No one can blame you if you've never heard of Zak Sally. Although relatively well known to music lovers as the bassist for the popular rock band Low, the 33-year-old Minneapolis cartoonist (b. 1971) has, since 1998, released only two issues of his minicomic Recidivist, with print runs in the low hundreds and the most recent issue released over five years ago. "My comics have never really been 'distributed' in any real way," explains Sally. "I used to go through [the small 'zine distributors] Spit & A Half, Puppy Toss, etc, and later, I'd haul whatever comic I had on me around on tour with Low, and kind of half-assedly sell them from the stage, or drop a couple at whatever decent comic/bookstore was in town." While Sally claims to have some excuses for his lack of productivity, he admits that, "none of them are very good." But despite the anemic output, his cumulative body of work represents one of the more unique and rewarding visions in comics.

His tentative foray into cartooning began over ten years ago. In 1992, the magazine Your Flesh featured, in issues #24 and #25, his early strips "Duct Tape for the Shit Heads" and "Killing Screws." More early strips appeared in his self-published mini-comic Benzene, as well as the Jerome Gaynor books Flying Saucer Attack and Bogus Dead.

Sally began to come in to his own artistically with the self-published mini The Recidivist. The first issue, released in 1997, includes the startlingly original stories "All My Friends Are Giants," an absurd comic monologue from a tiny insect-sized man; "Dresden," a presumably autobiographical story about a band on tour in Europe, with a silent, inscrutable religious moment with the locals; and "Severed," about a relationship crisis between multiple pieces of a broken arm, occurring inside an x-ray diagram. The artwork -- sketchy textural drawing and anatomical cross-sections -- resembles both the line quality and the aesthetic fetishes of Phoebe Gloeckner and Steve Ditko.

The second issue of Recidivist includes the stories "You're Going to Fry," a funny and disturbing Jack Chick-style dream about a screening of a highly polished, big budget Hollywood movie concerning the benefits of Hell, as sold by a clichéd but persuasive Devil; and "At the Scaffold," a detailed and moving adaptation of the events surrounding Fyodor Dostoyevesky's brush with death in his miraculously cancelled execution. While these stories share no obvious content similarities, they both showcase Sally's witty fatalism, expressive drawing and meticulous attention to the emotional nuances of storytelling.

In 2003, Sally released Don't Move, a hodge-podge mini-compilation of miscellaneous work, such as a possibly autobiographical story about a room service employee's adventure with an aging nymphomaniac hotel guest, and the previously published Dirty Stories contribution "Our Pornography," that can only be described as abstract porn.

The small scale of minicomics doesn't always play to Sally's strengths as a cartoonist, whose awkward design sense with occasionally unwieldy text-heavy caption boxes and sometimes sketchy, indistinct drawings are not well served by the smaller reproduction limitations of the mini-comics format. "Our Pornography," for example, was more readable at the slightly larger size printed in Dirty Stories, where the crowded design had more room to breathe and could be read more comfortably.

The third and final issue of Recidivist will be released in 2005 by Sally's self-publishing imprint La Mano, an effort now supported by the printing press he acquired and refurbished in the summer of 2004. In addition to the creepy spousal abuse drama "Feed the Wife" and the strange Biblical oddity "The Secret Girls," the third issue will feature "Animal Vomit," a playfully absurd and hilarious science-fiction story in the black humor vein of The Twilight Zone, which may be Sally's best work to date. Narrated in the apologetic voice of an unidentified bureaucrat, the story begins with a shadowy group of mostly unseen, vaguely described "scientists" who are involved in an experiment on three men afflicted with a mysterious disease leaving them with the deformed heads of animals: a dog, a monkey, and a pig. The story's title derives from the experiment conducted on these men in the search for a cure, which for some reason must be extracted from their own stomachs. From the first page, the narrator's suspiciously pleading tone sounds so defensive that the voice becomes self-implicating and the plot advances with a strangely funny sense of dread. The narrator's pervasive disclaimers ironically draw even more suspicion then he intends to avert, and his obsession with preemptively abdicating his own guilt about what's lurking just around the corner of his own story only exacerbates the already creepy narrative tension. The dissected plot creeps methodically toward one of the funniest and most unexpected final-panel punch lines I've ever read. Like much of Sally's dreamy and inventive work, "Vomit" is unlike anything available in comics, with an ingenious wit more reminiscent of the film Being John Malkovich or the nightmarish prose fiction of George Saunders.

In addition to his own work, Sally also plans to use his new printing press to publish the collected works of King Cat creator John Porcellino, beginning with an approximately 80-page collection of Porcellino's "Mosquito Abatement Man" strips, with more collections to be released throughout 2005. If Porcellino's popularity in minicomics circles draws attention to the comics of his publisher, Sally's days of obscurity may be numbered.

Matt Silvie interviewed Dan Clowes for the Journal back in #233. Beginning next issue, Daniel Holloway will take over as the regular author of this column.

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