a picture

This is one of my Div 3 drawings. my favorite, actually. someone bought it from Ada Books in Providence, where I now live.

a picture

This is one of my Div 3 drawings. my favorite, actually. someone bought it from Ada Books in Providence, where I now live.

it's not comics.

um, okay. so I haven't written in this in like a year. but I'm going to have a sweet website soon, designed by Maine's own Tyler Lafreniere, so I figured I would practice blogging i.e. promote my new website. It's called notcomics.com. funny, right? It's ironic because it IS comics.

I'm at work right now. work is the teenage mutant ninja turtles. yeah that's right. in northampton, ma. I work side by side with Michael Dooney, Jim Lawson, Steve Murphy, the greats. Peter Laird's around sometimes but I haven't officially met him yet. It's me and a bunch of dudes. I scan comics all day, sometimes organize them, soon I'll be writing and drawing a comic for them. Tales of the TMNT. mmhmm. it's pretty sweet.

I gotta get my life together soon. start drawing again. I'm a lazy ass. I finished my Div 3. I graduated from college. (what?) I need to figure out how to sell stuff. need to store my artwork better. lots of things. I could be really successful if I weren't so frinkin lazy.

I'm going to make more of Adventures of a Kid, and apply for a Xeric Grant by the end of July. !!!! I'm also going back to White River Juncton for a week or two to help my friend David Fairbanks Ford organize and catalogue his fabulously weird collection in the Main Street Museum. for similar things, look up the Muutter museum in Philly and the Museum of Jurassic Technology in L.A.

I'm also trying to figure out how to get to europe cheaply enough so that I can bum around and explore with Zoe for a couple weeks. I think it's something I really need to do. It's just so dang expensive right now. pretty impossible. but i'll figure it out.

And then, back to noho for a month or so maybe. And then....New York. probably.

I really wish I could have gone to MoCCA. My sister graduated high school this weekend so I had to go to that. weird. high school really blows.

I just bought a computer. A Macbook. it'll be super easy for me to blog now. sweet. I need to learn more about it, the macbook I mean. I can make movies on it super easily. and do everything super easily, actually.

northampton is kind of boring. but I'll figure out how to make it exciting. I heard there's an abandoned train tunnel. Killer. I went for a bike ride last night with Alex and ended up in this weird part behind King street that looks like Virginia or Florida or something. that was pretty awesome.

I can't wait to get out of here and go swimming.

tonight I'm going to draw. and hook up my scanner maybe. and keep blogging the shit out of the internet. this is really for me right now. I just needed some reassurance that I do have plans, that I'm not totally insane, and that I still know how to write.

mmmhmm.

this one was really long. geez.

HAPPY BORN DAY

Tomorrow, August 27th 2005, I will finally be of age to legally imbibe alcoholic bevrages in the united states. Thank the good lord. No more getting kicked out of bars and feeling like a dick.
happy birthday to meeeee

a day at the races

1. fried dough, carnies, and sketchy rides

2. went to the foodstop/videostop about 5 times

3. swimming is the best. so are the people I live with.

4. Henry Darger--watched "Realms of the Unreal". so fucking inspiring. I need to draw more. Maybe not as much as he did. but more than I do now.

family time

This is the creepiest coolest amphibian ever. It's called an african clawed toad. they just kind of float around and eat things.

Today was a rainy day, and I did all the things I always want to do on a rainy day: drank tea, stayed in my pajamas for a long time, read, went for a walk in the woods with kids wearing rubber boots, wore clean warm clothes fresh out of the dryer, and ate warm pie. perfect.

Glancing through a book by Edward Tufte called Envisioning Information, he seems pretty brilliant. Everything he writes makes sense, about details in design that I would never notice or bother to think about.

white river junction. it's not so bad. actually, it rocks. I am going to miss living here. a lot.

number one

This is my number one blog entry, ever. ever ever. I feel like a hugely big nerd.
Where I am right now is, in white river junction, vt. I am about to leave it in 2 or 3 days.
All summer I have been living here and interning at the Center for Cartoon Studies, (www.centerforcartoonstudies.org), only the coolest most amazing school ever. It's opening up this fall with about 20 students and some incredible faculty, including James Sturm (the director of the school and my best bud), James Kochalka (www.americanelf.com) and Steve Bissette (of Swamp Thing and tons of other awesome scary comics)....also some quite impressive visiting faculty including Craig Thompson, Art Spiegelman, Seth, and more. Okay I sound like a big ad. But seriously, this summer was probably the most worthwhile one of my life...cataloguing books, meeting cartoonists (including the Hernandez Brothers! holy shit!), making friends for life. etc. etc. reading and making lots of comics.
I don't know how I even got into comics. It was a way of combining my interests in language and art--in creating narratives through visual symbols other than the alphabet.
I read calvin and hobbes obsessively. but only recently did I get into comics as an art form. it's so much more than it's given credit for. there's so much thought you have to put into timing, placement of everything, color, lines, etc--so much attention to detail and design.
comics I have read this summer: Love and Rockets by the Hernandez Brothers (fucking amazing. they had no formal art training. they are just brilliant.) The Frank Book by Jim Woodring (definitely an influence for wordless narratives). Comix 2000, a collection made in 2000 of 2000 pages of wordless comics. Ice Haven by Dan Clowes. Super Fuckers and Sketchbook Diaries by James Kochalka. I started reading The Sandman--I read the first 3 books, but it's a little too much for me. putting the library together killed me. There are so many books I haven't read. I want to read all the classics--like Krazy Kat--and then all the superhero classics, and then all of the undergrounds, and then everything everything else.
My Div III or senior project is going to be about comics. I am going to make wordless comics. I want to create characters and put them in spaces, and create a world, kind of like Jim Woodring has done. I want to incorporate my interests in maps and exploration and colonialism and encyclopedias. I am having touble solidifying these ideas. I also have to put together my portfolio for my Div II. I'm pretty much screwed.
If anyone reads this and has an idea for me, or an artist to look at, please let me know. I doubt if you read this whole thing. but whatever.
crap, I forgot to call my dad.