WARNING: NOT SAFE FOR WORK. Unless you live in one of those European countries where you regularly see ads on the sides of pharmacies that are more explicit than this.
No page next week because I will be at the Small Press Expo this weekend! I’ll be hunkering down at the table of Carol “Klio” Burrell of SPQR Blues excellence. Look for her in the program and come sample our exciting historical fiction wares.
Among the wares I’ll be selling is this new 7×10 print, which you can click to see at full size:
Other than the page prints, this is the first bit of genuine Family Man merchandise I’ve created. I hope to have more such things this year while (my agent and) I determine how I’ll be making Volume One, aka Chapters 1 & 2, available in print.
I’ll see some of you in Maryland! And the rest of you, in the virtual funny papers.
And there we are! Yes, this shan’t be the last we see of subjectivity reality in this comic; it shan’t be the last, at all. Scads of it, coming right up.
I also learned a lot about bats over the course of making this page. A lot. About. Bats. I also made a lot of completely unnecessary investigations into the nocturnal mammalia of Western Europe circa 1768; you’d be surprised at what wasn’t lurking in the shadows back then.
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I’ll be in London this coming week for absolutely no good reason, other than my delightful grandmother providing free housing and the ladyfriend being able to come along and it being London and me still being able to take on decent-paying corporate freelance work and realizing that these elements are unlikely to continue to converge indefinitely.
The airfare was a lump to swallow, so I’ll mostly be making it through on cheap pasta at the flat and cups of hot water begged off of Caffe Nero employees, but it should be a memorable time for three ladies. And I’ll get to ogle some of the things I had to skip out on last year due to there being, you know, a lot of London. (Sir John Soame’s Museum, I am looking at you)
Expect to hear little of me between the 14th and the 23rd! Unless you are in London, in which case, you will probably be inundated with rumors and visions.
Now where the hell did I stick that damn Oyster card.
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?
I am home! For a day or two, before lectures and weddings and things set me to scurrying out of town once more. Folks, in July, I am pretty sure that I’m just going to chain myself to the front porch and resist all attempts to dislodge me until the month is out.
While in Manhattan, apart from selling comic books, I got to:
– shake Allison Janney’s hand backstage after a performance of 9 to 5
– check out the view from Lerner Books’ offices on the 72nd floor of the Empire State building
– see Angela Lansbury perform two days before winning a Tony for the part from seats so close that I could see up her nose
– eat some seriously dangerous pine-nut almond sugar cookies from an Italian bakery on Bleecker
– pray for death in Times Square (as all sane people should)
– take a survey of all of the red-figure Attic vase paintings depicting chickens in the collection at the Met
– see the awesome Donnetta Lavinia Grays bellow every obscene word imaginable at a reading at the Public
– stalk the turtles in Central Park
– mock Teddy Roosevelt’s unbearably butch statue, and a few other billion things.
Nonetheless, I am happy to be home. New York is a helluva thing, but it has the effect of making me appreciate the silly provincial charms and humane calm of Portland and the Northwest. (Although I really do wish there were a better selection of 5th century BCE chicken paintings at the museum here.)
It was a great pleasure seeing so many people at MoCCA! Thank you to everybody who came and said hello, bought a book, or just gossiped with me. After four years of studiously keeping to the left half of the country it was delightful to see both old friends and new faces. I’ll be visiting much more frequently in the future, so you’ll all have a chance to get bored of me before the decade is out.
And now I’m going to sleep off a bit of the jetlag before finishing the most recent page of Family Man writing a detailed outline for a book proposal sending out more book orders mocking up an illustration laying out three small press publishing projects inking three Oscar & Annie strips ordering more stickers ordering a new round of Bite Me redoing the Family Man webpage…ET CETERA!
In about twelve hours and change, the fabulous Katie Lane and I will be getting up to hop a plane (or planes, rather) to New York.
We’ll be there close to a week, ostensibly for the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA) festival on the 6th and 7th, but also to eat lots of food, see plays on the cheap, poke around museums, and just generally make nuisances of ourselves.
During the festival, I’ll be at table 517 with Klio from SPQR Blues! I’ll have books and minicomics and a few other things for giveaway – please stop by and say hello! I am very friendly and I will write silly things inside your book.
Speaking of books, I’ve sent out almost all Bite Me! orders at this point – less than a dozen orders have been delayed due to reprinting of some sold out art, shirts, and a slight shortage of spoons (who’d have thought). But odds are that if you paid online, your package is on the way as of this evening. Hurray! It feels good to be mostly caught up. International orders have all gone out as well,with only a few exceptions like the above.
It does make me feel ridiculous charging folks the $15 US it can cost to send a book overseas, but it’s also no fun to eat the mailing expense – if somebody in the UK knows of a decent small press distributor who’d be up for taking on my UK, Commonwealth, and European orders, I’d be interested in connecting. It would be a pretty light task all things considered.
And now: packing! See you all in New York, and I’ll see the rest of you online when I get home. It’s gonna be one crazy little summer, and I look forward to it.
(There might be a half page of Family Man tonight. To settle my nerves, if nothing else.)