Family Man Page 146 now online!

Well, I could’ve sworn up and down that I was going to miss Wednesday again, but apparently the update elves were on my side this time.

Does everybody remember the wolf statues all over town?  No?  That’s okay, it was two years (and 76 pages) ago.

There’s something very spiritual about putting together a wordless page; they’re one of the reasons why I enjoy telling stories through comics (beyond the fact that I get to write and draw).

Next week, if I don’t get too bogged down in rent-paying endeavors:  more silence!  So much silence!  Enough to fill a whole medieval town after dark…

Prints and such at the Store!

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Happy Bastille Day, gang!

Celebrate by swinging by the store and purchasing your very own sluttypants lineup of revolutionaries!

Or you could organize a mob and storm a prison containing only a half dozen rather well-treated white collar criminals and a couple of psychotics and aristocratic perverts.  Hey, if you do anything as productive as writing the Declaration of the Rights of Man afterwards, we’ll call it a win.

One of my favorite forgotten underlying causes of the French Revolution; financial stress caused by the military expense of saving our punk little revolutionary butts over here in America.  Yes, without the support of poor King Louis XVI, we Yanks would be spelling ‘honor’ with a u and paying for things with currency depicting the Queen’s corgis instead of mystical freedom pyramids.

So, my fellow Americans, any time some bellicose fellow says something rash about the French in your presence, gently remind him that France took it in the teeth for us back in 1776, which in turn sparked off the upheaval of the revolution, which eventually gave rise to European nationalism, from whence came those pesky World Wars. Then prepare to run, very quickly.

In the meantime, raise a glass, tear open a baguette, and buy a print, mordi!

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I spent most of my working time this weekend putting together the Family Man website move/redesign.  With the assistance of Mr. Tyler Martin it will hopefully come out looking very classy and atmospheric!  And all in one place, so you’re not obliged to scoot around addresses to read the blessed thing.

BUT all work and no play makes Dylan a cranky girl, so I finally let myself color what I called the Revolutionary Hotties print.

Here’s the current draft of the near-finished project (click it for full-size):

Yes.  I went there.  It’ll be on sale starting sometime this week in the store, to commemorate Bastille Day and the brave, idealistic, occasionally evil, but always charismatic men who gave their heads for the Revolution. I salute them!  And their cute little butts.

I know you want some 18th century man-meat on your wall.  You so do. ADMIT IT.

I haven’t quite settled on the dimensions – 8 x 16?  Meredith has warned me that I will rue the day I try to ship anything longer than 12 inches on a side, but dammit I never claimed to be smart, and I kind of adore poster tubes.  What say you, internet.

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Page 145 of Family Man now online!

Better late than never!  Here’s this week’s page of Family Man:  relative calm as compared to the frenzy of new information that’s appeared over the last few updates.  Still plenty of mystery, though.  As always.

Also of note with this update – I’ve switched over my online store services to Shopify, and have added some items, including the first ever piece of Family Man merchandise.

I’ve developed a great relationship with a local printer, who does wonderfully faithful giclee (high-end digital inkjet)  art prints – they’ve done such a great job with prints from the Lady Parts show that my only problem has been keeping them in stock.

So I’ve decided to start offering an experimental print-on-demand service for all the pages of Family Man to date.

If there’s a page you’ve really enjoyed and would like to have in a frame-ready physical form at the original size I drew it – 9×12 (or bigger, for that famous library page!), you can now buy it from me, and I will run over to the printer and ask him to please calibrate and print it just for you.

I’m starting things off at the low-low price of $25 per page (on archival paper, $40 on fancy watercolor paper).  It’s safe to say the price probably won’t drop anytime soon, so here’s your chance to get in on this before I decide it’s a big ole hassle!

Oh yeah, also, those chicken stickers are still at the store. Never gonna stop pushing these.  I love them so.

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This week’s page of Family Man will go up on Friday!  Paying work intervenes.  But, in the meantime, I have a new store online!

Now you can purchase glorious chicken stickers, or custom-order prints of Family Man pages, and I can actually have a back-end order and fulfillment system which means no marking up spreadsheets with highlighters and crying myself to sleep at night because your order is inexcusably late and probably you hate me now*!

Everybody wins.

(*If you are Abigail Ravn or Caitlin Starling, send me a line – your orders didn’t make it through the mail.)

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We sit on a rock
to allow our souls
to catch up with us.

We have been traveling
a long time.

Behind us are forests of books
with pages green as leaves.
A blood sun stares
over the horizon.

Our souls are slow.
They walk miles behind
our long shadows.

They do not dance.
They need all their strength
merely to follow us.

Sometimes we run too fast
or trip climbing
the rotten rungs
in fame’s ladder.

Our souls know
it leads nowhere.

They are not afraid
of losing us.

Erica Jong

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Page 144 of Family Man
now online!

Man, two big reveals in as many weeks!  Hearkening all the way back to, hey, page 3.  (Apologies for making you look at things I drew in 2006; I take comfort knowing it’s not nearly as painful for you as it is for me.)

Technically there’s one big reveal and one obscure tip-off.  But let’s not get greedy about it.

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COMMERCE: I’ve finally acquired the last of the stock items (spoons, some of the Lady Parts prints) that were holding back some very late orders on books and prints, especially international orders!  So if you have been patiently sitting on your hands over in the UK or Canada, don’t fear, I haven’t forgotten you.

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NEW STUFF:  I’ve got a new poetry chapbook out.  It’s called Private Island, and it’s for sale in my store at the LOW LOW price of $2.00, which is a mere ten cents for each page of action-packed verse, most of which has never seen the light of the internet before!

There are many flavors in this one, and it’s the prettiest thing I’ve ever made at a copy shop, so snag one at will.

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Page 143 of Family Man now online!

And now here is a page guaranteed to startle and confuse, if Luther’s face is any judge.

But, whatever you think is going on:  I’ll repeat my mantra of wait for it. Your questions should be answered by Labor Day.

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Page 142 of Family Man now online!

Gloriosky!  Weeks of traveling and a bit more yet ahead of me, but I freaking FINALLY have a page update.

I am so tired of looking at this page, guys.  It has been weeks.  It is a perfectly fine page, accomplishing what it needs to do, but jiminy.  No more!  Onto the internet it goes.

It’s been a hectic and unproductive space of time, these last few weeks.  I look forward to spending July within a twenty mile radius.

And I will use that time to make chicken stickers.  Watch me.

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Some day, if I should ever lose you,
will you be able then to go to sleep
without me softly whispering above you
like night air stirring in the linden tree?

Without my waking here and watching
and saying words as tender as eyelids
that come to rest weightlessly upon your breast,
upon your sleeping limbs, upon your lips?

Without my touching you and leaving you
alone with what is yours, like a summer garden
that is overflowing with masses
of melissa and star-anise?

Rainer Maria Rilke
trans. Albert Ernest Flemming

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I am home!  For a day or two, before lectures and weddings and things set me to scurrying out of town once more.  Folks, in July, I am pretty sure that I’m just going to chain myself to the front porch and resist all attempts to dislodge me until the month is out.

While in Manhattan, apart from selling comic books, I got to:

- shake Allison Janney’s hand backstage after a performance of 9 to 5
- check out the view from Lerner Books’ offices on the 72nd floor of the Empire State building
- see Angela Lansbury perform two days before winning a Tony for the part from seats so close that I could see up her nose
- eat some seriously dangerous pine-nut almond sugar cookies from an Italian bakery on Bleecker
- pray for death in Times Square (as all sane people should)
- take a survey of all of the red-figure Attic vase paintings depicting chickens in the collection at the Met
- see the awesome Donnetta Lavinia Grays bellow every obscene word imaginable at a reading at the Public
- stalk the turtles in Central Park
- mock Teddy Roosevelt’s unbearably butch statue, and a few other billion things.

Nonetheless, I am happy to be home.  New York is a helluva thing, but it has the effect of making me appreciate the silly provincial charms and humane calm of Portland and the Northwest.  (Although I really do wish there were a better selection of 5th century BCE chicken paintings at the museum here.)

It was a great pleasure seeing so many people at MoCCA!  Thank you to everybody who came and said hello, bought a book, or just gossiped with me.  After four years of studiously keeping to the left half of the country it was delightful to see both old friends and new faces.  I’ll be visiting much more frequently in the future, so you’ll all have a chance to get bored of me before the decade is out.

And now I’m going to sleep off a bit of the jetlag before finishing the most recent page of Family Man writing a detailed outline for a book proposal sending out more book orders mocking up an illustration laying out three small press publishing projects inking three Oscar & Annie strips ordering more stickers ordering a new round of Bite Me redoing the Family Man webpage…ET CETERA!

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In about twelve hours and change, the fabulous Katie Lane and I will be getting up to hop a plane (or planes, rather) to New York.

We’ll be there close to a week, ostensibly for the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA) festival on the 6th and 7th, but also to eat lots of food, see plays on the cheap, poke around museums, and just generally make nuisances of ourselves.

During the festival, I’ll be at table 517 with Klio from  SPQR Blues!  I’ll have books and minicomics and a few other things for giveaway - please stop by and say hello!  I am very friendly and I will write silly things inside your book.

Speaking of books, I’ve sent out almost all Bite Me! orders at this point - less than a dozen orders have been delayed due to reprinting of some sold out art, shirts, and a slight shortage of spoons (who’d have thought).  But odds are that if you paid online, your package is on the way as of this evening.  Hurray!  It feels good to be mostly caught up.  International orders have all gone out as well,with only a few exceptions like the above.

It does make me feel ridiculous charging folks the $15 US it can cost to send a book overseas, but it’s also no fun to eat the mailing expense - if somebody in the UK knows of a decent small press distributor who’d be up for taking on my UK, Commonwealth, and European orders, I’d be interested in connecting.  It would be a pretty light task all things considered.

And now:  packing!  See you all in New York, and I’ll see the rest of you online when I get home.  It’s gonna be one crazy little summer, and I look forward to it.

(There might be a half page of Family Man tonight.  To settle my nerves, if nothing else.)

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This is the time of year where the sunlight has finally and completely broken out of winter’s thin eggshell.

The photos turning up in my contacts list on Flickr have been glowing recently.  Some of my favorites (which can click to follow to the photographers’ accounts):

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A huge thanks to the lovely individuals who have purchased Livejournal subscription time for me this month!

I know that Livejournal is long past being cool, but this continues to be the best and most rewarding way for me to talk to readers and fellow artists. So many good things have been brought into my life because of people who follow me here.

So, thank you! (All of you.)

Family Man: New Notes!

I’m in the middle of working my way through the Bite Me! shipping backlog, putting together material for potential future publishing projects, and preparing for a week in New York for MoCCA!

Not to mention picking up yet another sexy round of prescriptions in an attempt to make my post-viral breathing tube look less like this:

And more like this:

So I’m taking a pass on a page this week, which drives me nuts but seems responsible.

But, here we are, a new set of notes for pages 130-140!  I really went kind of insane this time, trying to explain both wigs and early Protestant theology.  I know that you have had burning questions about these things for a very long time. Consider them answered.

And, again, I’ll be at the MoCCA Art Festival in New York, June 6-7, tabling with Klio of SPQR Blues.

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Ah yes!  Time to remind everybody that I will be at MoCCA in New York this June 6 & 7!  I’ll be exhibiting with (and courtesy of!) the dreadfully fantastic Klio, she who brings you SPQR Blues.  Together we will be historytastic.

I’ll be there with some of the remaining stock of Bite Me! .  Also with prints and buttons and stickers and whatever else I can cram into the suitcase that hasn’t sold out yet.

More news as we get closer to the show.  In the meantime, more books go out in the mail every few days!  It’s fun to watch the stack get skinnier.  Had a bit of a bottleneck with the button packs (those little bastards are time-consuming), but that’s on the mend, so a big chunk more of the deluxe packages will be going out soon.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled pony.

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Page 141 of Family Man now online!

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The Rector’s past!  Or a smidgen of it, from Luther’s perspective.  But he seems to be breaking for the door - will Luther tackle him and ask more questions?  Only the next page will tell!

Not much more out of me for the moment.  I’m still feeling poorly, because I keep trying to get work done instead of getting fully well.

Thanks for your continued patience as I balance the demands of sending out the massive slew of book orders, completing all my other work obligations, and not dying.  Especially that last one.

Notes for the last ten pages are all written and images are sourced - I just have to finish linking up all the darn pages, and then you people will know more about wigs and Reform theology than you ever thought possible!  Oh the things you will know.

Over and out.

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Current musical obsession: St.Vincent’s album “Actor”.  It has gotten into my brain something fierce.  It’s elegant and a bit creepy and full of interesting sounds and strange hooks.

I especially adore the video for the album’s single, Actor Out of Work:

Actor Out of Work on YouTube

St.Vincent - aka Annie Clark - is also a very distinctive-looking lady.

So I made an artist portrait.  New Yorker arts pages, here I come. (Click for full-size.)

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Some very (very) casual/crappy development sketches for a potential project set during WWII.  The girl is way too timid-looking!   But it was a lot of fun to draw some Rosie the Riveter-type ladies.

I feel like I have about six different irons in the fire right now, and I have no idea which ones are the most important to attend to (after getting books mailed out, that is).  I’m not used to this stuff being My Actual Work - no matter what I pick to settle down and fiddle with, my brain keeps telling me “YOU SHOULD BE DOING REAL WORK RIGHT NOW!”

I figure I’ll get over it soon enough, but boy, is it ever disorienting.

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Page 140 of Family Man now online!

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No wild tip-offs in this page: but some useful insight into who the Rector is.  Also:  lots of dead stuff!  Yay dead stuff!

Next week: what the Rector was doing in between Universities.  (Wild tip-offs: possible.)

Notes for pages 131-140 will go up this weekend, per tradition.  Rather than spending my evening seeing Star Trek a second time with my friends, I spent it researching the history of wig-powdering and Reform theology.  I can’t tell if this makes me more, or less, of a total dweeb.

Other news: I am finally well(ish), so shipments of Bite Me! are now going out at a regular clip.  I hope to work my way up to present-day on domestic orders very soon, and then send out stuff to all you international types in one big orgy of customs forms.

Thank you to everybody who’s ordered the book!  It’s been a lot of fun sending it out into the world.

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