a good kind of mismash. You read through it (Can you read a book without words? I guess that’s a question for another essay.) and it feels like chapters of our lives, like a story of the last 26 years is being told all at once. It’s great. I was moved.
To sweeten the pot and incentivize you to purchase (and just because he had tons and tons of cat material), he simultaneously came up with the first ever Crap Hound Mini-Issue: Black Cats.
Thirty-two pages of, you guessed it, black cats. It’s… a lot of cats.
And apparently, after that, he just couldn’t stop. He had his mouse in his hand and millions of scanned images in hundreds of folders and he just kept going. He just sat in a pandemic-fueled haze and made the next Crap Hound.
My phone rings (he calls, he’s a caller) and I didn’t answer. Moments later, I get a text message letting me know that we’re going to publish the single biggest zine issue ever (well, that doesn’t count the book) — 112 pages!
A few weeks later it was done.
A week later and he had picked out a color for the cover.
And then, three weeks later (about how long a print run takes for us nowadays) a pallet of these beauties showed up at the warehouse:
Books and Bees has in it what it says on the tin — a whole lot of books, and several thousands bees. It’s okay if you’re afraid of bees. A lot of people are afraid of clowns, and Sean had a whole issue with clowns in it. In fact, Crap Hound, if it is about anything, is really about conquering your fears.
The zines continue to be printed here in the United States, now finding themselves born in Salem, Oregon — Oregon’s sleepy little capital on the muddy banks of the Willamette River.
You can find everything Crap Hound and a whole-lotta Sean’s other venture LiartownUSA over at buyolympia.com.
