In the Extremely Cool department:

My work is part of the new Monsters of Webcomics exhibit at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco!  I sent in a series of images that takes this page of Family Man from dissociated layout doodles all the way to the final version, including the original, hand-drawn inked page. This happened to be the page I was working on at submission time for the show, so it’s really representative of my typical work-through, rather than the extra measures I go through for a more glamorous page.

I’ve never displayed my “process” anywhere before, so it’s a reasonably neat glimpse into my diseased mind.  The other artists in the show are all irredeemably fabulous:  Jesse Reklaw, Kate Beaton, the Foglios, Dorothy Gambrell, Nick Gurewitch, my dear friend and housemate Jenn Manley Lee, Chris Onstad, and Spike are all in the lineup.

It opened this past week and will be up through December 6th – in conjunction with, oh my childhood heart, their major exhibit on the art of the Disney film Sleeping Beauty, a piece of magnificent artistry that’s always blown Tiny Dylan away. Having work displayed within a five mile radius of that work is exciting enough to forestall several of my major bodily functions, so being just a few walls over is kind of nuts.

My thanks to Andrew Farago and the good people at CAM for inviting me in on the show!

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Meanwhile I’m gearing up for a week’s visit to London, which means that in order to avoid thinking about how much I hate transatlantic flights, I’m mucking around in my brain over the difference between what I’m calling Mythology of Place versus Mythology of Character in modern narrative forms.  To that end, riddle me this, dear readers:

What’s your favorite epic locale/setting/set piece from…

A movie? (example:  Cloud City in Star Wars)

From a comic? (example:  Atheia in Bone)

From a prose novel never adapted into film? (example: the attic room of carvings in the Gormenghast novels)

From a prose novel that has been adapted into film – but NOT the film’s take on that setting? (example: the Weasley residence in the Harry Potter books)

From the film version of a prose novel?  (example:  Rivendell in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings)

From a game?  (example:  the temple in Shadow of the Colossus)

And…why?