Sweet, sweet Comic-Con!

I'm all sad cause Comic-Con is going on in San Diego right now and Julie and I aren't there. We went on our honeymoon in 2003 for the first time (serious, serious nerds). Then, several years later, we went again in '07. It's straight bliss for comics geeks like me. Totally overblown. Totally packed (actually completely sold out this year). Totally Hollywooded and pop-cultured out. Pepper in all the great indie publishers and tons of panel discussions and artist talks and seas of crazies dressed up in elaborate, weird, costume and that's Comic-Con. I grew up on the superhero stuff, but now my tastes run more towards the indie true-to-life books. Anyhow, Comic-Con is a rare place where you get the absolute best of both of those worlds. Not many places does the great Stan Lee walk the same halls at the great Lynda Barry! Aw, man! We're not there!

Maybe next year.

Dudes like this Boba Fett are everywhere. Snapped this guy at the end of the day, walking back to the hotels last year. Just like it was nuthin. (This photo doesn't do justice to the many freak, goofy, elaborate, or obscure costumers up in this thing. But the pic's all I had. And Boba was my main man when I was, like, 8.)

Sheep Sketches

Some new pen sketches of pop and son sheep. Pre and post wool removal.

5 on the floor

I had a minute to clean up and reorganize the studio yesterday. It was in another sad state after a couple of months of working and not cleaning. It seemed to me then, a lot could be learned from an illustrator's stuff that's strewn about the floor (or just the messy ones, I guess). So I scanned 5 random objects and here goes:


This is a little 6" x 6" picture book Julie and I picked up on a recent trip to Toronto. Sweet, cool little colored pencil drawings of these two lil' sisses that are moles. One of a series by Roslyn Schwartz. They also sell these awesome little finger puppets too, which we didn't buy.



A sheet of shiny, foil Canada stickers bought on same Toronto trip–meant for our suitcase that has sticks of our various travel locales. As you can see, the stick hasn't made it to the case. In fact, til yesterday, this was still in a studio pile of Canadian souvenirs.



A copy of some songs by FLIGHT OF THE CONCHORDS (one of the best done shows on TV of recent times). This is not their newest album, but a bunch of songs (from a bootleg or something, I think?) that Julie's library assistant, Katie, was so nice to make for us. Hilarious.



A little work out I did with the pen one day. Always easy to whip up a round of hand drawings (immediate subject matter). Being a righty, I have to draw all left ones.



Phaidon's doing a beautiful suite of Jean-Jacques Sempé books in English translation. This is the first of the series of "Nicholas" books written by René Goscinny with drawings by Sempé. Nice cloth bound volumes with little metallic Nicholas characters inset right into the cover. Very fine, toothy, uncoated papers inside. (Only thing that puts me off is the huge PHAIDON logotype they gotta put on the cover of all their books!) Good stuff. Good times. I even joined Phaidon's "Nicholas Club" but I reckon I'll talk about that some other time.

The Steig Ball, Dropped.

Earlier this week, I noticed three original William Steig single panel cartoon drawings were up for auction on ebay (this is pretty rare). Two were kinda ragged. There were areas cut out and painted out--both, I assume, corrections made by Steig himself. But because of that, I didn't feel like paying up. Though the third was in, what appeared to be, good shape.


It's not an image I was loving, but hey... it's Steig!

Well. I totally forgot to bid on the dang thing, and it just got sold for the one and only bid of 149 bucks! (Last Steig cartoon I tracked on ebay sold for $800.) I'm kicking myself. Really.

Better luck next time.