My partner Michael and I are joining forces with our comics and art. I’m very excited to present our joint portfolio/comics site, Goat & Mouse!
I’m not sure what that means for this site. I admit it’s been pretty quiet over here lately. I’ve been meaning to give it an overhaul for the last few months. I may focus this site on illustration work and miscellaneous blogging, keeping most of the comics stuff at Goat & Mouse. Thoughts?
Hey there, kiddies. I don’t know how many people actually subscribe to this blog, but to those who do, I apologize for the lapse in posting. But lots of goodies are in the works.
First of all, an exciting new issue of Brine Weekly has come out! That’s right, in four-to-six weeks, we managed to turn out a new issue. Can we keep up this frenetic pace? Only time will tell. Until then, please enjoy the delightful contents of what I must say is our best issue yet.
So part of why I haven’t been updating at any kind of regular clip is because I’ve been working on some bigger projects — comics and finished illustrations and that sort of thing. And frankly, I would really like to redesign this site from the ground up so it’s more fit to represent my work in the Year of Our Lord 2012. I’m toying with the idea of converting to Drupal, since it seems, frankly, better suited to the kind of site I’ve been trying to have here the whole time, but of course there’s a learning curve on any new software platform.
Plus I’m tinkering away at a separate site for my comics — a portal to all the stuff I’ve worked on that I still like. Maybe not even full of the automated Web 2.0 junk I’ve been using, though I’m kind of accustomed to that convenience.
Anyway, that’s the State of the Union here at Fifteen Minute Intermission. Don’t be too surprised if things change here before the year end. Oh, and don’t forget to vote on Tuesday.
After fermenting within the earth for untold eons, a new and delightful issue of Brine Weekly has emerged from the molten tomato-style sauce bubbling up from one of the cracks in the asphalt of our cyber-office’s online parking lot.
There you can see my new comic (“Rocky Mountain Foods”), amongst other amusements and curiosities seven months in the making. It was a long time to go dormant, but we just got distracted and depressed for a while. Sorry. We’re chock full of ideas now, though, so hopefully the turnaround will be a lot faster on the next issue.
In related news, I’m working on some other comics right now, too… I submitted a little one-page comic to one zine and am working on two others, one of which is the longest single-story comic I’ve ever done (seven pages doesn’t sound like much, but it’s intimidating). That’s a big part of why it’s gone so quiet here lately… Most of what I’ve been working on has been larger works in progress.
When I get some more free time sometime in the near future, I’m hoping to redesign this site. It’s been roughly the same since 2008 or so. Yikes.
Haven’t had much of a chance to draw over the last week, so the last couple nights I’ve been trying to get back into my groove.
Some more doodles. These ones are from last night, while I was sitting in a cafe listening to musicians.
A few little sketchbook doodles I did yesterday:
It’s been a while, friends.
I quit doing the movie roundups. It was starting to feel a little forced to try to say something about every movie I saw without getting repetitive, and I wasn’t really sure what I was trying to do anyway—a recommendation service? A discussion? An attempt to distill my thoughts about the movie into something that could be part of a discussion later? Toward the end I was leaning toward the first, and that’s really the death knell for reviews. It turns into tedium, trying to think of the reasons someone might or might not want to see a movie. In the end, there aren’t many movies I see that I’d advise people not to see. Watch more movies. That’s all the advice I can give you.
There are a few I’ve seen lately that I’ve wanted to say a little about. It seems like people have said everything that needs to be said about Prometheus, at least. But it’s the most fun movie to talk about in a long time just because there’s so much wrong with it. I’m glad I saw it, in the same way that I’m glad I saw Spider-Man 3 (three times, in theaters—or was it four? It is hardly a secret that Spider-Man 3 is my favorite Spider-Man). Whether I write up an actual review, well, that’s up for grabs. I’m not sure I feel comfortable writing reviews anymore for movies I’ve only seen once. I forget everything. Real reviewers take notes.
The other movie I’ve wanted to talk about is Moonrise Kingdom, the new Wes Anderson movie, a sweet fairy tale of a film. I will definitely be seeing that one again. I came out of it both loving it and thinking it would benefit enormously from being shown on physical film. There are only a few 35mm theaters still standing, and those left must soon convert or die (studios are ending distribution of physical prints completely). But there’s one I know won’t be converted before the end of summer, and it’s getting Moonrise Kingdom in the next few weeks. Last chance. It seems like an appropriate last movie to see on the first physical medium that made movies possible.
What else have I been up to? I powered through four seasons of Mad Men over the course of a couple weeks. I’m waiting for season five to appear on Netflix—though I might lose patience and pay to watch it on iTunes or Amazon before that. It’s an addictive series. I have a terrible weakness for characters who inspire a combination of love and hatred and pity, so of course Pete Campbell is my favorite. I hear he gets punched in the face in season five. I would pay to see that.
I’d been in a rut when it comes to creativity, but I went to Anthrocon and spent some time among my cartoonist friends and acquaintances, who all have a ton of interesting work both in progress and finished. I didn’t spend much time drawing at the convention—I was stretched pretty thin among different groups of friends doing different things, and I was exhausted almost any time I got a chance to sit down, and I still didn’t get a chance to spend enough time with everyone. But I came home feeling energized about art in a way I haven’t been in months. I’ve been drawing since, but a lot of it is stuff that isn’t ready to post, or it’s for other projects besides my personal amusement and thus not available yet. But I’m working, and it feels good.
Marker sketch of a scene from Watership Down, and my first submission to the new weekly challenge Alphabooks. In this case, B is for Bigwig.
I actually have something for the letter ‘A,’ too, but it’s a more complex scene that I’m not completely sure how to depict yet. I didn’t really intend this to be the final submission for ‘B,’ but I’ve been so distracted that I haven’t gotten around to doing anything else. So there you are.
