This is one of the first long-form comics I ever drew, back when I was pretty clearly just beginning to learn how to draw. It’s an adaption of an excellent essay / short story by Twin Cities music writer Jim Walsh, who was nice enough to let me take his words out for a spin. Resurrected because Fleetwood Mac seems to be having some kind of goddamned renaissance.
Category Archives: Comics
Longevity and Comics and Who the Hell Knows What Else
OK.
I’ve been talking on and on all summer about wrapping up Nowhere Band this year. The idea was pretty simple: I’m turning 40 at the end of the year, and on some level it felt weird to me to think about continuing to do a strip about dudes in a band after I’d turned 40. Especially since it’s been a good 3 years since I’ve had an active band going. There was a bunch of burnout involved as well, much of it centered around a bunch of rules I’ve imposed on myself.
But now that I’ve thought things over and life has calmed down a bit, I think I’m going to keep the strip going. Part of what convinced me was the abrupt realization that some of my favorite comics are Jaime Hernandez’ ongoing run; he obviously didn’t feel weird about making comics about aging punks as he whizzed past 40, so why should I? Also, I recognized that lots of the things that were bothering me were completely self-inflicted. Tired of fighting with Photoshop in the coloring stage? You can always go back to black and white for a while. Feeling pressed by self-imposed posting deadlines? Who gives a shit? It’ll come out when it comes out. Don’t want every story to center on the band? Fine, they all have outside lives, tell some stories there.
The truth is that I do love the strip. Somehow, sneakily, it seems to have become my life’s work. I can live with that. I didn’t mean for it to be when I started out… but at least for now it feels like that’s where things are. I guess that gives some shape to my 20s- I wasn’t wasting my time in half-assed bands, I was gathering material. You always wish more people read a strip when you put this much work into it, but I love the readers that I have. people whose tastes and worldviews I respect tell me they like it; that means a ton to me.
So I think I’m going to keep going. I might structure things so that stories or even sections of life have clear starts and ends, but that’s the sort of thing that’s easy to say you’re going to do and then forget. So we’ll see. And I’m sure that there will be breaks and hiatuses at points as I work on prose stuff or other comics. But for the time being, Nowhere Band’s going to chug on. Even if (gasp) the Awesome Boys don’t, necessarily.
The Doctor Is In
Here’s a comic strip I worked up, kind of a prototype for a thing I might pursue after I finish Nowhere Band (which should be some time this year, unless I change my mind). I think this thing would mutate a little more if it actually went into production, but if nothing else I’ve got a pretty big google doc full of script ideas…
And yeah, inspired by Charles Schulz, of course.
Updated: I did indeed change my mind.
Catonia Lends a Hand
I don’t even know why I did this, but I did this:
America’s Next Top Novelist
The comic project I did back in 2007 immediately before starting Nowhere Band. I think this was a good script, but my art skillz were clearly still a work in progress. Note that I borrowed a couple of character designs for NWB.
The Very First Cartoon I Ever Drew
Drawn at age 30, right after the cartooning bug bit me. I guess my pencil and ink craft has gotten better, but I’m not sure my writing has.
This strip does accurately portray my feelings about the jerky industry.
Disasters and Recoveries and Education and the Return of Nowhere Band
Let’s start with the executive summary: After being in creative exile, more or less, for the past 4 months, I started work this morning on bringing back my old rock strip Nowhere Band. The new volume will, somewhat recursively, follow the Awesome Boys as they try to get their band back together after a long hiatus and deal with the fact that they’re now edging into being older than their musical peers. First new strip should go up some time next week. It should be funny and human. I’m stoked.
Continue reading Disasters and Recoveries and Education and the Return of Nowhere Band
Why So Quiet?
Well, it’s simple… since I work for a university, I recently became eligible for free tuition for grad-level classes, so a couple of months ago I started a master’s program in software. Which I’m sure will pay off in the long run, but in the short term it’s kind of meant tossing a hand grenade into my life as I knew it. Work on EYEBALL continues, but at a drastically-reduced pace; I don’t know that I’ll finish more than 4 or 5 pages this semester (although then it’ll pick up over the summer, at least for a while).
Stuff’s still happening, though. Before the coursework shit really started hitting the fan, I had time to work something up for Andrew Weiss’ Ultimate Powers Jam, and I’m actually happier with it than I am with pretty much any creative thing I’ve done for the past year. So there’s that.
In the meantime, yeah. I’m still around, and still working on comics at a snail’s pace. When I’m not fighting with Python.
An Ancient Comic: Pacmania
Just remembered this one, which I originally drew in 2007 (clicking on them should embiggen):
New project, page 1
So, here’s what I’ve been working on. This is the inked (but not colored or lettered) first page of a graphic novel I’m setting out on. This should be a pretty big project, and I’m actually not sure what my endgame will be as far as getting it out into the world- I want to have a big chunk of pages put together before I start thinking about whether or not to run it serially online, for instance.
The project is (temporarily) called Eyeball, and it’s about spyplanes in the early 60s. Or about not getting too lost in your job, depending on which way you want to look at it.
This one’s been gestating for quite a while; I wrote out the original plot and started scripting in 2006. I was really excited about the project, but eventually bailed because 1) I didn’t think I could draw well enough to do it justice, and 2) the thought of doing all of the visual research to get the look and feel right for a story set in 1960 just scared the piss out of me. But now I’m 6 years better at drawing (I still think it’ll be a challenge, but it’s actually possible this time) and, well, Mad Men has gone and done me the favor of researching what things looked like in 1960.
So we’ll see where this goes.
Rockefeller Center
Another drawing done with my new Wacom tablet, using a picture I took as a guide.
OTTO is on indefinite hiatus
So, this is one mid-level-upsetting part of a larger, extremely upsetting situation: I’m stopping production on Otto, Protector of the North Woods. Or, more accurately, I stopped a week ago and won’t be starting up again.
What’s the deal? Well, frankly, the deal’s a pretty severe bummer. Some really, really tragic shit happened in my family last week. Bad enough that I’m still reeling from it, and probably will be for a while. At this point, I’m not really capable of creative work. But even after this upset eventually eases, the upcoming Otto storyline is largely about depression and suicide (in some ways, the whole strip is), and that’s not an area of my brain that I think would be healthy to spend a lot of time in right now.
I don’t know if the strip will eventually be revived or not. I know that eventually I’ll pick back up with some sort of creative work, but at this point I have no idea what that’ll be. Keep an eye on this space, I guess, if you’re the sort who cares.
Wall of Sound II
A drawing of a photograph of a sculpture.