Everyone have a great, happy, food-filled Thanksgiving... I'm thankful for my family, home, job, career, representation, comics, barbecue and health.

Also? I'm thankful that I'm not a turkey

Mentioned this in an earlier post, this is the Marvel villains piece I'm working on for a charity auction.




For laughs I went ahead and penciled as many characters as I could without using any reference, just relied on the addled old fan noggin to see how it went. Funny how close but how far you get resorting to memory, the basics usually fall into place, but the details and arrangement of same are almost never on the money. I got close to the target on a few like Doc Doom , Doc Octopus, The Sandman, and The Scorpion, I'll likely find mistakes on these but between the simplistic versions and the fact that the costume details change constantly in the old comics (and that the piece measures 9" by 6"), I'm leaving well enough alone.

I screwed up Magneto several times already even though I know his outfit pretty well after doing a commission with him a few months back. I just haven't liked the way I've drawn him, he's been the big stumbling block so far for some reason. Can't recall much about a number of these goofs save some basic shapes and details, guessing heavily on Modok, The Leader, Loki, The Ringmaster, The Puppet Master and The Abomination, among others, I expect to be doing quite a bit of erasing on those when I break the old comics out. I'll need them for sure to finish up Klaw, Annihilus (barely sketched in), The Enchantress and the Executioner (ditto), etc. I'm drawing blanks on The Super Adaptoid (fitting), the Mandarin, Baron Mordo, they may not make it into the final piece. Ditto The Eel. I've failed at including The Plant Man and The Porcupine, and every time I tried to fit The Beetle in it didn't work, even though I can pretty much draw that idiot by heart. I put a HYDRA agent tin there but somehow another one slipped in and I didn't have room or time for that nonsense, so they're out. Would like to put The Destroyer in there, The Cobra, Attuma, Electro, Kraven, hell, a dozen or three other pen and ink childhood memories, but I'm almost out of space as it is.

Anyway, I started hitting the comics a few weeks back and used them to fix the Rhino and Batroc (I used the cartoony Batroc I drew for the Captain America: Red, White and Blue strip because I knew where the book was, the Rhino ref came from the 70's Spider-man Marvel Treasury edition), but I haven't had a chance to do any work on the piece since then. Anyway, once I get everyone penciled I can ink it up and send it off for the auction, which I believe is slated for early 2010.

I love Thanksgiving. When I was a kid, my mom was going through a phase where she decided the Pagan origins of most holidays made them Satanic, so I didn't have trick-or-treat candy, Christmas trees, or Easter baskets. But there was no taint of Paganism around Thanksgiving -- just the opposite, in fact! Plus, it fits right in with my family's love of potlucks and "make enough to have leftovers" philosophy, so we always celebrated Thanksgiving with abandon.

I'm making three dishes for Thanksgiving this year, which we're having at my brother's house. This is a little excessive, but because I am a vegetarian, I tend to err on the side of caution, lest sausage in the stuffing or bacon in the green beans leave me without Thanksgiving essentials. So tonight I'm making sourdough stuffing (with apples and golden raisins), to be re-baked tomorrow, and I have a game plan to coordinate making a butternut squash and kale bread pudding (the vegetarian main dish) and sweet potatoes tomorrow.

Thanksgiving without turkey is not even an issue, in case anyone is wondering. The side dishes have always been my favorites on Thanksgiving, anyway -- green bean casserole (I make it from scratch, no condensed soup!), mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, stuffing, dinner rolls, cranberry sauce!

Wow, has it really been EIGHT MONTHS since my last eBay auction? Doesn't seem possible... You, my friends, have been woefully under-served! Sorry about that.

BUT ANY-WHO. I have FOUR new pages from Serenity Rose Volume 2: Goodbye, Crestfallen uploaded to the eBayosphere right now, just in time for our current holiday season of gift-giving obligations. This will be the last auction before the book release next month... I figured you die-hard secret internet clubhouse folks deserved one more chance to grab a page or two before the larger comic book world is reminded of my existence in December.

HERE ARE THE THINGS (clicks and such for the listing):












BIdding ends this Monday, November 30th.

Thank you in advance for the biddery! I'm not quite sure when the next set will go up for auction, but I suspect it won't take another EIGHT MONTHS. And, of course, let me know if there's a page you're particularly interested in... I'll try to include it in the next batch.

The bodies have been hidden, the fur has been shaved and arranged into crude hairy pictures, and the pigs have been over-revved. Yes, i think bearfoo.com is very nearly ready. What I of course mean is the site has been kicked into place, the exclusive NEW Bear 4-pager is drawn and finished, and all thats left to do sort through the Bear issues and prepare the artwork.

I'm hoping it will go live on monday. Hoping.

• 19:44 Never trust a bar where a worn well thumbed copy of 'Bartending for Dummies' sits at the end of the counter. #
• 08:14 For those of you keeping score, I am now in Olympia, WA for the next couple days. It's very grey. #

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For Immediate Release: November 24, 2009

Contact Andrew Farago, 415-227-8666, ext. 313
Images Available on Request



Small Press Spotlight on Andy Ristaino

Cartoon Art Museum Exhibition: December 19, 2009 – March 14, 2010




Beginning on December 19th, 2009, the Cartoon Art Museum's ongoing Small Press Spotlight will feature the art of Andy Ristaino.

Andy Ristaino is a cartoonist and animator currently residing in the San Francisco. Originally from Franklin, Massachusetts, he has been drawing comics ever since he could. His first published work, a comic strip based on Greek myths entitled Myth Conceptions, appeared in The Pompeiiana Newsletter when he was in high school between 1992 and 1994. He attended the Rhode Island School of Design majoring in illustration/animation, during which time he self published two issues of his martial arts comedy zine Nightblade The Nearsighted Ninja, and drew a back up story featuring the character Dangerman, in Oz Squad from Patchwork Press.

Ristaino’s first solo book Life of a Fetus, a story about a bored baby who decides to jump out of the womb early and go on a road trip, was published by SLG comics in 1999 and ran for seven issues. This was soon followed by the spin off series The Babysitter, A send-up of Japanese pop culture. All three issue of The Babysitter have recently been collected by SLG comics. Ristaino’s work tends to focus on themes of the strangeness of life and the fragility of the human psyche, claustrophobia, and the odd space between understanding and incoherence. He looks at storytelling as something liquid.

His work has appeared in numerous comic anthologies such as Meathaus S.O.S., Spectrum 16, Tales of Hot Rod Horror, Spark Generators 2, Pet Noir, Go for the Gold, and the soon to be published Popgun vol. 4 from Image comics. His children’s comic the Uncredibly Confabulated Tales of Lucinda Ziggles was a regular fixture in the now defunct Nickelodeon Magazine.

Ristaino anticipates the publishing of his next SLG graphic novel Escape from Dullsville, a 288 page collection of Life of a Fetus with over 80 pages of unpublished material, sometime in 2010.

For more information about Andy Ristaino’s works and upcoming events, please visit http://www.skronked.blogspot.com and http://www.skronked.com.

About the Small Press Spotlight:

San Francisco has been a hotbed of innovative, groundbreaking comic art since the late 1800s with the advent of the modern comic strip. In the1960s, the Bay Area gained further notoriety when the underground comix movement launched from San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district. Today, some of the biggest names in alternative and small-press comics hail from the Bay Area, and the Cartoon Art Museum's Small Press Spotlight focuses on the works of these talented individuals.

The Small Press Spotlight is funded in part by The Zellerbach Family Foundation and The Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation.


]{[^]}[
Cartoon Art Museum € 655 Mission Street € San Francisco, CA 94105 € 415-CAR-TOON € www.cartoonart.org
Hours: Tues. - Sun. 11:00 - 5:00, Closed Monday
General Admission: $6.00 € Student/Senior: $4.00 € Children 6-12: $2.00 € Members & Children under 6: Free

The Cartoon Art Museum is a tax-exempt, non-profit, educational organization dedicated to the collection,
preservation, study and exhibition of original cartoon art in all forms.

Colouring a sketchbook doodle.

Thought Bubble was a lot of fun and it was great to see folks and catch up
and loll about after the show. Thanks to Lisa and team for putting on a friendly
and enjoyable con.
Missed the notice about the SLG sale while I was away at the festival. But would
encourage everyone to buy books directly from them. Here's a link to my own books:
http://bit.ly/8nw6pL
But there's all kinds of luvverly Xmas-presenty type things you can buy from Evan Dorkin,
Woodrow Phoenix, Ian Carney, James Turner, Faith Erin Hicks, Scott Saavedra and many more.
One of my absolute favourite books that is unfairly overlooked is A Bag of Anteaters
on sale for a mere dollar:
http://bit.ly/5AtkG1
Brilliant stuff from Ian Carney and Jonathan Edwards (both of whom I hope will do more
comics at some point).
Also, given away free is Tick Tock Follies:
http://bit.ly/7k5AWU
Would love to see Butler and Hogg's Killer Fly get collected one day.
Dig around and treat yourself to some of the excellent eccentric oddities on offer.

********************************************************
COMING SOON:

Glister: The Faerie Host
January 4th 2010
# Paperback: 80 pages
# Publisher: Walker (4 Jan 2010)
# ISBN-10: 1406320501
# ISBN-13: 978-1406320503

Extras include:
'Glister Vs The Toll Troll' short story
'Home to Roost' short story
'Glister and the Family Tree' preview

Glister: The Family Tree
March 1st 2010

OUT NOW:

Glister: The Haunted Teapot
64 pages
Walker Books
£4.99
ISBN-10: 140632048X
ISBN-13: 978-1406320480

Glister: The House Hunt
80 pages
Walker Books
£4.99
ISBN-10: 1406320498
ISBN-13: 978-1406320497

Originally published at Possible Impossibilities. You can comment here or there.

I recently watched the BBC series Lost in Austen, about Amanda Price, a contemporary London woman in love with the world of Jane Austen, who discovers, as it happens, she has a magic door in her bathroom that opens into the world of Pride and Prejudice. She and Elizabeth Bennet switch places, and soon Amanda finds herself fouling up the plot of her favorite novel, as her unconventional appearance and manners intrigue or infuriate everyone around her.

It was a frothy, enjoyable syllabub of an entertainment, a bit of Mary Sue writing on the part of Guy Andrews, taken up with zest by the cast. It’s like the make-believe games I played when I was a kid, inserting myself into my favorite books or moments in history. (Like Amanda Price, my presence invariably altered the way things were supposed to go — I think I once was an assassin who took out Octavius before he became emperor, thus allowing Cleopatra and Antony to win the war with Rome.) What was fun about this series was the facility of the plot: Andrews needed his heroine to go to Jane Austen land.  A magic door to Jane Austen land appears in her bathroom. Why? Who knows. Turns out it doesn’t really matter.

It reminded me that I just need to push past the hardest part of plotting for me — getting the plot going. How will I set it all in motion? I ask myself. Will it be believable? I didn’t have qualms like that when I was nine years old and writing a story about my friends and I becoming invisible through the means of a batch of pancakes made from an improvised recipe. I can be a bit more sophisticated about it now, but what I need to remember is that the forward motion is what is important.

So now that I’ve finished the second revision of Sliver of Light, I’m going to try to plot out a graphic novel that has a premise that is a little unbelievable, just like Lost in Austen and the stories I wrote as a kid. I’ve been stuck, but I’ll get myself unstuck and just get on with it already.

• 09:29 "How I spent my Sat night stranded in the snowy high Mountains with no way to contact anyone" posted on the blog thing: is.gd/52HJI #

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"How I got stranded in the Northern Idaho Mountains with no way to contact the outside world on a Saturday Night."

Saturday, Nov 14th

Now, let me go over the entire day cause a lot happened that was fascinating and horrifying. I did go into this whole trip wanting ‘ADVENTURE’, but didn’t really expect it.

This is where it happened:


The plan was to head out to two sites on Saturday in the Idaho Mountains before then heading out to Missoula, Montana. To get everything done, and because of the distances needed to be traveled, I had to be out of Coeur d’Alene, ID at 6:30 am. My first site was gauged at being about 2 hours 15 minutes away (about 130 miles away.) Of course, none of this took into account all the snow Idaho had got the night before. It wasn’t much in the towns, but the farmlands (which there are quite a lot of) were covered.

So up at 5:30 am, grabbed an English muffin, and ran out to my car to hit the road. Snow covered all the fields and pine trees making everything look like a life-sized Xmas snow globe. One of the most annoying delays were all the roads winding through the mountains and the slow drivers that I was somehow always found myself stuck behind. It’s like these old women never seen snow before. However, I did wind up rethinking this view when my car started slipping on the roads as I drove through the Nez Perce reservation.

I pulled up to the first site, a power station, around 9 am. The towers were snapping and crackling from the snowy damp weather. As I was out setting up the equipment, a woman stopped and asked me what I was doing. After I explained everything to her and pointed out the low flying helicopter above us. She laughed and said she had been wondering about the helicopter as she spied it with her binoculars. “I thought you were hunting wolves!,” she told me.

( The Rest of the Story )

Designed By: Matty LeBlanc - Ocktober Design

Some highlights from the past couple of months:



We put up a bird feeder on the patio, and Oscar soon found the perfect vantage spot from which to watch them.

Unfortunately, our complex has cut down the tree next to our patio and right outside our bedroom window. The window gets full sun in the mornings, and I miss the pattern of branches that used to be cast in shadow on my curtains. I miss the birds outside the window. I'm not sure why they cut it down or if they're replacing it, but I'm going to find out.



Landry Walker and Belinda Adams got married on Halloween in the Chinese Pavilion in Golden Gate Park. Todd Martinez (manager of Comic Relief) officiated. Landry updated his Facebook status. It was a fun ceremony, with kazoos, and vows by Landry, and it was followed with pizza at Little Star.



Brass, err, plastic knuckles were involved.



And yesterday I spent my birthday with the person responsible for me having a birthday -- and the person responsible for me giving someone else a birthday.

More senseless ramblings, logged on the interwebz. because. you. care:

• 17:42 Yes, my hair can now be described as radioactive in its colour. Brutal Legend night in a few hr's.That is all. Goodnight. #

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• 16:38 After driving through the forests, mountains, & strangeways of WA, ID, & MT, I've come to the conclusion: New Jersey is really not that bad #

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Signing/Reading: Fairest of All

Date: Saturday, November 21, 2009
Time: 1:00pm - 4:00pm
Location: SLG Art Boutiki & Gallery
577 S. Market Street San Jose, CA

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/juIr/~3/UXhMnrgW3QA/web-comic-project-day-153.html

In the early days of Slave Labor (now SLG Publishing) I hated our typesetter. He was slow, surly and didn't seem to appreciate getting our (admittedly meager) business. Costs forced me to keep word counts low and making last minutes changes were nearly impossible. I was unconcerned when the Desktop Publishing revolution killed the typesetter's operation. Desktop Publishing was The Future and I embraced it without reservation. It's no secret that publishing is once again in the throes of a major shift. And it's thrilling. It really is. Watching my son fool around with his new iTouch downloading books and comics is vicariously fun, his enthusiasm very infectious. But this time I do have some reservations. My biggest concern is the parasitic demand that everything be free and the effects of the lopsided burden this puts on independent, unfunded cartoonists. I recognize that the digital environment I choose to work in is what it is. That doesn't mean, however, that I can't try to create a fairer situation for me (and other creators) while maintaining a positive relationship with readers. After all, I'm a comics fan too. But I get the distinct impression that at 49 I'm older than the majority of web comic readers and creators. And that's fine. There's room for everybody. It's just that my experiences and age inform who I am and what I want. I expect that to be reflected more in the Web Project as it moves forward. Consider this a mini-statement of purpose. And as for my web comic, Java Town, there will be changes that reflect my evolving notions about digital cartooning. More on that soon.

Comics Journal Online Troubles and Immonen Torrented: I try to read The Comics Reporter every day. Tom Spurgeon often says what I want to say but he says it better.

SLG Recession Sale: 40% off comics, graphic novels, stuff -- everything! Lots of great bargains. (This sort of thing makes me crazy, but there is no mention of the sale on the front web page. Just, I don't know, trust in the force I guess and shop 'til you drop.)

http://www.benzilla.com/?p=1904

I normally confine my “shameless commerce” stuff to the Buy Stuff page on my site, but SLG is having a big 40% off sale at the moment, so I thought it’d be worth mentioning.  You can find everything I’ve done that SLG has published all grouped on my creator page.  You’ll get 40% off the [...]

More senseless ramblings, logged on the interwebz. because. you. care:

• 02:06 Project Pitchfork (fave band of all time) - Kaskade : Instead of an Angle - has been running through my head. VNV's Epicentre as well... #
• 02:16 For those not in the know or too lazy to search Wikpedia, VNV Nation's name means 'Victory NOT Revenge'. This is important. #

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• 08:18 Utter brilliance: Daily Show story on 10 year old who won't say Pledge of Allegiance until equal rights: is.gd/4ZG6P #

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