John F. Kelly fell in love with comics at age 10. He was so fascinated by Air Pirates Funnies that he dedicated the second issue of his new magazine, Dummy, to the Air Pirates. His story reminded me a lot of my own childhood in Lebanon, when I first discovered Superman at the same age that he discovered Air Pirates Funnies.

John went on to become a writer, a marketer, an educator, and later in life, an editor and publisher of a new magazine he aptly named Dummy. In the magazine industry, the term “dummy” refers to a prototype edition of a publication. He had originally been showing the prototype of his magazine and referred to it as the Pee-Wee Playhouse zine prototype—essentially, the dummy issue. And thus, Dummy magazine was born.

As a comics historian, John uses Dummy to explore comics history one subject at a time. In addition to the magazine, he also hosts a YouTube channel called DummyZine. I had the pleasure of interviewing John, where we talked about his love for print, his views on comics and their history, the impact of new technologies such as AI, and the reasons many are returning to print as independent publishers in this digital age.

So, without any further ado, please join me in this pleasant conversation with an editor and publisher that reminded me of myself falling in love with comics and transitioning to magazines.  

Enjoy the Mr. Magazine™ Interview with John Kelly, publisher and editor of Dummy magazine.  But first, the soundbites:

On what is Dummy magazine: “It’s a comics history publication that I focus on one particular topic for each issue.”

On why he launched Dummy: “I missed the printed magazine, holding something in my hand that had something that I spent a long time writing about and researching.”

On naming the magazine Dummy: “I was taking out this Pee-Wee’s Playhouse zine and showing it to them and saying, here’s the dummy of my new zine, my new Pee-Wee’s Playhouse zine. And that’s just what I was calling it because I started in printing and publishing, and that was just a term that I was familiar with.”

On the resurgence of print in this digital age: “There’s an analog movement for different people in this country and in the world. We consume so much information online. Print is like taking a break medium. I think that’s part of it.”

On the difference between issue one and two: “It was very important to me to have it look like a real magazine, so that there was a much more of a disciplined approach to it than my, let’s just throw this thing together, first issue. The second issue, which took a lot longer, in part was also tracking down the art.”

On his love for Air Pirates Funnies since he was a kid: “I opened Air Pirates Funnies number one and looked inside and saw, ah, this is not Mickey Mouse. This is not the Mickey Mouse that I know. They’re doing something very different here. And so from that point on, I’ve been really puzzled and fascinated by the Air Pirates. This was my chance to explore that deeper.”

On his view about AI: “I don’t really consider any technology a foe. I think things can be misused. Anything can be misused, and AI certainly misuses a lot of things.”

More on his views on AI: “Most of my friends are cartoonists or artists or writers. I’m a writer myself. The threat of AI stealing the intellectual property of artists and other people, plus other issues beyond that, makes it extremely dangerous and something that is theft.”

On his advice to start a new magazine: “It’s very difficult and very expensive, but that’s not a reason not to do it, right?”

On what he does to rewind: “I don’t really rewind.  I’m working all of the time.”

On what keeps him up at night: “Nothing. I sleep great. I take care of myself. I eat well. I exercise.  I’m doing something I absolutely love to do.  I’m completely content with everything.”

And now for the lightly edited Mr. Magazine™ Interview with John Kelly, publisher and editor of Dummy magazine:

Samir Husni: Give me the elevator pitch of this new magazine, Dummy.

John Kelly: Well, it’s a funny story. The elevator pitch, I guess, would be that it’s a comics history publication that I focus on one particular topic for each issue, and the guideline for what that topic is, is that it’s something that I’m extremely interested in, maybe I know something about it, but I want to know a lot more.

So by doing the research in the writing and putting it all together, I do a very deep dive on that topic so that I educate myself about it. And as a result, when it’s printed, others can also learn what I’ve learned.

Samir Husni: What’s the genesis of the magazine and why did you decide to call it Dummy?

John Kelly:  It’s a funny backstory because I was not planning on doing this at all.

I’ve been writing about comics history for many years. I’ve been writing for The Comics Journal magazine since the late 1980s or early 1990s, but more than 35 years. And I’ve written many, many pieces for that publication.

In recent years, as magazines, the printed magazines, have mostly disappeared, including, for the most part, The Comics Journal. They do a print publication occasionally. Most of my pieces have only existed online, and I was just kind of getting sick of that.

I missed the printed magazine, holding something in my hand that had something that I spent a long time writing about and researching. I’d written many pieces, and they only existed somewhere out there on the internet. I love printed materials.

I certainly am of the age that I grew up with them, and I wanted to put together something for myself. I chose to do that first issue on the Art of the Pee-Wee’s Playhouse show because I knew the people who were involved in that process, and I had seen all their archival material many times. So, I put together, really just for myself, a printed publication about that story, and I brought it to a friend’s house.

He had a color copy machine, and I had laid it out in InDesign and quickly put it together, brought over some flats to his house. We printed out the pages, folded, stapled them, and there it was. I held it in my hand, and I was very happy, and I thought that would be it.

I thought that I was making one copy just for myself because it was something that I wanted to do. Then people started seeing it. I was showing it to them, and I was saying, you know the term dummy in printing? It refers to a prototype publication. I was taking out this Pee-Wee’s Playhouse zine and showing it to them and saying, here’s the dummy of my new zine, my new Pee-Wee’s Playhouse zine. And that’s just what I was calling it because I started in printing and publishing, and that was just a term that I was familiar with.

More and more people wanted copies of it, so I thought I would print up a couple of them. I wanted to give a copy to the people who I had interviewed, to Gary Panter and Mark Newgarden and Kaz and Wayne White and Ric Heitzman. I wanted to send them copies for their own, and I thought I would print up 10 copies of it.

But more people learned about it and they wanted copies, so I, reluctantly, decided that I would print up a hundred copies of it. And the last thing that I did before I sent the files to the printer was, I thought, well it’s got to have a name, you know? I just don’t want to call it the Pee-Wee’s Playhouse zine? I wanted to call it something, and I liked the name Dummy. It was stupid and it had a secondary meaning to it, so I thought it was kind of funny to call a magazine Dummy.

Very quickly, maybe in 90 seconds, I composed the logotype for that name for the masthead title and just slapped it on to the magazine at the last moment. I was printing a hundred copies thinking that it would take me 10 years to get rid of them, that they would be in boxes in my basement forever. Then I posted one little thing on my Facebook page saying, hey, I made up some copies of this.

If you want one, just contact me. And they sold out in two hours. They were all gone immediately.

I was like, wow. Then the money from selling those copies allowed me to print 300 more, and those sold out immediately too. Then since then, I’ve just been reprinting them and still today, I still get orders for that copy.

That’s basically how it all started, but it was not something that was planned. I’m extremely happy that there are people out there who want it, who want a printed publication. I didn’t realize that there as many people out there, like me, who missed print and the printed matter. I’m happy that they exist.

Samir Husni: Why do you think is this resurgence of the independent return to print?

John Kelly: There’s an analog movement for different people in this country and in the world.

We consume so much information online. Print is like taking a break medium. I think that’s part of it. There’s a novelty aspect to it too, that people are not expecting a printed publication that’s well printed, produced, and designed as possible.

I want it to be a beautiful piece that people can look at. I can only say personally, I absolutely hate reading long things online. I’m getting older, maybe that has something to do with it.

My eyesight is failing and the chore of reading something online that is extremely long and complicated. I just won’t do it, and that includes my own work. I still write for The Comics Journal, and I tend to write very long pieces, one of the things that prompted me to really embrace doing a publication again, myself, was that I would say I wouldn’t even read my pieces online because they’re too long.

Not that because they’re bad, but just because there’s too long, and you get distracted. You get pulled away from something and you think, well, I’ll go back to that. Then you’re bombarded with 9 million other things that take you away from it.

You end up two years later thinking, oh, there was something that I wanted to read. If you have the printed thing, you can read part of it, put it down, read it again. And if you like it, you can save it and read it years from now.

Samir Husni: Your journey from issue one to issue two, has it been a walk in a rose garden or you had some issues?

John Kelly: No, no, no, no, no. With the first issue, since I wasn’t expecting it to exist, I probably designed that issue very quickly. I have rudimentary InDesign skills and layout skills.

I can get by to do like a mock-up of something. I’ve been using Adobe products since they came out, so I know how to use them. Also the subject matter for that first issue, the looseness of the art of the Pee Wee Herman program really worked well with my somewhat laissez-faire design for that issue, right? Once I was going to do a second issue, I wanted to really step it up and make it as beautiful as I possibly could.

All the images in the second issue are scanned at very high resolution from primary sources, so either the original art or usually a very rare, printed publication. There’s a lot of work that goes into cleaning up those images and having them color corrected and presented on the page so that they look like the actual artifact, like you could reach down and pick it up off the page.

That’s what I was going for, at least. It was very important to me to have it look like a real magazine, so that there was a much more of a disciplined approach to it than my, let’s just throw this thing together, first issue. The second issue, which took a lot longer, in part was also tracking down the art.

There were specific pieces of art that I wanted for that issue that took a long time to find, like who owned the originals for this piece, who had the original piece or who had a copy of this thing that there’s maybe three copies in existence. Getting that and then scanning it and working with the it took a long time, but in the end, it was worth it. Also, the Air Pirates story is a very complicated story.

It’s an extremely complicated story that I don’t think has been captured in the way that I’ve done in this issue. So, there were a lot of moving parts and a lot of people that I was talking to from the Air Pirates and around the Air Pirates for that issue. I wanted to make sure that I said that story as well as I possibly could.

Samir Husni: Judging by the poster above your chair, you’re an Air Pirates fan?

John Kelly: Oh yeah, sure. The Air Pirates have been very important to me since I was a little boy. I first saw copies of Air Pirates one and two when I was 10 years old and I was over a friend’s house. This friend had an older brother who was a junior or senior in high school.

He had a stash of underground comics hidden in his room that I knew about. When I would be over their house and when the brother wasn’t around, I would sneak into his room and go through the comics and look at them. I was way younger than I should have been looking at those things. But mixed in with the guy’s copies of Zap and Freak Brothers and some other underground comics were these like Mickey Mouse comic books.

At first, I didn’t know what they were. To me, they were just like regular Mickey Mouse comic books. That’s what they look like to me.

I paid no attention to them. But I wondered why those were there? Why were these Mickey Mouse comic books in there with these dirty comic books? And eventually I opened Air Pirates Funnies number one and looked inside and saw, ah, this is not Mickey Mouse. This is not the Mickey Mouse that I know.

They’re doing something very different here. And so from that point on, I’ve been really puzzled and fascinated by the Air Pirates.

This was my chance to explore that deeper.

Samir Husni: We live in a digital age and AI is everywhere now. Do you consider AI a friend or a foe of the printed matter?

John Kelly: I don’t really consider any technology a foe. I think things can be misused. Anything can be misused, and AI certainly misuses a lot of things.

Most of my friends are cartoonists or artists or writers. I’m a writer myself. The threat of AI stealing the intellectual property of artists and other people, plus other issues beyond that, makes it extremely dangerous and something that is theft.

I agree with those friends of mine who absolutely hate it and don’t want it in their lives. They don’t want their artwork stolen and reconfigured and used for other purposes without their permission. I completely understand that, and I support that.

That said, AI is a lot more than just that. That’s a bad side of what it does. I don’t think we were recording this, but when we first started, you were talking about how you do your transcriptions and that’s an AI process. That’s helpful.

That’s extremely helpful. There are other things that AI can do that is beneficial.

So, I am not 100 percent against it, because in theory it can be a very useful tool. I remember when desktop publishing was first starting, that was a threat to people who were publishing in the earlier, more traditional ways.

Society adapted to the new technology and now it’s what’s used. I still love the old methods of printing. I print a lot of things on a letterpress machine.

I love the fact that I have access to a letterpress, not just one, access to several letterpress machines. And I take advantage of that, and I print things with that technology.

I love the way that they look. It’s not efficient for me to be printing an entire issue of Dummy on a letterpress machine these days. And so it’s offset printed in Chicago and then mailed to me.

I would love it if I had a letterpress machine or some other old-fashioned printer in my basement that I could crank it out whenever I wanted a new copy and do it myself. But, logistically, I’m not able to do that.

So, that’s how I view AI.  It can be a very bad thing. In some ways it is a very bad thing. In a lot of ways, it’s a very bad thing.

In other ways, it’s something that we all use, whether we know it or not.

Samir Husni: If someone came to you and says, John, I have this idea of a new magazine, should I go ahead, and do it? Would you tell them, yes? Or you would tell them forget about it.

John Kelly:  It’s very difficult and very expensive, but that’s not a reason not to do it, right? It would depend on what their idea was. I hope that because of Dummy and a couple of other newer publications that I really love, I hope a lot more people start doing their own, whatever it is, their own printed thing.

I was just at the Small Press Expo this past weekend in Bethesda, Maryland, and I ran, along with Gary Hallgren, a member of the Air Pirates, we ran a workshop for younger artists on how to make mini-comics, Tijuana Bibles, and how to print your own little publication. We had a jammed session. The session was sold out, and it was great to see all these artists making their own little comics and holding them up and showing them. They were coming up to me afterwards and showing me what they did, and I loved that. I think people should explore whatever channels they can to have their expression created, whether that’s digital, whether it’s printed, whether it’s music, whether it’s painting, anything that they have a passion for.

I would say that I think one of the reasons Dummy is doing well is that it’s really a pure labor of love on my part. I think that’s very important. I’m not doing it because this will, I’m thinking, oh, this is going to make me money, because that’s probably not going to happen. My goal is that it makes enough money that I can keep doing it.  So far it is.

The reason to do it is because it’s something I want to do. Each issue of Dummy so far there’s only been two, but subsequent issues, they’re all going to be based on, here’s something that I wish existed, you know, here’s something that I don’t know enough about. As a writer, the only way that I learn, truly learn about something, is through the process of writing about it, through the process of researching it, to talking to the people who were involved in it, and writing the story, and then rewriting, and rewriting, and rewriting, and rewriting, and talking to more people, and then it comes together for me. I’m doing it as, because my focus, my target audience is one person, that’s me.

I’m the target audience. It’s something that I wish that existed, that if I walked into a store and I saw, or if I saw somebody posting about it, I would say, I need that, I’ve been waiting my whole life for that thing, and now it exists. So, if other people feel the same way, that’s great, but I’m doing it for myself, and that’s important for people, and especially doing a printed thing like this, it’s just because you got to really do it, because it’s something that you’re just motivated to do, because you want it to exist.

Samir Husni: Well, John, before I ask you my typical last two questions, is there any question I should have asked you I did not? John Kelly:  No, I think you’ve hit all of them so far. I’m having a lot of fun doing this. It’s a lot of work.

It’s a tremendous amount of work. I would say one thing that I wasn’t expecting, I hadn’t really thought about was the amount of work.  I sell a lot of copies of the magazine as a result, I’m going to the post every single day, dropping off stuff at the post office to mail out, sometimes two times a day, sometimes three times a day, bringing piles of mailers stuffed with Dummys to the post office, and that’s great. It’s a lot of time.

It’s a lot of time to stuff them into the envelope to get them to look the way that they want to. All the mailers are hand stamped. You know, they have a little note in there.

There’re some extra items. It’s very time consuming. There’re issues with mail delivery at times, especially right now, international mail delivery is really a nightmare.

You take a lot of questions from people about their orders.  I also sell t-shirts and other related merchandise. Somebody orders the wrong color or the wrong size.  What do you do then? There’s a lot of customer service stuff that takes a lot of time away from the actual writing.

I wasn’t expecting that because I wasn’t expecting any of this. It’s been a real learning experience.

Samir Husni:  If I come to visit you one evening, unannounced, what do I catch John doing? Reading a book, watching TV, cooking, having a glass of wine? What do you do to rewind at the end of the day?

John Kelly: I don’t really rewind.  I’m working all of the time.

The only I leave the house is I go to the gym every day, early in the morning. I get up really early. I get up around 4, 4:30 in the morning and I start working on Dummy at that point.

I’ll go to the gym around 7:00 or 8:00 am and then I’m working on Dummy or something for The Comics Journal or some other project until my wife and I usually watch about an hour of non-traditional television. It’s like a movie or a documentary or something, maybe an hour and a half of that before I, I usually start falling asleep about 10 minutes into it. Then we’re in bed at 10 or 9 pm.

Samir Husni: What keeps you up at night?

John Kelly: Nothing. I sleep great. I take care of myself. I eat well.

I exercise.  I’m doing something I absolutely love to do.  I’m completely content with everything.

I’m a very happy person at this point in my life. I don’t think there’s anything that keeps me up at night.  Everybody’s life has issues and concerns, and you just deal with them as they come.

I’m like powerless over most things. Usually, I figure out a way to make things work.

Samir Husni:  Thank you and good luck.