P0002306, originally uploaded by sparrowsfall.I did not appreciate it enough at the time, I fear. On the table is a copy of the Kansas City Magazine where they did a brief article on me. This was when KC Mag was cool and not all golden ghetto like it is now.
On the table also is Mikhail, looking as fat as usual.
From Action Heroes, Pitch 4/24/03
Two years ago, Parrish Baker issued what’s now known as his “call to arms,” which chastised local artists for failing to pick up where their predecessors left off. Baker’s comic is called Sparrow’s Fall; he has drawn, photocopied and distributed it for free since 1996.
In what’s essentially an introduction to the “Five String Serenade” issue of Sparrow’s Fall, Baker writes, “1995 … 1996 … 1997 … 1998 … a golden age for comics in Kansas City. 40 Oz. Comics was alive and well, and, most importantly, here, Jim Mahfood’s Grrlscouts and Cosmic Toast were in wide circulation, and Thereyago! Studios was about to produce the first (and last) issue of Meanwhile … and other folks were busy drafting out comics and cartoons left and right…. People who could draw and people who had something to say walked and breathed amongst us, and we were willing to listen.”
Baker is a loner, artistically speaking. He sits inside Broadway Café and draws.
Putting out 300 copies of each comic continuously for seven years and never expecting a dime, with feedback generally limited to watching people pick it up while they’re waiting in line for coffee — that isn’t something many people are willing to do.
But there’s a need for this sort of comics activism. It goes back to the 1954 publication of Seduction of the Innocent, a book accusing comics of causing juvenile delinquency, spreading sexual perversion and promoting communism. Fearing that comics would be banned, publishers established the Comics Code Authority, ensuring that comics supposedly not fit for juveniles wouldn’t see daylight. People like Jacobson, Casanova and Baker are still trying to undo the damage. Comics activists want more comics, more varied comics and more readers.
“I think Parrish is a goddamn genius, because he has absolutely no illusions about what he’s trying to do,” says Matt Fraction, a local comics writer who is nationally known as a commentator on the industry. “You have to go to a comics shop to find Superman, but you can find Sparrow’s Fall anywhere.”
Illustrator Scot Stolfus goes one step further. “Parrish leads by example,” he says of Baker’s guerrilla publishing style. “That’s what I’d like to do.”
For people who aren’t particularly excited by copying important documents, the place that must not be named also has an art show on display: Parrish Baker’s Reversion:Counter-Revolution. Baker is the creator of the local ‘zine known as Sparrow’s Fall, in which chain-smoking opossums react cynically to the evening news while otters sit atop Plaza buildings and look down - literally and metaphorically - on crazed shoppers. The premise of these ‘zines, published roughly six times a year and available free in coffee shops around town, is that “somewhere. . .is a neighborhood where the people are mad and the animals are sane, where armadillos are on the wrestling circuit and dogs do to art school.’ The same characters who populate this neighborhood appear on the walls of the place that must not be named at ___ West 4_th Street. The place that must not be named is open 24 hours a day, so whenever you need a little escape, you can either make silly faces for passport photos and plan a pretend trip to an exotic place, or you can eavesdrop on Baker’s armadillos, whose perspective on the here and now might prove just as refreshing. Call 816-___-____ for information.
Gina Kaufmann
I never even knew! Waaay back in 2006, I got a mention on the September 5, 2006 Comic Geek Speak podcast (at about 23:45 into the ‘cast) by Charlito of Indie Spinner Rack. Surprise, surprise, surprise. Only found that one by hunting links–ego-surfing, if you will. Heh! Almost enough to make me get my crap together like I keep aspiring to. They all seemed to know who I was when he brought me up. How long ago that seems! And it’s hardly over two years.
From This was the Warren Ellis Forum
Maybe it’s unfair to call this Superfast because as far as I know, Parrish has no idea about the WEF…
Around the time I came here (here being Kansas City, the time being summer of 1997), a comic zine started popping up around the coffeeshops and record stores in town at what was the apex of the KC comic zine boom that would put folks like Mike Huddleston, Kelly Seda, and Jim Mahfood (amongst others) out there into the world.
Called SPARROW’S FALL, it was created by a guy named Parrish Baker. Baker was pretty much self-taught as an illustrator, and was by his own admission not very good. But as Parrish says of himself in the intro to the latest collection (in the third person, but in the larger context of the essay, it’s not as cloying as it could be), “the inability to draw would have seemed to conspire to keep him in his place. He ignored reality… in those days, saying something seemed possible; madatory, even.”
And yet, every few months, there’d be a new SPARROW’S FALL out there. Like BLOOM COUNTY set in KC and reimagined by a mopey neurotic (which, i dunno, almost makes it like PEANUTS in an urban setting), SPARROW’S FALL has been growing up in public for a few years now, and has developed into something really worthwhile if you can get into it. I’ve paid yankee dollars for worse.
Right about every six weeks, Parrish puts out another 5, 10, 20 pages of black and white, 8.5×11 copied comics that are given away at local independent businesses, deposited into little point-of-purchase boxes he’s made himself and set up near cash registers. (Hell, it was Parrish’s ideology and methodology that I ripped off for getting SAVANT out and about in KC, way back when. He did it, so I knew i could too…)
Here’s the best part– once a year, give or take, he puts out COLLECTIONS for free. These vary in size, but they usually span they last year of SPARROW’S FALL and have lovely hammerpressed covers. FIVE STRING SERENANDE, the current collection, is about 88 pages of comics between cardstock and side staples. Regardless of Parrish’s drawing or storytelling abilities, these collections stand out as nothing short of remarkable… especially as you take them, for free, every few months.
What’s funny is that it’s almost easy to take SPARROW’S FALL for granted.
SPARROW’S FALL is just THERE because this is what Parrish needs to do. No money. Certainly no glory. Embarrassing and honest sometimes. Self-aware and self-depricating, just enough to keep the whole thing strangely bouyant without becoming clever.
Parrish Baker does comics because he wants to do comics. He does not seek fame, fortune, nor recognition. He wants to say stuff in comics form. So he does. They exist simultaneously on paper and online in short stories that interconnect given enough time. His comic is called SPARROW’S FALL. You can read most of them online at www.sparrowsfall.com, as well as order copies from him for nothing more than the postage required for him to mail them.
Like I said at the start, I don’t know that Parrish knows of the WEF. But he’s certainly on the same Superfast page. He can do it, he has done it, and he still does it.
SPARROW’S FALL, once again, is online at www.sparrowsfall.com
Live long and prosper??
But I kid, I kid. This is when Kansas City Magazine was cool, not lame and and in Johnson County and oriented towards the wealthy.And called KC Magazine. And intolerable. Did I mention intolerable? I should have.
I saw this article about the twenty-eighth of August or so, and it is somewhat overshadowed in my memory by certain events a couple of weeks later.
PARRISH BAKER reflects himself in comic-book style–or not
So what’s the deal with Parrish Baker? The guy has a master’s degree in history but works at a _______. He doesn’t own a car. He can’t think of one friend he made in college.
He hates Starbucks, he hates Johnson County. He hates money.
He may be satisfied with his lot in life. He may not be.
If all you had to go on was “sparrow’s Fall,” the comic he draws and distributes around town, you’d conclude that he is a most unhappy fella. Or at least you would if you assumed that the comic’s hero, Christopher Sparrow, is a thinly veiled Parrish Baker.
What’s the deal with Christopher Sparrow? He’s morose and pathologically shy, especially around women. “You are so awful a person,” his best friend tells him, “that NO one would be attracted to you.
And Christopher works at a _______, has great disdain for chains like Starbucks, yada yada yada.
Of course his jerk of a friend is an opossum that talks, so maybe Christopher Sparrow is not Parrish Baker. Still, ask Baker a question he doesn’t want to answer, and he’s like to shrug: “It’s all in the cartoon–that’s all I can say.”
“Sparrow’s Fall” is Baker’s pride and joy, you can tell. Over the past 4 1/2 yeats he has created about 100 pieces of it: single sheets front and back, single sheets folded into four pages, some as thick as magazines, a couple with handsome, heavier-stock covers. The best places to find them are Broadway Cafe in Westport and YJ’s Snack Bar at 18th and Wyandotte–Baker’s two main hangouts.
Some of the “Sparrow’s Fall” collection is also on the Web (www.sparrowsfall.com). And a single-panel spin-off appears in Review, a local arts periodical.
Baker figures he has churned out as many as 40,000 copies of “Sparrow’s Fall” in its various forms. He doesn’t charge a penny for it.
“I have ethical problems taking money from people,” Baker, 32, says over a cafe mocha and his sketchpad at Broadway Cafe. He is, he mentions, builing a Web site for the coffeehouse, but all he expects in payment is free java.
Baker grew up in tiny El Dorado Springs in southwest Missouri and earned two degrees in history at Central Missouri State University in Warrensburg. He’d expected to pursue a doctorate and become a university professor. But he burned out, “so I decided to take a little bit of time off, and that has lasted a decade now.
He has worked at _______ since moving here in the summer of ‘91. His title at the [ ] _______ is shift supervisor, but he is not, he insists, on a management track.
He used to write. A novel he never finished was set 600 years in the future, where a new civilization–one that included talking animals–lived among the ruins of ours.
Then, about 1995, something happened. Baker won’t discuss it, but one gets the idea that a romantic relationship blew up. He calls the indicent “a very sordid little thing.”
After that, he started sketching, and he eventually came up with “Sparrow’s Fall,” which seems to be primarily about its protagonist’s doomed quest for love, but sometimes includes political commentary, too.
The character Christopher Sparrow is a nod to A.A. Milne’s Christopher Robin; Nips, the opossum, is “an evil Winnie the Pooh.” In the cartoon Christopher and Nips are neighbors in a building on Warwick. There are two other chatty critters: a cat, Mortimer Easter, and a river otter, Chirp. The women in Christopher’s life include Hope (his ex), Faith and Charity.
One hopes that Parrish Baker isn’t as hard on himself as Christopher Sparrow is, but Baker can be ambiguous on this point. In one breath he’ll declare that all the stories in “Sparrow’s Fall” are true. But in another, he’ll say, “The cartoon really isn’t about me. It’s about itself.”
Christopher’s life is “much more unhappy than mine–it’s how I would look at my life if I were very depressed.”
Stephanie Smith, who met Baker last summer, says that assessment sounds right. He is pessimistic by nature, she says, but he’s funny about it.
“He isn’t happy with something in his life, but he takes that and puts it down in his artwork,” says Smith, a recent graduate of the Kansas City Art Institute who’s working as a printmaking technician there.
“I think he just has stuff to say to the world. He doesn’t always know how to tell people what’s inside. … ‘Hey, world, this is my problem’–but he does it through cute little fuzzy animals.
Baker’s drawings are crude, often dark, and usually dense with text. “The drawing allows me to think about the writing, and the writing allows me to think about the drawing,” he explains. “They go hand in hand.”
He likes to hang out wiith artists. He has even established his own online gallery, featuring the work of local artists, at www.truespoon.com. “I resonate well with people who like to create things. I like to see what they’re making. It gives me insight into the things they’re thinking aboout.
That’s one reason he’s a fixture at YJ’s, a gathering place for artists. David Ford, the proprietor, is familiar not only with Baker (”he has very particular snack tendencies”) but with his cartoon.
“He pays closer attention than almost anyone I know to the world around him,” says Ford, adding that part of this is attributable to Baker walking the city instead of driving.
By the way, for all Baker’s protestations about money and the conspicuous consumption of Johnson County, his is not exactly a Spartan existence. Granted, he’s without wheels, but he lived on the Plaza, in a small but stylish apartment. Artwork covers the walls; books, including a couple of antique encyclopedia sets, fill shelves he made himself. He has an iMac, a DVD player, and cable TV.
What about that, Mr. Money ruins Everything. He’s unapologetic. He likes to think of himself as “the barnacle under the boat of the (Plaza) rich.”
From time to time friends tell him he should quit his job (didn’t Charity just tell Christopher that?) and find something he’s better-suited for.
May happen. May not. In the meantime, Baker will keep cranking out “Sparrow’s Fall.” To hear him tell, it, he has no choice.
“I’m just a conduit for the story at this juncture,” he says. “The story’s there, and it’s not done, so I can’t stop. And I don’t know where’s it’s going any more than I know where my life is going.”
Tim Engle is a writer for The Star. To reach him, call (816) 234-4779 or send email to tengle@kcstar.com
i am afraid i made tim engle’s life very difficult with this article. he had to interview me twice–the second time with a photographer–and i think that he had a hard time understanding what the hell i was saying. but i wasn’t making things easy on him. i usually speak very elliptically, and i went out of my way to do so this time. I was hesitant to discuss a lot of aspects of sparrow’s fall, much less my personal life, in front of an audience of several hundred thousand people. to mr. engle: i am sorry.
i also still have one of his books. mea culpa.
Carrying his 3-year-old daughter, Bailey, on his shoulders, Hallmark Cards artist Peter Whitehead was circulating in the Crossroads.
“It’s a great place to see and be seen,” he said from beneath a green Gap ball cap.
And sometimes to buy. Although Whitehead and his wife, Jenny, both 34, weren’t looking to make a purchase on this night, they were noting prices and have bought in the past. One previous Crossroads acquisition, a mirror, now hangs above the fireplace in their Brookside home.
“That was about $500,” Jenny said. “But we did work with the artist and paid for it over a couple of months.”
The installment plan was mutually beneficial, Peter said.
“Some of these studios will have starving artists who are happy for what you throw them,” he said. “That’s why a lot of times they’ll work with you.
They want to get that price on the wall.”
Parrish Baker, 30, a self-described “guerrilla cartoonist” who lives on the Country Club Plaza, is interested in the “emotions and sensations” that artists at the Crossroads are expressing.
“Some of it I like and some I don’t, but it’s all kind of an experience,” he said. “I’ve never bought anything that I’ve seen down here. I mean, much of it’s very expensive, obviously.”
Looking to decorate his Kansas City home was insurance agent Rick Shanks, 54. His first stop at the Crossroads was the plush interior of Benjamin Sundermeier Space Planning and Design, 118 Southwest Blvd.
Among the handsome bookcases, lamps and stuffed chairs, Shanks said he and his wife were searching for home accessories “that you just don’t find anywhere else.”
His Crossroads tip: “Come down to find what you like. Art is not what the price is or who created the art. It’s what is to your taste. It’s what you like. It’s like wine. It’s what tastes good.”
The link is no longer good. Such is the vapor of the internet.
spank25, originally uploaded by sparrowsfall.
this issue had an interesting fake daniel clowes cover . . .
