All Hallows

Happy Halloween, my friends!

I come to you today with a trick and a treat.

The trick was played on me by Mother Nature in the form of unexpected allergies. Now normally there are one or two days in the spring and the fall that some pollen hit the air and wreaks havoc on my nasal cavity. This year I seem to have gotten an extra day-of-drip. I have a small headache from sneezing. I hope gorging on halloween candy will cure it, because that's what i intend to do.

The treat is this little snippet from the cover of Zita 2! This is what I've been working on today and it's coming along nicely. These little guys appear near the bottom of the spine:


The other good news is that Zita the Spacegirl is on the nomination list for the Texas Bluebonnet Award. You can read about that on their website here, though this person's blog entry does a good job of explaining the award (and you can read the list without downloading a pdf).

OWS Comics will return soon! I have another project this week that will make a fun post -it's something I've been working on for a long time. So check back soon!

Skull Sketching

It's been awhile since I posted a sketch. Here's a sketch from a Smithsonian display of early hominid skulls. I wanted to draw something from excellent the live insect exhibit but, man, the kids crowd around those guys.

More comics a-comin'!

Drawing Conclusions: The Photographer

Well this one took me awhile:



(Color version of the photo can be seen here).

Clip: After the Photo


The photographer only gave us his first name, but when I got back home it took me only a couple minutes of poking around online before I found this entry on Boing Boing about a whole set of portraits of the Occupiers. Lo and behold there we were. I highly recommend taking a look at his Flickr set, The Occupiers. It’s a striking set of pictures.

I hope everyone following this little blog has been enjoying this little comics journey! I originally designed this with about thirteen parts in mind, but at this point I’m not sure how many I’ll be able to get through. I may have bitten off more than I can chew. In the meantime...

Links!
Planet Money did a little podcast about OWS. Their audio sounds much better than mine and they somehow found a Ron Paul aficionado down there. (That’s what they call themselves, right? Aficionados?). I've been following Planet Money for a couple years now. It's a genuinely geeky economics podcast that explains things clearly.

The Occupy Movement is growing, and the arrest photos are ubiquitous. Please, please check out these images of, yes, Occupy Sesame Street. I want to high five cookie monster for that sign.

Drawing Conclusions: Walking on Wall Street

Woosh. Took me all day to get this one out!




Clip One: Ben and Anna on Wall Street


Clip Two: The Soothsayer


So next up our first experiences at the actual gathering in Zuccotti Park, plus a fun surprise. Stay tuned!

In the meantime here are a couple links:
1) an article about OWS and good ol' Distributism from the Washington Post.
2)The FIRST episode of the web-based comedy miniseries Fruitcake by my friends at Mirandum pictures. I have a cameo in a later episode!

Now go have fun. I'll see you all on Monday.

Drawing Conclusions: the REAL Part One

This is the real part one. The last installment was the prologue. Because when you start with a prologue you are hoity-toity. Comics!





Clip One: Banjo Man (FYI: this clip may be not safe for work. Adult language.)


Clip Two: Dance to Remember


So as you can see the REAL part one is a whopping four pages about a moment I’ll always remember. I’m starting to worry that I’ve bitten off more than I can chew with this project -there’s so much to tell! I think most entries will be one or two pages.

This is taking me back to my old days as a freelance reporter for the Lafayette Leader newspaper, when I would grab my not-so-trusty mini tape recorder and ride my bike to meetings about a new overpass or a zoo fundraiser. This was a lot more exciting.

Be sure to listen to today’s audio clips where you can get a taste of the banjo Man’s very excellent music and hear his controversial ideas about vandalism, which will have Mr. Andy O’Neill chortling “I told you so.” Andy chortles a lot.

See you in the comments.

Drawing Conclusions: Part One

Alright my friends! Today I’m trying something brand new: man-on-the-street-style comics-reporting with attached audio. It’s a little bit Journal Comic, a little bit editorial, and a little bit mini-Podcast and I don’t know if it will work or not. But as my man Chesterton says "Anything worth doing is worth doing badly."

Here’s the scoop:

Over the last weekend I attended the New York Comic Con (the link leads to an article about my friends Dave and Raina). But I also spent a good chunk of time at the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in Zuccotti park. I brought a mini audio recorder (thanks Dane!), a camera and a sketchbook and I came away with a couple hours of audio files, songs, conversations ...and a whole lot of experiences that I wanted to share. Better still, bouncing between the Comic Con and the OWS Protests offered interesting points of comparison. For me, each event threw the other into sharp contrast. It made a good story.

So over the next couple weeks I’m going to try to get as much of the story drawn and posted as I am able. This comic is unusual for me because the backdrop is something political. I will eventually draw conclusions and offer some of my own thoughts, but that isn't the point really. Truly my main goal here is to set down, in my own way, some little personal moments.

In other words, the good stuff.

So without further preamble, lets get to the comics:




And for today’s audio, a link to one of my all time favorite travelin’ songs:
I used to listen to this on every long car trip.
(The rest of the audio sections will be from my own tapes. I promise).

Finally, here is a link to some posts by my friend Daniel Nichols: Click here, here and here. This is what touched off the discussion with Andy that lead me to Wall Street.

Drawing Yourself

Unpacking my bags and my brain after a big weekend adventure spent bouncing between New York Comic Con and the Occupy Wallstreet Protest. So much happened! And I’m working on a way to condense some of my experiences into a story told in comics form. If all goes as planned those comics will start appearing this week, so please stay tuned.

In the meantime here is the new “about the author” illustration for Zita 2:



As you can see, it’s a little more “action packed” than the last one, which looked like this:



It’s always fascinating to me to see comics artists draw themselves and how those drawings match up to the real person. Sometimes all the characters in a comic will have a little visual hint of the person who drew them. Case in point: this weekend I finally met my flight comrade, Bannister, who travelled to the con all the way from France. I’ve been wanting to meet Bannister for some time. Not only are his comics are amazing, but he looks a lot like his drawings.

You can see some of his work by clicking right here.

Chasing Fall's Colors

Been working on a painting these past couple afternoons, chasing the colors of Autumn before they disappear.

Here's the painting at the lay-in stage.


Here it is after another afternoon of work, after I brought it home:

Mystery of the Baffling Batteries

That last panel is pure conjecture. In reality we never did find those batteries, so House Elves is still a perfectly valid theory.

I will be at New York Comic Con this weekend! Will you be there? I don't have a table of my on, but I will be signing at the First Second table on Friday at 3pm (booth 1730). Come say hello!

Dance Like You Mean It

Yesterday I took Zita to her dance class. Not her first dance class, but my first time taking her. What a fun time! And there's a coffee shop in the same building so I even got some work done.

Is there any thing cuter that 6-year-olds doing ballet? I submit that there is not.

Did you know there is a whole graphic novel about a little girl who loves ballet? It's called To Dance and you can find it here.

Packing Tape

This weekend Anna made a pot of magic soup. This has happened to us at least once before -where a pot of food will somehow feed a multitude, despite looking like a modest amount of food.

The first time this happened was when we were living in Italy and a group of honest-to-goodness pilgrims wandered into the village (there is a pilgrimage trail in the mountains nearby) There were three of them and they were hungry and tired and a little bit lost. Anna happened to be working in the garden at the time and she offered to give them a little something to eat. What started as an offer of snacks sort of blossomed into a full dinner as other friends and neighbors wandered to the table. There were songs and food and wine and stories and everyone ate well from a pot of pasta that Anna had sworn was only supposed to be enough for our little family. We called it the miracle of the pasta.

This weekend’s magic soup was perhaps not quite so dramatic, but nevertheless we were visited by lots of friends over the chilly rainy weekend and the soup pot was somehow never exhausted.