GUNK'L'DUNK e-mail newsletter for fans of _Tales_of_the_Beanworld_ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Issue 04 11/9/91 Gunk'l'dunk is here to provide a forum for fans of Larry Marder's _Tales of the Beanworld_ (TOTB), and to promote wider readership of this unique comic. This newsletter is sent out every 2-3 weeks. Compiled by Jeremy York, jeremy@stat.washington.edu Submissions, and comments on content and/or format gladly accepted! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- INFORMATION AND ADMINISTRIVIA In this issue : news about my interview with Larry and TOTB #20. Look for a survey for readers of Gunk'l'dunk in your mailbox soon... I finally gained a clue about how to do this first section. It bothered me to say the same things week after week, so now I've created an information file to mail to new readers. I've included the text of that file this time, but in all future issues, this section will be much shorter. Back issues and other files are always available on request. Does anyone have access to/suggestions for an anonymous ftp archive? #00 - written by me, just a sketch of what Gunk'l'dunk would look like #01 - news of the second trade paperback, character descriptions, a detailed list of sources for backissues, various discussions. supplement to #01 - Tim Tjark's Beanworld index, with plot synopses and cover descriptions for each issue through #16 or #17 #02 - mostly discussion by the readers, including the identity of the three lil' Mr.'s in TOTB #19 #03 - a quick summary of a conversation with Larry, speculation about the origin of Mr. Spook, the Fantastic Four reference in #19 sources - a slightly revised version of the backissues source list from Gunk'l'dunk #01 WANTED : More ASCII art! I'd try, but I'm no Beanish. Somebody out there's gotta have some time to waste... WANTED : More subscribers! Feel free to advertise this newsletter through any local means, and give my e-mail address out. ok, here's the info file for new subscribers : Proffy :"I'll spread the secret words that gather the Gunk'l'dunk gang! Hoka Hoka Gunk'l'dunk!" Beans :"Hoka Hoka Hey!" --TOTB #7 Hello, and welcome to Gunk'l'dunk. I got this thing started in early September of 91 by peddling the idea of a electronic newsletter on various usenet and mailing list groups. The idea is this -- subscribers can send me anything to do with Beanworld, and I'll try to edit things together so the result is easy to read. Currently, the thing goes out every 2-3 weeks, but that will vary depending on how many or how few reader submissions I get. I'd appreciate it if you would label things like "this part for Bean News, this part for Misc. Discussion", etc, but free-form ranting and raving will be gladly accepted too. Submissions can be : brief comments, naive questions, Beanworld press covereage, idle speculations, essays, stories, ASCII art (draw a computer bean with regular keyboard characters), contest ideas, new release sightings/reviews, etc. Myself, I'll be trying to stir up discussion, and compiling information on comics stores that stock Beanworld and ways to get back issues. If you feel like writing to the Tales of the Beanworld lettercolumn, one way you can do it is to send your letter to me via e-mail; I'll include it in the next Gunk'l'dunk, and every new Gunk'l'dunk gets snail-mailed straight to Larry Marder. Larry is pretty excited about Gunk'l'dunk, and will probably be sending stuff in from time to time. A complimentary forum to Gunk'l'dunk is the comix mailing list (send subscription requests to comix-request@world.std.com). That list is devoted to alternative, non-superhero comics, and TOTB discussions are welcome. The comix list allows for fast, spontaneous discussion which is impossible with a newsletter. If you don't feel like subscribing to the comix list, I will be including all the Beanworld discussion there in each Gunk'l'dunk. You can always feel free to distribute my e-mail address, and publicize Gunk'l'dunk in any way you see fit (as long as it's not illegal). At the moment, I have no intention of distributing this thing via snail-mail; even if I charged $$$, I still wouldn't have the time. So, please, don't give out my snail mail address. Finally, let me introduce myself; new readers are encouraged to send in a brief blurb on who they are and how they discovered the Beanworld for inclusion in the next newsletter... I'm working on a PhD in statistics at the U. Washington; 26 yrs old, recently married, with two bouncing 3-D mystery cats. Other interests include weird music (like the Residents), astrology (I'm strictly amateur), and, of course, obsessing on the Beanworld! My first TOTB was #13, and I was hooked as soon as I saw the cover. I just recently completed my collection by ordering some back issues from the Beanworld Press. Jeremy York jeremy@stat.washington.edu -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- INTRODUCTIONS From: Alan Jeffrey Alan Jeffrey, 25, about to get a D.Phil (or Ph.D in English) in Computation from Oxford, and currently a research assistant at Chalmers University, Sweden. I've been doing comics for about ten years now, including drawing some mini-comics, and writing reviews for the late lamented Fantasy Advertiser. Apart from That Strange Bean Thing, my comics tastes run the gamut of Raw, Yummy Fur, Terry and the Pirates, Weirdo, and other Comics Journal pretentions. If I won Miss Beanworld I'd like to save little puppy dogs and work for world peace. [Hmm, a beauty contest? Should I dust off my baton twirling routine? - jeremy] ******gunk'l'dunk****** From: Theresa Vaughan Dear Jeremy, I was wondering if it would be possible to be added to your list of Beanworld subscibers. I am a graduate student in Folklore and Anthropology at Indiana University in Bloomington Indiana, and have been an avid reader of Beanworld for about 2 years now. I was delighted to learn about your newsletter (my fiancee, a physicist and avid computerphile found #3 somewhere) and would like to receive it on a regular basis. I did a term paper on the cosmology of Beanworld for a class last year, which the profesor liked, and even used some elements from Beanworld for his own research on cosmology. I think I converted several members of class with my copious visual aids while presenting my work, more readers for Marder! If you are looking for submissions, I could try to distill the paper down to a more reasonable size, perhaps two pages or something (it is currently about 30) and submit it to Gunk'l'Dunk. This would have to wait for the Winter Break, however, as I am currently teaching writing a thesis, and taking classes. Would this interest you? In any case, thanks on behalf of lovers of the Beanworld, like myself, for putting this thing together. With the wide spacing between Beanworlds at the moment, it makes the desert less dry. [I'm sure we'd all love to see a version of your paper! - jeremy] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- BEAN NEWS Well, some not-so-good news, folks. TOTB#20 will probably not be out until February of 1992, and the second trade paperback may or may not be on store shelves by the holiday season. This news comes from Larry. #20 will be late because the comics distributers tend to play hardball with small circulation books when they fall behind schedule. The result with TOTB #20 is that it had to be "re-solicited" to the distributers, and this is the cause of the delay. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- TALES FROM THE MARDERWORLD Larry and I finally conducted our long-promised interview. We talked for nearly an hour and a half this morning, and it's going to be a while before I'm able to transcribe the whole conversation. The subjects covered include how Larry got started actually publishing TOTB, his current advertising work, real life American Indian Heyoka's, teasers about what might be happening in TOTB in the long run, his favorite childhood comics, Beanish's Total Eclipse crossover...Look for installments in future issues of the newsletter! By the way, I'm on a limited grad student budget; if anyone feels like contributing a buck or two to help defray the costs of the call, I'd be most grateful. My address is: Jeremy York, 6702 Roosevelt NE #B307, Seattle WA 98115. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ESSAYS, STORIES, INFORMATION FILES, ETC John Charles Fiala muses on the nature of the Four Realities : What are the Four Realities? The Four Realities, from now on referred to as the FR, are the four 'layers' of floating shapes around the island generally known as 'Beanworld'. They consist of, in forgotten order, slats, or generally rectangular or tubular objects with one dimention much larger than the other two, 'wedges' or triangular pieces, 'twinks', or star-shaped objects, and 'hoops' or circles/ovals. Above the FR is a shallow lake and then the beanworld, below is the area where the hoi-palloi live. The beans, especially Proffy and Beanish, use the FR as a source for the building blocks of their tools and their world. Proffy regularly uses things, such as slats and wedges to make spears, to make lots of regular objects. Beanish uses the FR to make statue/pictures. (The Look-See Show). However, once you consider the FR, one begins to get some questions in one's head. 1) Where do they come from? The FR seem, at first glance, to be inanimate objects that have no visible source. This suggests that the FR are a non-renewable resource, much like coal or oil in this world. Once it gets used, it doesn't grow back. But, as further questions will suggest, this may not actually be the case. 2) How come there are so many conveniently sized pieces near the island? Proffy is regularly shown making spears and scoopers for the beans, spears particularly because the spears are usually left behind in Hoi-polloi during raids. This suggests, since all of the spears are of the same size, that a lot of a certain sized slat and wedge have been used up already by Proffy. And yet, whenever Mr. Spook or Proffy have been looking for that sized slat or wedge, neither of them have had to go very far to find it. This is strange. For a society that has been using this resource that has gone on for as long as the Beanworld has, you would expect resource-finding expiditions to take a long time and to range far afield, as the usual depiction of the FR shows the various shapes in far ranging sizes and lengths. So, where do the various objects in the FR come from, and how? How, especially, is an interesting question. If the objects were created with an even distribution as to size, you would expect there to be a lot of non-used pieces floating around the FR, but one doesn't. This suggests that the only things in the FR that regularly get replenished, or that get replenished more than the others, are the commonly used ones. That suggests some strange sort of system... One might conjecture that they are produced by Gran'ma'pa, perhaps through the roots working through the island... It's hard to tell. Anybody else have ideas? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- MISCELLANEOUS DISCUSSION From: Alan Jeffrey On the subject of whether the Beanworld is 2-D or 3-D, I don't know if the question makes sense. It sort of assumes that Marder's drawings are meant to be an imperfect representation of some `true' Beanworld, in the same way that if I sit down and draw a shoe, I'm trying to capture a real 3-D shoe. The beans don't obey the concepts of 2-D or 3-D as we think of them, instead they obey Beanworld drawing rules, which are like childrens' drawings or cave paintings. Us asking how many dimensions the Beanworld has is like the Prof asking us what sort of float factor keeps the sun in the sky. Or, in shorter words, hey guys and gals, it's only lines on paper! ******gunk'l'dunk****** From: Jeremy York I recently completed my TOTB collection by ordering directly from Larry, and let me tell you, there were some real revelations in those missing issues! If you are missing quite a few issues, I encourage you to either find them or order them from Larry or Eclipse (info on that is in a sources file I'm maintaining; e-mail me for a copy). In particular, I had missed all the issues chronicling the destruction of Mr. Spook's fork -- quite an exciting story! It got the beans so stirred up that they jumped into the Four Realities the wrong way (by going in at the Proverbial Sandy Beach). I never thought I would have seen that happen. Another interesting thing was to see how the beans reacted to the Goofy Jerks when the jerks started saying that Gran'Ma'Pa was not the center of the universe. It will be interesting to see the Beans' reaction when they start to learn for themselves that the jerks were right. I now also have the issues of Total Eclipse that Beanish appeared in. In cas you missed it, this happened between TOTB #10 and #11. Total Eclipse (TE) was a weird, but more conventional, comic book that brought together characters from several Eclipse comics. Beanish first appeared in TE #3, where he gets a few panels. In TE#4, he only appears once or twice, but the cover is by Bill Sienkiewicz and has about 50 Beanish's climbing all over it. In the finale of the series, TE#5, Beanish plays a central role in the last few panels. If you're not really into super-hero comics, don't worry; anything that's really important to TOTB gets covered in TOTB #11. But if you're a completist, and/or if you're into Miracle Man, Aztec Ace, etc, you'll probably want to get these issues. In TOTB #18, the cuties started to talk! They're going to be little toddler beans in no time. Larry hinted in the interview that the adolesent beans were going to really give everyone a hard time - should be fun. Also in #18, the Boom'r's were using their bonnets to synthesize sound. Reminded me a lot of analog synthesizers - tweaking a few knobs to change the sound. Eventually, I hope we'll find out the nature of the Boom'r'bonnets. They seem to be something more than a hat - when one of them was adjusting his bonnet to get the poing noise, his eyes would go all funny. That, and the way they could soak up and think about a sound with them, made it seem like the bonnets are more like parts of their bodies. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- End, Gunk'l'dunk #04