Born on Bags: Care and Feeding of an Alter Ego

Howard Saunders was born in 1940 in New York City. In 1953, his traveling salesman father moved the family to Atlanta. He entered the University of Georgia in 1957, dropping out in 1961 to join the Navy. His active duty ended as the Vietnam War was just the beginning. He waited for the callback that never came. After a briefstint in advertising, he joined the counter culture and gave higher education another shot with assistance from the G.I. Bill. Cornered amongst the emerging conceptualists, he fell under the sway of Manny Farber; cranky painter/film critic. He learned a lot about film, a little about painting and only enough about conceptual art to appreciate a good joke when he heard one. So much for Higher Education.

He headed to San Francisco in 1973 where he became a co-founder of the Public Media Center. He envisioned himself as a propagandist within the environmental movement using his skills as a designer and a cartoonist. In 1977, he headed to New York City where he spent 30 years at a think tank in the service of the working classes. In 2007, the gig was up and he moved to Hudson, New York.

In December 2007, he attended the opening exhibition of the New Museum, Unmonumental, on the Bowery. He returned to Hudson and began his very first foray into the world of more personal, somewhat higher art, producing an installation on the Warren Street, hudson's main thoroughfare. He called in URmonumental and it hit the street on July 26, 2008. Documentation in the form of a 44 page full color booklet is housed in the Bard Hessel-CCS archives.

On the Memorial Day weekend of 2009, Saunders began formulating a new identity, an alter ego that would become AxeMan (born on brown paper bags). AxeMan Who Will be 70 in the Year 2010 was published with a grant from Kickstarter in 2010 and was runner-up as best Kickstarter comic of 2011. His work is not merely finished.

He is currently hard at work on the sequel to AxeMan: The Care and Feeding of an Alter Ego.