Minty, Hamazon, Texas Forever

Hey Friends,

Look! Minty Lewis drew a Freddy strip!  Minty is the author of the HILARIOUS book P.S. Comics, and the awesome comic Salad Days.  She and her husband Damien Jay (also an amazing cartoonist) and their baby Sally are one of my favorite families ever.




She has inspired me also to start these up again.  At the moment I'm working on Lou #2.

In other news, you can now buy Freddy Stories on Amazon!

And I've decided to do a new fun project, something totally and completely for fun.  Chuck and I have been watching Friday Night Lights, and I know it's kind of old now but, it's absolutely one of my favorite shows ever in the world.  Actually, it might be my #1 favorite.  I have grown so attached to the characters, and the family dynamics in it are so complicated and well developed, and there is this overarching sense of fairness, justice and hope that I love.  Plus, Taylor Kitsch is a babe.

We aren't done watching the show yet, we're on season 4 still, so don't give me any spoilers.  BUT I've decided that I want to print a Friday Night Lights fanzine! I think I'll probably call it "Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can't Lose", but not sure yet...

The page size will be 8.5" x 11" folded in half (so 4.25 x 5.5).  I'm looking for anything that has to do with FNL; comics, art, writing, girly collages with hearts, whatever!

it will be all black and white.  Please send bitmaps or 600 grayscale tiff files to crucifictorius@gmail.com.

I haven't decided on a deadline yet.

I'll keep you posted, it's possible I'll be starting a tumblr for this!

xo
mm

NEW

New things!

It's been a long time.  Hello from the woods of Hancock.

Things:  Charles Forsman is starting to print some more one-dollar black and white comics under the imprint "Oily Comics".   This includes his series TEOTFW (of which he just finished the lastest issue!), Max de Radigués's Moose (so good), and my new series that I've just started, called "Lou".

Lou is a 9 year old tomboy (surprise surprise) who lives in a rural area with her slightly dysfunctional but loving family, including an older brother named Eddie Jr, and her little brother John.  I'm drawing a lot on my own childhood for this one, even more than for Freddy Stories.  It's going to include a lot of 90's nostalgia, if you're into that sort of thing.

Here's the cover:


And a sample page:


And the back cover:


You can buy this comic here from my store, or at the Oily Boutique!


ANOTHER NEW THING ABOUT OLD THINGS:

I made this print about some things I remember from being a kid.  We are living in the house I grew up in right now, and I'm pretty much surrounded by nostalgia all day every day.  As you can probably see from this, I was a weird kid and so was my sister.  I loved that Beetlejuice figurine so much that I slept with it under my pillow.





You can buy this print here!

And last but not least, Foreword Reviews reviewed Freddy Stories!!! So exciting.  All of the books they review are independently published, and they print an actual real life magazine with all of the reviews in it.  You can read my review here.



xoxoxo
mm

Practice

Hi,

I'm practicing drawing kids:



And here's a peek at a comic I did for an upcoming newsprint publication:





xoxo

Momomomomomoooo

GUESS WHAT

Here's a new comic strip featuring Freddy and Momo, drawn by my close friend, Mo Oh, who is a mind-blowingly talented artist.  I love Momo (and Mo) so much.  This comic hits me deep in the heart. (Click on it to read).

More Things:

I am working on a mini-comic right now that Chuck will be printing, as part of Oily Comics.  Right now Oily Comics is just The End of the Fucking World, which you should read if you haven't already.  The new one just came out.  I did a little drawing for the front.  I love these one-dollar comics.

CONVENTIONS!
We are now definitely going to CAKE, MECAF, and TCAF.  I am also going to Mocca, where I will be seen hovering around the Secret Acres table (which will have Sean Ford's collected Only Skin!!!)  and eating Barry's snacks.
I'm super excited for convention season!  Friends!  Comics!

MUSIC
I am trying to spread the word about this dude, Thomas Patrick Maguire,  because this album is amazing.

WHAT ELSE
I can't think of anything right this second.
I am addicted to tumblr, been doing that a lot lately.  And slowly trying to wean myself off of the internet a little.

xo
mm

Haaaaay

I've been taking a break from doing the daily strips, in case you haven't noticed.  For right now.  But I started to put them all on a Tumblr, where they go up twice a day, if you feel like reading them again!  I'm in that weird place with my next project where it's all in my head, and I've written about it, but it's just sort of cooking in there.  So while it's in there I've been trying to do some other projects to occupy myself.

Like, redrawing more comic pages!  I think this is a really awesome thing to do while I'm thinking about how I want to draw my next project.  I want to be a better cartoonist, and I want to work hard and spend time on each panel.  So I decided to copy Pascal Girard, whose work is deceptively simple.  It was HARD.  But fun.  It's copied from page 21 of his book Bigfoot.  I decided to do inkwash, because I wanted to practice that (the original is digitally colored...)





Here are a couple other things...

A few months ago I submitted this as a rough draft to the New Yorker.  Maybe I'll try coloring it...



And I made this painting for my friend Ramona.   She's almost 3.  She wanted a painting of a Green Kitty with Clovers.  I love this kid!




It was a trade for this awesome portrait that her dad, Ryan Spahr, who is an amazing tattoo artist in Mechanicsburg, PA, did for us.

More Kids

Some comics by my favorite little friends from last week....

Brian drew comics about a cute little ducky who electrocuted things


And he drew this one.  How amazing are those two middle panels??


Coleman knows his slapstick


Helen drew a "rocketship with babies attached to it"


Ella decided to draw Frank.  He looks great in a bow tie!


Frank does Jersey Shore


I love this one


But this one, is my all time favorite.


Chuck invented this exercise, where I draw the first and last panels of a 6 panel comic page, and then photocopy it, and the students fill in the blank panels.  The first time I did it, I didn't have that many expectations, but it's AMAZING.  Everybody usually comes up with something completely different!  And it's incredible how clear the stories come out, and how imaginative they are.  I love it.  I haven't tried it with kids younger than 8, but I'd like to someday.  I bet even 5 year olds could do it.

The Kids!

Oh, the kids.

The one on the top right is Freddy in Space, in case you were wondering.

I'm taking a break from doing my daily strip this week because I am substitute teaching! I'm an art teacher for the week at the K-8 school that my mom teaches at. It's awesome so far. And it's only been one day and I'm exhausted. I have no idea if I'd be able to do this all the time...I've kind of been trying to figure that out. But really I should just enjoy it, and not make it into a existential crisis.

Today I taught kids how to draw Freddy and Frank, and then they came up with some of their own characters. I was feeling weird about just having kids copy my work, but then I realized how essential copying is to cartooning, and that you can learn so much from it. Just seeing that I make Frank the dog from just a bunch of scribbles, and that they can do it too, is empowering to them, I think. It makes having a real book seem not so far away. One kid even made a whole scribble world after I showed him how to draw Frank.

AND speaking of copying, Chuck and I started a tumblr on Saturday night called Redrawn. In my previous post I showed that Amanda Vahamaki page that I redrew, which was inspired by Chuck's James Sturm page, which was inspired by Michael Litvin's Tatsumi page, etc. etc. Also, Tom Hart had been doing this project for a while; picking a random page from a comic and redrawing it. So we decided to collect them all on this blog, to encourage more people to do the same. Anyone can submit. DO IT. I think I'm going to do another one soon.

Copycat

Here's the page that I copied, from "La Fete des Méres" (Which means, I think, Mother's Day) by Amanda Vahamaki. I only have the French version, published by FRMK, which Chuck bought for me. I tried translating this page with Google translate, but it didn't work too well. (Max?)

This is one of the most beautiful comics I've ever seen, and I look at it all the time. It was fun to copy from someone who naturally draws humans in a very different, more realistic way, and I think I learned a lot. I definitely like her version better, which I think is in graphite and colored pencil..I used a brush and ink and watercolors. She is unbelievable with a pencil. Drawn and Quarterly also published part of this story in English, in a D&Q Showcase, and they published her book "The Bun Field".

And looking at this inspired the strip I did today:

Summah

It's cold and gray here. Again. Part of me still loves that and then another part of me is thinking about summer evenings when it's a little cool and you wear a hoodie over your bathing suit and the sun's setting and you look out on the lake and it's all quiet, and the fish try to eat your toes. (It's weird to draw Freddy without pants).

I'm working on redrawing a page from a comic by Amanda Vahamaki, which has images of the woods and a lake (or an ocean?), and that got me thinking about this too. I'll post that page tomorrow probably. I was inspired by the C-man, who redrew a page of James Sturm's comic "The Revival". James is one of our favorite guys of all time. Lookee here.

Jambox

Boom boxes are high on my list of favorite things to draw. I don't know why. Maybe it's because it looks like a face? I think that's probably it. Sometimes I think that's the mark of a cartoonist...seeing faces in everything.

Speaking of faces, I saw Beauty and the Beast in 3D the other night with my mom, and Belle's face changes all the time. It's weird. I remember that from when I was little though...everything is the same, every weird intonation or weird look brought back memories. Also, I'm pretty sure we saw it in the same theater as the one I saw it in in 1991. After I saw it then, I drew a picture of Chip in school the next day.

"and when we touched she didn't shudder at MY PAW"

And, do you the know the Petunia books, by Roger Duvoisin? Chuck

's mom gave me "Petunia's Christmas" for Christmas this year. Duvoisin is an amazing artist! And the stories are really really great...in this one, Petunia falls in love with a man-goose named Charles (awwww), who is getting fattened up for Christmas dinner. She rescues Charles from his owners by painting herself all crazy and scaring away the farm lady (see image). Then they imprison Charles again, and Petunia makes little Christmas wreaths and sells them until she has enough money to buy Charles. The farmers are so touched that they just set Charles free so he and Petunia can get married and dance in the barn with the cows. CUTE.