THE OPTIMIST is an open-format black and white weekly comic strip. It's about whatever I feel like it being about. The Optimist is also a series of occasional podcasts - same type of humor, just ideas that I couldn't easily condense down into a comic. Plus, I love the sound of my own voice. If you are familiar with Whiskey! Tango! Foxtrot! (below) or Pinhole (also below), you will pretty much know what you're getting here. - Visit THE OPTIMIST site

Labels: 2010, Comic Projects, Comics, Self-Published

BROKEN LINES is a graphic novel (in progress) about a cowboy, a spaceman, and a waitress on a cross-country adventure. They fight evil. It's supposed to be funny. I'm about halfway through the story, independently publishing issues with little to no distribution at all. When the story is done, I will be shopping it around to publishers. In the meantime, "get in on the ground floor of this amazing opportunity." I encourage you to visit the official site for plot stuff, sample pages, multimedia crap, and the chance to purchase. Issues of Broken Lines are also for sale on this site, the BUY COMICS page. - Visit the BROKEN LINES site

Labels: Broken Lines, Comic Projects, Self-Published, Wicked Awesome

Labels: 2009, Comic Projects, Self-Published, Turn It Up CDs, Valley Advocate

FAMOUS FIGHTERS is 52 pages of evil-fighting mayhem! Incredibly stupid! Culled from the past 10 or 15 years of dumb collaboration between Tom Pappalardo and Matt Smith. You got yourself some zombies and some barbarians and a couple of headbangers and Satan. Sweet! A very small number of copies made it into circulation with a glitchy computer error on one of the last pages of the book. If you have one of those, you are either in possession of a highly collectible rarity, or a defective piece of merchandise. Only time will tell.

"...one of the most original books available" - Broken Frontier

"Buy it and laugh" - Optical Sloth

"Better luck next time, guys" - The Comics Journal

"...see how good a self-published comic can and should look" - Comic Book Resources

full reviews HERE | for sale on the BUY COMICS page | visit the FAMOUS FIGHTERS site

Labels: 2006, Comic Projects, Famous Fighters, Kung Fu, Matt Smith, Self-Published, Star Wars

FAILURE, INCOMPETENCE is a collection of unpublished comics & stories spanning the last decade. Jam-packed with fantastic mediocrity. Sixty pages of immense time-killing. Hated by many, loved by few.
After having spent so much time working on various attempts at comic strips, comic books, short stories, and illustrations, it was really depressing to me when I realized how few people had ever actually seen 'em. So in late 2004, I decided to start "cleaning out" my proverbial "closet" of old material. But as it happened, most of this stuff really was in my closet, in portfolios next to my sweaters. It took about a year of occasional scanning, cleaning up, and text-replacing before Failure, Incompetence took shape.
This collection represents several failed (though by no means bad) attempts at full comic book stories, many single panel comic strips (I didn't even include 'em all), some straight prose, a comic strip called Pinhole, some stuff previously published in zines like VMAG and Lollipop.  

"...gags by the pound..." - QUIMBY'S
 
"The inconsistency here is enough to drive you insane" - COMICS WAITING ROOM

Failure, Incompetence is out-of print

Labels: 2005, Comic Projects, Failure, Self-Published

Pinhole was a square-format comic that appeared in Northampton-based VMAG from 1999-2000 or so. Most of these bursts of randomness were reprinted/collected in Failure, Incompetence. Here's the first strip.

Labels: 1999, Comic Projects

(Artwork: Matt Smith - Story: Tom Pappalardo) Through the Wood... is a re-written, partially redrawn & expanded version of our Xeric grant-funded indie release Alec Dear. Between the original self-published Alec Dear story and this Caliber Comics release, I must've rewritten the damned rhymes a gazabillion times. Paul Jenkins helped out a lot the second time around, and also provided Guinness, which always makes writing better. This was our first time ever being published "for real" and for reasons I cannot recall, we never saw a proof copy. I was sort of crushed when we saw the finished product and there were a few lines missing (somewhat critical in a rhyming poem book) and I think one of the main character's name is misspelled once. Ah, well. We should've asked for a proof. Lesson learned.  


TTWBTM is for sale on the BUY COMICS page. Read the reviews here. See the cover: TTWBTM

Labels: 1998, Alec Dear, Comic Projects, Matt Smith

(Artwork: Matt Smith - Story: Tom Pappalardo) The blurb: "Find out what Alec Dear, the mischievous gasmask-wearing dead guy does when he finds himself in the burn victim unit of a secluded children's hospital!" Zowie fun times! Alec Dear was written by me, mostly while sitting behind the cash register at an All For A Dollar store in a mall in Salem, NH in the early nineties. A perfect setting to write grotesque horror, if you ask me. I tried drawing it, but knew my good buddy Matt Smith had more talent and vision than I did, so he took on the art side of things. He worked on it in Massachusetts, New York, and maybe New Orleans. He applied for a Xeric grant and scored a little money for printing. It was later heavily tweaked and released by Caliber comics in 1998. Alec Dear is free with purchase of another comic or a poster, if you email and let me know. I've got boxes of these fuckers! Read the reviews here. See the cover: AD

Labels: 1996, Alec Dear, Comic Projects, Matt Smith, Self-Published

La Luna Es Negra was a story I worked on a lot the first couple years I was out in western Massachusetts. Much of it was drawn downstairs at the Haymarket, and most of the white-out is mixed with their delicious coffee. It was a story about a cowboy and a drunk guy driving around in a stolen custom 70s van fighting evil firemen. I actually completed the first 32-page issue before deciding it wasn't quite right. Story was wrong, art was wrong. It was, errr. ambitious, I guess? It had sort of a crunchy art style and alternated between prose and comic, and kept switching narrators and stuff. But in the end, it just wasn't very entertaining. Bits of La Luna eventually got resurrected, becoming the basis of Broken Lines. Here's a random page to look at.

Labels: 1996, Comic Projects

Bughaus was a sort of crappy story I expended a lot of effort on and ultimately abandoned. It was a reworking of the original "Bughouse" story I started in MassArt's Don't Shoot It's Only Comics anthology. I built it around a new main character (his name was DICK) and wrote a bafflingly complicated and unfunny story arc. I was so desperate to simply produce something...anything... I cranked this little fucker out in mostly ballpoint pen. There are a handful of funny jokes in here, but it is mostly a fine example of... I dunno... lack of talent? Maybe someday I'll scan it and post the whole thing up here, just to embarrass myself and amuse a few 11-year old boys. For now, here's a 1-page taste. Peep that skill-level. ::cringe::

Labels: 1995, Comic Projects

From 1992 to 1994, I was the editor of this fine, lo-fi school-funded anthology at Massachusetts College of Art (MassArt). It was nightmarish and sort of fun. The name FORTY-3 apparently lived on for at least a short while after I left... maybe the incoming freshmen didn't realize that I'd made up the name and thought it was some thing "official", I dunno. The five issues I put out included contributions from Mister Reusch, Paul Alix, Jack Purcell, Matt Smith, and lots of dudes submitting under assumed names. As for my personal contributions to the issues, I had a recurring storyline comic called Bughouse (later renamed to BUGHAUS after some dude put out a "real" comic called BugHouse). - Tom (The Artist Formerly Known as Goat) FORTY-3 is out-of print and rabidly sought after by indy comic fans around the world.

Labels: 1992, 1993, 1994, Comic Projects, Massachusetts, MassArt, Matt Smith, Mister Reusch, Published In

Bughouse was a serialized 'funny' science fiction comic that ran in the MassArt comic anthology (first in Jef Taylor's Don't Shoot! It's Only Comics, and later under my editorial fist at FORTY-3). It featured some terrible, somewhat embarrassing artwork, some great side characters, and a relatively uninteresting main character named Dexter. I have all the original bristols (yeah, that's right... pen and ink on bristol board! What a waste of, uh, pens and ink and bristol) in the back of my closet, so maybe someday when I am under house arrest or beset with some sort of sickness, I will scan in a few pages and post 'em here.

Labels: 1991, Comic Projects, MassArt