Sunday Bloody Sunday

This Easter Sunday I celebrated by watching a zombie marathon with cartoonist friends. Jon-Mikel Gates and Colleen Frakes put the shindig together (it's their tradition). Here was the line-up:

Let Sleeping Corpses Lie
Bio Zombie
Wild Zero
Zombi 2

I missed Zombi 2 (and its famous underwater zombie vs. shark scene), but I stayed for the rest. I really enjoyed Wild Zero (with Guitar Wolf!) Bio Zombie was pretty good too. And we watched the Thriller music video! If it's been a couple of years, watch Thriller. It's just as good as you remember, I promise.

It got me thinking about the secret zombie comic that exists only in my head and in my sketchbook. Maybe, some day, I'll draw it.

This weekend I was able get back to work on Sourpuss. It hasn't been easy, but I feel like I'm back in the swing. There's no reason issue two shouldn't be at Stumptown.

Right now I'm trying to draw a teenage make-out scene. It's tough.

I don't want to spoil too much, so I'll just post an early image. I just want to let you know I'm back in the saddle.

ker-SPLAT

This weekend I went down to New York with Dennis and a bunch of CCS students to attend the SPLAT Graphic Novel Symposium. This was the event's debut year, and I think they pulled it off quite nicely. You couldn't ask for a better venue - it was held in the library of The General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen. It's in a gorgeous old building, grand yet utilitarian.

SPLAT had 3 tracks of programming, their audience seemed to be teachers, librarians, students, and members of the publishing industry. CCS had a table of promotional material and student work, and we attracted a pretty large audience.


Here's Paul Karasik "shilling" for CCS.

I spent the rest of the weekend catching up with friends, wandering with Dennis, and eating a lot of excellent vegan food.

Vegans of the world, listen: you must try the drumsticks at Foodswings.



For a while know, I've been working on a project in my sketchbook. It doesn't have much structure, I'm just sketching out ideas and hoping they'll come together in a pleasing way. The tentative title is Why's it Got to be So Hard? It's about the struggle (well really, MY struggle) to make comics. Making comics is hard! But does it have to be? Comics take discipline! But does that mean comics can't be fun?



For me, these are almost spiritual questions.

I hope this comic will be reflective and somewhat educational, or at least handy.

Pancakes & Champagne

I turned 30 last week and I feel pretty good about it. 30 is a milestone, and worthy of a good party!

So Dennis and I threw a Champagne and Pancake Jam! Dennis made this excellent flyer.



Here's what was on the menu (all vegan):

Banana & Cherry Pancakes
Tropical Pancakes (with coconut milk and mango)
Dark Chocolate Chip Pancakes
Potato Pancakes with Mushroom Gravy
&
Flirtinis
Mimosas

My birthday is also my anniversary as a vegetarian. I've been a vegetarian for 10 years! In a month I'll have been a vegan for 4 years.



I think this was my favorite birthday ever. Pancakes and champagne go together excellently (as I knew they would!) But best of all, Dennis put together a book of birthday drawings by my friends at CCS. It's a great gift, I'll treasure it.



I also got a painting by cartoonist Cat Garza! It’s nice having so many cartoonists in the neighborhood.

To be honest, birthday celebrations and CCS have kept me very busy this last week, and I haven't been drawing as much as I'd like to. Still, I have a few projects on my plate.


(Bonus points if you can identify who these Art Stars are!)

I'm working on a comic for an Existo fanzine my friend Colleen Frakes is putting together. Existo is a strange little film about the battle between art and the dominant culture. Steve Bissette showed Existo at the CCS Film Club a few years back, and it became a school favorite.
When I first saw Existo, it reminded me of Surf Reality, a strange little theater in the Manhattan's Lower East Side. Surf Reality was notorious for anything-goes performances, and has its own history for guerilla performance art. In 1998, key members of the Surf community formed the Dance Liberation Front. The DLF protested against Giuliani’s enforcement of the Cabaret Laws by coordinating a number of public dances, including a mass Hokey-Pokey on the steps of City Hall.

Welcome to 2008

Hello, friends and strangers of the Internet. Curious about what's going down at Unpopular Comics?

I've started this blog to offer weekly updates on my creative projects. Feel free to share your thoughts!

Ignore for the moment that we are well into 2008! I want to write about a project I do every new years: Diary Tunes.

Dairy Tunes is a mix cd trading club I started back in 2002. The idea is to create a mix cd that represents the past year of your life - sort of like an audio time capsule, and any music is fair game.

I've been trading for 6 years now, so I have quite the collection! Most of the Diary Tunes members are cartoonist friends, so I also get the benefit of having a nice collection of album art.



Here's my cover for my 2007 mix cd. The title is a lyric from a Byrds song (when Gram Parsons was in the line-up). Several of the songs on my cd are about winter (we've had a tough one in Vermont this year).







Here’s my line-up!

1. Out on the Weekend - Neil Young
2. Shisheler - The Mogador Band
3. The Butcher’s Boy - Buell Kazee
4. America - Simon & Garfunkel
5. Cherub Rock - Smashing Pumpkins
6. Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues - Bob Dylan
7. This Place is a Prison - The Postal Service
8. Van Occupanther – Midlake
9. Don’t Talk To Strangers - Chris Gaylord
10. 36-24-36 - Violent Femmes
11. Rolling Log Blues - Buffy Sainte-Marie
12. Ahlof Bi Houbbi Ya Min – Amaya
13. You Ain’t Goin Nowhere - The Byrds
14. One More Hour - Sleater-Kinney
15. Don’t Be Upset - Jeffrey & Jack Lewis
16. Waist Deep In The Big Muddy - Pete Seeger
17. You Are My Flower - The Carter Family
18. Hungry Heart - Bruce Springsteen
19. My Back Pages - Po!
20. Blue Eyes - Uncle Tupelo
21. Evergreen - Roy Orbison