Archive for the ‘A Tip o' the Hat’ Category
Saturday, August 7th, 2010
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Above top: Saturday night’s Gays in Comics panel featured both LGBT comics creators and nongay creators whose comics work includes LGBT characters. On the panel from left to right are yours truly, Tim Fish, Dan Parent, Charles "Zan" Christensen, Geoff Johns, Marjorie M. Liu, Daniel Way, and Jim McCann.
Above inset: Andy Mangels (organizer and moderator of the Gays in Comics panel), Roger Klorese and me seen posing during one of my signings at my home away from home on the Comic-Con floor, the Prism Comics booth.
I got home from Comic-Con International in San Diego a week and a half ago. How was it? The short answer is: I had loads of fun.
Want more details? Sigh. Maybe later. This week I’ve been swamped. But I can at least decorate today’s blog these snapshots taken during the five-day extravaganza by Prism Comics Event Chair Ted Abenheim.
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Above: Ted (in the orange tee-shirt) handed off his camera to someone else briefly so that he could be in at least one shot himself. Tireless Ted took way more photos than I have room to show here; if you want to see a few hundred more of his Comic-Con images, check out these Flickr pages.
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Above: Me enjoying one of the numerous interesting conversations I got to have with readers of my stuff.
Some of you are doubtlessly wondering how Eddie is doing now that his Great Kidney Adventure is several weeks behind us. Well, he is now on his feet again and as of today has even had his ban on driving officially lifted. Hooray!
Eddie still has sporadic stabs of abdominal pain to deal with, especially when he bends or twists in inadvisable ways, and his energy level has yet to fully rebound. But on the whole my hubby seems to be progressing as well as anyone who has had a surgeon slicing him open and jerking his vital organs out of their normal locations recently has a right to expect.
And at least he can get out of the house on his own like a grown-up again.
Mark Martin is a super-talented Berkshire County cartoonist whose work I had already begun admiring decades before I learned that he and I are fellow Birminghamians who at this point in our lives live not that far from each other. (See the blog entry I posted three years ago about my first face-to-face encounter with Mark.)
If you live in or near Pittsfield you’ll be interested to know that Mark’s cartoons are currently being featured in an exhibit called Comic and Cartoon Art Comes Alive: The Art of Mark Martin, which is now on view at the Storefront Artists Project (124 Fenn Street) in Pittsfield. If you’re like me and find it gratifying to spend time with an artist who really knows how to go crazy on paper, you should be sure and check out this show before it closes on August 29.
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Above: Mark gets zany for Facebook.
At the opening reception of Mark’s exhibit show, as it happens, I found myself unexpectedly invited to participate in an on-location live streamcast of Geeks With Issues that had set itself up in the Storefront Artists window. A lively discussion ensued, largely about southern accents and automotive mishaps rather than cartooning.
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Above: The handsomely designed new collection of Denis Kitchen cartoons and the cartoonist himself..
As an old underground comix creator who got his first big break thanks to a publisher named Denis Kitchen, I find The Oddly Compelling Art of Denis Kitchen exhilarating. I’ve long known that Denis was a terrific cartoonist whose talents were being overshadowed through most of his adult life by his acumen and taste as a publisher—not only of the underground comix that put him and his company, Kitchen Sink Press, on the national map, but also of beautifully packaged compilations that showcased classic mainstream cartoonists like Al Capp, Ernie Bushmiller, Milton Caniff, and others. And his role in introducing new generations to phenomenal creators like Will Eisner and Harvey Kurtzman is legendary.
For all that, this book is a reminder that the guy can draw really, really funny pictures. Thank you, Dark Horse Books, for pulling together Denis’s obscure but fascinating paper trail of cartoons into such an enjoyable coffee table art book. It makes me want to be a cartoonist again!
Adding to the fun is Charles Brownstein’s interesting essay about Denis’s life and career, which filled in many gaps in my understanding of the man’s remarkable professional arc. Besides telling me lots of new stuff about Denis himself, Brownstein’s profile amounts to a rich nostalgia trip for me personally, a reminder of all the youthful excitement I felt when my characters first began gaining national visibility in the comix that Denis put out.
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Above: Blake Bell peppering me with questions during my "Spotlight on Howard Cruse" event.
Back in 2002 Blake Bell authored a book of comics-related conversations called "I Have to Live With This Guy!" The unusual thing about Blake’s book was that this time it wasn’t us cartoonists being interviewed; it was our spouses. And Eddie was the star of Chapter Ten.
A number of phone conversations between Eddie and the author went into the composition of that interview, and I even spoke to Blake a few times myself. But I never met the man face-to-face until two-weeks ago, when he served as the interviewer for my "Spotlight on Howard Cruse" program at Comic-Con.
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Above: Blake Bell peppering me with questions in San Diego.
It was great getting attention lavished on me in front of an audience by an interviewer who was as knowledgeable about my work as Blake is. But I was also aware that Blake’s main mission in San Diego this year was promoting his newest book, a biography of comics great Bill Everett.
I don’t have a cover shot of Fire and Water: Bill Everett, The Sub-Mariner, and the Birth of Marvel Comics handy, unfortunately, but you’ll find a great picture of it here. As you can see, it’s due for release soon.
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Click a cover below to learn about my latest books.
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A Note to Those Who Enjoy This Blog: Given how irregularly I manage to add entries, you may wish to send me email asking to subscribe to my "Blog Alert" list. That way you’ll be among the first to get notified by email whenever I add a new blog post.
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Posted in A Tip o' the Hat, Books in my Bookcase, Family & Friends, Home Life, Life & Art, Me, Me, Me! | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, May 5th, 2010
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Let’s start off with package design!
Why today? I’ll get to that.
My high school alma mater, Indian Springs School, strove from its founding in 1952 to have a truly exceptional extracurricular music program. The centerpiece of that program, the Indian Springs Glee Club, began seriously gaining steam with the 1955 arrival on campus of Dr. Lara Hoggard.
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Above: A youthful Lara Hoggard shows Waring’s Pennsylvanians how it’s done. (Photo provided by Eileen Akin, curator of Penn State University’s Fred Waring’s America archive.)
Dr. Hoggard came to Indian Springs with extraordinary choral credentials. Despite the high professional standing he already enjoyed as the associate director for Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians, he allowed himself to be persuaded by Dr. Louis E. Armstrong — the visionary founding director of ISS and a longtime friend from Oklahoma — to set showbiz glitter aside in favor of providing new artistic horizons to a bunch of boys (Indian Springs didn’t "go co-ed" until the 1970s) at a still-wet-behind-the-ears experimental boarding school lodged way off in the country south of Birmingham, Alabama.
Dr. Hoggard was handsome, demanding, and had charisma running out of his ears. He relished the challenge of showing the largely untrained high schoolers now under his sway what making high quality, technically rigorous music was all about. Under Hoggard’s leadership, the ISS Glee Club swiftly gained a national reputation for excellence. When the Glee Club went on tour, audiences were invariably wowed at what everyday boys could accomplish with someone like Lara Hoggard at the helm.
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Above: I never got to sing in Dr. Hoggard’s Glee Club myself, but when the aging vinyl recordings from that era were finally transferred to CDs in 2005, I had a chance to provide the package design.
When Dr. Hoggard left the school his position as Glee Club director was filled by Hugh Thomas. Thomas was the director of the Conservatory of Music at Birmingham-Southern College at that time; he later became chair of the college’s Music Department.
The personalities of Hugh Thomas and Lara Hoggard couldn’t have been more different. Hoggard was tall and effortlessly attention-getting whereas Thomas, when not conducting, was so uninterested in courting spotlights that it’s been like pulling teeth to dig up archival photographs of him for the design project I’m about to describe. In both cases, however, a dedication to excellence in music was accompanied by a fervent desire to enrich the Glee Clubbers’ musical knowledge and bring out the best in the youngsters they were conducting.
Why is all of this on my mind today? Because I’ve just finished designing the packaging for a second Indian Springs Glee Club double-disc CD, this time covering the Hugh Thomas years. (The discs and package are presently being assembled by A to Z Media in New York and should be available from the school soon.)
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I probably wouldn’t have considered attending a college in the same city that my mom and dad lived in (one craves a little space between one’s parents and oneself at age seventeen, generally) if it hadn’t been for the presence on BSC’s faculty of Arnold Powell, about whom I’ve blogged before, and Hugh Thomas. |
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The Hugh Thomas I first met wasn’t yet the Glee Club’s director; he was my roommate’s dad. I was among the many Indian Springs students who boarded on campus full time, you see, so a fringe benefit of sharing a dorm room during my sophomore year with a classmate named Madoc Thomas was having Madoc’s very interesting father show up for visits every now and then.
What made the man especially interesting? He was in the process of composing the score for a musical comedy.
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I had become enraptured with the musical comedy form a year earlier when a bunch of us ISS students were bussed into Birmingham to see a touring company perform the 1959 hit Broadway musical Li’l Abner. And what could have been a more perfect introduction to professional theatre for a fourteen-year-old aspiring cartoonist than a musical version of a famous newspaper comic strip?
I was dazzled. From then on my cartooning inclinations had to share mental space with dreams of writing a musical myself.
Of course, since I have zero musical talent, composing a score myself was clearly not in the cards, but that didn’t stop me from setting to work writing the book and lyrics for an imaginary show on the assumption that, one way or another, I would eventually find someone to write the music.
Chalk such notions up to youthful fantasy. But given this backstory you can imagine how exciting it was, once my sophomore year rolled around, to find myself rooming with someone whose father was a real, flesh-and-blood composer of a musical that was destined in the near future to get a full production at some small Methodist college in the western hills of Birmingham called Birmingham-Southern.
The show in question turned out to be a hilarious spoof of Alcestis, a tragedy written in 438 B.C.E. by Euripides. The musical incarnation of the Greek classic was called Caught Dead, and upon seeing it I immediately became an avid fan not only of my roommate’s dad but of the writer of the show’s book and lyrics (and its director), the aforementioned Arnold Powell, who within a few years was to become my teacher, mentor, creative role model, and (continuing long after my graduation from BSC) friend.
Meanwhile, watching Hugh Thomas take the reins of the Indian Springs Glee Club at the beginning of my senior year cemented the admiration I had already acquired for the composing half of the Thomas-Powell team.
Below: A promo shot of Arnold Powell and Hugh Thomas with programs for their two musical collaborations, Caught Dead and Peer? (The question mark is part of the second show’s title.)
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It’s true that I ultimately opted for cartooning over theatre as a career choice, but that doesn’t mean that having access to talents like Lara Hoggard, Hugh Thomas, and Arnold Powell when I was young didn’t permanently alter the course of my creative life.
1 Watching each of these two men at work, each working in his own style, made it clear to this Alabama kid that the quest for excellence, however elusive it may be, was what being a serious artist was all about.
2 Spending time chatting informally with Hoggard and Thomas during campus meals, an outside-of-class student-teacher interaction that Indian Springs expressly promotes, gave me an early look at what thoughtful, urbane, and creative adulthood might look like.
3 Interacting with both Thomas and Powell once I became a student at Birmingham-Southern — I even got to help paint sets, design the program, and act in the Caught Dead creators’ second BSC collaboration Peer? How great is that?! — helped dispel any lingering notions that success in art is based on popularity or fame instead of the excitement that comes with using art as a tool to explore substantive truths about life.
And speaking of substantive truths about life…
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The low-rent animated "music video" I created seven years ago of Mike Lantrip’s and my satirical song "Purchaser’s Clearing House" has been situated cheerily on my web site for quite a while already. But since Apple’s iPhones, iPods, and iPads lack the otherwise ubiquitous Flash Player for viewing web sites like mine, I’ve decided to also post it on YouTube.
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Posted in A Tip o' the Hat, Family & Friends, Life & Art, Me, Me, Me!, Yesterday & Today | 2 Comments »
Thursday, April 1st, 2010
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If you go to the web site for this year’s Comic-Con International in San Diego and scroll through the list of Special Guests who are slated to attend, you’ll find me among them.
What this means is that Eddie and I will get flown to San Diego on the convention organizers’ dime and provided with lodging during the famous event’s four days of fun and craziness. During that stretch of time I’ll be holding forth at some panels and programs as well as signing copies of the newly re-packaged hardcover edition of Stuck Rubber Baby (which should be out by then from Vertigo) as well as copies of my new collection From Headrack to Claude, which you should be able to peruse or purchase at the Prism Comics booth if I work things right.
And speaking of Prism: many thanks, Prism folks, for putting a bug in the guest coordinators’ ears about bringing me to California this year. It’s an exciting prospect as well as a daunting one. The last time I was in San Diego was at the 1996 incarnation of the Con fourteen years ago. It was a madhouse then and I’m told it’s grown much larger since. Yikes!
But if any of you hardy readers of this blog are planning on braving the crowds at this year’s Comic-Con yourselves, do keep an eye out for me and say hello if fate causes our paths to cross amid the surging throngs—or more realistically, if you’re able to buttonhole me during a book-signing or at one of the events I’ll be scheduled to participate in.
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Some New York City friends of ours engineered a clever apartment swap with Parisians who want to spend a year in the Big Apple, so as long as they’ve got sleeping space available for a guest, they’ve offered us free lodging for a few days if we can make the trip.
I can’t go myself because I’ve got stuff to do here in North Adams, but Eddie is already packing his bags and will be on a plane from Boston come Saturday.
Assuming that his aircraft doesn’t cross paths with any airborne lava from that volcano that’s currently erupting in Iceland, where he’ll be stopping over before embarking on the last leg of his journey to France, he’ll soon be taking in the sights on the Champs-Élysées and wearing a beret in the shower. Will I still know him when he returns, or will it me some "Europeanized" stranger I’ll be encountering making eggs for me every morning?
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Above: One of the runways Eddie’s plane will hopefully avoid at Reykjavík Airport.
(Just kidding. Kudos to photographer Michael Ryan and the U. S. Geological Survey for this cool photo of an Icelandic volcano in action.)
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Remember my novelist friend Stephen Solomita? He’s at it again!
Mercy Killing was last week’s recreational reading indulgence for me. As usual Steve’s twists and turns kept me guessing and his ending blindsided me most wickedly. Along the way, I should add (and there’s no spoiler involved here), I learned more about arsenic than I ever expected to know.
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In solidarity with other North County good-film-lovers, Eddie and I recently posed for the photo you see above, which was taken by Jeanne Marklin (and slightly augmented by an impertinent local cartoonist who shall go unnamed).
The picture was taken in support of the current fundraising drive for Images Cinema, the only year-round, nonprofit, independent film house in the Berkshires. It’s located at 55 Spring Street in nearby Williamstown.
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Click a cover below to learn about my latest books.
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A Note to Those Who Enjoy This Blog: Given how irregularly I manage to add entries, you may wish to send me email asking to subscribe to my "Blog Alert" list. That way you’ll be among the first to get notified by email whenever I add a new blog post.
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Posted in A Tip o' the Hat, Books in my Bookcase, Family & Friends, Home Life, Life & Art, Me, Me, Me! | 4 Comments »
Friday, March 5th, 2010
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Yes, all of the months of blood, sweat, and tears that I’ve been devoting to nurturing my shaggy, shoulder-length tresses have now been wiped out in one fell swoop by the need to look clipped and clean for tonight’s opening performance of Main Street Stage’s Second Annual Short Play Festival.
Well, the good news is that my dear departed mom can now stop spinning in her grave for a while. The sweet lady thought in all innocence, I suspect, that she would be able to rest easy with regard to my wayward hair choices once she had successfully pulled out her big guns (maternal tears) back in 1968 to overrule my desire to be the first senior at Birmingham-Southern College to attend his graduation ceremony wearing a Beatles haircut. But alas, her years of torture were only beginning.
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Above and at right: Harold and Emma Tittleton ponder the inexplicable presence of a clown in their living room in Greg Freier’s play "We Appear to Have Company."
My cast-mates, captured in these evocative dress rehearsal photographs by Lisa Remillard, are Jackie DiGiorgis and Andrew Davis.
Ours is only one of five one-act plays that will be treading the boards this weekend and next at Main Street Stage’s intimate home base in North Adams. (Click here for more details.)
That’s March 5, 6, 12, and 13, to be precise. The shows start at 8 PM. Do drop by if you’re in the area.
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That University of Massachusetts panel about comics that I’ve been telling you about unfolded enjoyably on March 2 as scheduled, I’m happy to report.
In my last blog entry I mistakenly predicted that N. C. Christopher Couch (the tiny figure at the podium in the photograph below) would be serving as the panel’s moderator, but after Chris introduced the panelists that role was actually played by James Hicks (the tiny figure on the right below), who in addition to fulfilling his professorial duties in the schools Comparative Literature Department serves as an editor of The Massachusetts Review, the UMass-based literary quarterly.
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Besides having fun hanging out during the panel and afterwards with Gary Hallgren (the tiny figure in the middle above), who is a friend and colleague from way back, I had the pleasure of finally meeting and quickly becoming buddies with our co-panelist Sophia Wiedeman, writer and illustrator of The Deformitory. (Sophia is the tiny figure sitting between Gary and James above.) Sophia’s creativity has been appropriately recognized and rewarded by the Xeric Foundation, which provided funding for the dreamlike Deformitory, from which the panels below are excerpted. Sophia’s book is available in comics shops, sez Sophia. |
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For some reason squirrels seem to have played a disproportionate role in my creative life (see the numerous "Squirly & Earl" cartoon panels I threw at readers of this blog for a while).
Fortunately I like the little critters. So does Lulu the Dalmatian, although I get the feeling her motives are less humane than mine.
Anyway, note the newly imagined squirrel below, which found its way into the logo I designed this week for an upcoming ecology-themed Children’s Fair at the First Congregational Church in Williamstown.
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North Adams-based comics reviewer John Seven recently interviewed me about the upcoming re-issue of Stuck Rubber Baby (expected this June). The resulting Q&A was published this week in the online branch of Publishers Weekly.
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Posted in A Tip o' the Hat, Family & Friends, Home Life, Life & Art, Me, Me, Me!, Yesterday & Today | 5 Comments »
Sunday, February 21st, 2010
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At four in the afternoon on Tuesday, March 2, the campus of UMass in Amherst will be the site of a panel discussion about comics and graphic novels featuring two relics—I mean, veterans—of the underground comix movement of the 1970s, plus a member of today’s emerging generation of adventurous comics creators.
One of the aforementioned veterans will be Gary Hallgren of Air Pirates fame; the other one will be me. Sharing the stage with Gary and me will be Sophia Weideman, who will have to wait a few years before attaining the relic/veteran status that Gary and I enjoy but who appears to be making good use of her talents in the meantime.
Gary and I are longtime friends and I’m looking forward to meeting Sophia. Furthermore, if you’re near enough to Amherst to come and be part of our audience in Room 227 of Herter Hall, I’ll be looking forward to meeting you, too!
Moderating our panel, by the way, will be another old friend: N. C. Christopher Couch, co-author with Stephen Weiner of The Will Eisner Companion.
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Above: Gary Hallgren’s character Tom Turkey, as seen in the Marvel/underground hybrid Comix Book in the mid-seventies, is flanked by a photo of Gary taken at the 1976 Berkeley Con and a snapshot I took of him a year or so ago.
At left: A photo of yours truly, also taken at the same 1976 convention, garnished with one of my own drawings from that era.
Both 1976 photos were taken by Clay Geerdes, the legendary chronicler of and cheerleader for the underground comix movement.
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At right: I couldn’t find a current photo of our third panelist, Sophia Wiedeman, and I certainly couldn’t find one from 1976, since it’s highly unlikely that this 2008 graduate of the School of Visual Arts in New York had even commenced to exist by then.
I can, however, show you the cover of her new book The Deformitory, which she self-published with funding provided by the Xeric Foundation.
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Our UMass panel is named "Will Eisner’s Ideals," and as the title suggests we’ll be discussing how our own work has been affected by today’s expanding recognition of comics as a medium for serious artistic expression. Many cartoonists of my generation who cut our teeth in underground comix have been aware all along that, while a lot of pioneering went on in the pages of those undergrounds, a trailblazing comics creator named Will Eisner had already begun leading the way well before our own sex-drugs-and-rock-&-roll contributions made the scene.
Amazingly, Will Eisner continued to show what comics are capable of in the parade of acclaimed graphic novels he contined to draw tirelessly until his death in 2005 at the age of 87. In honor of his achievements a host of events will soon be taking place as part of a national celebration called Will Eisner Week. It’s cool that our March 2 panel will be among them.
Fast on the heels of my UMass panel will be the opening night (that’s March 6, for those of you who live near enough to North Adams to think about coming) of the 2nd Annual Short Play Festival at Main Street Stage (57 Main Street).
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Above: Me rehearsing on a cluttered stage with Jackie DiGeorgis. I’m sure you think we’ve got our scripts hidden behind those two books, but actually we’ve (almost) got our lines memorized.
Among the five new one-act plays that comprise the evening’s entertainment will be "We Appear To Have Company" by Greg Freier., in which I’ll be making my debut appearance for this community theatre. The other plays in the program are "Restraining Orders" by Ruben Carbajal; "Something Like Loneliness" by Ryan Dowler; "The Shoe" by Ralph Tropf; and "Drip Torch" by Trey Tatum.
Below left: My cast-mate Jackie mulls over costume options with "We Appear to Have Company" director Sarah Rae Brown.
Below right: Assistant director Melanie Staples-Barth grabs a quick snack in the aisle before our rehearsal commences. Our third cast member, Andrew Davis, was out of camera range while I was playing with my Canon PowerShot.
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Posted in A Tip o' the Hat, Life & Art, Me, Me, Me!, Yesterday & Today | 1 Comment »
Saturday, January 30th, 2010
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If you were paying attention to my blog a year ago you may remember that a young lady named Olivia Walker and I had all kinds of fun creating goofy images of ourselves using the special effects that come with Apple’s Photo Booth application. (If you’d like to refresh your memory, you can click here and scroll down the page a bit.)
So when I got in the mood to experiment with iMovie a couple of weeks ago and needed some visual raw material to work with (having no "real" video footage as a result of having no camcorder), I decided to whip together a visual soufflé made up of those magnificently distorted photos and a bit of video created by my iMac’s built-in camera, with some animated opening credits made with Adobe Flash.
It was a learning exercise and the result is rough-hewn, to say the least. But anyone who’s curious is welcome to have a look. (Yes, yes, I know that I’m no competition for James Cameron, but I’m sure you’ll bear in mind that I’m an iMovie newbie and be kind.)
Here are two things I learned from this exercise:
1 I should have made the end credits larger; these are pretty unreadable. Unfortunately, YouTube doesn’t make it easy to insert minor changes once a video is posted.
2 Olivia’s last name is just "Walker," not "Cole-Walker." (This from her parents, Bo and Lynn, who were otherwise cheerful about the indignities imposed on their daughter.) I don’t know how I got confused about that, but I intend to revise Olivia’s IMDB listing accordingly without delay.
And a final caveat: Credit Apple’s Photo Shoot application and built-in webcam for the images in this video. That Canon camera that Olivia and I are bandying about is nothing but a sneaky red herring.
Fooledja, didn’t we?
Today’s Extra Credit
A UAB (University of Alabama in Birmingham) art history student named Stephen Smith wrote me a month or so ago to let me know that Stuck Rubber Baby and I were going to figure prominently in a paper he was writing about graphic novels as fine art. He asked if I would confirm a few facts and provide a few observations on the subject.
Naturally I tried to be helpful. Getting an occasional (like, once every two decades) mention in, say, The New York Times is pleasant, but having my name bandied about in my youthful turf’s halls of ivy (or is that halls of kudzu?) is special.
How well I remember when I was the guy writing papers like the ones Stephen’s been laboring over! Lemme tell ya: being the guy getting written about is a lot less work.
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I should mention that an excerpt from Stephen’s interesting paper has gotten play in the January 2010 edition of the Birmingham Free Press I learned last week—and there’s even a link to the whole treatise.
Good going, Stephen…and thanks for paying attention to a hometown boy.
And Now For a Little
Something Different…
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Did I lie?
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Hey, here’s stuff of mine that you can buy!
Click a cover below to learn about my latest books.
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Tired of having to depend on RSS feeds to know when I’ve updated this blog? Just email me and say so to get added to the list of folks who get notified by me whenever I add a blog post—or you can forego my personal involvement by filling in the "Subscribe to Email Updates" field that’s provided by WordPress.
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Posted in A Tip o' the Hat, Family & Friends, Life & Art, Me, Me, Me!, Pure Toontime | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, January 19th, 2010
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Our pal Jim Groves of Savoy departed the planet last Saturday. He and his wife Cathy were among the first North County folks to reach out and befriend Eddie and me when we moved to North Adams in 2003 and the four of us have remained close ever since.
Here’s a link to the obituary for Jim that’s running today in the Eagle and Transcript.
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I’ve introduced you to Zina Saunders before in this blog. She’s a portrait artist extraordinaire who goes way beyond capturing the mere surface attributes of the people she paints, leaving you feeling that you’ve been taken on a journey into her subjects’ inner lives.
Compassion comes naturally to Zina, but she also knows how to insert a satirical needle when the inner lives in question belong to political figures whose hidden selves can’t necessarily bear up well under scrutiny. You’ll see what I mean if you check out the two book collections of her work shown above: Overlooked New York and The Party’s Over.
The reason I’m mentioning Zina today is that she has recently embarked on a new series of paintings that I’ll be taking special interest in as she develops it. Its title alone, Gay Couples: Love and Marriage, should immediately clue to in to why Eddie and I are personally grabbed by her plans.
As Zina explains in her introduction to the new series, "I was dismayed in December when the New York State Senate voted down the gay marriage bill, and I decided to interview and paint long-standing gay couples, both men and women, and ask them about their stories and their relationships and what marriage means to them." The first entry in Zina’s series (shown below) beautifully captures our friends Nancy Goldstein and Joan Hilty (and their dog Juno, who doesn’t seem to have a web page I can link to) while inviting them to reflect on their history as a couple.
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A second installment in the series has already been posted, and Zina’s many fans will be eagerly awaiting future ones.
A Couple of Thank-Yous
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| Meanwhile over at the web site for Mother Jones magazine on December 30, my book was included in the roster called MoJo’s Top Books of 2009. Many thanks for the cool new year’s gift, mom. |
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Click a cover below to learn about my latest books.
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Tired of having to depend on RSS feeds to know when I’ve updated this blog? Just email me and say so to get added to the list of folks who get notified by me whenever I add a blog post—or you can forego my personal involvement by filling in the "Subscribe to Email Updates" field that’s provided by WordPress.
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Posted in A Tip o' the Hat, Family & Friends, Life & Art | 1 Comment »
Thursday, December 17th, 2009
Tired of having to depend on RSS feeds to know when I’ve updated this blog? Just email me and say so to get added to the list of folks who get notified by me whenever I add a blog post—or you can forego my personal involvement by filling in the "Subscribe to Email Updates" field that’s provided by WordPress.
Hey, here’s Stuff of Mine
That You Can Buy!
Since he founded the blog in March of this year, Larry has been busily keeping us LGBT residents of the Bay State’s non-Boston end apprised of everything a culturally aware gay person in our area needs to know, reminding us along the way that, despite the lesser population density here in the Massachusetts mountains, our segment of the human community is holding its own as a vital part of the local mix.
Larry also writes regularly about the regional art scene for the Berkshire Fine Arts web site, by the way. Many thanks for spotlighting From Headrack to Claude, Larry.
Adapting Wendel For Slideshows
Way back in 1983 I began presenting slideshows featuring my comics and career history before interested audiences in various cities. This was way before advancing technology allowed me to transition from presentations using Kodak’s clunky old carousel slide projectors to the more versatile, digitally empowered Powerpoint software I use today. (I wrote at some length three years ago about my felicitous switch from Kodak to Powerpoint in a 4-part series of blog entries called "Moving On From Ker-Chunk".)
Things are different in the digital era. Transitions between images can be seamlessly fluid and it costs nothing to prepare almost-but-not-quite-identical images using Adobe Photoshop. The practical effect of this is that balloons only appear when I’m damned well ready for them to appear, as simulated in the Flash animation below. (If you can’t view the image below, by the way, it means you need to download the newest version of Flash Player from Adobe.com. Don’t worry; it’s a free download.)
Above: Presenting my slideshow for a London audience in 1990.
I’m mentioning my slideshow sideline here in an effort to tell you a little bit about what’s occupying my time these days. Other, perhaps more interesting projects are also afoot, it’s true; but these are too unformed and tentative to talk about, yet my need for blog fodder is unending. Fortunately, my preparation of new slideshow images requires no veil of secrecy.
Invitations to present my slideshows have tended to be extended of late by educational institutions (Southern Connecticut State University and Ocean County College hosted me most recently, you may recall), so my slideshows have taken the form of illustrated lectures, usually featuring background info about Stuck Rubber Baby’s creation. But in earlier times my shows were created primarily to entertain (and, of course, to hawk my books), and to that end they featured adaptations of my existing comic book stories, with me reading aloud the contents of balloons contained in a succession of individual panels.
A down side of the old Kodak mode was that (a) each image I created cost money to photograph, which ruled out the willy-nilly use of subtle variations; and (b) an obtrusive moment of blankness accompanied each change of images as the slide projector plucked one physical slide from its position in front of the lens and deposited a new one into that slot; which made any kind of smooth transition impossible.
Among the practical effects of these limitations was that, when a comic strip panel projected on the screen contained several word balloons (as in the one shown below), I had no way of preventing my audience from jumping ahead of me while I was reading. This offended my need for dramatic control.
Back in 1986, as I prepared to give my slideshow at A Different Light bookstore in Los Angeles (which was shuttered, sad to say, earlier this year), a Wendel enthusiast in the front row held aloft an adorable kitten dressed in a superhero cape. She and her partner had named the kitten "Clawboy," she told me, in honor of the feline sidekick of "Branman," who was little Farley Chalmers’ superhero alter-ego in my Wendel series. (Click here to read Clawboy’s 1983 debut episode.)
The women gave me Clawboy’s cape to take home with me. (Understandably, I suppose, they did not give me the kitten as well.) That cape remains a valued memento that I continue to keep near at hand in my workspace.
Below: Clawboy’s cape. All it needs is a kitten.
It may look simple, but no small amount of work is required to adapt comic strip panels in this way. So if you want to visualize what I’m doing in odd moments when I’m not working on new projects or partying at one of North Adams’s glittery discos (yuk yuk!), imagine me hunkered down in front of my iMac adapting a sequence of ten pages from Wendel All Together for Powerpoint, panel by panel.
Sidebar: A Favorite Slideshow Incident
Posted in A Tip o' the Hat, Life & Art, Me, Me, Me!, Shop Talk, Yesterday & Today | 3 Comments »
Saturday, December 12th, 2009
Above: A pre-winter preview of coming attractions. Sigh.
My Dr. Seuss Letters of Note
"Those silly boys, breaking their backs shoveling snow out there!" thinks Lulu. "Don’t they know that if they just sit by the window looking beautiful like I’m doing, somebody will go outside and do it for them?"
Last week Eddie and I received this year’s round of holiday cards from my pal from Detroit John Benson, whose beautifully crafted linoleum-cut prints have been adding to the atmospheric majesty of Michigan’s Renaissance Festivals for years and whose artistic contributions to AIDS-related causes have saluted AIDS activists and commemorated those lost to the disease since the epidemic’s early days. As the link above indicates, John’s cards can also be found among the many gems offered by the Biddle Gallery in Wyandotte, Michigan.
I’ve been intending to call attention to John’s work in this blog for quite a while, and since he’s on my mind as I write this, let’s make it today!
In keeping with sensibilities John has borrowed from centuries past, he doesn’t maintain his own independent web site, which makes me feel a little guilty about tantalizing you with tidbits of his work here without being able to link you to a lavish presentation of his prints. But if you want to learn more about the range of his artistry, just email him directly and express your interest.
Below:
Much as I appreciate the cathedral-ready symmetry of many of John’s prints and cards, the perverse side of me loves it when he gets grisly!
At left:
Just for fun, John and I collaborated in 1993 on this limited edition print depicting two angels in a state of, uh, sublime arousal.
Posted in A Tip o' the Hat, Family & Friends, Home Life, Life & Art, Me, Me, Me!, Shop Talk, Yesterday & Today | 3 Comments »
Sunday, November 29th, 2009
His nights may have been spent portraying a scary colonial-era barroom drunk (see my October 24 blog entry), but during the days my husband Eddie took on a very contrasting role for last month’s Haunted Williamstown festivities: playing the ghost of Oxford don Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll, 1832-1898) for children who flocked to the Milne Library for Halloween observances in a more literary vein.
Though impersonating a thoroughly dead historical personage, Eddie refrained from scaring the kiddies and opted instead to mess up their minds by reciting Carroll’s nonsense poem "Jabberwocky," leaving no borogove’s mimsiness undramatized.
(Truth to tell, Eddie doesn’t bear much resemblance to Carroll; but then, Meryl Streep doesn’t look like Julia Child, either, and that didn’t stop Streep from playing Child in a movie!)
"One, two! One, two!
And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack…"
Above: Eddie’s audiences were generally respectful, with the exception of one little know-it all who thought it would be cute to bring a pig to the show.
Dr. Seuss and Me: The Sequel
Remember the note I got from Dr. Seuss in 1957 in response to a fan letter I sent to him when I was thirteen? Y’know, the one I shared with you in my December 6 blog post a couple of years ago?
Well, I recently came across a carbon copy of a follow-up letter I sent to him in 1985, to which he responded with a similarly gracious reply. Both are reproduced below.
Maybe it’ll take a cartooning rebel like Abby Denson to inspire the next generation of plastic Barbies to think outside of the box and seize the reins of their own destinies. With the subversively childlike drawings in her graphic novel Dolltopia, Ms. Denson does her part to further the revolution.
Mr. Millidge Weighs In
In his new graphic novel trust/truth, Tim Fish delivers a romantic comedy built on the less-than-romantic tribulations of gay lovers James Michael and Terry, who are doing their damnedest to end their relationship and move on. But who gets custody of the dog?
Doll Liberation
Now it’s time to salute a few of the worthy new comics-related books that have been settling onto my bookcase shelves of late.
Can This Breakup Be Saved?
The award-winning British comics creator Gary Spencer Millidge (famed for the Strangehaven series), has collected a career’s worth of insights about how comic book pages are built into the lavishly illustrated volume, Comic Book Design. The keenness of Gary’s visual taste is demonstrated, of course, by his decision to include a few pages from my own Stuck Rubber Baby in his book. But no kidding, my own fleeting presence in this book is but the least of its attractions, which include work by an international who’s who of comics masters, past and present, most of whose work is displayed in beautiful color.
(You may notice, by the way, that the version of Gary’s book that’s available from Amazon has different cover art than the one shown above. That’s because the American version comes from Random House, whereas the copy in my bookcase comes directly from the book’s British publisher, Ilex. They do that kind of thing just to confuse you.)
I thought I was going to be unable to show photos from Eddie’s rendition of Carroll. Eddie’s sister Susan, however, belatedly sent us these snapshots of Eddie in action, thereby enabling me to belatedly share them with you.
Posted in A Tip o' the Hat, Books in my Bookcase, Family & Friends, Life & Art, Me, Me, Me!, Yesterday & Today | 5 Comments »
