New painting with sickly colors (click for larger version). Thanks to the folks at Drawn! that posted about my artwork and appearance at Partyka.
My pal, John Hankiewicz, has a new collection published by Sparkplug Comicbooks and I gotta say, this is his most ballsy approach to that thing we call "comics". John plays off of the formal aspects of the medium, the use of titles/labels, time and setting, and even distorts the figure more so than he has ever before, giving abstract and fragmented emotional responses. Can you tell I'm digging this new book? Can you tell I'm telling you to buy the sucker? Do it here or at a comic shop in the not-to-distant future. Here's some more info from the Sparkplug site:Asthma is a collection of recent comics by John Hankiewicz. From story to story, even page to page, the book mixes a startling range of graphic and narrative styles to form a dreamlike whole.
"Amateur Comics" creates a wordless lyric of body, chairs, and space. "Martha Gregory" delves into the rhyming psyches of a young woman and an old man. "Jazz" charts a single day through the lens of the unconscious. Also included are the visually abstract "The Kimball House," the autobiographical "Westmont Is Next," the elliptically humorous "Dance" (printed in black and red), and several other ineffable pieces.
Sacha Mardou has several playing cards she's taken around to cartoonists and drawers of all sorts and had them doodle out some pretty cool stuff on 'em. I forgot that I did one of these and I came across her Live Journal page and found it. She has several other cards too, as well as (of course) her own very cool artwork.
These are four self-portraits that I did for a class, in the styles of Renaissance, Baroque, Post-Impressionism, and Cubism. The first was Renaissance and I decided to show myself doodling and so I kept the theme going in the remaining ones. Eh, whattya gonna do? It's friggin art school...
The Fantagraphics anthology, "Hotwire Comix & Capers" (that includes five pages by me - all under the theme of Oklahoma-livin') is now in stores. You can order it here. It's a damn fine book, featuring new work from Ivan Brunetti, J. Bradley Johnson, Johnny Ryan, Mats!?, Tony Millionaire, Carol Swain, and several others. Below is one of several one-panel gags I did fer it.
I have a one-page comic strip in the Vice Comics Issue (along with Robert Crumb, Gary Panter, Johnny Ryan, Marc Bell, Sammy Harkham, Ted May, and several others) that's supposed to be out sometime this week. It's called, "I'm Evil, Randy!" The character from my strip is the blue-skinned guy on the top of the head explosion above. Pick it up if ya can.
Featuring old and new work, The Museum of Contempory Art in Chicago will be hosting an exhibit of Chris Ware's work starting May 6th and will be up until August 27th. From the MCA site: "...his first museum one-person exhibition in Chicago, Ware presents works he created when he first moved to the city a decade ago, and works from his recent series set in a Chicago apartment building."
The final project for one of my classes was to create three images with a unifying theme and visual style. When thinking of three's, I could only come up with playing around with the primary colors or the Holy Trinity and well, I chose the primary colors. So here they are with their supposed meanings: Red = Anger Rage, Yellow = Joy Happiness, and finally Blue = Sadness Depression. (Click on images for larger versions.)
I recently came across Mark Lansdown's online gallery collection of comic pinbacks from the late 1800's to the 1950's. Had a swell time looking through them too... Here's a couple of samples.
Update: Oh, and I guess Monte Beauchamp's newest book is out - a collection of matchbook covers. Pretty cool.
I've posted two new illustrations up on my main site that I recently drew. Above is an illustration for the school I'm attending (combining the interior and exterior of landscape/space designs). Below is another illo for Reverie Theatre Company, for the play "Emma." I wasn't too pleased with the outcome of the Emma illustration, as I'm not the greatest with any degree of realism in my artwork. Eh, but there it is...
Kevin Huizenga, Anders Nilsen, and Sammy Harkham made their last stop on their book-signing tour here in Chicago at Quimby's. I decided to make some small drawings for the three of them, so above are separate cards for each of 'em. These three cartoonists are pretty damn inspiring to me and it was great to hang out with them after the event swillin' beer and talkin' 'bout comics and whatnot. 
Jeremy Adolphson has a huge gallery of original 4"x6" cards that he's collected over the years from artist signings and submissions to his site. I only learned of his site from him contacting me and asking if I would draw one for him (my card is above), and I was pleased to see some of my favorite cartoonists had also submitted cards to him as well (some of which are featured below). For anyone who's interested, he takes submissions, so check out his site, browse through the 4x6 cards, and get some more info. www.4x6-art.com
"The Wurst" online gallery currently has an exibit of 14 Print Gocco prints that shows in full force the ability of the Gocco printing kit with artists using multiple screens with fantastic registration. Above is a print by Brad Simon and below is Minza Wada. All of the prints exbitited are for sale online as well.
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