There’s been a whole lot else going on since the days when I was last a steady blogger. For instance, at SPX back in September, I debuted a new Oak & Linden mini featuring the Grown-Up Babies. It’s called Dental Damned!!, and if you follow this blog, you’ve read it…

…in BLACK & WHITE!! You poor sucker! It’s a full-color comic! And yesterday I posted it on my website. (I also posted a recent illustration, with layout and colors by Michelle Ollie, and featuring a cousin of Wilma Whistlepig.) Some day soon, when I get my grubby fingers on some capital, I’ll print some more Damned minis and provide them for sale at my shoppe. But why wait until then, when you can read it now for free? Am I a great businessman or what?? I’ll also eventually show you the original art for the covers, and I’ll blather on for a bit about why I’ve grown to love yellow ink.

I drew this in homage to Lawrence Lee Dirk III’s Grim Bard. Last year at the CCS Telegraph Studio, he would warm up for drawing his comics by making self portraits in the adopted styles of his classmates, or eventually drawing the Bard inhabiting his piers’ comics. Then, I think he got back to doodling super heroes like a good member of the Merry Marvel Marching Society. I gave the image above to Law after he had whipped up this little number:

As a longtime superhero reader, Lawrence is a teasing student of showmanship and merchandising. He loves making peripheral products, like posters and plush dolls, archly posing himself as a snake oil salesman pushing his goods on unsuspecting kids.

I think some of his mocking commercialism rubbed off on my Baby Pat material, which has better allowed me to have my own way with autobiography, and I’d say the babies have been better for it. Memoir is a form I don’t take naturally to. It can feel desperate or needy to me for middle class white kids to slavishly record and draw their own unremarkable existence…but maybe I’d better back off that rant for now. Anyhow, our’s is a time of Self as Product.

So anyway, Lawrence countered with Wilma Whistlepig (of much Farmy Acres fame). And get this, he even cut out little stand legs for her so she could admonish me from next to my drawing table. I couldn’t best it. I haven’t. And then at the end of the year, he gave each of his classmates a mini of his complete, funny, Golden Book-sized The Grim Bard and the Immortal King’s Crescendo. So now I double owe him! I’ve also been having lots of fun following Law’s blog, even though I’ve seen everything he’s posted, just because he’s a delightful writer.

Well, after all this, my boyfriend Ben got a bit jealous and made a mashup with three of his own characters impersonating three of mine–one of whom has not yet even made her debut to the world outside White River Junction. (So look out, cause Anita’s cooommmmmin!!*)

I love Ben and I love his Grump Toast comics. From bottom-left that’s Unfortunate Face as Izzy, Asphalt Monroe as Anita and Pinky Palms as Steve. Ben actually drew this when I was pretty deep down in the dumps, feeling both stretched thin and disappointed in myself.

In particular, I felt like I’d stopped seeing any progress on Petrified Girlfriend. I’m in the middle, which people always say is the hardest part. I’m ready to persevere, now, and this week’s New Yorker profile on Pixar writer-director (/new-delver-into-live-action-adventure) Andrew Stanton was inspiring to me. The article [pay link, sorry], by Tad Friend, compares the Pixar production method with the old Studio System. I love sentimental Old Hollywood stuff, and I love most of Pixar’s movies. I want to keep sight of their spirit of upholding a duty to entertain, and to always edit, revise, and improve.

*To the tune of “Rosalita,” not “Santa Claus.” [BACK]

I prefer the Donald Duck mode of dress. Wear a black shirt that stands out against colorful backgrounds, and just let your bush cover your vitals. Call it a Modesty Bush.

Meanwhile! This weekend (and also the following Wednesday), maybe you should check out the Drawn-Out Storytelling shows at The Comic Book Theater Festival at the Brick in Williamsburg (meaning Brooklyn, not Colonial). Some friends and I will be drawing live illustrations to accompany live storytelling, along with a band of instruments you’ve never heard of. For a few, there will be slideshows of prepared drawings, but there’s still live drawing every night. Please come by if you’re in the area. The show dates are:

Friday | June 24 | 8:45
Sunday | June 25 | 8:00
Wednesday | June 29 | 8:45

It’s $15 for a show, but just $5 for any following performance after your first. Still, if it’s outta your price range, I’ll understand. I’d still like to see you while I’m in town. More information about the show is here.

Here’s one I’ve been sitting on for a while. For, like a year. This was when my ex-roommate, my ex-ex!-EX!-rooommate Todd was updating a blog every once in a while. Which was before Dan McCool and I (he hatching ideas from his six heads like Scylla, and I sucking wayfaring cartoonists into a depthless cavity of deadlines and despair as Charybdis) pulled him into the spiraling vortex of Farmy Acres. Now Todd McArthur’s after-work creative time is mine! ALL MINE!*

As I was saying, Todd drew that on the subway in his Moleskine. I said I’d love to see it in color, he said, “So why don’tcha color it?? Neener-nyaaa-nya!!” So I did. I limited myself to the colors (if not the style) of classic comics. This is something I keep doing to myself.

The image is apropos, readers, it’s apropos. And yes, I’ve been looking for an excuse to write “apropos.” Isn’t it so weird that it ends with an “s”? It’s apropos because this is the summer of collaboration. Right now I’m in the process of assisting the acclaimed Joe Lambert as a colorist on an up-coming book. I’m also on a top secret mission with the Nymphonomena crew, as well as some…other stuff…which we’ll get to. Because, I’m trying to get my blog posts back down to a reasonable length. I figure they will as I get back into the habit of writing em.

Speaking of which, the Party Time I alluded to when last we spoke, well, it ended pretty quick. I’ve been running back and forth between Vermont and New York, working long days, fretting, taking meetings, all of it. Real life started again. Just like that! Again I’m starting to see what things I can live without. I want to simplify. I wanna get rid of some stuff. I’m having my lump looked at before I turn 26 and rejoin the legions of uninsured Americans.

Look forward to more regular updates this summer, precious reader. There is much to talk about, and I’ve scanned a buncha sketchbook pages, too.

*As it was once before, in a dream…
–Punctilious Pat

Now that I hit the major deadline, I’m coming back, bit by bit, to the little pleasures I didn’t allow myself in the past three or four months. One was Mario Galaxy 2, another was The Sopranos, I turned on my Google Chat again, checked out some old comics from the Schulz Library (and bought a new one, too), I look forward to reading The New Yorker again, and I keep coming across new time suckers I forgot I used to do all the time. And NOWwww, I’m blogging! I really do have fun writing these, and I hope I’m not the only one being entertained.

There have been a million developments since I went into seclusion. For one, Hicough & Belch the imps are on Top Shelf 2.0, in living color! For another, I found out that hiccough is spelled with two “c”s. What else? Thanks to Brett Warnock at Top Shelf, James Kochalka at American Elf and Tom Spurgeon at The Comics Reporter for linking to the Cartoonist Laureate post! Thanks, too, for new folks that I’ve met at MoCCA Fest and elsewhere for visiting here; I’m sorry if it has looked like a barren wasteblog. There was also some exciting news yesterday, when Rob Clough at The Comics Journal named Nymphonomena one of the Top 25 Mini Comics of 2010 (it’s at #14)! Lots of my Cartoon Studies cohorts are listed as well, and it’s a true honor to be named alongside folks like Kevin Huizenga, Jim Rugg and Damien Jay.

I know that may have been a lot of self-congratulating to swallow, so I thank you all for being such considerate lovers and readers. As I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve got a backlog of doodles, outta-left-field opinions, and new comics to show you, as well as some exciting summer projects coming, many of which are collaborative. This’ll be a pleasant contrast to the past few months of solitary activity and trying (and often failing) to not distract myself with social engagement. I’ll be happy if I/we can pull off only half of our fun activities.

I’ve got so many things I want to show you! There are doodles in my sketchbook, comics and illustrations, and side-by-side comparisons of silkscreen-vs.-laser-vs.-offset printing! But they’ll all have to wait for another day. One fine morning in May, when the fruit trees are all in bloom, perhaps our love can once more blossom. Until then…

MOCCA FEST! MOCCA FEST! MOCCA FEST!

Friends, New Yorkers, countrymen, lend me your eyeballs! I’ll be at table M-11, along the back wall, with hot young cartoonists Beth Hetland, Ben Horak and Josh Kramer. I’ll have a new sampler of Farmy Acres strips and Oaks & Lindens numbers 1–3 (the last with it’s lovely new Pantone color cover), and I’ll be checking out fellow-CCSers’ material up and down the M and H rows. You might like to do the same.

MoCCA Fest is this Saturday & Sunday, April 9 & 10, at the Lexington Avenue Armory, 68 Lexington Ave (between 25th & 26th).

And! Guess what ELSE?!!

For those of you on the other coast, I’ll have some original art and some comics on display at Portland, OR’s Nisus Gallery. They’ll even be open for extended hours during the Stumptown Comics Fest the following weekend (April 16 & 17). The show is called Paneled, and it’ll be on exhibit through the 30th. Check it out at 328 NW Broadway #117 (at Flanders).

Lately I’ve been watching my mega-pal Kevin finishing up what will surely prove to be the sickest comics anthology of 2011. I mentioned it once before, and seeing more work coming in for it, I’m increasingly giddy for its springtime release. Its called Visions of the Aporkalypse, and it features plenty of Swineclopses like that guy up there. Kevin’s been dropping previews on his blog, including two pages from mine own entry. I’m so excited!

Here’s some more piggies. Pot bellies have the most personality and babirusas are even grosser than warthogs (sometimes those upper tusks grow into their heads!!). That’s what I learned.

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.

[ 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.

Guess who’s blowin up The Comics Journal Internets lately? That’s right, it’s your old pal the Toothless Wonder: me. Not that I want to toot my own horn or anything (because I’m pretty sure that would require removing a rib, and I don’t have health insurance for that). Says Rob Clough, about Tag Team, “The clear-line style of Barrett meshed well with Chapman’s heavy ink line.” In Rich Kreiner’s review of the Caboose anthology, you may even notice a fave-bomb:

Several of those faves of mine, though, use localized experiences as the springboard for legitimate, telling — and funny — elaborations on a theme… you know who you are, penguin opining why the Center shouldn’t forsake its cold-weather isolation for a sunnier clime and you “Grown-Up Babies in ‘The Land of No Women.’”

Now, I know my Legion of Imaginary DC-Area Fans is just quivering with anxiety, wondering if I’ll be at SPX, the Small Press Xpo. I’m sorry, true believers, but I won’t. I will, however, be at a new lil’ thang called MICE, for Massachusetts Independent? Comics? Ex…poooo? I think? It’s at the Art Institute of Boston on Saturday, September 25th. So, I’ll see you there, you Brigade of Hypothetical New England Devotees.