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.