Today’s Animals for Animals original watercolor fundraiser is a Knitting Hedgehog!

What a sweet little fellow.  Maybe he’s knitting a full-body scarf for a weasel friend.

For sale on Etsy!

Today’s Heifer International fundraising painting-for-sale:  a Connected Otter!

It’s not a MacBook.  It’s a ShellBook!  (that’s why it works underwater.)  This otter understands that in today’s wired world, being down on the river bottom eating a fish is no excuse for being out of touch.

Behold!  Another day, another fundraising critter for Heifer International.  These things keep selling immediately!  (If you want a good leap on one then I recommended hanging around my Twitter account between 11 and 3 Pacific.)

I love this one so much, guys.  Witness ye the Leggy Llama.

Also already sold!  I think I’ll start noodging the price up a little bit, since folks seem to be very enthusiastic about both the paintings and the beneficiary.

After I raise $500 I will produce prints so that those of you without much spending money can contribute, too!

Here’s today’s (already sold) painting for my Animals for Animals fundraiser on behalf of Heifer International:  a Possessive Raven!

Turn-offs:  sharing.  Turn-ons:  shiny things.  This one was pretty fun to do – painting in those crazy oil-spill highlights that ravens have in their feathers.  This one was sold for $50, since it took me a bit longer and has lots of colors.

Total raised so far:  $130, which is enough to buy a whole llama or goat!  Two of my favorite ungulates of all time!

I did a raven because so many people suggested it, so if there’s a critter you’d like to see me depict next, post a comment.

Page 162 of Family Man now online!

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And now we’re back to full story pages; a piece from the past.  Woo, even a few weeks off and I feel rusty!  Soon enough we’ll get back into the present day (well, present day circa September, 1768…) and see what Luther’s up to.

Meanwhile, in case you missed it this past weekend, Erika Moen and I, under the supervision of Bill Mudron and Katie Lane, recorded two solid hours of talk about comics, working as a freelancer, and several other topics beside!  I’m editing the podcast version, but you can also view the video Ustream version right here on Erika’s channel. Plenty of questions answered about Family Man!

If you check in here but once a week, please also make sure to keep an eye on this journal or my Twitter feed as I sell off original watercolors (every day possible this month!) to raise money for Heifer International.

And lastly, on the afternoon of the 5th I’ll be at the Legends of Webcomics open house here in Portland with Meredith Gran, Aaron Diaz, that jerk Erika again, and Luke Mahan, selling all sorts of fun and exciting things and, surely, being delightful.  Details here!

Today’s Heifer International fundraising watercolor is a literary hare!

Writing her memoirs, no doubt!  An entire chapter is dedicated to yesterday’s fox and what a doofus he is.  Also what sell-outs bunnies are.

This one sold instantly (wow dang), but there will be more on the way this week!  If you have a request for a particularly fun animal you’d like to see me do, post it in comments and I’ll throw it into the hat.

And, just to start keeping records, Animals For Animals has now raised $80.  That’s enough for four rabbits or half of a llama!

People have started asking if I’ll produce prints of the animals for sale.  The answer is yes, but I want to encourage sales of originals before I start selling reproductions (although I would like for proceeds from print sales to go to Heifer as well).

Stay tuned!

Every year I try to make a Christmas donation to my favorite charity – Heifer International, a wonderful organization that purchases animals (from bees to buffalo)as well as veterinary care and training  for impoverished families the world over.  (Read more on their site.)

This year it’s a bit harder for me to donate than usual, since I’ve made the transition to being a self-supporting artist.  Many of the friends with whom I used to go in on an animal purchase are in the same financial situation.

It seemed to me that this was an opportunity – for me to make things, for you to purchase something lasting, and for a family in the larger world to benefit from it!  For the month of December, I will be creating and then selling watercolor paintings of animals (as often as I can manage!).  When I finish, I’ll count up what’s been raised and then buy the most animal possible!

My offering today:  an enemy of many of the animals Heifer sponsors, a fox!  Little does he realize that his dastardly deeds will ultimately be doing good.

This crafty fellow is on sale at Etsy for $40.  It is a lovely little painting, and I will guarantee arrival by mail to any part of the world in time for Christmas, and that it will be packaged fancy-like.

Chapter 3 of Family Man has begun!

…and there’s a new website!

Change your links, everybody!  Family Man now lives on one single website, and that’s http://www.lutherlevy.com.  It’ll update there every week, and all the notes and extra features you have come to love (or merely tolerate) live there with it, along with many new bells and whistles and an all-over shinyness.

And a new chapter is off and running, with yet more exciting bunny imagery.  Sorry, bunnies of the world; it’s nothing personal.

Happy Thanksgiving to all those of you in the U.S. of A!  Now go play.

Finishing the website and putting together a book pitch have delayed me for another week.  But that’s okay, because it gives me the opportunity to make some long overdue fan-art for the best ever webcomic set in Ancient Rome: SPQR Blues by Klio!

Yessir, that’s Vesuvius in the background.  The volcano is to SPQR Blues what werewolves are to Family Man:  you never know when it’s going to kick in.

SPQR Blues, beyond being a great ensemble soap opera, is also one of those rare works of historical fiction that make the time and place it depicts feel both cozily familiar…and completely foreign.

Klio’s delicate and conservative linework can be consumed in large doses with no dangerous side effects, and the obstacles and heartbreaks of daily life in a complicated society make for very tasty reading as well.

There’s an immense archive available for your reading pleasure, so shoo!  Go read!

Nostalgia.

Remember the 1340’s? We were doing a dance called the Catapult.
You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade,
and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular,
the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework.
Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon,
and at night we would play a game called “Find the Cow.”
Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today.

Where has the summer of 1572 gone? Brocade and sonnet
marathons were the rage. We used to dress up in the flags
of rival baronies and conquer one another in cold rooms of stone.
Out on the dance floor we were all doing the Struggle
while your sister practiced the Daphne all alone in her room.
We borrowed the jargon of farriers for our slang.
These days language seems transparent, a badly broken code.

The 1790’s will never come again. Childhood was big.
People would take walks to the very tops of hills
and write down what they saw in their journals without speaking.
Our collars were high and our hats were extremely soft.
We would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs.
It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.

I am very fond of the period between 1815 and 1821.
Europe trembled while we sat still for our portraits.
And I would love to return to 1901 if only for a moment,
time enough to wind up a music box and do a few dance steps,
or shoot me back to 1922 or 1941, or at least let me
recapture the serenity of last month when we picked
berries and glided through afternoons in a canoe.

Even this morning would be an improvement over the present.
I was in the garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees
and the Latin names of flowers, watching the early light
flash off the slanted windows of the greenhouse
and silver the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks.

As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past,
letting my memory rush over them like water
rushing over the stones on the bottom of a stream.
I was even thinking a little about the future, that place
where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine,
a dance whose name we can only guess.

Billy Collins
photograph by (Eric)

Soon we’ll back to regular updates and I’ll roll out the new website, but in the meantime, here’s our third week of art devoted to some of my favorite comics online.  This week we move away from longform narrative comics and head for strip land, with Arthur (duck) and Flaco (lizard) from Dave Kellett’s Sheldon.

There are many strips online that I enjoy deeply, but Sheldon is the only one that makes me feel like I’m a little kid again, pressing my nose with delight against the daily newsprint funnies while I wolf down a bowl of Rice Chex before school.  Calvin & Hobbes was a strip at the time which, even if I didn’t get every joke, was so exuberant that I loved every panel.  I think 9 year-old me would’ve felt the same way about Sheldon.

As it is, 26 year-old me happily returns to Sheldon every day, snerking at the obscure “grown-up” or pop culture jokes and quietly enjoying the sheer silliness of it all.

Dave Kellett is also a bonafide funnybook scholar and a stand-up fella.  Bless the internet for bringing him to us in this day and age!

My maternal grandfather died a couple of years ago.

We were very fond of each other – he took me to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (a full day and a half drive) from 7th grade through my high school graduation, a gift of immeasurable impact.  He was a bright, curious, caring, and endlessly enthusiastic man. He reacted with genuine joy whenever his didactic little granddaughter held forth on erudite topics.  I still remember his delight upon hearing me tear apart the production of Romeo and Juliet that was one of the first productions we saw together at OSF.

I didn’t ask for anything of his after he passed away; my mother knowingly brought me a few things that meant a lot, but all in all my memories were the most vivid token of our relationship.  Recently, however, his last wife sent my mother a number of his old files.  Including one entire manila folder full of every letter and picture and document I had ever sent him, or that my parents had sent him relating to me.

So I’ve rediscovered verything from short stories I wrote in second grade to novellas I wrote in middle school to graduation notices and e-mails and silly cards.  I haven’t quite had the strength to go through all of it yet, but one thing I did find:  the poem below.  I remember this odd, apocalyptic little poem quite well but had no record of it myself, so knowing that he had it all along is very touching.

And, now that he’s gone, the poem – being as its topic is a girl with a fondness for the departed – takes on a sweet poignance.

Anyway. Here it is.

Annie stayed.

Annie McSalva stood that day
but no one was there to enjoy her stay
only the ghosts had not gone away

Annie remained for the ghosts.

Annie McSalva walked down the streets
her feet tapping sidewalk to various beats
She looked in the theatres, all empty seats

Annie played Hamlet for ghosts.

Annie McSalva read all the books
out loud, in the library, and none gave sharp looks
the ghosts listened well in their crannies and nooks

Annie read on for the ghosts.

Annie McSalva swam in the pond
that led to the gutters and sewers beyond
but nobody stayed to drink that which was fond

to Annie, who swam with the ghosts.

Annie McSalva lay in the sun
and thought that the world had only begun
but the ghosts whispered back that it almost was done

Annie survived with the ghosts.

photo by Nocturnal Bob

Hey hey hey, guess what I got sixteen boxes of in the mail today?  If you guessed it was sixteen boxes of the second printing of Bite Me!, then you win!

As an extra “thank you” to everybody who ordered while the book was reprinting, trusting all the while that I was not going to run off to Cabo with their hard-earned $15, I’m including a nifty print I whipped up just for the occasion.  I promised “Claire and Lucien bein’ silly”, and lo, hopefully this qualifies:

Oh, those crazy kids.  Two peas in a pod, really.  A dead, bloodsucking pod.

It will be a delightful 6×10.5 inches so I can slip it into your book order all handy-like.  If I have any left over, I’ll put the extras online next week for those who might be interested.

Another week, another drawing of somebody else’s character!  Continuing with the unintentional theme of “naked green ladies”, this week it’s Angora from The Meek, by Der-shing Helmer.

Sadly I drew this sucker on Bristol, and had to use my four remaining Colerase pencils – or else I would’ve watercolored again.

I’ve been gawking at The Meek since shortly after it started up, so it was a pleasant surprise to turn up at APE and see actual print copies of the first chunk!

The Meek is one of the few comics that manages to be densely, lushly illustrated… and lively.  Too often an artist will lavish all their time on the coloring or the stylish character design…and forget to inject life through gesture and interaction or, you know, writing.  The result is eye candy that I get bored with about ten pages in.

But Der-shing has been knocking it out of the park for several dozen pages now.  I can’t wait to see where she’s going and how these delightful, elastic characters are going to smack into each other.

Also?  I adore how she draws Angora’s boobs.

Buffalo Bill’s
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeons justlikethat
Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what I want to know is
how do you like your blue-eyed boy
Mister Death

ee cummings
illustration by bone_doll

Pages 159 & 160 now online.

This concludes Chapter Two of Family Man – and therefore Volume One.  Starting today I get to research potential costs for a print edition.  I’ll be shopping it to publishers as well, but since this is, after all, Volume One and therefore presents a bit of a risk, I’m anticipating the need to self-publish it until I have the structure for Volume Two mapped out in a format understandable by other human beings.

I’m expecting that Volume One will be pricey to print; the comic loses legibility when printed in fewer than four colors (even though it LOOKS like the only color is sepia-green).  So stay tuned for a possible pre-order fundraising drive.  If you’ve had a great experience getting a color project printed, please refer me to your print vendor!

BUT, THE BIG NEWS…

…I’ll be taking three weeks off of updating the comic to get a head start on the next chapter.  In the meantime I’ll be updating with drawings, a podcast, and other extras.  When I come back, Family Man will move onto a single, cohesive self-hosted website.

The comic itself, blog updates, notes, gallery images, cast page…all brand-new and all at Lutherlevy.com.  The site will have a complete (and extremely sexy) Comicpress overhaul courtesy my slightly unhinged design skills and the eternal patience of Comicpress guru Tyler Martin.

No ads!  No subscription fees!  Still free as always, just lots prettier and in one place.

I’d like to thank Joey Manley and the other folks who’ve pitched in at Webcomics Nation for providing a really great service.  WCN has saved me a lot of hair-tearing in the past few years.  If setting up your own webspace and installing Wordpress and Comicpress and customizing your theme and all that just feels utterly daunting to you, I totally recommend wandering over to WCN and checking out their features.

And now, back to the drawing board!

I’ve realized lately that I haven’t been drawing much outside of comics and freelance work.  To heck with that!  If you’re going to draw for a living you need to find ways to preserve the joy, experimentation, and spontaneity inherent to the act.

At the same time, if you’re a goal-focused person like me, it’s hard to just sit down with blank paper and goof off for an hour (unless you’re on hold with tech support).

So once a week I’m going to try to doodle a character from somebody else’s work, starting with comics and maybe later branching out into prose fiction.  Perhaps this can also serve as a sort of Recommended Reading list.

This week:  Bottle Woman, from Order of Tales by Evan Dahm (of Rice Boy fame). Watercolor, oil pencil, colerase pencil.

What a wonderful character design!  That stopper head is just brilliant, and the simplicity of her features belies a complicated and moody character.  (the same could be said for Evan’s art overall!)  I don’t think she’s actually green, or that her contents are blue, but it was the palette that seemed like fun.

I picked up Order of Tales at SPX on a personal mandate to Read New Things, and I can wholeheartedly recommend it as strange and absorbing.  It’s rare to pick up a story that’s so immediately distinctive.  A lot of people doing fantasy comics can spend a million years designing political systems and special ceremonial corsetry and researching weather patterns in an attempt to create a world so dense and realistic that a reader can immerse themselves in it, but Evan manages to suck you in with just a few brush strokes.

Family Man page 158!

Okay, those of you who scoffed at the mild semi-nudity in previous weeks of Family Man pages, this time you really DO need to be concerned for your employment.

Sorry it’s late (APE tripped me up a little), but I didn’t want to just crank this one out.  Beyond that, I won’t say much about this week’s page; sorry.  It’s up to you, kids!  And I’ll see you next week, possibly with a multiple-page spread.  (ooh la la)

Folks waiting on me for commissions and/or products, never fear, tomorrow I’m back behind the retail wheel and will be sending out pictures and grammar labels galore.

LASTLY:  After I wrap this chapter up I’ll be putting together an incredibly belated podcast; I’ve been avoiding doing one in the strange certainty that there nobody could possibly have any questions left to ask me that weren’t just Family Man plot spoilers, but who knows. So if you have a burning question, throw them my way in the coming weeks, and I’ll answer as best I can in mp3 format!

Before then I’ll also be posting about some of the other projects I’m working on right now, so maybe folks will get intrigued about those.

Page 157 now online!

Hm, I wish I had a little more time to fidget around with this one, but a rampant cold, a sudden and violent rush on Grammar Nerd stickers, and preparing for APE got in the way.  But regardless, this page is a change of pace even from all the pace-changing that’s been happening of late.  So close to the end of the chapter, guys!  Sooooo cloooooooose.

APE! You’ve heard all this before, but just in case you missed it – I’ll be at Table 440 with Kate Beaton l’infame. Topatoco have carefully delineated where we will be on this handy map. Thanks, lads! Bless them and their ways.

I’ll be there all weekend, with the last thirty or so copies of the first printing of Bite Me! (plus special deals for those who pre-order the 2nd printing) and all kindsa merchandise and original art and also I will do sketches for a low low price until my hands fall off.  I also have work up at the Cartoon Art Museum.

This is my last convention of the year thank goodness, and it looks to be a very fun one.  I’ll see some of you there!

Go hang yourself, you old M.D.!
You shall not sneer at me.
Pick up your hat and stethoscope,
Go wash your mouth with laundry soap;
I contemplate a joy exquisite
I’m not paying you for your visit.
I did not call you to be told
My malady is a common cold.

By pounding brow and swollen lip;
By fever’s hot and scaly grip;
By those two red redundant eyes
That weep like woeful April skies;
By racking snuffle, snort, and sniff;
By handkerchief after handkerchief;
This cold you wave away as naught
Is the damnedest cold man ever caught!

Give ear, you scientific fossil!
Here is the genuine Cold Colossal;
The Cold of which researchers dream,
The Perfect Cold, the Cold Supreme.
This honored system humbly holds
The Super-cold to end all colds;
The Cold Crusading for Democracy;
The Führer of the Streptococcracy.

Bacilli swarm within my portals
Such as were ne’er conceived by mortals,
But bred by scientists wise and hoary
In some Olympic laboratory;
Bacteria as large as mice,
With feet of fire and heads of ice
Who never interrupt for slumber
Their stamping elephantine rumba.

A common cold, gadzooks, forsooth!
Ah, yes. And Lincoln was jostled by Booth;
Don Juan was a budding gallant,
And Shakespeare’s plays show signs of talent;
The Arctic winter is fairly coolish,
And your diagnosis is fairly foolish.
Oh what a derision history holds
For the man who belittled the Cold of Colds!

Ogden Nash
Photo by petrichor