I’ve got some doodles from the last semester up at the CCS Visiting Faculty blog! Also representing are my buddies Melissa Mendes and David Yoder. What a semester jam-packed with Livin Legendz!! Here’s a lidl preview–some drawings of Kim Deitch that I didn’t submit to the blog. Instead I horded them to share with you, my Dear Sweet Pals.

And his hands. He has the longest, cartooniest, expressive-est figners I’ve ever seen. Special bonus: they’re actually square at the end! Like a Kirby hand!!

To see my crowning Deitchievement, check out that Visiting Faculty, aight? And by the way, I keep forgetting to mention that Oak & Linden issue # 2 is now available at the shoppe. Keep your inner consciousness alert for #3, dropping in the fall.

Sorry my posts have been a bit sporadically lately. There have not only been a whole buncha deadlines, but also there’s been a crazy string of unseasonably warm weather in the V-T (talkin 70s–even 80º!!). I’m also sorry to say they’re gonna keep on bein sporadic until May! I’ll try to keep bringing you something new once a week, at least. I just don’t wanna let nobody down. This might be bad timing, but I’m also starting in on this newfangled thing, the “twittle,” the “tweedle?” Whata you call it? Anyhow, enough of that. Tweet and Retweet went out in a boat, Tweet fell off, who was–http://twitter.com/paddymacjr, OK????

Well, there is plenty of news. Big news! All of it related to this first item: I’ll be at table G4 at MoCCA Fest next weekend, so if you’re in the New York area, please stop on by. It’s Saturday and Sunday at the “Fightin 69th” Regiment Armory on Lexington Ave between 25th and 26th. I’ll be debuting Oak & Linden issue #2 there, which’ll be available at the shop after I get back. And! my work will also be appearing in a few anthologies:

1. Caboose, a tabloid-size extravaganza all about White River Jct, VT, distributed for free
2. Tag Team Comics, “a round robin cartooning adventure” that blends factory-style job separation with jam comic togetherness (a full description awaits you at the other end of the link)
3. San Papel–Westerns! And perfect bound! I drew the cover, remember?

Mayhap this will pique your interest until next weekend. It’s the new Oak & Linden cover some time in its second trimester. I’ll post the finished baby juuuuust before the actual Fest, so I hope your breath is bated!

Well, I guess I slipped. If you’re wondering what I’ve been up to, it’s basically been this:

Yes, that’s right, it’s spring break time at the Center for Cartoon Studies! I’m waystid! Not too long ago, I wrote about my boy Steve Ditko and his Objectivist obsession, Mr. A. I’m afraid it’s a little, uh…verbose, but if you like Steve D, you might like it.

What else, what else? Gabby returned to the green mountains on my feast day, and wrote all about it, and it was too much fun. We all miss him very much in Vermont, especially Yours-Truly, as a quick troll through his comments will attest. Speaking of missing people, this delightful episode was immediately followed by my own return to the swamps of Connecticut. My co-writer-for-life, Caitlin, met me at my parents’ house, and we had delicious food and cookies and beers, and it was lovely. We rubbed elbows with my dear old friends Danielle and Chad, and spent most of the weekend just sitting on the porch. Danielle and her family were mourning her grandfather, Dick Shand, and we all went to his simple, sweet funeral, surrounded by his family and friends, in a church that must have been plucked from Western Ireland and plopped down in the Hudson Valley. I think maybe the whole town of Pearl River was transplanted from those emerald shores. And now I’m in good ol’ Brooklyn where spring showers are sprinkling the forsythia–forsooth! More friends and beers and fun times and celebrations of the return of Persephone from the Underworld are sure to follow.

Aaaaaanyhow, if this post hasn’t been vernal enough for you yet, what if we were to celebrate the return of sports I care about with this helmet decal I drew for my baby brother Jack, and for the Wooster Generals varsity LAX club.

Yesterday I was explaining the premise of Curb Your Enthusiasm to somebody, and today I watched a bunch of clips on YouTube. The thing that Larry does best is end his seasons with a serious kicker–it’s the punchline for the uber-joke that was being told for the last couple of months. Like, what about that third season?? Or the sixth season (which I still haven’t seen, but have heard enough about to feel like I had)??!! And then, through watching clips, I came across this LD-Marty Scorsese stuff. And it’s funny. It’s a great sendup of gangster movies. But it doesn’t look at all like Scorsese shot it. Then I thought about how HBO shows tend to look cheap. They’re written wonderfully, and with terrific acting and directing, but most of them look like they’re shot with a camcorder in a basement. A couple exceptions are Flight of the Conchords and especially Sopranos. (And I know there are others, but I’m not about to do the kind of research that it takes to write something well! So deal with it!!)

Maybe this low-budget style makes it easier to pay great actors, and allow great writers to take as long as they want to come up with something. And maybe it’s essential to the improvisational, or live performance, quality of Curb and Tenacious D. Anyhow, once streaming HBO exists officially, all I’ll do anymore is watch it.

Now I’m back in New England, but not the mountains of Vermont yet, folks, for now I’m in the swamps of Connecticut. I’m in Mom and Dad’s living room, and he’s workin the P90X while I write. This morning Caitlin did the woman in the gray suit commuting thang on Metro-North down to The City. She and I watched Schmavatar on Christmas, and I’ll admit it was interesting, especially that crazy bio-luminescent flora and fauna, and the only times I felt overly aware of the fact I was looking at CG were the times when real people were in fake helicopters. There was some really dumb dialogue, beat-you-over-the-head parallels to the Iraq war, colonialism and the environmental movement. But still, it’s nice that somebody is addressing (and entertaining) a mass audience with these liberal polemics. And there were some really exciting action sequences, and a cool alien concept that I won’t divulge lest I be called a spoiler. I forgot to mention this galling fact: the Na’vi subtitles were written in…PAPYRUS!When I get back to my home/office computer up north, I think I’ll post the full Captain Walton, since its plot so closely parallels the Av’s, right down to hot, blue alien babes and mining for rare crystals.

Oh, here’s another diary doodad I forgot to show ya! A bit cutesy, yes, but that’s what sells, kid.

All my blog friends have been blogging awesome/hilarious stuff and I haven’t been reading it! Even Devon returned from nowhere. Sorry Devon, I don’t think you’re awesome or hilarious. jaykaying, oh my g! So now I’m writing too.

Here’s the deal. Basically I’ve just been drawing portraits of BFFs lately. One for what’s become the defunct-est artists’ community/blog I’ve ever seen, and the other for, of all places, Slate!

A couple weekends ago Jen played me this song. It roolz. Love the weird operatic soprano.

I just want to properly acknowledge all the sites that linked to the Inspiratomatic, especially Pop Candy, Neatorama, Fecal Face, Buzz Feed, The Presurfer, Ueba (in Portuguese and in English), QBN, Boar’s Head Tavern, the How Design Blog and The Little Chimp Society. This is not to mention all those social bookmarkers on Stumble Upon, Twitter, Facebook, Del.icio.us, etc. Thanks.

And check out the young Abraham Lincoln who must journey through time and space to end injustice wherever, and whenever, it stands! (Comic coming up at I am the Last VCR.)

You may have noticed that this and the last posts’ drawings are particularly sexual and wiener-oriented (I checked the spelling Cait, it is “ie,” not an exception to the rule – I <3 U), blame Alfred Kubin. A few weeks ago Caitlin and Danielle and I went to the Neue Gallerie and looked at a show of his drawings and watercolors. It had sort of hokey mood elements, like creepy silhouettes behind windows and a room with period artifacts and brooding German music, but this stuff actually did its part in adding to the atmosphere, especially because it was relegated mainly to the hall and away from most of the artwork. I had no idea the man existed until Danielle said we should go see the show. Exquisitely disturbed, monstrous stuff. Sex and death and terrible beasts and bleak landscapes.

And speaking of terrible beasts, you can bet this wang would have been longer if I had known from the beginning that this was a horse man.

The Inspiratomatic has gotten a really positive response from my dearly beloved, so I got a domain for it. I’m gonna see if it can’t make at least a minor splash in the Blagoblogosphere. Just a heads up. So look out!

Speaking of Dr. Strange, I drew a picture of him (below). In my never-ending quest for accurate detail and my nerdy desire to stay “on model,” half way through doodling the occult surgeon, I looked up drawings of him by co-creator Steve Ditko on the Google. I had read through his adventures in the Marvel Essentials format, which is a big soft cover, black & white newsprint book. I thought the crazy character designs and psychedelic dreamscapes were basically the coolest thing to ever happen in super hero comics. Then, thanks to the Google and Sanctum Sanctorum Comix, I saw it in color. Whoah. God bless those little old ladies in Connecticut that meticulously cut out all those halftone screens in these acid candy rainbow hues.

Here’s that follow-up I promised. These are marked as copyright of Field Publications, but it looks like they belong to the Dr. Seuss Collection at the University of California, San Diego. They’re from a collection my mom found at a used book store called Dr. Seuss Goes to War: The World War II Cartoons of Theodor Seuss Geisel. It’s by Richard H Minear and was published by The New Press, New York, 1999.

Apparently the good doctor drew political cartoons from 1941 to ‘42 for PM, a liberal New York rag, before he joined the service making instructional and propaganda films. Seeing this many of his drawings back to back to back pointed out how clearly Seuss used the silhouette to improve legibility. It’s a classic trick of cartooning and animation, that an action is clearer if it can be judged by the shape of the figure against the background (this is also a trope of character design). So, rather than sipping a drink held in front, cartoon characters turn their heads sideways and gulp it from an uplifted hand. Anyhow, the dude gets it.

I’ve also been reading Popeye and Krazy Kat and Little Nemo comics lately, and I feel like I could stand to incorporate some of the frontal, theatrical nature of old comic strips into my own work. I tend to compose cinematically, with camera angles and a sense of space, but I’m really drawn to the clarity and elasticity when the characters are at the front of the frame, and the scenes are behind them. This is something that’s worked for book illustration since the illuminated manuscripts. But what do I know? Maybe my overly-rendered backgrounds are my thing. Maybe I’m more a product of the movie theater than the stage.

Okay! That’s enough art school blah blah blah for today. Here are those drawings I’m ripping off: