Line #2 Creator/AaronCometbus

Context Creator / AaronCometbus

Go To


1	[[quoteright:200:http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/JiQiT_7987.jpg]]
2	->''"Nothing sounds quite so good as failure. A band that ages well, whose members go on to interesting careers as filmmakers and silkscreen artists -- such a thing does not interest me. Yet put on a song sung by someone who went on to be a preacher in Cuba, Missouri; who hung herself in an art gallery; whose moment of hope, as captured in the scratchy grooves of a seven inch, was but fleeting before an avalanche of total doom and failure -- now we're talking! Now that's music! That's punk. Listen to the SmokingPipes or Music/ViolentFemmes, for example, with their terrible hole-in-the-soul wounded passion, before both patched it up with religion. You can hear how it was either god or suicide -- no other choice. To which I must respond with a quote from Code of Honor: 'Better to die than to live a fucking lie.'"''
3	-->-- Cometbus #52, ''The Spirit Of St Louis''
4
5	Aaron Elliott (born May 20, 1968), better known as Aaron Cometbus, is a CultClassic Zine author. Influential in the Bay Area scene in the 80s and 90s -- the scene that spawned 924 Gilman, Maximum Rocknroll, and too many good bands to count. He has been in a number of these, too: Crimpshrine (with Jeff Ott, of Fifteen), Sweet Baby Jesus, Astrid Oto (with Cindy Crabb, author of Doris), Pinhead Gunpowder (with [[Music/GreenDay Billie Joe Armstrong]]), and Thorns of Life (with Blake Schwarzenbach, of Jawbreaker), among others.
6
7	For the longest time, he handwrote and photocopied all of his zines, giving them a [[http://www.nothingwrongwithme.com/flipside1990/gdtour1km9.jpg distinctive]] [[http://krucoff.com/images/yogi2.jpg style]]. These days, he alternates between typing and handwriting things. You can still get his zines by mail though, from various zine distributors.
8
9	His work has been collected in two anthologies. The first one, ''Despite Everything: A Cometbus Omnibus'' includes numbers 24 through 43, with [[OldShame selections from the first four years]]. ''Add Toner: A Cometbus Collection'' came out pretty recently, and would be an excellent place to start. Also great are ''Double Duce'' (the chaotic history of a bunch of punks living in the eponymous house; cover pictured) and issue 47, ''Lanky'' (a short novel about his life with a girlfriend of his, Larenka, aka Lanky).
10
11	!!Tropes common in his works:
12	* TheQuincyPunk: Averted, subverted, or glorified, depending on the work.
13	* RomanAClef: Nearly all of his work (but especially ''The Spirit of St. Louis'') could be considered this, with fictionalized versions of real people and scenes. See also: the short story ''Stitch'', the "Ice City" stories, and ''Double Duce''.
14	* TenMinuteRetirement: This has happened a couple of times: Aaron will announce that ''this issue'' will be the last ever. A year or so later, a new one quietly comes out.
15	* WeUsedToBeFriends: So many times.

Context Creator / AaronCometbus