Archive for the ‘Family & Friends’ Category
Wednesday, September 1st, 2010
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If all goes as planned, our house will be a two-dog domicile for five weeks later this fall while a certain bulky but mellow canine from New York named Junior (see below) edges in on what has heretofore been Lulu’s domain.
Last weekend we gave this arrangement an overnight trial run in advance to see whether the two dogs would be likely to play well together for a more extended period come October.
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Above: Junior scopes out the joint.
No significant sparks flew, which is a good sign, and so far prospects look good for peaceful co-existence. Maybe they’ll even be BFFs before it’s over.
Below: Lulu keeps a bemused eye on the interloper.
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Junior’s sojourn in North Adams is being precipitated by a five-week trip to Thailand that’s been booked, beginning in mid-October, by Junior’s human companion Cheryl Thacker. (Cheryl is a friend of mine from college days who went on to become a professional lighting designer for stage and television once she graduated from our shared alma mater, Birmingham-Southern.) Letting Junior board with us is far preferable, it goes without saying, to subjecting the fellow to five long weeks in an institutional environment equipped with no conversationalists as scintillating as us Cliff Street dwellers to swap ideas with. In addition, he stands to get his belly rubbed a lot more frequently with us in the room.
Having Junior around for an extended visit should do wonders for Lulu’s social skills while allowing Eddie and me to test our theory that there’s no fundamental difference between dogs with black noses and dogs with pink noses. Being true liberals, we believe that it’s not the color of your nose that counts; it’s what’s inside of it.
Below: Eddie and Cheryl engage in a futile effort to get Lulu and Junior to be photographed together without fidgeting.
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Above: My visualization of video game inventors being creative
Back in 1982, when video games were fast gaining steam and Pac Man was already getting left in the dust, author Steve Bloom asked me to contribute several illustrations for his book about the phenomenon called Video Invaders. The goofy drawing shown here, which depicts assorted game creators lost in the throes of inspiration, was one of the pictures I came up with for Steve’s project.
It’s a drawing that has been lying quietly in my flat files for 28 years while video games themselves have become ever more bloody and elaborate. Now at last I’m able to put this artwork to socially beneficial use by offering it for sale at the silent art auction that’s sharing billing next week with delicious fish edibles at Sushi Fest 2010, a benefit spearheaded by Berkshire Elder Law Center’s Jim Sisto. Tickets are $45, the raising of funds for the Alzheimer’s Association being the goal. The fun will take place at Taylor’s Fine Dining (34 Holden Street here in North Adams) on Thursday, September 9, from 6-9 PM.
There will be classier works of art than mine for sale that night at Taylor’s, probably, but it’s unlikely that any will be zanier. And any money you spend will increase the chances that you and your loved ones will live out your later years in a more satisfying fashion than my mother did.
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Above: Robert Rendo’s promotional image for the show
If you’re in the North Adams neighborhood this Friday (September 3), be sure and drop by the opening reception for Illustrious, the upcoming exhibit at the Eclipse Mill Gallery at 243 Union Street. The party starts at 6 PM, admission is free, and I’ll be there to provide my special sizzle in person since a drawing of mine (my cover drawing for the new edition of Stuck Rubber Baby) will be part of the show.
According to co-curators Charles Giuliano and Astrid Hiemer of BerkshireFineArts.com, the exhibition will showcase "a mix of fourteen local and national artists [and explore] the theme of narrative art and publications." Astrid herself is among the exhibiting artists, whose numbers also include Barbara Armata, Susan Baker, Varujan Boghosian, Shepard Fairey, Robert Henriquez, Bruce Koscielniak, Erika Marquardt, Melanie Mowinski, Marianne R. Petit, Robert Rendo, and Thor Wickstrom. And, as I already mentioned, me.
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Above: How my cover art looks framed
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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 Artifacts, Family & Friends, Life & Art, Me, Me, Me!, Yesterday & Today | 5 Comments »
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 »
Monday, July 12th, 2010
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Above: An illustrated ode to Eddie’s kidney created by our friend Juliana in advance of the organ’s surgical removal this morning
As some of you who’re reading this already know but as most probably do not, Eddie had one of his kidneys taken out this morning along with its associated adrenal gland. His other kidney and gland are in fine shape and, as best the doctors can tell, will be fully up to the task of doing all the kidney duty that my husband requires for the foreseeable future.
I am writing this note during a quick visit to our home (which handily enough is roughly five minutes away from North Adams Regional Hospital) while Eddie is still in recovery. Within an hour or so he’ll be moved to his room on the third floor where he’ll be spending a couple of nights before returning here to recuperate.
The surgery went well, the surgeon has assured me. And that’s about all the detail you’re going to get from me since I need to return to the hospital now that I’ve had a bite of lunch.
I’m not going to fill this blog with much additional medical talk since that’s not its purpose. But for those who want to keep up with how Eddie’s doing I’ll be posting periodic reports on this Eddie Update web page that I’m setting up right now. Check back there from time to time if you want to keep up with my hubby’s progress during the next few days.
Take care, and remember never to take a good kidney for granted. They’re ugly but useful.
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Posted in Family & Friends, Home Life | 1 Comment »
Monday, June 21st, 2010
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As you know if you read my previous blog entry, I spent three days in New York City last week presenting slideshows and participating in panel discussions with my friends and cartooning colleagues Jennifer Camper and Ivan Velez Jr. Below are a few photographic artifacts of what we called our Attack of the Queer Cartoonists tour.
(I was also interviewed on Thursday by Frank DeCaro on Sirius/XM radio, by the way, but I didn’t remember to whip out my camera and shoot any pictures while that was going on.)
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Above: Low-lighting and a flash camera that failed to flash made for weird color in this snapshot taken at ther Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance after our Wednesday night slideshow, but that’s OK because we were five weird cartoonists being photographed. From left to right you’re looking at Mike Diana, Carlo Quispe, me, Ivan and Jen.
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Above: On Thursday night Jen and Ivan and I were joined by Joan Hilty (second from the left above), who moderated our panel discussion at Jim Hanley’s Universe.
Below: After the panel it was book-signing time.
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Above: Among the trip’s pleasures was hanging out with two cartoonists and fellow Juicy Mother contributors that I had never met before: Victor Hodge (at left above) and David Hooper (at right), who drove all the way from Washington DC to join in the fun.
Below: We could have snapped our fingers and been chauffeured around the city in limousines, of course, but being Cartoonists-of-the-People we opted for hauling our books around with collapsible luggage carriers…
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…and traveling to our public appearances by subway.
I arrived home just in time to see Saturday’s performance of The Baltimore Waltz at Main Street Stage. If you live in northern Berkshire County and love theatre, you’ll really be cheating yourself if you don’t catch this very funny, very moving play before its final performance next Saturday.
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Above: Michael Trainor as the stuffed-rabbit-clutching Carl and Jack Sleigh as the many-faceted Third Man.
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Above: Jack Sleigh’s Third Man provides medical perspective to Carl’s sister Anna, played by Mollie O. Remillard.
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Above: The medical realm gets crazier as the play progresses, but watch out for the emotional wallop Baltimore Waltz provides before the lights go down.
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For example, you’re occasionally given marvelous jewelery like the fanciful peacock-phonograph pin at left, which was bestowed on me in the course of sipping tea with my longtime pal Nina Paley, last Wednesday. Nina, as you know, has been wowing the world for over a year now with her dazzling full-length animated film Sita Sings the Blues and she also has one of the world’s most fascinating and thought-provoking blogs.
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| Other Nina News: She’s doing a webcomic these days called Mimi and Eunice and it is very funny indeed. |
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Some nice person surprised me a couple of months ago with a copy of Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s massive (856 pages) fictionalized graphic memoir about his life as a manga pioneer, A Drifting Life. Perplexingly, the sender simply popped Tatsumi’s book into the mail to me without revealing his or her identity.
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The giver’s anonymity makes extending a proper thank-you difficult, for sure, but let it be known, should he or she be reading this, that I am appropriately appreciative.
Comics fans who are interested in Japan’s manga culture are likely to be fascinated by Tatsumi’s drawing-board-level view of comics creation as he has experienced it and of the camaraderie (and rivalries) shared by the guys who labor in the creative trenches. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a book whose characters spend so much time drawing, but the book definitely brings back many memories of the survival issues that come with pursuing a cartooning career.
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As a Brooklyn-born native New Yorker, my hubby has always been urban to the core — which is why his recent impulse to make our backyard garden into a thing of beauty takes some getting used to. It’s not that he has totally ignored the garden in years past. We inherited a version of it when we bought the house and have always known it had potential. Last year Eddie took tentative steps toward organizing it into a plot of earth that had more flowers and fewer weeds. But this summer he has really been out there in the sun hoeing, weeding, and sweating—and to good effect, I must say.
I, of course, have been happy to supervise from afar, since I lack the cultivation-of-vegetation gene.
Below: Eddie enjoying an "American Gothic" moment.
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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 Books in my Bookcase, Family & Friends, Life & Art, Me, Me, Me! | 5 Comments »
Friday, June 4th, 2010
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I got some advance copies last week and as far as I’m concerned it looks great. Alison Bechdel has contributed a very kind introduction to it, too. Meanwhile, Alonso Duralde of the gay-culture site Queer Sighted has just posted a new interview with me to mark the occasion. Thanks, Alonso.
And if you read that interview you’ll be among the first to learn about some new developments on the Wendel front. Since they won’t come to fruition for a year, though, I won’t bother feeding details to you now.
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That’s right. You guessed it. But what else?
The three of us will be joining forces to present a group slideshow in the Bronx at 8 PM on June 16. It’s called "Serious Funnies" and it’ll be happening at the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance (acronymically known as BAAD!) at 841 Barretto Street. Oh, and did I mention that admission is FREE?!
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Above: One of the new images from my new slideshow adaptation of my 1983 comic strip "That Night at the Stonewall."
Ours is but one night’s installment of BAAD!’s Out Like That! 2010 Festival, which is in turn part of NYC’s citywide Gay Pride Month celebration. So get those Metrocards ready for a workout, kids; BAAD! is gonna be rocking this month!
I’ve been devoting a lot of time recently to the creation of nineteen drawings to be projected during Pulitzer Prizewinner Paula Vogel’s Baltimore Waltz, a play that’s now in rehearsal under the direction of Wendy Walraven at Main Street Stage here in North Adams. The show will open on June 18.
Below: One of my completed Baltimore Waltz drawings. This one depicts a street hot dog vendor peddling his wares in front of the Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore.
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I recently happened upon the mildly risqué parody sketch you see below. It was one of my roughs submitted to Playboy in 1979, back when they were hitting me up for spoofs of mainstream comic strips for the magazine’s "Playboy Funnies" section.
Several of my parodies were accepted, finished, and printed in the magazine. This Mutt and Jeff riff was one of several proposed additions to the series that fell by the wayside, however, after threatening noises from newspaper-syndicate lawyers led Playboy to back away from the whole idea.
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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 Artifacts, Books in my Bookcase, Family & Friends, Home Life, Life & Art, Me, Me, Me!, Yesterday & Today | 2 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 15th, 2010
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Now, while he’s unpacking, I’ll show you a few of the snapshots my globetrotting hubby brought back to North Adams with him this morning.
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You’ve seen the drawing before, but while Eddie was overseas DC Comix got around showing me what the new Vertigo edition of Stuck Rubber Baby is going to look like once the title and other cover copy has been added (see below).
The June release ain’t that far off. I’m getting excited.
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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 Family & Friends, Home Life, Life & Art | 3 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 »
Sunday, March 21st, 2010
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The drawing above, originally published during the 1980s in American Health magazine, has always been a special favorite of mine by virtue of the fact that it was a favorite of Eddie’s parents, who kept the original art for it framed in their living room for decades.
I had given the artwork to Hesh in advance of a surgical procedure he was facing quite early in Eddie’s and my relationship. Hesh and Eddie’s mom Evelyn were amused enough to keep the drawing perpetually on display thereafter.
Hesh and Evelyn both passed on in the last few years, which is why I find myself in possession once more of the drawing that I gave them so long ago. At this point the artwork’s colors are in sad shape indeed, having faded drastically as a result of years of uninterrupted exposure to light.
Much of my color art from the late-’70s and early-’80s has suffered the same fate, I regret to say. This has provided me with a sad lesson about the need for choosing one’s pigments judiciously in the first place. Somehow or other a product called Dr. Martin’s fluorescent dyes had become my medium of choice around the time I moved from Alabama to New York City, and that’s the medium I began using to color many of my drawings as I began getting color assignments late in the 1970s.
It took me a while to discover how unstable those dyes could be if you didn’t keep them out of direct sunlight. As a result of that misstep, no small number of my color drawings from that era can now be mistaken for black-and-white ones.
I might have remained under Dr. Martin’s sway even longer had it not been for the fact that you just couldn’t get an attractive violent from the palette of dyes the good doctor provided. Try as I might, anything I mixed up by combining blues and reds turned out muddy and ugly. This was a big problem, since I really, really craved the services of a good violet for an illustration I was in the middle of painting for Bananas magazine.
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I finally dropped my brushes and paid an emergency visit to a Manhattan art supply store, on whose shelves I discovered tubes galore of Winsor and Newton Designer Gouache, offering me at least as vibrant a selection of colors as the Dr. Martin selection I had previously been making do with. A very nice violet hue was among them.
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Above: The Bananas illustration that led to my discovery of designer gouache.
So gouache is what I subwayed home from the art store with. And as it turned out, not only did I return to my drawing board with a good violet in tow, I was soon to learn that gouache colors had way more staying power over the long term than dyes did.
Hence my swift defection to gouache in the months that followed. And that, my children, is why most of my color art from the second half of the 1980s, unlike much that preceded it, is still color art today.
POSTSCRIPT: By now, of course, I color my art with Adobe Photoshop, whose digital magic has allowed me to restore the desired vibrancy to "Resist Unnecessary Surgery" as seen above.
In my last blog entry I told you about the role played in my career by a particular variety of rodent—namely squirrels. So it’s fitting that I mention in passing that I was recently commissioned to render a drawing of a friendly rat for a web site promoting The Rat Shop, which is an enterprise that caters to owners of the cute branch of ratdom that are fortunate enough to be nurtured as pets and which are not to be confused with their less cultured cousins who can be seen foraging in restaurant dumpsters or skulking along the grimy subway tracks of New York City.
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The designer of the logo from whose typography my rat emblem can be seen discreetly peeking, by the way, is a skilled California designer named Dickinson Prentiss Jr. Dick and I have joined forces before, I should mention: ten years ago I provided an impudent logo for his similarly impudent web site (since discontinued) called Mooned.com. That drawing can still be found on mugs and t-shirts that are part of my CafePress line of merchandise. |
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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 Artifacts, Family & Friends, Life & Art, Me, Me, Me!, Yesterday & Today | 3 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 »
