It’s “the holidays,” and it’s been lovely, but I wouldn’t want the internet to think I’d forgotten it. So here I am, with another short-term memory-drawing of the north country. It was funny passing by the same spot the next day and realizing how different the construction of the bridge is, and how there are bigger, uglier buildings just past it. But, isn’t that the great part about memory? The relevant parts stick out. I’m really enjoying doing these landscapes in this way. I think it has a lot to do with cartooning, and with only including the pertinent details. If I ever teach a class, I’ll probably make my students do some memory sketching. First I’ll show them Laura Park, who does a lot of it.

In other news, my whirlwind tour of the New York metro-area is drawing to a close, and it makes me sad. Caitlin and I extended our Christmas stay in Connecticut, due to that big snowstorm the entire Eastern Seaboard is talking about. One of my oldest and dearest friends was staying there, with my parents, and blended right in, an extra sibling, just like he used to when we were kids. That was lovely.

The other day a bunch of us took the commuter rail down to Grand Central. It was the day after the storm, and the train was packed. My dad had to go to his bank, my sister to the French Consulate, my Chad (that’s the friend I mentioned) to Brooklyn, along with a friend of his who joined us on the train. Caitlin and I took the subway over to Penn Station, and never emerged to the light of Manhattan. We just got straight onto a New Jersey Transit double decker train and took it to her grandmother’s, where we’ve been the last two days. Upon arriving in New York, neither Caitlin or I felt the Country Mouse sensation that I’ve had when emerging from a day’s travel on Amtrak directly from Vermont. There was none of that “gorsh, there sure are a lotta pretty people…an’ boy do they move fast!” kinda thing. I don’t know if it was the buffer of some days spent in the suburbs, or the familiarity of the commuter line, or what, but it just felt comfortable and right.

I’m looking forward to our approaching weekend stint in Brooklyn. I miss the old borough, and haven’t been back since August. I’m worried that I might never live there again. I can’t stop thinking about what I’ll do, and where I’ll be, after graduating (unless I fail) from CCS this coming May. I know I’ll stick around in Vermont for a while, but I don’t know for how long, or how I’ll be paying my loans. Ah, the future! There’s nothing like the New Year to make you obsess over your plans, is there? Welp, that’s my life. Sorry to get all reflective on yas.

The other day I saw this happening. I felt really sad, like this was some sort of a betrayal. Each detail that hadn’t been removed, like the mailbox on the wall and the little flag on the porch column, and the kid’s room wallpaper I spotted through the window, felt like a cruel reminder that somebody lived here. That people have been living here for probably more than a hundred years. A hundred years! And then the steam shovel, it’s business end like a mammalian face, mouth agape and just sorta knocking things around, then pulling, then smashing through. When I finally stopped staring, and walked by, I started to choke and cough on air-born house dust.

I dunno. Maybe this was just the outpouring of disappointment after I went to pick up some covers at the printer’s. They’d been printed horribly wrong. All 300 of them. I was really excited to see them and to make some more Oaky Lindy 3s and get them out to the public. Ah, well. It’ll just hafta wait ’til January.

it gets a lot bigger || that is, if you click it

Poll time, blogheads! Would anybody be interested? in purchasing or gifting these two posters? They’d be digital inkjet prints on nice, archival, 11″×17″ cream colored paper. Probably with short descriptive text (hand lettered) in the black corners. Signed and numbered. The whole deal. For $8 for one or $12 for both (the second at half-off). Let me know, by comment or by email, and I’ll make em available on the shop or by direct order. If you’re not sure how you feel about my work, maybe you can allow some other people to tell you it’s not too bad, for some punk kid.

Now that you’ve slogged through my hucksterism (second week in a row), how about some good news of family, friends, and fun? I’m getting pumped to roam around all three of the NYC tristates! First at my family’s in Connecticut, see Better-Half Caitlin’s family in Jersey, then pal around with my dear ol’ college chums in Brooklyn.

And how better to kick off this whirlwind tour of the New York metropolitan area? A Wu-Tang concert in Burlington! It’s gonna be full of bros, but all the founding members but ODB and the RZA are gonna be there! (Although, the Razor dropped out only about a week ago, and after I bought a ticket. Supposedly he’s filming something in China. Whatever. Maybe they’ll each drop out, one by one. Still ready to love it.)

My buddies Dan, Todd and I have started a new web comic called Farmy Acres. It’s set on a farm in Kansas, 1962. Each of us draws a strip about one area of the farm. Our characters can move around from place to place, but we’re stuck drawing the same location, which means story lines will wander from cartoonist to cartoonist. A new strip will be posted every Monday and Wednesday at farmyacres.wordpress.com.

Somethin’s comin, dear readers. While you’re stuffing your face and quaffing champagne, I’ll be diligently working to bring you something earth shattering Monday morning. All while I recite the name of every Wampanoag killed by Whitey and collect my tears in a jar, so that I might drink a people’s sorrows. Nah, I’m just playin. I’ll be stuffing my face and quaffing champagne. Look out on Monday, though. Look out. Farmy Acres is coming.

Also seen here (upside-down) are revised panels for a story I’m submitting to my pal Kevin Uehlein’s Visions of the Aporkalypse anthology. I highly recommend getting in on this action. It’s gonna be hilarious. He’s taking drawing, writing, comics, whatever. So do it.

As had been promised months ago, the real story of how I got a new tooth. Careful observers may notice the typical fat outlines are missing in this strip. I tried primarily using the pen. How do we feel about that?

I confess, it took me a long time to sign on to this project, and even then I dragged my heels. It’s already been done, I said. And, why should we step on the ladies’ toes, I whined. But Josh Kramer can pursuade with a fearsome diligence unheard-of since Henry Clay. So, I contributed to the Beef Steak 2011 calendar. Canto made an impressive list of contributors (with links), and calendars are available from him and from Josh.

Each month pairs up to CCS (and environs) cartoonists drawing each other doing manly jobs. I was matched with Jesse Mead, a funny cartoonist and deft stylist, and we got the month of February. February is ripe with holidays to riff on, but what could be sexier than signing bills in the Oval Office on President’s Day? It must get all hot and steamy every time that quill touches parchment.

I know that maybe it’s unfair to consider the presidency a manly job, but that’s been the precedence so far. Maybe the Tea Baggers will get some sort of momentum behind a female candidate someday. You know, the kind who always talks about motherhood and promises to strip women’s rights in the uterus and at the workplace. The kind we can rally behind for promising to slash funding for needy families, like school lunches, head start and health care. Oh what a day that will be.

Update: Apperently there was never a working caption on this thing: That’s Paradisa’s Rockit Rocket from Planet Nymphonomena. Totally unrelated to this post. More at nymphonomena.tumblr.com

Recently I’ve been working day and night, then lazing about at home for hours staring at a screen, often in a state of effed-up-ness. Also eating out too much, but eating local at home, and having overnight visitors on the weekend. We go out and do touristy things and then go to a hip place and drink micro brews. That’s exactly how I lived when I lived in New York!

The difference is all the time I spend here making comics, reading comics, and talking about comics. Which isn’t to mention the time I spend analyzing movies, watching animation, or with a group of friends trying to one-up each other with crazy stories or better jokes. And also seeing magnificent vistas as frequently as when my 14th-floor dorm window looked onto the sun setting behind the Empire State Building. Here instead of stone towers I’ve got rivers, hills and trees. I can dig it, but sometimes I still long for the Big Shitty. At least here in White River I’m still surrounded by ambitious, driven and funny people.

Is this a burden on your RSS feeds, dear readers? Have you had it up to here with walking wieners? This page started with a horse and a bird. My beloved Caitlin actually asked me to draw the horse in order to distract me from drawing a penis person. Lo and behold, I came back to this spot months later and what should pour out of my brush pen? A pouty, veiny cock cutey and his happy pussy pal. Then I thought about how she looked like those creatures you’re supposed to knock over at the carnival. So it goes!

[ click'n'big | © King Features, scanned from Fantagraphics' Popeye vol 4 ]

This made me laugh aloud while I was pooping. I guess it’s just that funny to me to see a really tiny guy bopped with so little effort by a really big guy. Because I’m a bully at heart. The action’s counter to the reading flow (right to left, not left to right), and somehow that may have made it funnier to me. Something about how in the third panel, he’s just completely disappeared, with an X marking the spot where he was (we are on a pirate ship, after all). And then, it just seems like he’s been suspended in the air forever. He’s traveled so far that Popeye didn’t even see him get punched out. But Castor Oyl* being Castor Oyl, he’ll crack wise even as he flies over the deck with a black eye. I just can’t stop gushing. I think the action lines against the stark black somehow made it funner to me. And now that I’m looking again, do you think maybe he’s been sailing through the air so long that he’s unconscious in the fourth panel, and then come to again by the fifth?

I love Thimble Theater.**

*That’s Olive’s brother, and the erstwhile star of the strip.

**That was the name of the strip at the time.