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)

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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.

Click -> Big.

Also, check out this kickass review that Monsters got from the super-cool Women’s Community Clinic in San Francisco.

After bushwacking through a gargantuan jungle of html, I have finally emerged here on this thin digital pier to break the champagne bottle on the doomed launch of the USS Buy My Shit — that is, the Playhouse’s new storefront! Yeah, I’ve put up a few pages of my original art for people to buy. There are no Monsters pages up yet — but they’re coming, as are prints, I assure you.

Please let me know if there’s any problems, or anything is hard to understand, or if you’d like to buy something that isn’t listed (like one of the many doodles I’ve peppered this site with). For I truly serve to live you.

Things up in the frozen north as of late — they’ve been proper nice, to be honest. The cartoon kids are back from vacation, the tomato plants aren’t completely dead, and I even rode my bike the other day, before the snow came back. Nevertheless, soon it will be adieu to all the calm, short and languorous Vermont days, as In February I pack my bag, clean out the back of the Red House living room, and beeble on down to the rancorous jaws of New York, where I’ll probably spend the rest of the winter lettering Monsters in French and rooting through the Strand’s outdoor shelves for books to sell on half.com. It’ll be quite a change for this country mouse, but I suppose, considering the amount of smack I’ve talked about the Big Apple in the past, no one can accuse me of setting my expectations too high! Aw, I’ll have a grand time, I’m sure. Maybe while riding my bike down some icy Park Slope street I’ll get doored by Sarah Jessica Parker’s SUV and I’ll be able to sue my way into a retirement fund! In the big city, you gotta dream big.

As proof of the overwhelming prevalence of herpes in the comics-reading public, the Best Comics of 2009 Meta-List was just posted on the I Love Rob Liefeld blog . Here’s the top ten:

“This meta-list combines 130 different ‘best comics of 2009′ lists, written by reviewers and critics across the internet, into a single list of the top 100 comic books of 2009.”

Go Monsters.

I have a question. For you.

Seeing as I am slated for a migration south come February, I have of late been reviewing the state of my personal effects — that is, I’ve been crouching under the stairs of a cold, sooty basement digging through boxes, awash in five dreamy flavors of bittersweet nostalgia.

Among these dusty boxes I have uncovered literally hundreds of original pages of my comics, which I am none too eager to lug through two states and at least that many piles of dog poo on my way to my new residence. And so I set to thinking — as would any poor, desperate fool struggling to free his foot from the jaws of the world’s largest, shiniest, most ruthless capitalist regime: How can I make some money getting rid of these things?

Of course, from this question springs the inevitable corollary: Who would buy them?

And so I put it to you, dear readers; dear lovers of Fine Comics; you Patrons of the Arts and True Believers and Generous Souls, ever searching for the latest, obscurest repository for your cherished munificence: If I were to traffic pages of my own Comic Art on this very website, are there any among them that you would particularly hanker to fondle?

I can assure you that, debased and stricken by indigence, I am determined to set my fees well within the range of what any Art Lover deems affordable.

I will begin scanning particularly juicy pages this week, and will soon unveil an entire digital forum, in stunning HTML, to assist you in selecting your purchases. However, now is a rare chance for you to become the very invisible hand guiding the flow of commerce, and request a peek at any particularly poignant pages which I have penned! Such requests imply absolutely no obligation to buy; I merely want to know how better to entertain and service your whims, oh shahib. (Translation: I wanna know which of these stacks of pages to start scanning first.)

Here is a sample of one juicy nugget with which to titillate your whimsy (it’s NSFW — click to make big only if you don’t mind dildos in people’s brains):

In all seriousness, I will be selling original art soon — including many pages from Monsters — and I’d love to hear it if there are any in particular you’d like to peruse. I won’t even be insulted if you don’t end up buying them; it would just help me to spend less time feeding this damn scanner.

A note: Due to my increasing infatuation with Photoshop, some of my more recent pages are somewhat different in appearance “IRL” than they are in the books. In such cases I will, for a slight fee, be more than happy to manually engineer it so that it appears somewhat similar to this Platonic form you envision in your brain. Other pages have all sorts of cool/odd/embarrassing/psychopathic marks in the margins, which I will gladly keep intact for your amusement.

Hey, it’s snowing outside…

Hey, maybe you’ve noticed the little line of text on the sidebar, but in case you were curious about what the deal is with this Monsters book, I made a clunky little preview for you to read. At the end it takes you to the page of my books. I’m pretty sure this is kind of annoying. Sorry, our development team is currently investigating the focus-group surveys. And roasting another whole chicken.

Thanks to migraines from prolonged headphone attachment, I don’t usually get to listen to stuff on the internet, so I must apologize for my ignorance concerning these gents — but thanks to google alerts, I’ve discovered that the Deconstructing Comics podcast just gave both Monsters and Weclome to the Dahl House very generous reviews! They start talking about the books about 41 minutes in. The gist is they really enjoyed Monsters, giving it 5 out of 5 stars; Welcome to the Dahl House they gave 4, claiming that “for $7 I have not had such a good time with comics before.” Thanks, dudes.

[This note from the Corrections Department: During the podcast's discussion about my book's commentary on healthcare, one host claims Monsters takes place in Canada. We should mention that this is is not in fact correct. However, since the story actually takes place in New York, Honolulu, Phoenix, and some bridge in the middle of Vermont, we can fully understand any geographical confusion in our readership.]

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