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The Next Big Thing January 12, 2001

Know what this is?

It’s Radio Free Larry.

It seems every six months or so, I find I’m introducing myself to a whole new set of cats, and I’m running out of cute and entertaining ways to do it. This time, let’s leave it at this: I’m Larry Young. I write the Astronauts in Trouble family of graphic novels, as well as “The Bod” for Image Comics’ February release Double Image . I’m the Minister of Propaganda for one of the best comic stores in the country, Comix Experience. I’m the co-publisher of AiT/Planet Lar (www.ait-planetlar.com), the folks who’ve brought you Channel Zero and are serving up Warren Ellis’ Night Orbit and his Come in Alone compendium, as well as Steven Grant’s return to Whisper . We do all of the fulfillment and distribution of our product line that Diamond doesn’t do first. So that’s writing, publishing, and distribution and fulfillment taken care of, and a few hours a week behind a counter at a retail shop. Everything in comics from concept to commerce; I have an idea and four months later I’m giving you change from your twenty and putting a graphic novel in your hands.

So I see some things along the way, and Jonah Weiland is holding the antenna to broadcast Radio Free Larry.

But there’s a monkey in the business, because I don’t have to worry about playing nice. I don’t go out of my way to piss people off, but I worry a lit tle less than some do about stepped-upon toes. I don’t have any corporate masters, so I don’t mind stripping the paint off of things to show you what I think is really going on.

I’m a loose cannon.

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One of the things you run into in the sort of media-saturated world we live in today is the New Expert. The New Expert gained life again, reanimated from the steenkin’ corpse of the Know-it-All, right around the time the phrase “hanging chad” became as prevalent as “paper or plastic?” and people who haven’t read a newspaper in five years became accredited scholars in Constitutional law overnight.

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