Robot Johnny

Hey everybody! A comic that I wrote and tedprior drew is up on Top Shelf 2.0! You can read it here. You can also read the first E&A story here!

I have been neglecting this LJ since I finished the Month of Girls, but I have just finished Mungo Bean Book 2! It will be in our Etsy shop as of next week, and should be online fairly soon. It is a cracker!

Also, if you are in Perth, come down to the Made on the Left Markets this Saturday and buy some things! You don't have to buy them from us but I strongly recommend it.

Requests aren't done, they will be popping up as we go, but honestly I do not need annnyymooreee! I was looking at the Wonder Women that I drew last year and started drawing her again, because she's pretty fun to draw, and surly Wonder Woman here came out. Don't settle for being a tits and tits heroine ladies, be yourself! Poor Nibbles.


Hey Montreal! I'm going to be at Expozine this weekend! You should come.

Store!

I get really freaked out about some of those drawings! If I drew that Crazy Fish or that Crazy Snake in my sketchbook today I would post them on the internet.

I might upload the whole episode, there's a bit with me pretending to be a bee, and a really cool Paddington Bear short. Also there's more of that red headed girl acting CRAZY.

My maternal grandfather died a couple of years ago.

We were very fond of each other – he took me to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (a full day and a half drive) from 7th grade through my high school graduation, a gift of immeasurable impact.  He was a bright, curious, caring, and endlessly enthusiastic man. He reacted with genuine joy whenever his didactic little granddaughter held forth on erudite topics.  I still remember his delight upon hearing me tear apart the production of Romeo and Juliet that was one of the first productions we saw together at OSF.

I didn’t ask for anything of his after he passed away; my mother knowingly brought me a few things that meant a lot, but all in all my memories were the most vivid token of our relationship.  Recently, however, his last wife sent my mother a number of his old files.  Including one entire manila folder full of every letter and picture and document I had ever sent him, or that my parents had sent him relating to me.

So I’ve rediscovered verything from short stories I wrote in second grade to novellas I wrote in middle school to graduation notices and e-mails and silly cards.  I haven’t quite had the strength to go through all of it yet, but one thing I did find:  the poem below.  I remember this odd, apocalyptic little poem quite well but had no record of it myself, so knowing that he had it all along is very touching.

And, now that he’s gone, the poem – being as its topic is a girl with a fondness for the departed – takes on a sweet poignance.

Anyway. Here it is.

Annie stayed.

Annie McSalva stood that day
but no one was there to enjoy her stay
only the ghosts had not gone away

Annie remained for the ghosts.

Annie McSalva walked down the streets
her feet tapping sidewalk to various beats
She looked in the theatres, all empty seats

Annie played Hamlet for ghosts.

Annie McSalva read all the books
out loud, in the library, and none gave sharp looks
the ghosts listened well in their crannies and nooks

Annie read on for the ghosts.

Annie McSalva swam in the pond
that led to the gutters and sewers beyond
but nobody stayed to drink that which was fond

to Annie, who swam with the ghosts.

Annie McSalva lay in the sun
and thought that the world had only begun
but the ghosts whispered back that it almost was done

Annie survived with the ghosts.

photo by Nocturnal Bob

{wp version}

I posted some photos from this weekend's King Con in Brooklyn.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/daveandraina/sets/72157622768312930/

This was NYC's newest indie comic show, and for a first-year con, it seemed like a success! It was held at the Brooklyn Lyceum, which is sort of like a rundown cathedral that sells muffins and puts on zine fests. The unisex bathrooms added to the punk rock vibe (but could become an issue if this show grows).

Raina and I were only there on Sunday, but everyone seemed in good spirits and excited about the future. People told me turnout had been a better on Saturday but that sales still seemed to be good overall.

It’s cool that friends like Allan Norico and Alisa Harris benefited from the smaller room and got to be among the stand-out cartoonist! We picked up both of their new books which are fantastic!

Secret Science Alliance just got a pretty great review from Boing Boing!

Ever since it was released, I've been obsessively watching SSA's sales position on Amazon (I assume that every author - and author's significant other - does this). The day the review went up, SSA shot up to a high of #9 on Amazon's "top 100 Comics & Graphic Novels" list! Now it's slipped entirely off again - ah, Boing Boing... the ride is thrilling, but so short.

http://www.orneryboy.com/index.php?comicID=382

Brian solves a problem with violence, leading to inconclusive results; and awkward introductions are made.

The treacherous mountain pass known as Crow's Whisper was paved with the bones of brave travelers.

It was a bitter Autumn morning and the wind had snow in it that stung your flesh like needles. Although large the battle kitten, Kippers, didn't make a sound with his padded paws while walking on the frosted path. Creak!... echoed through the grey stone pillars as No Scars shifted her weight in the saddle; one hand on the the reins and the other hand always on the hilt of her bloodied war sword. There is a legend in this region of a ruthless guardian that patrols this pass.

Approaching a narrow crest, suddenly a loud cry rang out, a mix of wildcat and a barstool being scraped across a tile floor. The sound vibrated No Scars' bowels turning them to ice. It was the brutal 13 Scars on her raging steed Mr. Peepers! Bounding from a moss-covered crag the tabby fury hurled himself towards the travelers. Kippers fell backwards to meet their attacker with his fangs and claws. No Scars was thrown and then pinned under the bulk of her bi-colored charger. Looking towards the sky the last thing she saw was the point of a black spear and an even blacker shadow.

There will be more bones to pave the pass.

To be fair about my paralyzed reaction to this sort of contact, I had no idea how to deal with boys, despite being about 13 and having almost only male friends. Up until that year (when Gareth noticed I was female), I was...um... I had a singular style, and never had to think about boys beyond how much I enjoyed hanging out with them and playing Ren and Stimpy on Sega Genesis.

In order to draw this comic, I did a little research into bottle-base sidewalks. They were made to illuminate the basements below the city buildings, because NYC is so crammed that it's mostly built up and down. Turns out, there are a TON in downtown Manhattan, where I was a kid. They exist in other cities too, but they aren't that common, anymore. What's really sad is that a lot of them are wearing away-- the prisms busting out and breaking. But look: aren't they fascinatingly beautiful?

I had a fantastic weekend.

Things were busy, as always, but time opened up for some strange reason. There wasn't any looming immediate deadline, things at the college were rolling along well... I actually had time to hang back a bit and socialize. It was great.

Friday night we went out for Korean food down the street, engaged in great conversation and then dragged people back to Zub Haus for cocktails and video games. Street Fighter IV and LittleBigPlanet playing ensued. I can't remember the last time we just spontaneously hung out without needing an event, birthday or holiday to serve as the reason. It was great just hanging out because we could. Using the house as our headquarters was comfy and way cheaper than partying it up at a bar. Everyone had a ball.

Saturday morning I woke up and joked to Stacy that I had so much fun on Friday that I wanted to do it all again.

"Well, why don't you? We don't have anything planned for tonight" said the wise Stacy.

And so we did! We invited more people, pulled together a greater variety of wine and spirits, people brought amazing snacks and we all chilled out, chatted, laughed, played Apples To Apples, competed at video games and enjoyed cheeses, cookies, chocolate, crackers, fruit, dips, Halloween candy and much more. I finally shooed people out the door at 4am but I honestly could have kept going until dawn.

Today Stacy, Chris, Eric, Derek and I ventured up to Pacific Mall for shopping, wandering and more good food. We just got in the door a little while ago and I'm feeling completely satisfied about our weekend. A burst of social goodness that was much needed and appreciated.

Our friends kick ass.

This weekend has been just what I needed. I am rejuvenated! Friday night I museum'd, a good ease-in to the weekend. Saturday I pottered, internetted, shopped a bit, and then had a great evening with friends new and old playing Rock Band and karaoke games. Today I slept in again (oh the delight of waking up to a quiet room, and not an alarm), cooked stuff (choc-pumpkin pudding, and a nice potato/pumpkin/white bean soup), and got a good amount of domesticity out of the way. I don't even feel as much dread as normal of the heading back into the working week sort of blues, as I am pleased about my extension til the end(ish) of December, plus I get Wednesday off (Remembrance Day is a holiday for gov't employees in Ontario).

Plus, this has been my first proper weekend at the new house, so i've had a week to settle in and start to feel at home which I am somewhat more now. There's the usual existing house-politics and the detrius of years of sharehousing around the place, but I am happy with my own personal space - I have a nice room with lots of space and I don't feel like i'm hiding from anyone when i'm in here. I already feel so much more different than the old place; I'd forgotten what it was like to be in a sharehouse, not just having a room in a house.

Time to laze around a bit and have a read, I think. But figured i'd drop this in keeping with my attempting to blog more. Hope everyone's weekends were up to standard!

My computer's been on the blink for a while, so I've been using Sarah;s, which has led to a pile of post-it notes and scribbled-on scraps of paper gathering on my desk. A lot of these were reminders to post this or that on the blog, which, I obviously didn't do. Sarah spent many hours yesterday trying to revive my ailing machine, which is more or less now acting responsibly. We'll see how long that lasts. In the meantime, I'm gonna play catch-up with a few random mentions of this, that and the other:

- The House of Fun Art For Sale list was updated after we got home from the Baltimore Convention, I just never told anybody because I'm such a savvy business person. We got hit with some unforeseen expenses (inc. a hefty car repair bill, ouch) so I'm offering up some new pieces, a few of them relatively big ticket items, a few of them relatively affordable -- pages from Milk and Cheese pages, Bizarro Comics/Bizarro World, Hellboy: Weird Tales, as well as a few pin-ups, odds and ends and the cover to Dork #6, which was The Eltingville Club issue  (a note to the reader/customer who purchased the back cover to #6 and the Eltingville t-shirt some months back - I have lost your contact info, which is why I did not write you about the front cover. If you're reading this, please get in touch with me, because I feel badly that I screwed that up. My apologies!). Also, we've lowered the prices on a number of older pieces on the list. Several pages have already sold since we added the new artwork, as a few regular customers contacted us, but the list has been updated to reflect those purchases. If time allows we'll be adding more stuff before the holidays and we'll likely put some more layouts and small pieces up on e-Bay as well.

- I am going to be appearing weekly on the SLG Radio show every Thursday, or at least every Thursday SLG head honcho Dan Vado puts a show together. My segment will be taking place in the last fifteen or twenty minutes of the show. We'll talk about comics, I guess. We'll see. So far I've mostly yammered about nothing in particular while Dan tries to get a word in edgewise. It's a live call-in show, so folks can participate if they want. Previous broadcasts are archived on the blog radio site and upcoming guests are announced on the page as well, so check it out.

- Speaking of radio, I don't remember if I posted about Jill Thompson and I having been guests on Robin McConnell's Inkstuds radio program recently. You can listen to the episode here. Inkstuds is a great comic book resource, Robin's interviewed a terrific array cartoonists over the course of its 4-yr run (Happy Anniversary, btw).

- Speaking of interviews, here's one Jill and I did with Crimespree Magazine regarding Beasts of Burden.

- Speaking of Beasts of Burden, here's a preview of the first three pages of the upcoming third issue, which is an Orphan solo adventure. While the orders for the series have been less than stellar, the response has been extremely gratifying, and it doesn't look like retailers are getting stuck with too many copies dying on their racks. We've also received some very nice comments about the series from creators like Neil Gaiman, Dave Gibbons, Len Wein, James Robinson and Eric Powell (all on Twitter), which has been cool as all hell to see, I must admit. #3 ships on the 25th, and hopefully will be a fun sort of palate cleanser after the downbeat second issue. At least that was the plan.

- Geek Alert: Universal Monster movie fans take note - I accidentally stumbled across a reference to The Universal Cult Horror Collection, a set of five lesser-known weirdies including Murders In The Zoo, The Mad Ghoul and Rondo Hatton as The Creeper in  House of Horrors. The set is only being sold through TCM.com (and one other online source, but the price is the same, iirc), it's part of a deal TCM made with Universal to release some films on demand, and hopes are high that perhaps this could lead to getting Island of Lost Souls out on DVD. The films can be bought separately, as well. I haven't seen any of these, I'm sure they're nutty jerk-fests, but I love this stuff. Now, if I could only afford them...

-I've got something like seven new Fun Strips done or almost done. I've gridded up a batch of strips and pages to work on whenever the ink's drying on another job, so who knows, I may have some Dork-type comics to show you folks sooner or later. Still trying to get more done on that Milk and Cheese strip I started and posted a bit from a little while back, but it's slow going. 

- I'm also working on a pin-up for a charity auction that has been fun, little cartoony versions of as many old Marvel Comics villains as I can remember the details for. It's a small piece but I'm trying to get as many figures in as possible, I think I have thirty or so right now. I'm trying to see how many characters I can draw more or less by memory, and then I'll get the reference out and see what I screwed up, and complete the details on the characters I don't know well. Some characters I can't even lay a single line down for, so they'll need reference. In my head I can see The Mandarin and Klaw, but on paper...nada (besides the sonic weapon -- weird!). But it looks like 80% of these bums are still floating around in my memory banks while I forget my social security number and my own phone numbers. Maybe I'll scan it as it stands and post an in-progress image. Or maybe not.

- If the November issue of Nickelodeon was the swan song for the magazine, I'm depressed. If December turns out to be the final issue, still depressed. We had a gag panel in the November Nick...what a bummer to see it end. And just when Emily started reading it, of course.

- I've been reading a lot of Spider pulps, my first Avenger pulp, old horror short story collections, some Fritz Leiber SF short stories, some Robert Bloch, some recent young adult fantasy series (The Magic Thief and The Last Apprentice), some David Goodis crime novels, some lesser-known (to me, at least) Black Lizard crime reprints (The Vengeance Man, You Play the Red and the Black Comes Up), some Jim Thompson, and some Blackjack manga. Nothing heavy, nothing too depressing.  The Lawgiver is planning a house move, and is culling his library, so I've been hauling bags of old paperbacks over here to digest and then donate. I'm keeping the Spider paperbacks, though. It's been a lot of fun, and a lot of it is research for projects, so it's sort of work, as well. Some days I just want to stay in bed and read until I fall back asleep, like when I was a kid on a rainy day. 

- I'm doing a lot of stuff for Bongo right now, and for the foreseeable future --, and it's time I got back to that. 

Latersville, all.

I'll be at the King Con in Brooklyn tomorrow speaking on a panel with Raina, Sara Varon and Matt Loux.
It starts at 11AM which is when I'm usually still asleep. So this should be interesting!

http://kingconbrooklyn.com/

Well, I used a lot of the suggestions that came my way from that post the other day! I was pretty pleased with the turnout of readers for that question, I must admit. I guess it's because you hear a lot that people don't give a darn about history in this country, if depressing yearly polls from the Dominion Institute mean anything, but it's clearly not the case among my livejournal followers. You guys are great!

I had to do a general sweep that involved a good range of places, professions, backgrounds and time periods, so you know, not everyone's favorite author is going to be in there but I sure did like the range in suggestions. Looking at it now I wish I had someone from the NWT (not one! for shame) and New Brunswick. Stompin Tom is from New Brunswick but he's also sort of from everywhere.  I could have put the Irvings in there, I think they control history in NB as well as anything else.

I was all crazed out with strep throat while I did this, but listening to Radiolab shows and a burning passion for Canada I guess(?) kept me going.  You can find the image in today's National Post, along with an article about the Historica/Dominion merger! Interesting stuff.


( picture is under the cut because it's huge )


Here is the legend, the rows are sort of wonky but you'll figure it out:

Row One (bottom):
James Wolfe, Louis-Joseph de Montcalm, David Suzuki, Louis-Joseph Papineau, John A. Macdonald, Terry Fox
Row Two
Emily Carr, Joseph Howe, Joey Smallwood, Robert Bartlett, Louis Riel, Joy Kogawa
Row Three
Marshall McLuhan, Samuel de Champlain, Marilyn Bell, Wayne Gretzky, Emily Murphy
Row Four
Rene Levesque, Sam Steele, Farley Mowat, L.M. Montgomery, Susanna Moodie and Catherine Parr Trail, John McCrae
Row Five
Pitikwahanapiwiyin (Poundmaker), Oscar Peterson, Rush, Pierre Berton
Row Six
Les Filles du Roi, Mary Pickford, Skookum Jim Mason
Row Seven
Charles Best, Frederick Banting, Pauline Johnson, Mordecai Richler, Tecumseh, Stompin’ Tom Connors
Row Eight
William Hall, Tommy Douglas, Marc Garneau, Roberta Bondar, Rosemary Brown, John Diefenbaker
Row Nine
Shanawdithit, Louis de Buade de Frontenac, David Thompson, William Shatner

My show at Rotofugi comes down after this weekend. There are still some great paintings left. Keep in mind, these are pages of an upcoming book, and if you purchase them now, you will be personally thanked in the book!

Some choice paintings:







These three and more are still available in store, or through Rotofugi's online store.

SIMILARLY-

My show with Grant Reynolds at Giant Robot SF is coming down on the 11th- so this is a good time to pick up one of those pieces! Might I suggest:







These and more available HERE!

More to come, later

new superhero tidal dave. I always liked the idea of Aquaman, but i've never read a really good aquaman comic, and i never got into the sub-mariner. I also wanted to make a superhero i could relate to, so Dave's problem is his parents weren't killed and he has no driving force to help him fight evil.

Oh and loads of people just added me as a friend, have i been featured in something?

Trying to figure out a colour scheme that would work on a longer project and wouldn't be so time consuming as the current default. Here's a page from The Treasure of Constantinople, re-dunned. Too much work, but my other attempts sucked. I never drew it with any solid blacks or any colour plan, and it's obvious that the dudes who are good at this stuff think about that first.


Here's another one, where I did all the values first and then tried to do colour washes overtop, similar to the David Roberts stuff I've been looking at this week. Dunno what I'm doing wrong, though - it looks muddy.


I'd like to be able to do something simple that wouldn't be too time consuming, but I think since I didn't originally plan for solid blacks, my dumb ass will have to do it the hard way.

You and me, we all like livejournal. Lately it feels like it's running a little dry, I'm guessing it's because of twitter (@wolfhard)? Here are some of my favorite livejournals that are still posting like crazy*. (beatonna also makes lists like these. She would be listed bellow because she is the best at comics but I think everyone reading this already knows and follows her. If you don't then you are nutz.)

nedroidcomics Everyone probably already knows how funny and smart these comics are, but if you don't they are the total funniest. Anthony produces a rich feed.

davario Dave has the best line work and the most appealing drawings! Also he's doing a Brovember, drawing fellas all month long. Get on board!

royalboiler Brandon Graham posts a PILE of amazing things all of the time. His own work is amazing, his girlfriend's work is amazing, his friends' work is amazing. He produces a rich trove of content all of the time. What a great journal.

r_dart Rebecca Dart is possibly the most talented person I've ever met, she is out of control. You may have seen this comic featured recently on Drawn.ca, holy cow so good). I had the good fortune to work with her on a kids' cartoon last year, she is the definition of tops.

bougieman Robin Bougie is married to Rebecca Dart and his livejournal is NOT WORK SAFE, (but is wonderful). This journal is a wild collection of the filthiest drawings and kitten youtubes. You should be following this guy.

bottomlesspop Brian does the rad fantasy comic JobGoblin (linked by me many times in the past), but lately he has been doing these cool sprawling doodle pages. Really neat stuff!

jasonturner Jason Turner is like a god-damned poet!

teamdynamite I don't know who this guy is but this stuff knocks my socks off.

bugs_is_icky I have a big big crush on Britt's paintings. She's an amazing artist who does amazing (often filthy) work. She also has an amazing dad. Follow her now so when she gets big you can act smug!

There are so many people missing on this list! I'll do another one of these in the future.

*I'm going to post a new comic next week unless things go haywire.

RE: My last post.

Anyone know how we can contact the band The Killers without going through their record label?