Happy Halloween from the Tethered Hawk!

We had a Halloween party at the after-school hangout spot I volunteer at (Somewhere Else), and watched Young Frankenstein with our projector.  We have blackboard walls there, and my friend Dave made the brilliant suggestion of tracing a freeze frame from the movie on the wall, which I did.  The party was a blast; the staff are awesome, lots of kids came in costume, I couldn’t ask for a better group of young people to spend time with in general, and I got to eat lots of chili dogs, which are among my favorite world cuisine.  Mergatroid.  Here are some of the staff:

It was a great end to a really crazy month.  Stressful, fun, busy, exciting, frustrating, relieving, tiring, and many other descriptions apply.  I have been doing much less drawing than I could have due to being very tired pretty much every day, so I’ve been feeling really guilty about how procrastinative I end up, as well as how little I’ve added to this page.  I went to a sweet comic convention, too, and haven’t even posted pictures!  But I’m slowly finishing up the stuff I’m doing for various people who’ve asked me to do things, and I hope November holds more energy and focus, and some actual finished projects.  For my friends’ sake, I sure hope so.  Soon, I’m gonna post some fun vaguely Halloween-related stuff, so check back in a few days for some visual stimulation.  Love and peace!

A Forest of Teeth

Well, my 24-hour comic is up!  Click the image below to go straight there.  You may notice I made a grouped page for the (two, so far) 24-hours I’ve done.  The ‘Martial Role Models’ one from last year is right under the new one.  Uh… that’s about it!  Oh, I should mention to the purists that not only did I not ink it, I also wrote in about half the text after I got home.  It was all in my head, though, from the thumbnail stage, I swear!  Except for the Dryad’s “song” in the middle…  that I wrote afterward.  So, basically a total 24-hour comics day failure.  Oh, well– there’s always next year!

I survived ‘24-hour Comics Day’!!!

Here’re the folks who started Oct. 3rd at 10 am:

…you can check the link for some blogs and pictures.  This was my second year doing it.  Last year I only drew 14 pages, but they were all finished and snazzy.  This year I drew the full 24 pages (!!!), but only in pencil.  Once again, my visionambision ran away with my ability to actually perform physical acts within a 24-hour space of time, and I was rendered powerless to ink.  But I have to say that I am really pleased with the final results, though I have no idea if I’ll actually finish up the art and stuff or not…  I’m thinking of simply turning the blue pencils into greyscale on Photoshop and adding a bit of color, maybe.  We’ll see.

As an experience, this year’s 24-hour was outstanding.  We had a ton of fun people, many of whom performed with outlandish skill and pluck, coming up with some totally rad comics that I can’t wait to see all put together.  We a had a bunch of people connected to the Minneapolis College of Art and Design attending this year, and they really made the rest of us look like crap.  Walking around peeking, I felt like I was taking a tour of an animation studio or something!  I met some great new comic nerd friends, and got to play some of my own music for everyone this year, which was a real treat.  Cheers to Carlos, Vern and Zach, who I had some really nice chats with.  I hope I can run into those guys more in the future!  I was kind of bummed when it was all over because I had so much fun hobnobbing and lallygagging that I totally forgot to blog at all during the night.  Bummage.

Another thing that made it really great was the fact that by putting inking out of my mind as the night went along, the task of drawing all night and day took much less out of me than last year.  Inks, especially with a brush, take so much fine motor skill and concentration that you end up locking every muscle in your body up without thinking about it, and it really strains you.  At least, it does for an inking amateur like myself.  But the pencils flowed smooth and easy all night, and my sketches came out surprisingly clean, with not a whole lot of wasted line.  And the whole time I was just really happy with the story that grew from my four randomly-selected dictionary words that I started the event with.  As a hint of what’s to come, those words were: THEORY, CONVALESCE, DRYAD, and ORTHODONTICS.  That’s right, baby.  You couldn’t ask for a better narrative setup.

And to top it all off, Dana made a truckload of the best freakin’ cranberry-oatmeal-white-chocolate-chip cookies ever, increasing everyone’s quality and productivity by over 23.4 percent.  Oh, here’re the rockstars who persevered until 10 am the following day (to be fair, Danno Klonowski should also be there, having taken off only moments before.  He stayed the whole time even though his comic was finished long hours before.  What a star!):

Sorry to say you won’t be able to see the scans of my comic right now, as there aren’t any.  Soon, though!  I’ll get ‘em on here ASAP.  In the meantime, click the link below to check out other people’s stuff.

Peace and love, and stay tuned to the Tethered Hawk!

http://24-hourcomic.blogspot.com/

News of Ultimate Sweetness, plus Props

Uh, no art to post today (soon, though), but some amazing news:  in the last two weeks I have put in about 18 hours in my new job as an intern at the art studio of Peter Gross, one of the creators behind the Vertigo comics book “Unwritten“!!!

It’s a really fun comic to work on, and Peter’s work environment makes it a dream job.  The only difficult aspect is the 1-hour-each-way commute, making it hard to put a ton of hours in.  But it’s the first genuine, bonafide “art job” I’ve ever had!  (…not counting a year’s stint in High School as the cover artist for a video game catalogue put out by a local gaming store- perhaps something that would fun to post here for nostalgia’s sake someday.  I got paid in unlimited free video game time at their little lounge area, which is a story in and of itself…)

Anyway, I’m more excited and honored than I can even say, since I my portfolio was pretty unprofessional, with not a lot of real “comicky” content.  On that note, I am extremely grateful and indebted to Danno Klonowski, Dan Olson, Ted Anderson, and Steve Stwalley for being agents of my recent artistic opportunities, which really fleshed out my portfolio.  These dudes are awesome, and make me so excited to be a part of the Cartoonist Conspiracy.  If you aren’t a part of one, you should be.  Make your own cell today!

But my greatest debt belongs to Clarence Thrun, who, though we never hang out and I never get to do anything cool for him, has name-dropped me all over the place and is the one actually talked to Mr. Gross and found out about the opportunity.  In fact, if it wasn’t for Clarence, I would never have found out about Kevin and Zander Cannon, who connected me with the Cartoonist Conspiracy in the first place!  And I guess I might as well send out the ultimate props in all this to my very own brother Benjamin, who introduced me to Clarence, and has always been one of my biggest fans and supporters.  All these guys have played parts in making the last year one of the most exciting, entertaining, and motivating years in my whole life!  What does the future hold?  What goofy, cartoonish wonders lie over the horizon?  Stay tuned to find out as I do!!!

PS– coming up soon, I’ll write a run-down of what my duties at Peter’s studio actually include, and what it’s like to see comics made from the ground up.  It’s crazy fun!

Celebrating Bad Poetry Day

For the tiny minority of you who didn’t know that August 18th was national Bad Poetry Day… it was.  We held a reading at Somewhere Else, the hang-out spot we staff at in Cambridge.  Don’t you wish you could staff at a “hang-out spot”?  I did, when I was seven and watched a lot of “Silver Spoons“.  Dreams DO come true!

Anyway, here’s a picture of us getting ready for it,

Click “read more” to experience the three poems I crafted just for the occasion.  Drumroll, please:

Viking. Tattoo. Mutant puppy.

I have a tip (recently discovered) for any parents out there who enjoy singing lullabies to their kids: learn “There’s a Hole in the Bucket (Dear Liza, Dear Liza).”  It’s a very calming song with a nice rhythm, and if you can make slightly different voices for Henry and Liza, it’s entertaining, too.

And with that randomness out of the way, here are a couple of recentish drawings, just to spice up the site while I’m working on other things:

This is an illustration for a church biking/camping trip to Alexandria, the “Birthplace of America”; I’ve done a t-shirt design for them the last four years.

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Every few weeks I get re-convinced I need a tattoo.  I’m holding out for the perfect design idea, though, and it hasn’t appeared yet.  This one comes dang close, though.  Any suggestions?

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And here’s… …       …      …anyway, here it is.  I was in a Jim Woodring mood.  Take him with you in your heart today; he needs love.

Forty-eight Pages of AWESOME!!!

Well, the Big Funny gallery opening party-o-rama has come and gone.  And it was…

-~*!!! SO AWESOME !!!*~-

I had only seen two or three of the other comics online in the weeks before the show, so 90% of the content was totally new to me.  (I had to skip Thursday’s Conspiracy jam where they were handing out copies to contributing artists early.)  It was a really special thing to be able to see people’s original artwork to begin with, then the (sometimes full-color) print version in the actual newspaper.  I was really blown away by the overall quality of the work; if you haven’t seen it, it’s really worth ordering a copy, even for the 10-dollar online price (which includes shipping), or you can buy it for 5 at the actual gallery.  I want to shout out some props (‘cuz they got hella chops) to Jamie Schumacher and the rest of the Altered Esthetics crew for putting on a heck of a show.  The gallery made awesome use of space, and made dying of muggy suffocation almost fun.  Man, big crowds can breathe!  It was fun to be in the same room with all these cool people who had contributed to the project, to see all our work together for the first time, together.  (I’m totally available for advanced English sentence construction, by the way.  Call me.)   Also, I really hope Steve Stwalley gets some attention for the great writing in the “articles” and “editorials” on the front page, which were actually one of my favorite parts of the paper; he’s a great writer.

I’m just so fortunate to have been connected with this group of people: artists, writers, jokesters, storytellers, draimwaivahs (Garth Marenghi accent) that are all really helping me a ton to get motivated and actually DO SOMETHING!

Speaking of doing something, I really want to accomplish two things this fall.  1) I want to finish the “pitch” comic project I’m doing with Ted Anderson, who is a great comic writer you should pay attention to, because as soon as we make the scene you’ll be using money with our faces printed on it in your everyday transactions.  Because we’ll be RULING THE WORLD.  Or maybe you won’t be using money at all, which is one thing I might implement if I actually could rule the world.  So now you’ll know who to thank when that happens.  And 2) I want to make at least one mini-comic to share with folks who come to FALLCON!  I’ll probably help host the Cartoonist Conspiracy table there, and probably all my good jam buds will be there.  They all do cool self-printed stuff, and gosh-darnit, I want to join the crowd!  Who knows, maybe we won’t be broke by October and I’ll actually have the means to do so.

Lastly, here’re some snapshots from the opening, for your vidial enjoyment!  (You know, the English language is starving for expression.  Only YOU can help.  Make up a word today.  Thank you.)

a bunch of pages on the wall

the crowdthe sweaty, excited dork

HOLY *insert culturally appropriate fecal expletive here* !!!

Being a totally mature and thick-skinned adult making his way in the cutthroat business of comics and freelance artistry, I was hardly fazed at all by the recent review of the Big Funny project mentioned in the previous post, in which (one of my favorite cartoonists) “Ape Lad” Adam Koford of Laugh-Out-Loud Cats fame called Little Emo “the stand out”.  In fact, on an emotional level I hardly even noticed the praise because A) I totally knew Big Funny was going to be seen by people like that and B) I had totally predicted my page to “stand out” from the other 50 amazing artists that contributed.  So yeah, if my wife or housemates tell you that I looked anything like this as I read that review for the first time:

They’re full of crap.

There have been two other reviews, too, which can be seen here and here, which also did nothing to chink my manly Stoicism.  You wuss.

BIG FUNNY! A finished illustration! Hyperlink city!

I have been honored to have been included in having been a part of an amazingly awesome artistic production called “BIG FUNNY“!  It was first mentioned to me a few months ago by my jam bud Steve Stwalley who has both an amazing website and an amazing hairstyle.  He told me that Altered Esthetics, an art gallery in St. Paul, as well as the Minneapolis cartooning studio Big Time Attic, were producing a tribute to classic newspaper comics!  Now this alone made me quite the excited little lad, but when Steve said that it would be around 40-50 area artists doing full-color, full-newspaper-page comics, one page per person, all printed as an ACTUAL NEWSPAPER of nothing but said comics, I pretty much peed my pants and jumped over the moon.  Don’t try doing that, by the way.  It chafes horribly.  Anyway, I did one last month, and it was just printed last week (I think) and I got to peek at the finished product on jam Thursday.  I was only barely able to contain my urge to once again jump over the moon in pee-pants, thanks to the still-fresh memory of the chafing.  I don’t know who’s reading this, and where you are, and if you’re going to be able to purchase this thing, but if you can, DO IT.  It’s WAYYYYYY more impressive and fun than I ever thought it would be.  There is a BOATLOAD of amazing artists in it, and I’m insanely fortunate and, in truth, flattered to death to have been included among them.  There is also a gallery showing of the originals at Altered Esthetics, the time and place of which you can check out by clicking here.  OH MY GOSH!!!  I’m really excited about it, especially because I’ve finally been able to do a tribute to my all-time favoritest newspaper comic (well, pretty much my favorite art-y thing ever-ever), “Little Nemo in Slumberland”!  For the sake of education, here is a link to Wikipedia’s page on Winsor McCay, the amazing creator of the comic.

Just so you can see how my homage pales miserably in comparison, here is one of his strips (from 1905!!!):

…and here is my entry to Big Funny, “Little Emo in Slumbaland”:

Uh… the humor in mine is WAY too obscure, and I’ve constantly regretted having chosen such a dumb idea.  Little Emo only talks in song lyrics characteristic of an emo music fan (I think), and the denizens of Slumbaland speak in a rotten attempt at hip-hop Ebonics.  Cuz it’s Slumb*A*land, get it?  Like Timbaland?  Right?

I’ll write a formal letter of apology to the entire world later.

Still alive!

Hey, world!  What’s happenin’ with you?   Lots of stuff going on, and some cool drawing opportunities have popped up.  I’ll post some projects later, but tonight I just wanted to update my “Jam Panels” page with frames from the last couple of International Cartoonist Conspiracy jams at Diamond’s coffee shop in Minneapolis.  So, even though I just linked to it in orange back there, here, again, is the link to the Jam Panels page.  Here.  To see Jam Panels.  ‘Cuz I know that’s what you navigated your way here to see.  But check back in the next couple of days for some actual real illustration postings!  Whee!  Later, dude!