Old Paint.

by Barbara Manui & Chris Adams

Originally uploaded: 2/12/97. Reedited: 7/6/99.
All Contents Copyright © 1992, 1997, 1999 Manui & Adams. All rights reserved.

 

In the Summer of 1993, five artist types disappeared into a restaurant in SoHo to make a magazine.

A year later, they simply gave up.

Ah, the Summer of 1993.Saugerties was debating parking provisions for the next Woodstock. Everyone was abuzz about how Clinton was going to get us all health care, and sometimes we kidded her husband too. And in Greenwich Village, we hung out at cafes and places we were going to make trendy by our presence, and spent entire evenings with people arguing over what we were going to name our arty magazine, and pointing out the lame hubris of spending entire evenings arguing over the name of the arty little rag. It was called ZENO, and it was hip to forks and little else.

Don't even ask where the money came from for this thing. Suffice to say, everyone escaped back to the West alive.

Anyway, before HOB was born in a REAL art magazine, there was ZENO, and this one episode of Old Paint.

 


 


 

 


It should be noted that this is based on a real Fortean incident of "The Jumping Man", which Chris read when he was a kid, and it really freaked him out. Which English(?) town was so attacked he doesn't recall, but the figure in the tale was more man-like, only extremely tall, and able to leap about as pictured. The villagers in the tale describe the Jumper as finally leaping straight upward into the air, until he vanished from distance.

Our own furtherance of the story was to involve Old Paint (the Jumper) rescuing a child from drowning. But we didn't have anything that really grabbed us beyond the original moment of bizarro terror.

The next (and last) issue of ZENO sported Ralph Kramden making a lewd gesture on the cover. Old Paint had already vanished.

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