Inkstuds Interview

I'm putting some drawings up tomorrow. And some more stuff from my travels. But I just got this email from Robin McConnell that the interview we did last July in Vancouver just went live. Many thanks to Robin and to Daniel Giantomaso, who shot and edited it.

Bad at Sports Interview

This Interview I did with Bad at Sports last September just went live. Discussed:

•How drawing comics is like being a preacher
•The kings of Chicago's special brand of Misery Comics
•An awesome comics show at the art institute that you can't go to
•How, when it comes right down to it, I'm actually just @#$%ing with the reader

Also, Duncan calls me out for punishing moral certainty.

Bikini Kill gets things started. A little song I wrote about my troubled early thirties takes us out. My thanks to Duncan and Richard both for a really good conversation.

BQ Originals

When I was in Toronto last I left a pile of Big Questions originals with Chris and Peter at the Beguiling to be put on their online art store. And then I walked away and let them deal with scanning and tracking down page numbers. I owe you guys a drink. Or three. Many thanks. The pages are here.

X in time for Justmas

I'm back from the road and beginning to regain my equilibrium. Very nice to be home (for a second – tomorrow I head up to Minneapolis to see family and to attend the Minneapolis Indy Expo). I've still got a bunch of stuff to post from the road, but I also just put a few new things up at the store:

For the signing I did in Brooklyn at Desert Island Gabe asked me to put together a small zine or print to have as a giveaway with the book. I told him he was crazy, I had no time and wasn't a six hundred page graphic novel and 30 city book tour enough? Geez. And then about a week before I left I got inspired and decided he was right, what a good idea. Wasn't he surprised when, with no time to spare I sent him a 24 page zine of outtakes, process pages and various other related material that wasn't published anywhere else. And I demanded that he print the cover in color. And he actually got it done. Bless that man. This is the result.
      Included are images of some matchbooks I made to go with issue #3 and the strip I did during a workshop at the DH Lawrence ranch in 1996 that includes the first appearance of the birds anywhere ever and the germ of the story that would eventually turn into BQ. Completely unbeknownst to me at the time. And a bunch of other stuff. 24 pages, on newsprint, 7" x 8.5".

At Pierre Feuille Ciseaux one of the first things we did was a group collaboration to make a screenprinted book on the subject of the Twelve Tasks of Hercules. The edition was only large enough for the participants to each get one (man, they were beautiful, sorry folks!). But I like Hercules (image of his Ascent to Mount Olympus with Sock and Office Chair, here) and so I couldn't shake the theme. I ended up doing this print as well. I gave most of them away to the other artists, printers and support staff, but I have 15 or so to spare. 2-colors, 12" square, edition of 55.

And lastly:

I made these Trading Cards a few months back as a sort of promotional give-away kind of thing. I sent small stacks to stores that ordered The Game, and put cards in orders from here. I sent a stack to Drawn & Quarterly to do with as they saw fit as well. I also made a few full sets to sell on the road for gas money. I'm going to make one last batch a little later this month. I'm taking orders starting now so I know how many to make (they're a little labor intensive to print, cut and wrap). There are 24 individual cards, representing a few more characters than are on the flaps of the book, and several of the vignettes are different. the paper stock is the thickest, chunkiest, acid-free art paper I can jam through my friend's high-res, six-color, archival ink printer. Action shots on the back. Sorry – no chewing gum. These won't ship until around November 25th. But that gives you all kinds of time before Christmas, kids.

After the Barbarians

One of the artists I met at Pierre Feuille Ciseaux was Anton Kannemeyer (AKA Joe Dog, co-creator of Bitter Komix with Conrad Botes). His work kind of blew me away. He's got a show up in New York right now at Jack Shainman until November 12.

Portrait of the artist as exhausted boarder

When I was in London I stayed with Tom Gauld, his partner Jo and their two truly delightful daughters, Iris and Daphne (check out pages from Tom's forthcoming Goliath, here). Iris did a couple of wonderful little drawings for me while I was there, which I will also post soon, but Daphne did a drawing of me (above, complete with stocking cap), as well as one of Tom and I in conversation for Comica at Orbital (below) even including the slide show (note slide of bird in flight). How awesome is that. Podcast of Tom and my conversation here.

The Marine Invertebrate Room

My fourth day in England I drove back to London from Leeds, arriving with enough time to get to the Natural History Museum for about an hour before it closed. There was a bunch of cool stuff I'd like to have sat down and drawn for a while, but wasn't in the mood, somehow. I ended up spending most of my visit in the Marine Invertebrate room, which was the emptiest room in the museum, it seemed. Me and a bunch of lonesome, weirdly beautiful shellfish and coral, regarding one another sympathetically across the centuries from behind glass.

This is a kind of lobster:

And this a squid:

Below is Number 45:

And Number 57 and 58:

These are Sea Cucumbers. Apparently when Sea Cucumbers feel threatened they spit out their guts and "breathing apparatus" at their perceived predator, coating it in sticky slime. They can then grow a new one. Which seems a small comfort somehow.

Lastly we have a Coelecanth. It's a bit out of place in this list, given its having a spine, but I thought it had a nice, sympathetic color. Apparently the people who know about these things thought the Coelecanth had been extinct for millions of years. Then they found some swimming about happily in the 40's. It's never too late.

After that I went for a walk in Hyde Park, which was very nice, but I didn't take any pictures