As some of you know, we've been dealing with some house mishaps which have given our wallet a swift kick in the teeth, which has prompted us to part with some more art we are hoping to sell. This includes the cover art to Milk and Cheese #666, which I don't really want to sell, but, it's not like I don't have Milk and Cheese drawings in the house, and I still have two other covers. Three, if you count the mini-comic. And hey, four, if this one doesn't move. There's always a bright side.



You can find the auctions here. They also include the second Fun Strip page from Dork #2, the cover for the Punk Rock Holocaust 2 DVD (with an additional rough sketch), two Animal Man/Vertigo penciled tryout pages, a page of spot illos for Nickelodeon Magazine, and a small Georgina Riley Murder Family drawing. Starting bids range from $15 to a few hundred for the cover, all for the cause (hot water heater , washing machine repair, dehumidifier, Ibuprofin...).

Such is life. 

I always wanted to upload my old Fun strips from Dork to the web, but I'm a slob and can't even get new ones done, let alone get my act together on presenting old material in the internet age. I think we (meaning, Sarah) attempted this once, back a ways, but our ability (meaning Sarah's, as I am a slob), was overwhelmed by work, life, child, rolling her eyes at me, etc. So, yeah. No go.

Anyway, for some crazy reason Christopher Butcher of the Beguiling and TCAF recently decided he wanted to start running my short Fun strips on his nifty blog, Comics 212. And What ho!, this is what he's doing (I apologize about the "What ho!" thing, it just came out, and I'm keeping it, because. well, it's "What ho!", and I rarely get to use traditional yiddish expressions like that on my blog).

Chris wrote a very flattering overview of the strips and my work, which you can find here. The strips started yesterday, here's the first one. Here's the second one. I'd like to point out that he's started with some of the earliest strips, which date back to 1992 (!), so, the art is rough, the gags are even stupider than usual, and, well, that's  the end of the apology, if I didn't want anyone to see these I wouldn't have reprinted them. They are drawn in a fashion resembling a child doodling while riding in a rickshaw over potholes. What ho! (Okay, I'll stop).

Anyway, my thanks to Christopher for the plug and the bizarre undertaking, If this brings any folks to 212, cool, if this brings 212 folks to my work, cool, if anyone actually buys a book of mine from the fine folks at SLG Publishing, awesome, if this gets tomatoes thrown at The Beguiling's windows, ha ha, if this gets people wondering aloud how I ever had a career after releasing this infantile twaddle, boo hoo.

Coincidentally, I just finished up three new Fun strips this week, I was hoping to post one here today but I need Sarah's help (there's some photoshop crap that needs doing to fix a drawing error, and I can't reverse images from black to white, and beyond that the art's too big for my piddling scanner), and she's still busy with all that stuff. I've started drawing the strips five to a standard comics page after, jeez, 18 years or so of doing them seven to a page. I couldn't handle the little panels anymore, 21 to a page, plus the title, was wearing me down, my eytesight isn't what it used to be, my hand's a mess. I probbaly should be doing them even larger, but I'm trying this size, and I'll see where it takes me. I'm only doing new strips in the hopes there will be a Dork #12 someday, and it keeps my hand in at doing my own stuff in-between the paying work. Who knows. I'm just getting frustrated at seeing the gag and story notes files pile up with nothing to show for them. Even if I chip away at them, eventually something will get done. That's the hope, at least.

In the meantime, feel free to wallow daily in the youthful, ungainly gag strips of my past.

I thank you.

The bottom half of the "Fun page" that ran in Dose a couple of years ago. Again, this is from the raw board, before Sarah cleaned it up and fixed the wonky lettering and erased the lines around the paste-downs, et al.

Yes, I'm a dork, I still often physically paste down corrections, even though Sarah can fix that quickly and cleanly on the magic box. Sometimes we do it that way, sometimes I get compulsive and just haul out the rubber cement or the glue-stick, especially if I'm working late and everyone's asleep. I just need the page to look "finished", which is why I also still fill in the black areas by hand, and don't resort to duplicating backgrounds or panels digitally very often. If we're really short on time for a magazine job or what have you, I will try to plan on using the computer to help speed things up, but it's hard for me to let go of my dinosaur ways. I have stopped lettering white on black as I used to, Sarah reverses my lettering on the computer when I want that effect, but I used to hand letter that stuff in white ink and, man, what a nightmare. It dissolved on the pages pretty quickly, too. Never again.

Anyway, yeah, some gags from a few years ago.

As requested by reader lantern7.

Taken from Dork #11, but scanned  -- haphazardly -- from the original art, so it's not cleaned up. 

Part of it, actually. Drawn for Brendan McGinley's Dose anthology in 2007. The printed version look a little different, this is from the original board and hasn't been cleaned up, some of the text was reversed white on black, etc. By Sarah, of course, I never touch the strips on the computer.

Break time over. Gotta get back to inking Ron Jeremy holding up a Cookie Monster puppet.