With the specter of book-making mentor Joe Lambert gazing Kenobi-like over my shoulder, I recently crafted this new sketchbook from nothing but hand-me-down 300-series bristol, found cardboard, dental floss, the torn-up cover of a discarded Jimmy Corrigan graphic novel, and a bit of gaffer tape. Total cost: negligible:

It was so easy! I got the edges trimmed for free down at the neighborhood copy shop. (And sorry the pictures are so awful.)

I also recently steamed a frozen burrito.

And here’s a doodle, per our agreement:

Today, strictly in a flippant attempt to amuse myself, I up and doodled out two New Yorker cartoons:

Yeah, I know: ha; ha. How very quaint it all is. Cue knowing, cynical smirk; bask in silent validation and revel in the comfort of knowing that artists are on the job replicating your culture’s dominance 24/7. Yes, Virginia, the urban upper-middle class do after all have valid concerns. And they face them with a dignity, grace, and jauntiness simply absent among the illiterate non-prep rabble. Fine. Now where’s my damn check??

It’s interesting to note that I’ve officially been in this town long enough to start thinking like a New Yorker cartoon. The above just sort of plopped out like the rainbow italian ice slipping through your sticky inebriated fingers at 3am while you’re juggling a slice of pizza and your beeping smartphone to see if it’s your ex drunk-sexting again. I remember a time when $5 for a bottle of domestic was a dealbreaker… sigh. Misty water-colored etc.

Oh! I just realized I’d forgotten the final touch — my little stylized signature in the corner! Oh no, now someone else can pretend they drew these little masterworks, and seek an unfair portion of fame and admiration! And what would I do then? Most likely, I would cry.

Just more doodles. Click, big, etc.

Awww. Poor guys. Everyone’s so damaged, you know?

Click on pages to make them magically less ugly:

To be honest, I’m not sure why I even drew this. It sort of just… came out, tonight.

The really odd thing about this strip is that the man who spawned me hardly looks or acts anything like he’s portrayed here. And, at least ostensibly, these days we get along better than ever (thanks to that all-too-common stalemate of polite familial detente we sag into upon adulthood). He’s made his peace with a lot of his old, inconsistent rage and other bad behaviors — or at least seems to have learned the old man’s trick of sublimating it all into a hazy, generalized bitterness as the testosterone slows to a trickle. And no one who knows him would deny the presence of a firm yet distant kindness coursing through his demeanor. In fact, anyone who knows him would probably be furious that this awful cartoon even exists.

But in another, more visceral way, this comic is entirely accurate — and is, in fact, only the tip of the shitberg. I suppose this is just the image of the man my id is stuck with, as tragic as that might be. In some ways he’s a sweet man, and has done more than enough with the cards he was dealt. I have no reason to believe that he ever actually reads this “blog,” but if so — sorry, pop. It’s just lines on paper, which even I can seldom claim any control over…

And what do you know — as I type these very words, my phone lights up beside my laptop with a rare call from the paterfamilias himself. Sometimes the myriad threads of this mysterious life can entwine a bit too snugly for my tastes.

I’ll probably delete this post soon, but, well, enjoy it while it lasts.

Just some doodles to twiddle with.

Things have been pretty crisis-oriented lately, but nothing to be concerned about. Just a very slow bomb breaking apart the senility, I mean sterility, I mean serenity of this drifting life aboard the Good Ship Solitude. I fixed my bike today and thought of absent friends, and what the hell it is I’m supposed to do with my life. This didn’t help:

Another doodle. Click/big/click/big

If anyone was interested in hearing the phone interview I did for Inkstuds and CiTR*, the full audio (minus some fuzz and cut-outs) can be heard right here. Just scroll down a bit.

Also thanks to the couple of you who took a chance & bought a book from my website after following the link Robin provided. I’ll be traipsing on down to the post office with your orders first thing Monday!

*CiTR’s website has also had great & regular updates on the G20 protests in Toronto, “from a fully alternative, non-corporate perspective.”

And a doodle, why not (click click click big big):

So in my constant campaign to make myself ever more pretentiously artistic, and thus marketable in this New (non-)Economy we creative types have been dragged into like the mom through the door at the end of A Nightmare on Elm Street, I’ve been dabbling in watercolors.

The first one’s even FOR SALE.

I drew it to at my table at HeroesCon, with my When in Rome philosophy at the ready. It was admired and guffawed at by attendees ALL WEEKEND of HeroesCon — people even dragged other people over to my table to look at it — but for some reason no one wanted to actually own it. So now you can — for just $30!

These two I drew for an upcoming art show of gag strips put on by Tom Neely. They (& probably a couple more) will be for sale at the show.

This one I drew for an art show in Honolulu a while ago. It’s been just sittin’ around, so if you want it, I’d love to let you have it for just $25 little tiny dollars.

Also if you didn’t hear my Inkstuds interview (which happened just an hour ago), it’ll surely be available as a podcast soon. I talked a LOT of nonsense. It was one of those conversations where minutes became seconds, and I just could not shut up. Sure to be edifying, or at least cringeworthy!

I keep forgetting to mention it, but this guy here is from Europe. A while ago he, David Ziggy Greene, sent me a minicomic, gratis, and it was a really squicky read. Which regular GP readers will recognize as a fine compliment. Observe:

Right? His comic “The Ripened Squelch” is a collection of short strips, a lot of which are about his travels with the band Cats in Paris. Great things coming from this lad — great things! If, that is, you lend him the encouragement of your patronage, and keep him from just giving up entirely. Cartoonists need a little back-pattin’ sometimes, you know!

He also runs the portal http://www.samu.co.uk/.

Holy litcrit, Monsters just done got writ up in a bona-fide Literary Review. (You know — for adults!) (Not porn.) (Although I’d probably sell a lot more copies of Monsters if it had been.)

Anyway, Rain Taxi recently had this, among other nice things, to say about my book:

“[T]he tradition of showing, um, warts and all continues, but Monsters answers to a higher calling than mere exhibitionism or celebrating the quotidian. Instead, it tells a story of maturation, earning the moniker of graphic novel like few other long-form comics really do.

While Dahl has done his research on the disease, the inevitable “educational pamphlet moments” come late in the story, when we are already invested in Ken and his more passionate dilemma — how to live as a doctor-diagnosed carrier of herpes simplex type 1 and a self-diagnosed monster. And like all great fictional monsters, Ken becomes an oddly poignant character. This is largely because Dahl uses the medium of comics to every advantage, depicting the spiky virus cell as everything from a lurking threat in the background to a full body condom encasing our protagonist in a blob of isolation, angst, and self-pity….

Ken eventually finds the humanity hiding beneath his herpes… to the relief of us readers, who remain on pins and needles as to whether this affliction is going to destroy his life. Such engagement is a winning result of Dahl’s deft storytelling. Having watched him hit it out of the park with Monsters, one can hardly wait for what he’s going to do next.”

Wow great! They also called Monsters a “tour de force,” which I think means it’s… a movie, right?

As for what I’m going to do next, hoo boy… I’ve been wringing my hands over that for months now. I know that’s crazy, but it’s easy to get… self-conscious of the fact I’m drawing comics, which actual people are reading. I think ideally I would be most productive if there were, say, some sort of dungeon on a barren island in the North Atlantic where a large man whipped me awake every morning, led me to the drawing table, and handed me cups of hot ginger tea while I drew. Every second day there would be yoga in the courtyard and a single ice-cream sandwich. Otherwise: gruel, rice, grinding angst and toil. And massages once a week, whether I needed it or not. And once every year, a single demure, touching letter from a pretty foreign girl who I never hear from again.

Meanwhile, whatever I manage to draw is mailed back to civilization to be published and enjoyed, totally without my knowledge. And at the end of my life, when they’ve squeezed the last drop of vitality and inspiration from my decimated hand, I am shown the vast trove of press clippings and modest awards and Amazon customer reviews my books have garnered back in the world, and from my bed I am shown a very thorough hidden-camera video of a sharp-looking young man at a comic-book convention, pretending to be me, signing my books with my signature, face all aglow with the joy of accomplishment I surely would have felt in his place. And as the lens pans across a row of adulating fans, I allow a single tear to slip down my creased, spent face, whereupon my soul slips from my body, and I return to the cosmos.

Then they feed my corpse to bears!

(Click make big)