Pancake Prevarication

I realize it's been awhile since I've put a full comic up on ye ol' blog-o-tron, so I figured why not rectify that, even if it is only a two-pager. This comic was originally done for the anthology Lies Grown-Ups Told Me, which is a pretty solid collection of comics if I do say so myself. As always, click the pages to view larger.

Hard Candy Christmas

Happy Holidays everyone. Did this drawing in honor of the season. It's Generic Holiday Claus, perched atop his Level 5 mount, preparing to rain both terror and merriment in equal measure on all the children of the world. While I don't actually celebrate Christmas, I appreciate the veneer of it. Outside the commercial and religious aspects, I think the atmosphere is actually kind of nice. Besides, it's hard not to get behind a time of the year that encourages you to spend time with your family and be nice to people, especially when it's so dang cold outside.

So Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, Joyous Kwanza, Happy Solstice, and all those things! And remember - without mass market holidays, our economy would collapse! See you in the New Year. Stay classy.

First the Drought, Then the Rain

Hey all! Sorry for the lack of updates this past month or so. I'm gonna level with you, I've been starting to delve a lot deeper into my work as of late. This might mean a slight decrease in the regularity of some of my posting for a little while (though hopefully not quite to the recent extent). Please don't take this as a sign of neglect! I still love you, Internet! I just need to ride this wave of recent creativity to its natural end before I can return in full force. In the meanwhile, here are a couple of quick things I've been up to this past month!

The above is a photo from a few weeks back, when I had a chance to speak to a couple of classes of grade 7 and 8 students at King Edward Public School. They recently completed a unit on comics, and had invited me in to talk about the craft, and what it's like to work on comics all day everyday (in brief: it's pretty awesome). It doesn't take much in general to get me excited about talking about comics with any age group, but these students came off as particularly bright and eager and were a real pleasure to talk to. Big thank you to Miss Venn for inviting me, and creating this opportunity.

Then secondly, because I have trouble bringing myself to put up a blog post without some actual drawing in it, here's an excerpt of some recent work I've been doing for the upcoming documentary Cartoon College. It's a documentary about the comics school I went to, as well as about cartooning in general, and is full of some exceptionally awesome people (including Chris Ware, Lynda Barry and Art Spiegelman, to name drop a few).

I'm in it as well - likely acting like a generally silly dude, as is my wont. I'm fairly proud of some of the drawing I recently completed for it though, which is perhaps a thing of note. Anyway, more on all that as the film approaches completion and release, but keep checking here for updates as time goes on.

Halloween 2011

Okay, you guys. Guess what? Guess what? HAPPY HALLOWEEN!



Oh man, oh man. So Halloween is my favourite holiday of all the holidays, and I am always extremely excited every time it comes around. Actually, I wanted to do something big on the blog for it this year, but as soon as I started working on my plan I got swamped with work and wasn't able to follow through. Ah well. So it goes. But hopefully this fun little illustration will suffice in its stead!

I hope everyone reading this has a wicked happy Halloween! And I hope you all get a chance to dress up, or go to a party, or at least watch a scary movie or something. Halloween only comes once a year, ya know! Ya gotta enjoy it while it's around!

Bleep Bloop Bleep

Another pile of backing board sketches. Click for bigger. The drawings on the right are largely copied from Mort Drucker's Mad parody of the movie "Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte," "Hack, Hack, Sweet Has-Been, or Whatever Happened to Good Taste?" And the dog in the bottom right corner is copied from Taiyo Matsumoto's "Tekkonkinkreet." In other news, started reading some Raymmond Carver for the first time recently. Man, that dude could write.

Craig Thompson

So I went to see Craig Thompson talk at the Toronto Underground Cinema a couple days ago, after a friend reminded me about it last minute. This was possibly a bit of a deal for me.

Reading Thompson's "Blankets" for the first time was a big part of what originally got me thinking about making comics more seriously (I'd been producing my webcomic for about a year at that point, but had never considered pursuing comics as an actual career prior to then). So he's always been someone I've admired pretty strongly.

What struck me the most about seeing him talk, however, was less the impressive nature of his work (though there was certainly a great deal of that) than the relate-ability of it. This is someone who, historically, I've always put on a bit of a pedestal. I love his work, but it also always seemed so unattainable. So I was a little surprised to find myself nodding along to his talk about exertion and process, and the slog of working on a longer piece. "Yeah man, yeah... I know how it is."

Then afterward, met up with some friends to go see Dark Dark Dark and A Hawk and a Hacksaw, which was pretty rad as well.

Also! Something I forgot to mention in my last blog post! But my friend Bryan has just started putting a huge chunk of his old comics online these past couple months! If you like comics (as presumably you do) then these are some comics worth reading. Especially the Onion Head stuff. So you know, maybe go check it out!

Spider-Man Hates Weddings!

Saw this Spider-Man cover while bagging comics at work the other day, and instantly felt compelled to redraw it, if perhaps only for the pun. "With this ring, I do thee web?!" - hilarious! I'd submit it to the Covered blog, but it turns out they've already done this cover. Plus, I think my version kept a bit too close to the original. Oh well! Original cover by Gil Kane, who is a genius, and Spider-Man and all that stuff is owned by Marvel Comics, in case you didn't know.

I feel a bit bad for having fallen behind on the twice-a-month blogging schedule I'd had going for awhile, but I was away end of last month visiting Nick Patten, Ryland Ianelli and Beth Hetland! All three of whom are frickin' fantastic human beings, and who it was a total blast to see. It was fun having a chance to just wander around Chicago for a bit too. Beth even made a blog post about it! (I'm hiding in the dark in the picture at the bottom, 'cause that's what I do)

A couple other quick things: Steve Bissette recently posted a preview of his inks of my pencils for the N-Man collaboration we've been working on for the last little while. It's extremely exciting to watch this thing take shape - hopefully we'll have more for you some time soon. In the meanwhile, however, turns out SPX is this weekend! I won't be there physically, but I will be attending in spirit through my contribution to Lies Grown-Ups Told Me, which will be debuting at the show. Pick it up from Jen Vaughn, Nomi Kane or Caitlin M at table C6, if you're attending!