Sparkplug Books is running a Kickstarter campaign to publish my graphic novel Vortex and Elijah Brubaker’s Reich #12. I’m doing a series of blog posts called The Hiizzztory of the Miizzzard that show how the protagonist of Vortex has evolved over the years.

I’ve been portraying the Miizzzard in various forms and media since at least January 2007. The oldest Miizzzard documentation that I can find now is these photos from a performance art piece that Lanneau White and I did that month. Here we are assembling a hyper gate:

The Miizzzard is on the left in the brown corduroy jacket and red, Karl Sapien (Lanneau’s persona) is on the right with the green skeleton mask.

The Miizzzard began as my performance art persona. I took a lot of performance art classes in college, mainly under Mike Smith, and then after school I continued to do performance and video art for a few years. Here’s one of the only videos I did then that I’m still into, with a text intro from July 2007:

The moon was low and large and distant in the sky. The inter-dimensional machineries churned to keep the Trans-Dimensional Hypercastle in place, and the haze produced fuzzed the moon, as if she were the ghostly final slice of a peach. The crystalline lattice of fluorescent blue light tubes slowly unfolded under the heavy-lidded lunar gaze. It seemed to be grasping at the whole of night.

The Miizzzard walked up to it and began to play his Hyper-Crystal Mind-Organ…

I had a brief infatuation with weaving in late 2006 and early 2007, when I made the Miizzzard’s mask and other fabric scraps:

The name of the Miizzzard comes from Roy Wood’s Wizzard’s Brew album:

My first blog post in May 2007 was about the origins of the Miizzz:

The Miizzzard no longer exists. He died circa 400,000 B.C.E. while trying to discover the transformative secrets of the Space Yetis.

His ghost haunts the digital realm and possesses various weavings and synthetic fabrics in the material world in an attempt to recreate Scriabin’s ‘Mysterium,’ a Gesamtkunstwerk that destroys this earth to give birth to another.

He is a figment, a warm bowl of minty fig meat topped with a spoonful of cold jellied plum.

I have also heard that, although he has lived out only twenty-three years, the path that he traces thru spacetime is discontinuous: he shook to Marie Curie’s radioactive boogaloo, procured pamphlets from Le Sony’r Ra in Chicago, was a starving outcast with Grettir Armundarson on Drang Isle and pissed blue thanks to Yves Klein. His last known location was drunk out of his mind at the Deep Eddy Cabaret, singing karaoke alongside the shade of Rrose Selavy.

All we can know for sure is that he’s a weird guy.

More hiizzztory next week!