About

The Comic

Bassist Wanted is a comic strip for musicians, about the music industry: the bands who make the music, the labels who sell it, and the fans who have opinions about all of it.

It begins with a band missing its bassist. Kevin used to play bass for the Ambulance Men, a local band in Brooklyn, until he quit to form Jumpstart Malady, the most successful rock band in twenty years. The rest of the Ambulance Men, John, Dan, Roni and Christina, are still playing karaoke nights and asking for free drinks.

Meanwhile, Kevin copies a song out of his VCR manual, Joel at the record label tells his boss what he wants to hear, and Brett and Greg go out to see every band in town, most of whom also make their burritos.

Where It Came From

I drew Bassist Wanted from 2004 to 2010 for alternative weekly newspapers, to run next to their music listings. It appeared in Artvoice in Buffalo, C-VILLE Weekly in Charlottesville, the Hartford Advocate, the Fairfield County Weekly and their sister papers, the LA Alternative, the Dayton City Paper and Seven Days in Vermont, and then online. I wrote, drew, inked, scanned and web-designed all of it by myself. No one helped me do anything because they are all jerks, and anyway I have a Charles Schulz Complex.

The comics became two books. All Local Bands Suck (Except Ours), the first 150, named for one of John’s rants, came out in 2008 and was nominated for Best Book at the 2009 ECNY Awards. Jingles Are the New Punk, named for one of Greg’s arguments with Brett, collected the next 150 in 2011.

In 2009 I started a second comic strip, One Nation, Thunder Dog, to do for politics what Bassist Wanted did for music. But by then the weekly papers’ budgets were drying up, and they could no longer pay for comics. Rock bands mattered a little less every year, too, and the music industry ate its own tail, Auto-Tuning everything and compressing it with computers until all the music sounded the same, just as I predicted in 2009. Not that I’m bitter. The last Bassist Wanted comic strip ran in April 2010, as Kevin gave up on charity.

The Cartoonist

I’m Porter Mason. I have published comics since I was 13. Besides Bassist Wanted, there’s Johnny the Mediocre Human, about college life, and One Nation, Thunder Dog, about politics.

I also used to perform and teach comedy at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York and Los Angeles. In my spare time, I raise millions of dollars for nonprofits online.

These days I draw Roonie the Rabbit, a comic strip about a bunch of cute little animals with some very big feelings. I just Kickstarted its first book, Cute Animals for Flawed People, a beautiful hardback collecting the first 301 comics.