Page 143 of Family Man now online!And now here is a page guaranteed to startle and confuse, if Luther’s face is any judge.
But, whatever you think is going on: I’ll repeat my mantra of wait for it. Your questions should be answered by Labor Day.
Page 142 of Family Man now online!Gloriosky! Weeks of traveling and a bit more yet ahead of me, but I freaking FINALLY have a page update.
I am so tired of looking at this page, guys. It has been weeks. It is a perfectly fine page, accomplishing what it needs to do, but jiminy. No more! Onto the internet it goes.
It’s been a hectic and unproductive space of time, these last few weeks. I look forward to spending July within a twenty mile radius.
And I will use that time to make chicken stickers. Watch me.
Some day, if I should ever lose you,
will you be able then to go to sleep
without me softly whispering above you
like night air stirring in the linden tree?
Without my waking here and watching
and saying words as tender as eyelids
that come to rest weightlessly upon your breast,
upon your sleeping limbs, upon your lips?
Without my touching you and leaving you
alone with what is yours, like a summer garden
that is overflowing with masses
of melissa and star-anise?
Rainer Maria Rilke
trans. Albert Ernest Flemming
I am home! For a day or two, before lectures and weddings and things set me to scurrying out of town once more. Folks, in July, I am pretty sure that I’m just going to chain myself to the front porch and resist all attempts to dislodge me until the month is out.
While in Manhattan, apart from selling comic books, I got to:
– shake Allison Janney’s hand backstage after a performance of 9 to 5
– check out the view from Lerner Books’ offices on the 72nd floor of the Empire State building
– see Angela Lansbury perform two days before winning a Tony for the part from seats so close that I could see up her nose
– eat some seriously dangerous pine-nut almond sugar cookies from an Italian bakery on Bleecker
– pray for death in Times Square (as all sane people should)
– take a survey of all of the red-figure Attic vase paintings depicting chickens in the collection at the Met
– see the awesome Donnetta Lavinia Grays bellow every obscene word imaginable at a reading at the Public
– stalk the turtles in Central Park
– mock Teddy Roosevelt’s unbearably butch statue, and a few other billion things.
Nonetheless, I am happy to be home. New York is a helluva thing, but it has the effect of making me appreciate the silly provincial charms and humane calm of Portland and the Northwest. (Although I really do wish there were a better selection of 5th century BCE chicken paintings at the museum here.)
It was a great pleasure seeing so many people at MoCCA! Thank you to everybody who came and said hello, bought a book, or just gossiped with me. After four years of studiously keeping to the left half of the country it was delightful to see both old friends and new faces. I’ll be visiting much more frequently in the future, so you’ll all have a chance to get bored of me before the decade is out.
And now I’m going to sleep off a bit of the jetlag before finishing the most recent page of Family Man writing a detailed outline for a book proposal sending out more book orders mocking up an illustration laying out three small press publishing projects inking three Oscar & Annie strips ordering more stickers ordering a new round of Bite Me redoing the Family Man webpage…ET CETERA!
In about twelve hours and change, the fabulous Katie Lane and I will be getting up to hop a plane (or planes, rather) to New York.
We’ll be there close to a week, ostensibly for the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA) festival on the 6th and 7th, but also to eat lots of food, see plays on the cheap, poke around museums, and just generally make nuisances of ourselves.
During the festival, I’ll be at table 517 with Klio from SPQR Blues! I’ll have books and minicomics and a few other things for giveaway – please stop by and say hello! I am very friendly and I will write silly things inside your book.
Speaking of books, I’ve sent out almost all Bite Me! orders at this point – less than a dozen orders have been delayed due to reprinting of some sold out art, shirts, and a slight shortage of spoons (who’d have thought). But odds are that if you paid online, your package is on the way as of this evening. Hurray! It feels good to be mostly caught up. International orders have all gone out as well,with only a few exceptions like the above.
It does make me feel ridiculous charging folks the $15 US it can cost to send a book overseas, but it’s also no fun to eat the mailing expense – if somebody in the UK knows of a decent small press distributor who’d be up for taking on my UK, Commonwealth, and European orders, I’d be interested in connecting. It would be a pretty light task all things considered.
And now: packing! See you all in New York, and I’ll see the rest of you online when I get home. It’s gonna be one crazy little summer, and I look forward to it.
(There might be a half page of Family Man tonight. To settle my nerves, if nothing else.)