Archive for the ‘Yesterday & Today’ Category
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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Click a cover below to learn about my latest books.
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Posted in A Tip o' the Hat, Family & Friends, Home Life, Life & Art, Me, Me, Me!, Yesterday & Today | 4 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 »
Friday, January 8th, 2010
[A NOTE TO READERS: Does anything about the appearance of this blog entry look, uh, screwed up in your browser? If so, please let me know. I'm trying to construct it using Adobe Dreamweaver instead of my old, familiar GoLive and my footing with the new software is far from secure. -H.C.]
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Mutant Vegetable Escapes from North County Farm
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Which is its "front" and which is its "back"? Who can tell? (But either option is disturbing.)
Getting In Touch With Our Inner YouTube
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Eddie and I found ourselves in the mood recently to begin converting a number of our old VHS video casettes into digital videos, with Apple’s iMovie and a camcorder, loaned to us by a friend, serving as our technological enablers.
And once you’ve got a batch of newly minted video clips in hand, who could resist uploading at least a couple of them onto YouTube, no matter how little interest they may hold to anyone else among the World Wide Web’s ten billion inhabitants?
Not us, that’s for sure!
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Above: The future cartoonist at age six (or thereabouts) with his dad in 1950. See also the same kid negotiating the brambles of our Alabama woods.
So if you want to see the only extant home movie showing how I and my family (and some neighborhood pals from up the street in Springville) looked back in 1950, click here. It’s chaotic and formless and it ends abruptly because my dad didn’t realize when our borrowed movie camera had run out of film. (Those scenes that we shot after the film ran out — now those would’ve been great, lemme tell ya. What a loss to cinematic history!
Also, there’s a brief slapstick artifact from a Shakespeare play I was in while in college. Its mixture of film and live theatre was unconventional, but word-of-mouth about the show generated long lines outside Birmingham-Southern’s Munger Auditorium by the time the final performance rolled around. As far as I know it’s the only time Arnold Powell, the show’s director, was ever known to bow to public demand by allowing some of the latecomers to view the show from Munger’s balcony, even though the sightlines up there were terrible.
Below: The future cartoonist at age nineteen in a scene (believe it or not) from my College Theatre’s 1964 production of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. (That’s me with the bushy eyebrows in the leftmost circle.)
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Also in the cast, by the way, was a fellow named Britt Leach (featured in the rightmost circle above), who played fumbling Constable Dogberry in Much Ado and who subsequently distinguished himself as a character actor in numerous movies and television shows.
Below: Among Britt’s many character roles in movies and television was handyman Easy Jackson in The Waltons.
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Glenn’s Story
Before I go, let me call attention to a third online video — this being one for which Eddie and I can claim no credit. While it’s neither quaint nor amusing, as the videos cited above might be said to be, this is one that carries special resonance at a time when the Ugandan Parliament just may back away, thanks only to distressingly tardy international pressure, from its proposed law condemning gay people to death — in favor of the more "humane" alternative of merely imprisoning gay people for life.
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This video features my friend Glenn Shadix, the Alabama-born actor about whom I’ve written before and whose blog Glenn’s Ruminations is decorated with a drawing I did for him last year. It was apparently recorded on an urban rooftop under non-optimal conditions, which means that y’gotta ignore the background traffic noises and just concentrate on the content.
Glenn’s harrowing description of his encounter as a youth with attempts to "cure" his gayness with "aversion therapy" appears on the web site of Truth Wins Out, a worthy organization devoted to debunking the myths promulgated by so-called "ex-gay ministries."
TWO’s is a cause that Glenn supports passionately, for reasons made obvious by his personal testimony.
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Posted in Artifacts, Family & Friends, Life & Art, Yesterday & Today | 1 Comment »
Thursday, December 17th, 2009
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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.
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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 »
Thursday, November 19th, 2009
Then on Monday I found email in my inbox from James Vance, author (with illustrator Dan Burr) of the award-winning graphic novel Kings In Disguise. James was giving me a heads up about his blog’s November 16 post, in which he comments generously about next year’s re-issue of Stuck Rubber Baby and reminisces about the link we share to my 1989 short play About Scott. The play, a theatrical tribute to Broadway dresser Scott Wiscamb, who was the first person that Eddie and I knew personally to be struck down by the epidemic, was written at the request of my college mate Lyn Spotswood, who wanted something to direct in Birmingham for that year’s International AIDS Day. Soon thereafter James wrote and asked if he could perform, for an AIDS benefit in Tulsa, OK, a stripped-down, one-man version of what in Lyn’s and my hands had been a multi-media, puppetry-enhanced pageant of sorts with masks and projected images of ACT-UP demonstrations interspersed with pop recordings and music by a live jazz ensemble.
What’s impressive was how moving James’ shorter and far simpler rendition of About Scott turned out to be. I know. James sent me a videotape.
A handsome trade paperback reprint of James and Dan’s graphic novel, which first saw print during the late-1980s under the auspices of Kitchen Sink Press, has recently been published by W. W. Norton, by the way, and a sequel by the same team — also from Norton — is now on the horizon.
From My Photo Archives It Came:
Could I Really Have Ever Looked Like This??
Eddie and I finally succeeded in luring cartoonist Jennifer Camper up to North Adams for a visit earlier this week. Jennifer was one of the earliest of the Gay Comix contributors, which means we’ve known each other and been buddies for something like 28 years now.
The weird thing is that Jen was already a grown up when we first met for lunch at a Seventh Avenue diner in New York — and yet today she still looks like she’s maybe twenty-two. How is this possible?
Jen’s longtime sweetie Emmalee couldn’t make the trip so she brought along another young cartoonist, Carlo Quispe (see below, with me and one of his drawings). If you’d like to see the online video of Laura Flanders‘ GritTV interview with both Jen and Carlo (as well as San Francisco’s Erika Lopez), click here.
Eddie and I enjoyed taking Jen and Carlo around to see some of the cool attractions North Adams has to offer (besides Mass MoCA, I mean), including the top of Mount Greylock, the highest point in Massachusetts, and the fascinating collection of barber chairs (plus a dentist’s chair) that has begun drawing tourists to the waiting room at T&M Auto on Curran Highway.
Above: Jen, Carlo, and Eddie pause to seek shelter from Greylock’s mountaintop chill. Below: Afterwards, at T&M Auto…
What fun we have in the Berkshires!
Now For Some Thank-Yous
I’ve been honored of late by two friends and fellow comics creators who’ve seen fit to include laudatory mentions of me and my work in their respective blogs.
Above: a photo of my mom and me taken on March 18, 1966, the day before I boarded a plane for a six-week visit to San Francisco.
As you can see, my penchant for plaids, about which I have been teased by no less a personage than Alison Bechdel, had already been established by then and has continued uninterruptedly to this day but for a temporary side trip into paisleys during the late-’60s and half of the 1970s.
Posted in A Tip o' the Hat, Books in my Bookcase, Family & Friends, Home Life, Life & Art, Yesterday & Today | 2 Comments »
Monday, November 9th, 2009
Posted in Pure Toontime, Yesterday & Today | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, October 7th, 2009
A friend pointed out to me today that DC Comic has posted the image at its Vertigo blog Graphic Content, so I guess I’m not required to keep it under wraps anymore.
Gab Alert:
Are You Ready for (Me and) "Dr. Dick"?
Here are three questions that may help you decide whether to listen to a certain podcast interview that has been posted online in two parts over the past two Mondays:
1 Would you tend to be wary of a website named Dr. Dick’s Sex Advice?
2 Might you find it reflexively unsettling to encounter a podcast that opens with the cheery, booming salutation "Welcome, Sex Fans!!"?
3 Would pondering the likely merits of an herbal erection-enhancement product named So Hard deter you from forging onward to a lively recorded conversation about life, cartoons, and the closet between yours truly and an ebullient former-Catholic-priest-turned-sex-therapist that follows it?
The last couple of weeks have been all about preparing my slideshow called Emotions and India Ink, which I’ll be presenting tomorrow (October 8th) to students at Ocean County College in Toms River, NJ, as part of the school’s Visiting Writers’ Series.
That’s kept me pretty darned preoccupied, and my head is still filled with the jumble of new images I’ve been putting together. Hence the spare verbal content of this blog entry; I’m pretty much "written out" for now. So I’ll compensate with a couple of pictures and a tip about my latest round of podcast gabbing.
Picture 1: "Death By Art"
If your answer is "Yes" to any or all of the above, then you might want to think carefully about listening to the interview with me that was conducted recently by Dr. Richard Wagner, better known to his fans as "Dr. Dick."
It’ll be your loss, though, because our wide-ranging discussion of my history as a gay cartoonist and occasional porn purveyor turned out to be a jolly exchange that wasn’t X-rated in the least (at least, not by my admittedly indulgent underground-comix standards). As I said in surprise to the good doctor when our interview had concluded: "Gee, what kind of sex site are you running? I don’t think we said the word penis once!"
Anyway, the undeterred among you can find Part 1 of our interview here and Part 2 here.
This was my contribution to this year’s $99 Sale benefitting the Soap Factory in Minneapolis.
Picture 2: My Cover Art
for Next Year’s 15th Anniversary Re-issue
of Stuck Rubber Baby
Posted in Life & Art, Me, Me, Me!, Pure Toontime, Yesterday & Today | 2 Comments »
Saturday, September 12th, 2009
E. J. Barnes is bailing out of the Pioneer Valley and heading for her new digs in Cambridge! What are we cartoonists she’s leaving here in western Massachusetts supposed to do now??! Whimper.
E. J. has been the prime mover behind the Pioneer Valley Comic and Cartoon Shmooze, a monthly informal gathering of cartoonists from around these parts that I blogged about back in 2007. But now her life is taking her eastward, which means she is unavoidably leaving the rest of us to our own devices. Will we recover from the loss or will we shrink back into our respective caves and chew on our kneaded-rubber erasers for recreation? Time will tell.
Whatever the future holds, a number of us shared a most enjoyable send-off shmooze for E.J. at the Monarchs Restaurant in South Deerfield, where we chattered to the soothing sounds of flapping butterfly wings wafting our way from the beautiful Magic Wings Butterfly Conservarory next door.
Above: My snapshot of E.J. at her farewell Cartoonists Shmooze last month. (The cartoon image next to her is a panel from issue #1 of Blaster Al Ackerman’s Tales of the Ling Master, her three-installment adaptation of the works of the writer and mail artist alluded to in her title.)
Below: My fabulously talented cartooning colleague (and fellow Birmingham expatriate) Mark Martin took this photo of me alongside Michelle and Gary Hallgren. Next to Gary and all but cropped out of this picture is Andy Laties, author of Rebel Bookseller and winner of the 2006 Independent Publisher Award. Some more photos from this gathering are included in a Facebook photo album called "The Last Supper" that Mark has posted here.
So What Have I Been Doing Lately?
Many hours have been spent drawing cover art for next year’s re-issue of Stuck Rubber Baby. I’m pretty happy with the new drawing and would love to give you a peek at it now. Unfortunately, you’ll just have to be patient, since I’m not supposed to go public with the art until the book’s publication date (June 2010, the last I heard) is approaching.
Next Stop: New Jersey!
I’ll be giving presenting a slideshow about Stuck Rubber Baby at Ocean County College in Toms River on October 8. It’s part of the school’s Visiting Writers Reading Series.
Today’s Offering From
My Artifacts of a Misspent Youth File
Here’s a 39-year-old drawing I came across yesterday. Old Simon & Garfunkel fans will recognize that it’s based on a photograph of the pair that appeared on the back of their 1970 Bridge Over Troubled Water album jacket.
(Ah, for the days when contemplating those 12"x12" album jackets within which vinyl records came packaged was a major artistic experience!)
Shown to the book’s left above as they prepare to "do it" are my own Ollie and Wendel; to the book’s right is a panel by the British master cartoonist Hunt Emerson, taken from his 1986 comic book adaptation of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. (As for the "Tentacle Porn" component of Pilcher’s opus: you’ll have to buy the book to see what those randy Japanese octopuses do for fun on a Saturday night.)
I am personally impressed by the sheer classiness and excellent production values of this book, which lift it far out of the realm of sleaze that its subject matter — rife though the book is with cartooned genitals in every imaginable state of turgidity, lubrication, and unembarrassed copulation — might imply. Pilcher quotes webcomic artist Jess Fink’s assertion that "Sex is just as good a topic for art as anything." I concur.
As this book’s title suggests, an earlier volume (which I haven’t seen) already exists, and since Pilcher was also in charge of that one I would expect it to be of similar quality. I’m especially aware of Volume 2 because my own work is included in it.
A Thank-You Moment
Reviews tend to be few and far between for self-published, print-on-demand books like my recently released venture From Headrack to Claude, which makes them more likely than conventionally published books to fly under everyone’s radar, especially when the self-publishing author can’t afford to pay for advertising.
For that reason I want to include a grateful shout-out here to some folks who’ve been gracious enough to call attention to my book online.
Gay Sex! Straight Sex! Sex with Octopuses!
It’s all there in easy-to-read comics form, a perfect adornment for your coffee table on those special Sundays when your local Jehovah’s Witnesses comes to call.
I’m speaking of the second volume of Erotic Comics: A Graphic History, a handsome and lavishly illustrated hardcover showcase edited by comics historian Tim Pilcher, which arrives with extensive and enlightening commentary contributed by Pilcher and with an introduction contributed by comics legend Alan Moore.
Below: The British edition of the book (published by Ilex Press), which features a different cover design that the one used for the American edition (published by Abrams ComicWorks) that’s displayed at U.S. bookstores.
Posted in A Tip o' the Hat, Artifacts, Books in my Bookcase, Family & Friends, Me, Me, Me!, Yesterday & Today | 3 Comments »
