Winter Greetings

Who knew that last year was to be our last winter in New York? We may have experienced our last Christmas in a winter wonderland. So this year, while we are cozy and warm in our new home in Atlanta, we greet you from a fantasy landscape covered in imaginary snow. Have a great holiday season!!!

Laura

Got a new illustration coming up in the New Yorker. Cover date will be 02Jan12. This one is for another noir film. “Laura” by Otto Preminger. Apparently I am becoming the noir illustrator over at the NYer.

I have not posted any of my personal work lately, but I plan to rectify that soon. I have several other jobs in the pipeline, but I have a lot of new pages of comics I have not posted or mentioned.

From the end of August to the beginning of November I logged around 40,000 miles of travel. From the mountains in North Carolina, to the river banks of St. Louis, to drought stricken Austin, to the inland shores of Chicago, to the future city of Tokyo, to the magical mystical forests of Oregon. Whew. It was exhausting. And now I am looking forward to a winter holed up and working on some magickal concoctions.

 Until next time, enjoy the illustration.

Faust

The Met is putting on a new production of Faust replete with bespoke suits and atomic bombs. A Faust for the World War eras.

I was in Tokyo last week, but how could I turn down Mr Awan’s offer to do an illustration for this?
I mean, it is Faust.

So, below is what I came up with and it should be in the 14Nov11 issue of the New Yorker.

Black Narcissus

Okay, a new piece coming up in the Halloween edition of the New Yorker. Cover date should be 31Oct11.

This one is for the movie “Black Narcissus.” I have never seen the movie. I didn’t have time to see the movie before the illustration deadline. So, I went solely by the source images Mr Awan sent me.

I hope the movie is as good as the illustration I came up with. Know what I mean?

Southern Comfort

I just whipped up this poster in a two night frenzy.

My good friend Takuya runs a design business in Tokyo. He was hired by Southern Comfort (yes, the liquor company) to do some design work. Part of his job was promotional work for a party they are sponsoring to kick off Design Week in Tokyo, which is 01Nov-06Nov11. Takuya hired me to do the postcard and poster for the party in exchange for a future trip to Japan. So…

Here is the poster:

The postcard is basically the bottom half of the poster, but in black and white:

Festivals Galore

In conjunction with AthensPopFest the fine boys of Fluke have organized an arts and comics flea market of sorts for this Saturday, 15Oct11. If anyone is in Athens this weekend or inclined to come to Athens you can find me and my comics at OctöberFLUKE. It will be held at the Classic Center between 10am-6pm. Man or Astroman and the Dead Milkmen will be playing the 40Watt that night and Masters of the Hemisphere and Olivia Tremor Control will play Friday. So, if you are looking to make a weekend of it in Athens without the fall football crowds this would be the weekend to do it. I hope to see you there!

In other festival news my good friend Gabriella Gomez-Mont recently directed a documentary film entitled “El Hombre Que Vivió en un Zapato” or “The Man Who Lived in a Shoe.” The film evocatively dives into the abysses of a true eccentric’s life in Mexico. By turns banal and fantastic it is well worth a viewing by any of you fascinated by the extremes of the human condition. Well, the film got accepted into an international film festival in Mexico, I am not even sure which one, and Gabriella asked me to do the poster for it. So, below, you will find my very first film poster!

The end of an era

As you will no doubt recall on 18Oct08 I blogged a post, or perhaps plugged a boast or flogged a roast or snogged a host or hugged a ghost or… Wait a minute…

Where was I?

Oh. Yeah. So, in 2008 I mentioned a piece I did on the landmark Monster Island building, an arts and music space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Well, Monster Island is about to be submerged in a tsunami of industrial “progress.” Its demise has been written up in the New York Times, Billboard, and several other places on the world wide Indra’s net. Or is it the veil of Maya? Either way this news seems very fitting for me personally.

Monster Island started seven years ago, which is around the time I moved to Brooklyn, and is now closing down around the time I moved away. This symmetry is just something I find personally resonant. Of course the largest part of the personal connection is the fact that I put a mural on its walls three years ago and it has remained there since. Another factor is that Kayrock printed my wedding invitations in that building as well.

Monster Island was a visual delight in Williamsburg for as long as I was there. It is sad to see it go, but I am glad I won’t see it go. Just another casualty in the war of attrition that is the Eternally Grinding Wheel of Progress. In restaurants we have sliders and poppers to attest to the fact that progress seems to have a goal of frictionless consumption, but what happens when there is nothing left for the Wheel to grind and nothing left for the gullet to consume? I suppose the Beast will then have to consume itself. I think it has already started.

Check out the links above and you can see my piece on the walls as the building enjoyed its last hurrah. Below are some images from my post of three years ago.

Ali inspires little green men from Asia

Got a new illustration coming out in next week’s New Yorker (26Sep11 issue).

This saxophonist Fred Ho paints himself green and will play a concert inspired by and in homage to Muhammad Ali. Muhammad Ali, saxophones, and green body paint with matching green trainglehawk hair style sounds like a winning evening to me.

Check it out:

Where the Sidewalk Ends

I will have a piece in the 05Sep11 issue of the New Yorker. I suppose someone (Film Forum, Anthology Archives, Lincoln Center?) is showing the film “Where the Sidewalk Ends”? I don’t know. It was not explained to me what this was for. I was simply asked to illustrate a piece regarding the noir film “Where the Sidewalk Ends.” It is quite different than the Shel Silverstein book of the same name, and came before it.

The film was directed by Otto Preminger who also did the classic junkie film “The Man with the Golden Arm” starring Frank Sinatra. And, for all you graphic design historians, featuring titles designed by the great Saul Bass.

I had never seen the film before so I watched it this weekend. The scene I came up with does not actually occur in the movie, but I wanted something that hinted at some drama and had a relatively dynamic composition without slavishly copying an actual scene. Also I was asked to include the two main characters if possible.

If you have never seen the film I recommend it as a well crafted noir. But the ending is a bit too contrived and unconvincing. The actions of the main character implied a resolution that was more fatalistic than the mildly syrupy redemption he was granted. Sure, he didn’t mean to be bad, but he was a brute to the core and should have met a brutish fate.

The Hooded Utilitarian Poll

Comics blog the Hooded Utilitarian just conducted a best comics poll recently. I took part with my top ten list, which you can see here. And you can see the overall poll results here.

Thanks to Mr. Robert Stanley Martin for inviting me to participate and the massive amount of work he had to do to consolidate, calculate, organize, and display the results.

 I have been really surprised at how many great looking comics I have never heard of have been turned up by reading the other participants’ top tens. I think this was a really worthwhile project. Go check it out!

Nearing the end of “Severed Limbs”

Well, it suddenly occurred to me. I am near the end of my second book, “Severed Limbs”. The first draft at least. I have been working on it, more and less, for the past three years already. There have been many other, less ambitious, projects in between, but I started it before I had quite finished “The Moth or the Flame”. So, to be this close is quite exciting for me.

I have one more scene to complete on the first draft. And then, by my calculations, a few months of revisions. Hopefully the book will be complete and looking for publication by early next year. But, unless something catastrophic occurs, it definitely will be ready by next Spring.

Here is the final page of the next to final scene. Some of Fred’s encounters are reverberating through his mind, while he is also worried he may have made a drastic mistake in his course of action.

(This page has already been slightly revised. I scanned in an earlier version just to get a sense of what it would look like fully inked and that is what you are seeing.)

Nate McClusky, child soldier

Poor Nate.
Ever since he was kidnapped by the rebels he has been subjected to unimaginable atrocities. In the quest to create super soldiers to combat the UCE the children are pumped full of pharmacological super-cocktails, trained relentlessly in guerilla tactics and combat, flooded with propaganda, etc.
At the age of 9 he is already an expert marksmen and working as a sniper in some of the heaviest battlefields in the system. He is also already jaded beyond belief.
Thousand yard stare? Pfft, Nate has a thousand mile stare.
He sees right through you.
And everyone behind you.
Say a prayer for Nate McClusky.

How does Roderick Doughnuts say it?

In the course of installing the show I have coming up (Return of the Prodigal, see below) there was a space left open right next to the door. So, I thought it would be nice to have something graphic to welcome people in and also to bid them adieu. Well, aloha does both of those things and Roderick says it with gusto! So, I whipped this up last night and will print it up tomorrow.

Roderick Doughnuts is one bad dude. And this is how he says it.

Return of the Prodigal

I have a show going up soon at the historic Barnesville Depot.
It will be open from July 1-August 20.
The opening reception is July 8, 6-8pm.
Everyone is invited!

Below is the postcard for the show:

The Little Humpbacked Horse

The June 13&20th double issue of the New Yorker will contain an illustration by yours truly. The Mariinsky Ballet is putting on “The Little Humpbacked Horse” at Lincoln Center. It looks to be quite a treat. I wish I could go see it.

Mother’s Day

This year’s Mother’s Day card.

All tomorrow’s after-parties

After the party the Goddess Honeysuckle just wants to gather her belongings and head home.

Where’s the nearest nail salon?

Is there a place in this solar system for a well groomed cosmonaut?

Love is in the air

Need I say more?

The Other Place

Roseanne’s sister in Roseanne Barr’s show “Roseanne” is starring in a play called “The Other Place” in New York City. It/she will be reviewed in the 02May11 issue.

I love how the premise of the review establishes in the first line that there are a much broader array of qualities in an actor than “sexy” or “rugged” and then in the next to last line she is (oh, look at the range!) both sexy AND authoritative. Wow, there really are so many other possibilities for an actor.

Here is the illustration:

Flotsam & Jetsam: Deep Space Redux

Here is a page I just remodeled for the next Static Fish. I drew the image last year for a poster advertising a gallery show in Red Hook. But I had always intended to turn it into a page of comics. Here, finally, is the end result.

I am really feeling good about the headline. It took me almost as long as the rest of the page, but it was worth it.

Headline detail:

Harmonization

Sketch of the day:

Un Regard Moderne and Me

I was in Paris last week for a Moebius exhibition at the Fondation Cartier, which, by the way, was amazing and inspiring. I will post more on that at a later date.

But my second order of business was visiting one of the world’s most stupefying book stores. Un Regard Moderne is stacked toe to top with fantastic and stimulating books, books, and more books. If you are a bibliophile, as I most certainly am, or an aesthete, also guilty, you will love it.

I went twice and on the second visit Mr. Noël bought the books I had hauled over from Cabbagetown. If you are ever in Paris and fit one of the two aforementioned categories you must visit.

The facade on Rue Git-le-coeur.

Beautifulness.

Mr. Noël holding up some newly acquired awesomeness!

The Moth or the Flame and Static Fish cozying up to a stack of paper delight.

Moon Blood

Feel the blood coursing through thy veins.
How it pulses.
Like the ocean’s tides.
Does this blood also rise or fall,
according to the Moon’s feminine caprice?

Five Divas

This illustration will be in next week’s New Yorker. Film Forum is running a film series of five Japanese divas throughout the month and this will accompany the write-up.

This is my first illustration since moving to Atlanta, so no more Film Forum for me. The move is also responsible for the lack of posting for almost a month now. We still don’t even have internet, don’t ask. So far we have been too busy unpacking and getting situated to get much else done. A very little exploring. A bit of sketching here and there. And trying to stay honed. Moving is arduous.

Another severed peek

Fred keeps getting nearer and nearer his goal, but somehow farther away.

Every step seems to take him into another distracting and divergent realm he had no intention of entering.

Will he ever catch up to Le Gooch?

Well, he has to survive this first.

Awkward silence and still life with orange

I did my first illustration for a fiction piece in the New Yorker this week. It accompanies a story by Tessa Hadley. The piece will appear in the 07Feb11 edition.

Check it out.

Olympian Spreads pt 2

Here are a couple more spreads from “the Olympians.”

Hermes is one of my favorites. If you click to view larger you should be able to read it. This is the story in which Hermes kills the hundred-eyed giant Argus. I love the way Hermes is sidling up all buddy buddy to Argus in the image. But later…

Lop.

And Poseidon? Well Poseidon is just the man. Check out his watery palace!

Olympian Spreads pt 1

Here are a couple of spreads from the Olympians. More to come.

The Olympians: Gods of the Greeks

Almost two years ago Kristin asked me if I would draw something about the Olympian gods for her periodical Uncle Envelope. I have worked on it off and on since then, but the last two months saw me working vigorously to get it done. I was to put the coup de grace on the periodical’s two year run. Uncle Envelope has decided to take a much needed vacation and the Olympians will be the final mailing.

Kristin, Mary and I worked this weekend putting together the final books and stuffing envelopes. The books were mailed out on Saturday.

I am really happy with my final design. I plan to seek financial backing to publish a larger run on an offset press. Until then, enjoy some images. I also plan to post some larger images of a few of my favorite spreads soon.

Last blizzard of 2010

I keep forgetting to post this.

We Rays travelled down to the Dirty South for Christmas this year. The first time back home since 07.

Well, we had a flight for Sunday the 26th to return to Brooklyn.
But then there came a blizzard.
We were “stranded” in Georgia until Wednesday.

When we finally returned home this is what our car looked like.

There was even a raggedy Christmas tree buried underneath it!

The importance of being woman

Below is an illustration for next week’s New Yorker 17Jan11. The subject is Brian Bedford, who’s directing and starring as Lady Bracknell in “The Importance of Being Earnest” at the American Airlines Theatre.