This past week I finally finished drawing the first edition of Catch Up: Louisville.
Catch Up, a Gold County Paper Mill presentation, is the brainchild of Jak Cardini. Each issue will feature the combination of a poem and a drawing by a different writer/artist pair.
Hey y’all, looks like another week has passed and I’ve missed my Tuesday post again. Apologies folks, I’ve been working on a long post about The Exile Waiting by Vonda McIntyre, and I didn’t get a chance to finish it because this past Tuesday was my lady and I’s anniversary.
I’ll get that up eventually, but last nite was Sketch Klubb so I’m gonna show y’all the comic that I drew. I hadn’t made anything since E.A.S.T. so it was great to just sit around and draw with a bunch of my friends (and some new people too). Anyway, here’s the comic, it’s meant to be read from right to left. Each panel is numbered for your convenience.
Also, this past Monday, Dash Shaw’s The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century, a series of sci-fi animated shorts, premiered on IFC.com. Go check it out, although be warned, there is some full frontal male nudity. When I went to MoCCA this past June I got a chance to talk to Dash Shaw about animation, I appreciate his dedication to hand-drawn animation and legacy processes like acetate cells. He really keeps it rough in these webisodes and it looks great — the animation process, drawing something over and over again to make it move, is laid bare when the frames are inconsistent and the cross-hatching on the Unclothed Man’s arm changes from second to second. I also dig the sequences that reference the visual language of 8-bit video games, silent film, and comics.
Smoke Signal #3, put out by Desert Island‘s Gabriel Fowler, is debuting at the first annual Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival.
The festival, hosted by Desert Island and PictureBox, will be this upcoming Saturday, Dec 5th, from 11am to 7pm at Our Lady of Consolation Church, 184 Metropolitan Ave, Williamsburg, Brooklyn. If I lived in the tri-state area, I’d definitely be there, the lineup looks amazing and admission is free.
Smoke Signal #3, which is also free, is a newsprint all-comics anthology featuring the work of many amazing cartoonists!
After the festival, this newsprint anthology can be ordered through Desert Island’s online stop for the price of shipping or picked up in store.
EDIT: I thought that the second Shamanman strip would be in the third Smoke Signal, but they changed the specs and I didn’t realize. It has the work of a lot of awesome people though, so y’all should definitely check it out.
Sorry about the missed post on Friday, I was taking a little Thanksgiving blogcation.
My parents live in The Woodlands, a master-planned community 28 miles north of downtown Houston. Although the suburb was bought out by real estate developers in 1997, George Mitchell’s original vision for the community was focused on aesthetics. Relics of some of the original ideas can be seen. On Research Forest Drive, office buildings made entirely out of mirrored windows crouch among the pine trees and swampland. It’s as if Superstudio’s utopian Continuous Monument was begun in the Great Piney Woods of East Texas.
These buildings house genetics firms with nondescript names like GenSys, GenTech, and BioSynth. Inside these corporations, sinister DNA-bending scientists are working to create a new subspecies of humans who can thrive in the petrochemical smog that blankets Houston. One day, they will break free from the labs and take everything within 50 miles of the refineries in Pasadena away from their oxygen-breathing brethren.
First of, thanks to everyone who came out to our studio for E.A.S.T.! I had a lot of fun. It was also a hectic and exhausting weekend, and I’m looking forward to relaxing over Thanksgiving and then getting back to it in December. While I was cleaning up my studio and then sitting around I had a lot of mental space to plan out how to arrange my studio for maximum productivity and efficiency. As we all know, making comics/art/whatever is a time-consuming process so I try to streamline it as much as possible. I’m also trying to figure out the best model and publishing strategy for my comics and other drawz going forward – traditional, screenprinting, POD, web, some sort of mix. I’ll post more on this once I have something concrete, but don’t count on anything semi-coherent emerging from the haze.
To keep pumped about all this through the post-event malaise I’ve been listening to doom metal, recommended to me by my buddy Ryan Lauderdale. One of my new favorite tracks is Her Sisters They Were Weak from retro-doom-psych-folk band Witchcraft’s 2004 self-titled album.
I was going to post something about the East Austin Studio Tour and how you should come by our house and check out all the art we have up on the walls and in the garage and growing from our couch, but then I stumbled across a treasure trove of Bob Pepper sci-fi book covers, including one for my favorite Philip K. Dick book, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch:
from the International Haus of Pictures via ski-ffy.
For more, check out Josh Burggraf’s amazing set of Bob Pepper covers on his flickr.
Also, come by Boongoo Studio, stop #125 on the East Austin Studio Tour this weekend, Saturday and Sunday, from 10am to 5pm! We’ll have a pony keg this time and I got my gouache drawz back from Chicago so there’ll be something new to see.
First of all, thanks to everyone who came by Boongoo Studio, stop #125 on the East Austin Studio Tour this past weekend!
I got to play host to friends and talk to some new people, including our awesome neighbor Thor Harris and these guys Ben Goddard and Daniel. Ben and Daniel recently moved to Austin from the East Coast and have settled in to Glade and I’s old house. Ben sent me his website, he takes some pretty hilarious, well-constructed photos, including this one:
Here’s a shot of something that I haven’t posted before:
It’s a collaboration between me and Glade, it was a landscape that I didn’t use for the No More Worlds show that Glade added a bunch of awesome details to. Speaking of that No More Worlds show, I should have all of those drawings back next week, so come by if you want to check ’em out!
Here’s a shot of Aaron Flynn’s installation, which I didn’t have a photo of last week:
That inside-out polar bear/coyote is amazing.
And finally, thanks to Kate Watson for the shout out on Glasstire! I invite you all to come by and snoop this next weekend.
Glade and I are participating in the East Austin Studio Tour this year as Boongoo Studio. We’re number 125 on the map, come check out our spaces!
Here are some shots of my studio:
As you can see in the upper left, I’ve got plenty of Gold County Paper Mill books left over from STAPLE! 2008, including Jak Cardini Achieves the Narratological Singularity, a book of J.C.‘s poems, and Impossible Objects, a collaborative book between me and Jak.
Here’s a detail shot. I’ve also got some color drawz, raw comix pages, and black and white india ink drawz.
Here’s my drawing space and something that I was working on.
Our good friend Alison Kuo came and did an installation in our living room! We’re also going to be featuring the artwork of Beverly Anderson and Aaron Flynn.
Yesterday would have been Carl Sagan’s 75th birthday. The man was a champion of secular humanism, space exploration, exobiology, and many other realms of science.
via the rustbelt radical.
At his most lyrical, Sagan painted pictures of the strange alien beings that could inhabit our solar system in order to broaden our search for other forms of life, such as these sinkers, floaters, and hunters on Jupiter:
via wandering space.
For Sagan’s sake, I hope that the upcoming expeditions to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn find some traces of life within their icy shells.
At times, Sagan could get quite spiritual, describing the search for extraterrestial life as the quest for the cosmic fugue.
