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graphics for Girl or Chocolate, and I’ll do t-shirts for Four Star or Lakai or a shoe for Lakai. On a typical day I’m working with those eight guys on whatever projects come through—anything from board graphics to advertising, to store promotional stuff. Now it’s stuff for the video that is coming out. When’s the video coming out? It’s gonna hit later this year. What’s it like working with your friends and peers in the Art Dump? Are they artists you had admired in the past that you got on the team? For sure! The Art Dump’s consisted of a few different people throughout the years, and a few of them have left naturally and gone to do their own thing. Progression. So there are people like Jeff McFetrich who had worked for Chocolate for a while, Kevin Lyons, Bucky Fukumoto, Johannes Gamble… All of whom I really have a great appreciation for. Michael Leon is another who is doing his own thing now. I had a big hand in hiring most of these guys. I hire them because I really like their aesthetic and them as a person. It’s really important that there is not some overpowering ego. We really do keep egos in check at Girl. Everything works out really well because people understand the process and no one gets their feelings hurt if something doesn’t get picked. I have a great appreciation for the Art Dump guys - each and every one of them for different reasons. Taking it back to the Wrench Pilot days… can you explain the comic and if it was influenced by anyone you knew? I started that in probably 1989 for Transworld Skateboarding, but originally it was for Thrasher Comics. The character himself, Lettus Bee, is basically me, but skates much better than I ever skated. He can skate switch or regular at will, it was nothing I could do for sure—It was like my fantasy-self. So all the situations that he got embroiled in that weren’t completely fantastical were situations that I had kind of been through, or ones that I had fictionalized a bit to make them funny. What about your pen name? When I started working at the BMX magazine I was probably about 19-years-old, and I was really into skating and punk rock, and different things that the magazine I was working at wasn’t covering. They weren’t really doing lifestyle stuff, so I did a punk rock noise ‘zine and I called it “Bend.” The name Bend kind of stuck, and I used to wear this bowling shirt that had the word “Mel” on it. My friend Todd Swank just started calling me Mel, and Mel Bend just kind of came to be as a pen name. But I used the pen name in order to do the ‘zine on the sly because I didn’t really want the office guys knowing that I did it. I was using their Xerox machine and paper and everything. What about your collaboration with the Hundreds? I was really stoked that they asked me to do it. Basically, it’s Mel Bend style illustra-
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tions. There’s a couple of the t-shirts and hoodies that have the characters on them doing different things. I was pretty psyched to do that! What about just in terms of your art in general? What sort of mediums do you like to work in? Besides doing pen and ink stuff for Wrench Pilot, which I recently restarted again, I like to do multimedia collage stuff. I’ll start with a piece of wood or piece of cardstock, and just start applying paint, found papers, polyurethane, tape and everything I can find. I’m kind of a pack rat as far as collecting old notes, papers, receipts and parking tickets, and those things wind up in my pieces. It’s real personal stuff, but it hopefully has a wide appeal as far as the aesthetic of it goes because I really enjoying doing it. What about your publishing endeavor, Bend Press? Bend Press was an offshoot of the ‘zine itself. I started the ‘zine in ‘86 and then did issues here and there. Each issue got more and more elaborate as I went, they would have cutouts or silk screened covers or pullouts. It finally came to the point where I wanted to publish a book. I didn’t have any contacts in the book industry and I was kind of a DIY guy myself so I decided, “lets just do it.” I did a book that was really a compilation of all the letters I had received from different people over the years, from like ’86 to ’95 or something—pre-email, when it was all snail mail. I have a really interesting group of friends that I met that way, through touring around the country and skating. Pen pals? Yeah. Trading ‘zines, that was a major thing for me. I’m still friends with a lot of these guys that used to do the ‘zines back in the day. It culminated with that book which came out and was called, “I Only Check The Mail When It Has Arrived.” It’s all letters and postcards, a block of documentation of this specific group of people over, like, a ten-year period almost, which is kind of cool. It did pretty well and sold out of its first printing. I never reprinted it. It was like a yearbook. Yeah, a real creative one. After that I did a novel for a friend on Bend Press, a writer by the name of Mike Daily who I was really into. He did this unique novel called “Valley,” and we published his novel together. That was pretty much the last book. We did two books for Bend Press, and it’s just online now. It’s completely switched over to digital. I’ll still pop a ‘zine out every once in a while, but as far as publishing goes, I probably won’t go there. It cost me a lot of money to do those books. I never really made it back. What about the rest of the year, what do you have planned? Any special projects? Right now I’m heavily into Girl and the movie stuff for Girl, which is a pretty big deal. Over the next few months we’ll probably be putting together all the packaging and posters and movie titles. Hopefully we’ll get the Art Dump out of the country for a show sometime, too.