New Chicago Comics

Holiday Shopping

Stop in at Third Coast Comics this Saturday for your last minute holiday gift buying. And if any of those gifts happen to be drawn by me, I'll sign them for you too. Hand drawn trading cards will also be available.

Merry Catmas!

To promote my most recent cat book Cats Are Weird, I drew up these holiday cat cards. You can download a zip folder of all six to print out and mail until December 12 here. Feel free to share with friends!

Electronocybercircuitron

Here's a huge drawing of Electronocybercuitron I did for next year's Change-Bots Two art show. Huge for me, anyway, so about fifteen inches by fifteen inches. My scanner isn't that big, so apologies for the poor photo quality.
I've also got a new story you can read online over at the excellent Nashville Review.
Finally, an illustration I did a couple years ago is finally seeing print in the story collection Machine of Death.

Drawing On Comics Week Eight

Week Eight's exercise came after watching the Lars Von Trier film The Five Obstructions. I gave the students each two "obstructions" which they had to follow while re-drawing their midterm comic stories. To let them have their revenge on me, I let them give me obstructions. They chose to have me re-draw Be A Man with no text, no characters and no panels. I picked seven pages and the cover to re-draw, making a little minicomic I handed back to them the following week. Here's one of the obstructed pages.
In other news, the new issue of Filter magazine features a full spread and spot illustrations by myself for an article titled "Televisionaries," about kid's TV shows like Yo Gabba Gabba, Pee Wee's Playhouse and Fraggle Rock. And if you missed it coming out at your local comics shop a couple weeks ago, Marvel's Strange Tales Vol. 2 #2 included a four page X-Men story I wrote and drew. I'm taking baby steps toward fulfilling my childhood dream of being the regular penciller on Uncanny X-Men.

SALMON CAT

Weeks Six and Seven of the comics class were largely devoted to students finishing their midterm comics (a four page story) and an all day critique of the finished work. So other than a lively discussion about art and commerce, my role was basically working with everybody one on one. In the meantime, I've kept busy, working on a one page comic for the CBLDF, a Gargamel minicomic (not to be seen anytime soon, I'm afraid), and some comics to promote Incredible Change-Bots Two as well as a new story for the third Change-Bots book. Basically I'm avoiding starting the next Book, I guess. I also gave my 'Process' talk at the Tippecanoe Public Library, where I also demonstrated my process by working on a cat comic based on the cat of one of the audience members; I finished the comic when I got home.

Drawing On Comics Week Five

For this week's class I wanted to get the students thinking about how they balance text and image, how they spread out dialogue and how they use narration. The exercise I came up with was to have the students adapt an excerpt of prose into comics form. In retrospect I maybe should've provided the prose to be used, but even with all the different texts being adapted, it was still a good way to investigate these issues. Here's the example I brought, from my cover artwork for the Penguin Graphic Classics Edition of Ethan Frome. I'd probably tackle this adaptation much differently now if I was doing it over.