OK, uh… how about this, for example?

Is that too much? Did this irrevocably damage any children? Is it kosher? Is your boss furious?

If not you can click it for a closer bigger look. You sick pervert.

Here’s a couple crumbs to follow until I get more time on my aching, gnarled hands to write a proper post:

Click to make big.

So what do you think is the policy on not-safe-for-work drawings on your own website? Dear reader, would you personally be outraged if you clicked on this site and saw a boobie? (Or worse.) Would you immediately scour my presence from your internet? Would you write an outraged and indemnifying letter of protest to the board of directors of the Web? Would you take steps to ensure my name appeared on a sex-offender registry? Or do you wanna look at peepees? Solid answers are sought.

Howdy do, internet wanderer. I thought I’d stop in after another busy week to check in and say that NOTHING HAS REALLY CHANGED. New York is still being New York, lovable and stimulating and wallet-draining to a truly impressive extent. I mean, I’m really seriously going broke here. My bank account balance is dropping like a stone through fresh water. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t enjoying the ride well enough. Anyway, it’s not like I have any control over it — I leave the house and the next thing I know I’ve not only spent $10 on subways, I’m in some snotty fantastical Williamsburg club dancing and choking on a fog machine. Then I’m eating sushi and watching Rice play right in front of me in a living room. Then I’m eating the best burrito of my life and meeting up with half of the current and past enrollment of CCS for half an hour. Then I’m eating delicious ramen by accident, and doing yoga, getting ice cream, eating cart tamales, getting snowed on, watching hapkido, all that shit. It’s hard to keep up.

The most important development of all is, however, one which I cannot yet discuss — for reasons of superstition, as usual. Don’t want to jinx it! Or make an informative or entertaining “blog” post! Sorry. I’m not even sure why it’s important that I announce anything on this blog. What the hell is this here for? I’m having a crisis of e-presence.

The least I can give you is this old doodle. As soon as I recover my little scanner from Vermont, I can update you with more current scribblings. Because that’s essential, isn’t it. It’s essential that I do.

The man collapsed in a heap in the background of this picture is a True Champ. His name is Thomas Simmons, and he is lying unconscious among hundreds of pages of his novel — a novel which he has just finished reading, in its entirety, to a surprisingly crowded and enthusiastic room of friends and fellow lovers of literature.

In true Modernist fashion (and because, frankly, the idea of reading your novel to a basement full of not-drunk-enough people you sort of know must be downright terrifying), he took a shot of Jim Beam at the end of every chapter.

There were fourteen chapters.

The spent heap of flesh you see here did a great service to Art and humanity on this night, for by his deeds and his craft, he inflated the languishing faith of at least one audience member — faith that someone, somewhere, still cares deeply enough about the intricate, heinous, gorgeous mousetrap of Human Existence to attempt to decipher even one small part of it, with mere words — words untainted by poisoned ironic detachment, art-school snobbery, or the idle urban faux-profundity rampant in today’s increasingly idiocized, neutered “creative” circles.

This man cares enough to try. And for many of us, some nights, that can sustain us through the worst of it.

Dear diary, it finally happened! They all said it would, but until this past glorious weekend, I never believed that it would. A fresh new feeling swept over me, heralding a bold new change, and at once all my anxious dull care was swept off my back and down the street like so many copies of last week’s Village Voice. Dear reader, it is true! At long last:

…until I get mugged, anyway.

And whose “♥” could resist “♥”ing NY, after a weekend of a caliber such as mine was just treated to. There was libation! There was entertainment! There was education! There were deep conversations and trips to Coney Island and communions with seagulls. There were zine readings and cartoonist meetings and arcade bleatings. There was pizza and hot dogs and hamburgers and bacon. There were sing-along basement shows, and suave dances in Latin after-hours clubs. There were chubby schoolboys and hardened ghetto youth carrying huge bouquets of flowers. There was snowfall and subways and sleeping in late. There were cheap boots and yoga and Black Lions. There was this:

And this:

(The latter of which depicts a bookshelf at the Strand, which sells only the older of my two books but has chosen it as a milestone to find your way alphabetically across their graphic-novel shelves, imparting the illusion that I actually have my own section of books at the Strand. An incidental yet significant surprise, in its own private way, and hard not to take as a small laurel extended by the city towards your humble narrator.)

It is because of all this, my cherished and patient reader, that I could have been found strolling the slushy streets of my lovely new home all weekend, whistling a jaunty tune, and ruing the explosive lack of decorum with which I tarnished your monitors in my previous Playhouse post. Please consider that transgression but an ungainly growing pain from yet another bewildered immigrant to this fair, decaying and epic city, as, like a young platypus struggling within the confines of its safe, warm egg, we scramble our way out into the joyful mud of LIFE — that real life, at the cusp of things here in the Naked City. And so I hath been reformed, and verily hath seen the light.

I will spend this week drawing, trying to renew my driver’s license, walking two sweet dogs, and trying to figure out how to install a Biggie ringtone on my cellphone. I’ll probably also be going to this. Eyyyyy… it ain’t so bad, right?

So it looks like I’ve moved to Brooklyn, land of 10,000 messy confrontations. Nobody seems to have the energy to make any sense here. Everyone is constantly prepared to assume the worst, and always ready to let you know what that worst is. We’re all training each other to glare and frown, pushing and shoving and getting in each other’s way just enough to make you wonder whether it’s personal or not. This is a place where the one mortal sin is a lack of certitude in yourself and your superiority. An empire of the extrovert. Basically it’s prison rules. The other day at the Food Bazaar in Bushwick, me & Caitlin saw a bored-looking girl leaning over her cart (or “wagon,” as they call them here) saying “es-CUSE YOU” to everyone in her path.

And meanwhile, in every bodega, grocer, diner and department store they’re belting out a catalog of songs glorifying New York. I seem to hear the words “New York” or “Brooklyn” blaring from the ceiling every time I leave the apartment. I mean, New York’s alright and everything — but is this soundtrack of self-tribute actually contributing to Brooklyn’s earth-salting war against itself? We stand United, sure — united in a mandate to use each other’s faces as stepping stones, stampeding after that scummy will-o-wisp towards the shadowy, vague promise of “making it” in New York. What does it mean when the myth you’ve created about your city, from Rockefeller to Woody Allen to Biggie, is that of a frothing, gilded cesspit of disaffection and overstimulation that pits human against human in a balkan no-rules cage match to win the best tenament on the best block of the world’s best pile of toxic waste?

These days, I find my mind often drifting towards a contemplation of the man that has, to me, always personified the smug, solipsistic, mercenary neo-Noo Yaw-wuck attitude: Derek Jeter. Now, I know this isn’t going to win me any fans in my new boro, but to me this guy basically looks like walking date rape. Just imagine him in a crisp soldier’s uniform, mauser slung across his shoulder, laughing as they sic the dogs on you. He looks like the kind of guy who’d fingerfuck your wife just to make you smell his finger. He’s a modern-day Achilles, grown spoiled on the chorus of tributes hailed at the banquet by the acolytes of Success. A groomed horse. An uber-mook. A bronze statue in a shitty park somewhere in East Jersey. And don’t the ladies just love him.

And now that I find myself a freshly conscripted resident of Brooklyn, I must take it upon myself to gaze into the eyes of this baby-cheeked sadist, to really spelunk down into the core of his heavy-lidded leer and feel real love. I must understand Derek Jeter. Relate with him. Make my peace with our respective positions in the merciless natural order of things. Come to terms with the vicious pathology of urban survival here in the epicenter of this post-9/11 farce. I must leave off my search for humanity, clarity, insight or reason in my neighbor, let my succor remain denied, and just melt into this fruitstand-strewn hades with the rest of the doomed $10-a-drink sinners. I will make ambivalence my enemy, pinch off my wavering sensitivities, and cure my psychic skin into a jerky tough and nitrite-laced enough to withstand the ammunition of the eight million other damned souls who wouldn’t piss on me if I was on fire. This is my oath and my promise. To merge into this congealed stream of ‘roided antipathy. To learn to breathe, drink, and bathe in the poison. To creep through the smutty labyrinth of this wasp nest until the pheromones transmit and I can pass for normal. Maybe by then I’ll be able to take my newfound asthma/colorectal cancer/hypertension out for a walk in Prospect Park in the spring.

EDIT 2/11/10: Jesus, was that morose! I assure you that things are not really all that bad, and that the blame should like at least partially on my own perennial bouts of severe depression, an affliction under which even Shangri-la itself would probably get on my nerves. Stay tuned for my next blog installment, when Gabby’s Playhouse examines the Not So Shitty Things About Brooklyn (and tries really hard not to insult anyone else).

A few weeks ago I caught a hankering to submit a drawing to Robert Goodin’s Covered blog, which posts various cartoonist’s takes on whatever other cartoonist’s comic-book cover they may choose.

It was an unintentionally educational experience. For my redraw, I chose the cover of the eleventh issue of Arak: Son of Thunder, one of the only comic books I remember owning (and loving) as a child:

Arak #11 cover by Ernie Colón (July 1982)

I think I must have gotten it in the Foodland as a reward for not being too much of a shit while my mom was shopping. I’m not sure why this particular character interested me as a kid– my four issues of Arak constituted the majority of my comic-book “collection” — probably because stories about “indians” tended to rule even more than Nightcrawler, especially when they were fighting white-skinned gladiators in an underground coliseum or messing around with downright bearish naked centaurs. (The latter of which, upon a more mature inspection, has me all but scandalized at the quite purple Tom of Finland-type undertones of Mr. Colón’s art! Seduction of the Innocent indeed!)

For this particular issue I remember the story inside was actually pretty engrossing, with a sort of early-Frank-Miller darkness to it that suited my tastes at the time. But I remember enjoying the cover in particular. Although I probably didn’t realize it at the time, there is such an oedipal analogy lurking under the surface of this picture. I mean, come on — “into the valley of death”? The whole cover is basically one big vagina! It so plainly evokes every true-believer fanboy’s fear of and attraction to the powerful, castrating Female; the sharp-toothed, fit and iconically feminine harpy mother who locks the hero in an almost desperately sexual embrace, carrying him up to the same dizzying heights (so many bad metaphors) which force him into a dependence upon her for his survival — even as she threatens to overwhelm him with her strange, fearsome passions. His response — hatchet the bitch! — captures the latent patriarchal death-cult superhero archetype in all its self-defeating Snoop Doggian misogyny. As I look at this cover now, the message snaps out clear as a pealing bell. Comics is an ugly town. (And don’t even get me started about women in manga.)

Anyway I tried to emphasize these facets in my version:

(Also note I gave Arak a bigger sack.)

To be completely honest, I’m a little disappointed with the result. For one thing, before I really started looking hard at this Ernie Colón drawing I was too dumb to see how well drawn it is. This guy really had a handle on anatomy, perspective and composition, and he wasn’t shy about demonstrating all this simultaneously in one drawing. To be frank I was a bit humbled by it. I could say I even felt unworthy of copying this work. It’s true that I’ve never been the biggest fan of the superhero comic genre’s hackneyed, bombastic tropes, its tight circles of influence, its posturing sound & fury. But this was just good drawing — drawing that seems to yearn to transcend the puerile trappings of its lowbrow, just-for-kids assembly-line exploitotainment format. It’s like if Barney the dinosaur suddenly dropped some lines of T.S. Eliot. One minute you’re vegging out on your prepubescent testosterone fix and the next you’re navigating the darker caverns of how youths are given gender cues in our society.

Obviously I should have had my way some other cheaper, less-ambitious comic cover — by the time I got elbows-deep into redrawing this one, I’d become too stricken with reverence to make any worthwhile improvements, mockeries or mutations on the original. Plus it turns out that my watercolor set sucks epic balls. I guess that’s what I get for using the playskool-colored plastic set I found in the basement. It’s got fluorescent orange though!

I type all of this only by way of proof that this old dog can still learn a good lesson from his own folly and hubris; can chew on a wad of his own pride when need be; and can at least attempt to mill up that grist into an ever finer, richer perception of the fantastical inner workings of Art and human experience.

Barring that, I’d like to make a little rent money. This drawing is officially for sale.

Yesterday I received an email from a very nice gentleman with a diacritical mark in his name. Such ornamentation always inspires both excitement and frustration here in the Playhouse offices as, while it is thrilling to establish contact a country that puts strange marks in and around their letters, it also means we have to somehow figure out how to repeat these diacriticals in our response, so as not to appear the gun-toting, Bible-throwing, science-fearing Americans we are.

And, really: Hòw dô ýóû ƒo®êígñ péoplè d☼ †hî§ ã∟∟ Ðå¥? Do you have special buttons on your keyboards? Or is the rest of the romanized world just walking around with a catalog of special ALT-character codes lodged in their brains?

Because I can tell you, we fat, lazy Americans sure as hell aren’t. Does that piss the rest of you off? Is this just futher damning evidence of our 68-oz economy-size American privilege? Is this why the furriners be takin’ our jobs to Bangladesh?

Anyway, Érico wrote me yesterday from the exotic, Xanaduesque shores of sunny Brazil. He wanted me to know that a Brazilian website, Omelete, just gave my book a good review* in Portuguese! This has made my heart as sweet and warm as a fresh malasada — not least because this in some small way increases my odds of one day winning over the heart of my favorite soccer player.

Thank you, Brazil. Thank you, Google Translate.

*(scroll down a bit)

(clickbig)

Just found this old scrap from when I was sitting in IHOPs in Phoenix a lot, waiting for my mother to die from cancer. I swear the moralistic ending was completely unintentional.

Last night I found myself drunk and trapped in a country house with a lot of really great cartoonists. We’d tried to leave earlier but by 2am the whole state had turned into an ice-skating rink. Three carloads of people slid off the road, four counting us. We had to slide-push our car back up a couple hills like it was a fallen chaperone at a kid’s ice-rink birthday party, our feet splaying about like fawns, while the owner of the car struggled to maintain his tenuous grip on his consciousness/dinner.

We got back intact and danced some more, with a new tinge of abandon, joyfully resigned to our fate. Then we collapsed on the living room floor and slept like a big pack of dogs.

By dawn the roads had more purchase, and we filed out in a stupor, still half-drunk. On our dreary drive back to civilization we passed a giant plume of flame shooting two stories above the quiet, snow-rimed housetops of Woodstock. I forgot my deer mask in the car.