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.

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!

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.

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.

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

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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: