By Way Of The Drum (Pedro Bell album cover version)

[ChrisB]

@SlipperyDude, welcome to the forums! I’d be happy to see more Pedro topics on here.

@SlipperyDude

How’d you come across this thing anyway?

I came across it, as I often do with P-Funk research - by luck. That 2004 transcription of the interview I linked to in the OP allowed me to find it the interview, since it mentioned some other albums I was keyword searching. Anyways, I then located this “original” (it is uploaded to Archive.org by the Roctober editor), and there it was, two-toned and sitting in the margins.

@SlipperyDude

you might be able to find a higher res version of the page if you can find a physical copy.

Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. I posted it here hoping someone might have had an intact copy, or have more interest in buying it than me. (If you want to upload an image, I recommend having it level, neutrally-lit, high-resolution and containing some extra space around the edges.) Anyways, I quickly shifted my focus to locating a color version, as I think the Roctober editor may have a copy, so read on for more on that.

@SlipperyDude

Since Rocktober is a zine, I doubt you can find a color version

That was my initial thought too, however, (1) the Roctober editor was apparently friends with Pedro. Here’s a quote of a Tweet they posted:

I spent 100s of hours with Pedro Bell, and tried my best to help him realize his futuristic ideas/crazy schemes. I got drawn on a Funkadelic LP cover for my troubles. But his weird, warm friendship was the real value. Today is crazy but I’ll go into archives tmrw to share stuff.

Based on this, I don’t know if he really uploaded much, since he tweets personal stuff almost every day, and his account, I think by default, is set to limit how far back someone can go, so I can only text search, and thus I don’t know what stuff he shared from his “archives”. He may have posted some picture-only stuff.

And (2), as I just posted in the C Conspiracy topic, the editor does have a tweet of a print test of the comic that was probably made for those unreleased Parliament/Funkadelic 1999/2000 albums, since it has the Mammoth Records logo in the white space at the bottom. This makes me think they may also have a color version of Pedro’s By Way Of The Drum.

@ChrisB

In the inside of the How Late… album, in the four Pedro Bell panel comic that came with the album, one sub-panel is labeled “Conspiracy C-2000”, and the rest labeled with slight variations: “P-2000”, “Z-2000”, “T-2000”. (See a low quality image on Discogs.)

On Twitter, Jake Austen (editor of Roctober magazine, among other things), posted a print test of one of the sub-panels, the one labeled “C-2000”. In the bottom margin there is the Mammoth Records label logo and their address information. This seems to confirm that the comics were intended for The Last Time Zone.

As I briefly mentioned in the OP, I’ve tried to contact Roctober. First with an email through their website, and later through Twitter (the editor’s Twitter is linked on the Roctober website). No response. Maybe they are offended by me asking to see it, or can’t legally share it? Regardless the reason, I decided to post this as I didn’t want to sit on this for too long. More people on the search, the better.

///

BTW, as a general announcement, I’ll say it explicitly just in case this could cause a problem: Don’t harass the Roctober editor or anyone else involved with the zine! I’m sure they don’t want people constantly bothering them for stuff related to their friend who’s passed on, especially if they don’t want to share it.