The Lost Dwarf Strips
I was trying to do an article for Vice earlier this year about outsider cartoonists. Tiboni was one of the names I got off a friend who has Asperger's for the lost internet, archive.org. I was able to read some of the strips and, compared to his written output, they seemed almost sane, as if he was trying to go mainstream with his crudely-drawn Microsoft Paint bitmaps. I called his agent and eventually (quite a lacuna, actually) was able to arrange a meeting with Tiboni at his apartment in a notoriously shitty part of town.
The next part of the story, I kind of blame on my flakiness and general idiocy. It was really late and raining on the prescribed day, and I don't know Homewood too well, and ended up getting lost after the street ended before the house number I was given. After some locals started taking interest in me and following on foot, I decided to regroup and call Tiboni, who did not answer his phone. Neither did Kent McCall, his agent.
It took another two weeks to get through to McCall. He admitted that he had not known Tiboni to be in residence in Pittsburgh for some time, though he occasionally used the home when he was in town. He was cagey and evasive when I asked about Tiboni's whereabouts.
Through some research and leaps in logic, I was able to find the residence in question, a grand-looking orange house long condemned. We were able to get in through a second-story window. The place was in bad shape, but an upstairs storage room had some salvageable items. Of particular note was a 166 mhz Gateway 2000. Jeremy and I went to work on it, and though the hard drive had been through a lot, we were able to recover some items. Among these were the lost strips.