Archive for the ‘Yesterday & Today’ 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 | 3 Comments »
Monday, July 5th, 2010
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Well, not quite at Papyri; Papyri’s proprietors are away on a well-deserved vacation and the North Adams bookstore at 45 Eagle Street will be dark until their return.
But the store’s monthly WordPlay event will go on as usual next Saturday evening, July 10, at 7:00 PM at 43 Eagle Street—that’s the space next door to Papyri. And that’s where you’ll find me on July 10th, since I’ve been invited to enlist the help of my digital projector in presenting a portion of one of my traveling slideshows. To be more specific: I’ll be reading excerpts and projecting images from my graphic novel Stuck Rubber Baby, a new edition of which was published last month.
(John Mitchell, the Arts and Entertainment editor of the North Adams Transcript, wrote a very day-brightening review of my book in last Friday’s edition of the paper, by the way. (It’s archived here, under John’s pen name John Seven). Thanks for the kind words, John.)
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Following my slideshow, of course, will be WordPlay’s traditional Open Mic segment during which audience members are encouraged to read from their own writings or from the writings of other authors whose work turns them on. Gail M. Burns, as usual, will preside.
So if you live in or near North Adams or are going to be in the area next Saturday, I hope you’ll consider dropping by to see me do my slideshow thing.
More than one camera was snapping pictures while I was in New York last month presenting a group slideshow in various venues along with Jennifer Camper and Ivan’s Velez Jr. The four snapshots I showed you in my last blog post are but the tip of the iceberg.
A camera being wielded by Daniel Joy Kim yielded some especially nice shots. I hadn’t yet seen these when I composed the aforementioned post, so let me catch up now. The photo above is one of them; the rest can be viewed in the album called "Attack of the Queer Cartoonists" in Ivan’s Facebook photo section.
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Hey there, all of you college kids and administrators who’ve got student activities money rattling around in your piggy banks that you don’t know how to spend!
Hey there, you non-academic organizations with budgets that include money for outside speakers!
You don’t have to live in New York or the Berkshires to see one of my slideshows. I’m just sayin’….
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Above: Remember when land lines were the only way to get on the Internet?
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Above: This one is from while I was in college—the first time I ever got to do a cover painting for a magazine. Disney, look out!
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Above: While I was in high school I experimented with water colors and markers.
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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, Me, Me, Me!, Yesterday & Today | 2 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 »
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 »
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.
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 »
