I won’t say a lot about Alison’s book right now, since I know how much her legion of fans will enjoy torturing themselves with curiosity between now and the book’s arrival in bookstores this summer. I will promise you, though, that you’ve got an interesting, touching reading experience ahead during which you’ll get fascinating glimpses of Alison’s personal history that will broaden even further the appreciation for her gifts and insights on life that you’ve already gleaned from DTWOF.

One thing that won’t surprise you, of course, is that it’s a damned good book.

So as long as I’m doing a new drawing anyway, I thought I would document the successive stages involved for the benefit of those folks who are always asking me how computers have come to affect my way of drawing.

No, I don’t use a Wacom tablet and stylus yet, although I have to say that many of my cartoonist friends are getting really impressive results by going entirely "paperless" and drawing directly into their computers. As you can see from what follows, my own drawing goes back and forth, into and out of my PowerMac G4 at least twice before it’s cooked.

B
Outside the Mac: I place a sheet of vellum over my pencils and do slightly tightened ink sketches. (Notice how I’m not yet worrying about how the elements will be grouped. That comes next.)

C
Inside the Mac: I’ve scanned my ink sketches. In Adobe Photoshop I separate each figure onto its own layer so that I can use the move tool to play with ways to assemble them into a satisfying composition. Sometimes I will reduce or enlarge a figure slightly. When I’m finished I print the result onto a new piece of paper.

D
Outside the Mac: I tape the printout onto the back of a sheet of Strathmore Bristol board and place them both over a light table. 2-ply Bristol is translucent enough to see through when light is behind it. I then trace my sketch onto the Strathmore in pencil and ink it. I don’t yet bother filling in black areas or fixing the small flaws that in my pre-digital days would have called for white-out or pasted-on patches, because these final corrections are much more easily made, once I erase my pencil lines, if I scan my newly inked "finish" so that the drawing is back…

E
Inside the Mac, where Photoshop’s tools make it a breeze to bring my drawing to completion.

If anybody has questions or remarks about this process (which is not necessarily the best one, just the one I happen to have arrived at from my experimentation), toss ‘em my way. As anyone knows who has spent time at my web site’s Cartoonists Corner, I have pedagogical tendencies that are way out of control!

As you already know if you read my March 7 blog entry, I was just beginning to roll out my mammoth promotional campaign for my illustrated reading of The Swimmer With a Rope In His Teeth, heretofore earmarked for a debut on March 18 at the Topia Arts Center in Adams.

It’s not going to happen for a while, however, due to the mysterious disappearance of the cafe’s projection equipment, which came to light within the last 24 hours.

Now "heist" may be an overly dramatic term to apply. Caryn and Nana have done a lot of packing and unpacking in the course of relocating from New York setting up and renovating their Park Street performing center in Adams these last two years. If that process was anything like Eddie’s and my far less demanding three-block move from Union Street into our present home, I can sympathize with the difficulty of keeping track of everything. In other words, the projector may simply be lurking in an unpacked crate or corner somewhere.

Or it may have been "pinched." I like the frisson of declaring this to be a good, healthy, non-violent heist, whether it really is or not. I’m allowed to relish the film noirishness of the disappearance, it not being my projector that’s being a no-show. I don’t get to be a part of that many crime dramas and they are all the rage on TV. (I almost picked up the phone to summon Jessica Fletcher, but then I remembered that Angela Lansbury only does murders. The show ain’t named Burglary, She Wrote!)

And murder, this isn’t. No lives have been lost at the Topia Cafe, only a preliminary timetable for the unveiling of my Swimmer slideshow.

My show will keep. It’s been in the works for a while and this was an under-the-radar tryout rather than a Broadway premier. I’ll let you know when this project resurfaces.

Nina stopped being unknown to me when I met her at the 1989 edition of Comic-Con International in San Diego. I quickly learned that she is among the funniest cartoonists around, male or female. Just root around in some out-of-print bookstore bins until you find Nina’s Adventures, the Pentshack Press collection of the comic strips she was knocking out back when she was content to let her drawings sit in unmoving, hilarious grandeur on pieces of paper.You’ll be rewarded for your industry. (There are some online samples of Nina’s old strip here.)

Nina switched her sights to animation a few years ago and has already created some short-form Flash masterworks. Now I’m on the edge of my seat waiting to see Sita Sings The Blues, the full-length labor of love she is slowly creating bit by bit in her Brooklyn apartment.

It’s still years from completion I know, but the teaser clips viewable on her web site give a glimpse of the magic to come.

Now I see that she’s auditioning voice actors for Sita. That makes the project seem yet one more step closer to reality. She needs investors to help her move forward on the movie, though, so if you’re rich, run put some of your smart money on Paley. (And if you’ve got any left over, I could use a few grand myself.)

And speaking of my own petty needs, I know that some cynics among you may suspect that I’m raving about Nina today only because she wrote glowingly about Stuck Rubber Baby in the Nina’s December 29 entry of her blog. Hey, Nina’s and my mutual admiration society goes way back and transcends the blogophere by light years. Besides, I can’t help it if we both have discerning taste!

Thanks to a gracious invitation by Caryn Heilman and Nana Simopoulos, proprietors of a hot new performing venue in nearby Adams called the Topia Arts Center, I’ll be debuting a new live adaptation of Jeanne E. Shaffer’s and my recently published fable The Swimmer With a Rope In His Teeth.

Specifically, I’ll be reading the entire book (it’s only 70 pages long and none of those pages have very many words on them thanks to my large illustrations) accompanied by a running slideshow of the book’s pictures.

It’s an experiment. We shall see how it goes. If anyody reading this lives around here, feel free to drop by: it’ll be happening at 8:30 PM on Saturday, March 18, at the Topia Cafe (27 Park Street on Route 8 in Adams).

There’11 be no admission charge, by the way. We’ll "pass the hat" but I’ll cover my eyes so I won’t know whether you put anything into it! Copies of the book will be there for sale, too, and Papyri Books in North Adams is also stocking it.

He is a man of astonishing shallowness who has banished nuance from all public discussions within his control and who is incapable of admitting any error of consequence.

He is in the thrall of a coterie of power-hungry liars whose instinct if not conscious goal is apparently to establish a de facto dictatorship in America while preaching about democracy elsewhere. They are serenely content to spill the blood of innocents around the world while throwing gasoline on the fires of dangerous hatreds.

Our President has, in the process of establishing his "my way or the highway" foreign policy, run roughshod over hard-won treaties forged by statesman with a greater degree of wisdom in their toenails that he is capable of imagining in his most vaulting moments.

Meanwhile, he is in the process of obliterating every humane and forward-looking program here at home and is shameless in his dedication to the unquenchable greed of his friends in the corporate ruling class.

He claims to worship God but kneels more convincingly before an unthinking ideology of tax-cutting that invites all of us to throw future solvency overboard so that his rich friends won’t be asked to sacrifice any of their perks.

He and his Republican predecessors have packed the Supreme Court with judges who show little indication to protect the public from Executive Branch excesses, and both remaining branches of government are controlled by either wealth-obsessed amoralists or ineffective wusses who long ago lost whatever skills one would wish them to have that might enable them to rise to the occasion and effectively fight back.

The President has three more years in office. The voting machines destined to inform us whether we are pleased with the present crop of rulers are trusted by no one who has been paying attention.

God knows what ways the "opposition party" will find to make itself useless in dislodging the current ruling party from its position of reckless control, but it has proven itself to be endlessly inventive in accomplishing that task in the past.

Not to sound bleak or anything, but a fellow can’t help wondering exactly what the American citizenry is supposed to do about this situation.

As inevitably happens when I get interviewed, of course, I threw out at least one undercooked remark that calls for subsequent modification. When Susan asked me how the "North Adams Experience" compares to the "New York Experience," I joked and am correctly quoted as having joked, "The New York experience is one of not getting stuff into a gallery, for one thing!"

It was all work I am proud to have done and proud to share with others because of my core belief that nothing good comes from puritan efforts to separate out the erotic parts of our lives and imaginations from the rest of our human comedy and declare those parts unfit to be portrayed in art. It’s also a branch of my work that goes unrepresented in my current show on North Adams’s Main Street, there being nothing to suggest that the average citizen of North Adams is of the same mind as me about sexual explicitness in cartoons.

I can identify. I felt the same way before my mind was expanded by underground comic books.

Leslie-Lohman, on the other hand, is not interested in displaying my cartoon depictions of anthropomorphized vegetables or silly comic strips about ghosts or my recent experiments with cartoon surrealism. I’m proud of those drawings, too, but they’re not what Leslie-Lohman’s gallery exists for.

So I’m still waiting for the social walls to erode that separate my erotic imagination from my non-erotic imagination. That will only happen when America loses its irrational terror of sex — sex as it’s experienced by everyday people, straight and gay: funny, clumsy, undignified sex between people grappling awkwardly for honest human contact and sensuality. Not the phony, sleazy, heavy-breathing sideshow-mirror distortions of sex that pass for erotic sophistication in today’s mass media.

Someday maybe we’ll allow all of human experience to be rolled together into one big ball of good-humored affirmation. Until then, be grateful that galleries like Leslie-Lohman exist to nurture explorations of humanity’s forbidden naughty bits. "Depravity" is often in the eye of the beholder.