Who are you?

Cat's Out of the Bag collective members live throughout New York State. Sometimes elsewhere. They write fiction and nonfiction, teach, make art and social documentary, engage in activism, practice healing arts, write and argue cases before appellate courts, and much else.

Some people's individual web sites:

Loret Gnivecki Steinberg: Photos from New York, the week of the Republican Convention and earlier work: Juvenile detention, color panoramas, and more.

Michael Steinberg: publisher's page for The fiction of a thinkable world: Body, meaning, and the culture of capitalism; and a page introducing his law practice.

How can anti-capitalists charge money?

You will never have to pay to read or print our comics. You'll be able to get all them right here on this site, free to download and print and assemble yourself. We're releasing everything under the Copyleft license, which specifically allows free reproduction and distribution as long as you respect and credit the creators.

So why are we asking for an exchange of money for the preprinted, preassembled comics? We can't do all the labor ourselves. We need to pay other people money--namely, the printers and the post office--to print and bind the comics and get them out of our houses and into yours. Everybody in the collective has already donated her or his time, labor, and materials, as well as money out of our own pockets to pay for the printing for the first run of the first five comics. We're all committed to continuing to make a gift of our labor for the duration of our project, but we sure don't have infinite cash resources for future printing and postage--so every penny you send will help us to print more copies and new titles.

We'd like to add that in a society where labor and goods are most commonly exchanged for money, we don't think that getting paid for work is the same as capitalism when no capital is accumulated and workers aren't being separated from the means of production. And we also engage whenever possible in alternatives to commerce using government-issued currency, such as barters.

Please be assured that the workers we're paying to print and bind our comics are union members (and the comics are recycled paper printed with soy-based inks).

How do I get in touch?

Best is by e-mail link, like this one. If you prefer the more traditional sort of mail, you can write to the members who keep the paper files:

Cat's Out of the Bag
c/o Loret & Michael Steinberg
109 Rutgers Street
Rochester NY 14607
USA

Who's Jack Chick?

He is the creator of some of the most widely-distributed Fundamentalist Christian literature around. Since his first 24-page comic, This was your life, appeared in the 1960s, more than half a billion copies of his tracts have been handed out.

Chick promotes a literal interpretation of the New Testament, complete with fiery devils and a burning pit, and attacks Islam and the Catholic Church as well as rock music and feminism. (Recent tracts allege that Islam was a "black operation" of the Devil himself, working through his chosen instrument the Church of Rome.) We find Chick's theology debasing and his politics vile, but we have to respect his skill as a propagandist. He developed a really effective format, and we hope to use it for much more positive ends.

What does "detourned" meant?

It's an Americanization of the Situationist term détournement. Ken Knabb, who translated Guy Debord and Gil Wolman's "User's Guide to Détournement," defines it as "deflection, diversion, rerouting, distortion, misuse, misappropriation, hijacking, or otherwise turning aside from the normal course or purpose."

It's come to mean the critical subversion of dominant media, in activist practices like altering billboards and advertisements, mimicking corporate logos and slogans, changing the text in a comic strip, and taking a familiar object and causing it to function very differently from its common use and context.

Since Chick claimed to have taken his format from Chinese propaganda comics he encountered during the Korean War, you might say that our comics are the result of a double détournement.

Why cats?

And why not? The IWW chose a cat for their symbol because they obey no masters. All of us are fond of cats, and--we're happy to add--our cats seem to be fond of us, too.

How can I help?

Of course you'll want to get on our mailing list, to be the first in your town to read our comics. If you'd like to help in the pre-launch publicity, you can download ready-to-print pdfs of stickers, bumper stickers, palm cards and buttons. If you do any of this, please let us know! Or you can send $5.00 for our handy Publicity Kit, containing 30 stickers, two bumper stickers, two buttons, a master palm card sheet you can photocopy and cut up, and a nicely-printed letter about Cat's Out of the Bag suitable for reading and personally signed by a human being.

Here's the page with the goods.