Eleanor made a big “thermometer” to chart our Secret Science Alliance progress, both thumbnails, pencils, and inks. Where are we now? At about 180 out of 460 filled units. But we’ve been making steady progress. Here, Detroit takes a sniff at the finished pages.
A paltry stack so far, but growing.
Are you guys excited for Fluke next weekend? ‘Cause I’m kinda terrified! I really need to get more ’07 Anthologies printed up!
(X-posted from the litle house blog)
Hey guys!
Looks like we’re going to have to shut the Little House site down until June.
Until then, every moment of Eleanor’s (and my) time is going to be filled by turning this:
into a finished book! These are Eleanor’s thumbs for her upcoming kid’s book, The Secret Science Alliance. I’m going to be inking it!
And since Eleanor and I are about to enter super-deadline-crunch mode, and we’re not going to have the time to fill orders, much less make new copies of all the minicomics we’re low on.
Don’t worry, we’ll be bringing it back, revamped and with a lot more original art for sale. But if there’s anything you want now, you’ve got till Friday!
• Devlin took Eleanor and David Mack and me up to the “Silver Scream” showing of Mad Love – apparently Peter Lorre’s first American movie role. What an amazing movie – it’s a hodgepodge of German Expressionist sets, Grand Guignol, and broad comedy veering unexpectedly to horror -and back again. Lorre’s the brilliant (but, of course, demented,) surgeon, Doctor Gogol. There’s a beautiful actress he’s obsessed with. There’s her famous pianist husband, who has his hands crushed in a train accident. Gogol transplants the hands of a recently-guillotined murderer (who happened to be a knife-thrower for a circus,) onto the pianist, with the expected result. There’s even a drunken housekeeper with a parrot.
• After the movie Eleanor said that young Lorre “looked like a beautiful baby.” I had to admit it was true. There were all these long lingering closeups on him, all this velvety modeling of shadows on his bald head. One of the cinematographers apparently later worked on Citizen Kane.
• The spook show before the movie was great as well. They also showed a Three Stooges short. Lest you trust Eleanor’s judgement TOO much, she also called the Three Stooges “awful little men.”
• Here is a little snippet of a project I am working on:
• Well, shucks. I made a New Year’s Resolution to update my blog at least once a week, and I went and broke it immediately. Hope you had a good holiday type season. Eleanor and I are having our Christmas on Wednesday and mashing it up with her birthday. We found a perfectly good (well, slightly dried out) Xmas tree out on the curb by a church, so: score.
• I almost missed this! I drew a choose-your-own-adventure comic written by the mighty Jason Shiga for the current issue of Nick Magazine (the Dec/Jan issue) and there was a post about it on the Nick comics blog. Check it out! I’m actually working on another Nick piece right now.
• We found a huge dead possum lying in the grass behind our house yesterday. We ended up digging a little grave for him in the brush and putting a bunch of logs on top. This was more a matter of practicality than sentiment.
• We went to a fun re-gifting party at our friend David and Kerry’s house and came back with a tiny whisk, some cinnamon-toast scented candles, and a bottle of Vermouth. So I guess we’ll be whisking up some martinis around our cinnamon-scented house.
• I’ve almost filled up a sketchbook! Man, I’ve been working on this one since I was in college. Did I mention I’m really bad with sketchbooks? Anyway, I’ve been doing tons of life drawing recently, so it’s been filling up quick. I feel pretty bad about not doing more fun, creative sketches like Eleanor, but I can barely bring myself to draw in sketchbooks at all for some reason. Here’s some sketches I did at an old-timey music last weekend.
• Hey high school Drew, fuck you for not listening to country music. Back in high school, I would brag about my eclecticism by saying I’d listen to any genre of music… except country, of course. To ho ho. Well, I was an idiot back then. We’ve been listening to so much country radio recently. On a related note:
• Fuck anybody who dismisses “the south” as an entire entity. Whoops, you’re a bigot!
• Most terrifying Christmas song I’ve ever heard: “Ding-a-Ling, the Christmas Bell” by Lynn Anderson.
This song is supposed to be about an anthopomorphized bell that rings off-key and is mocked by all of the other bells, with requisite Rudolph-style day-saving at the end. But there’s this repeated refrain of “Ding a Ling’s” chime, and it’s in this weird minor key that sounds almost exactly like the theme from “Halloween.” I think you can listen to it here, if you’re curious.
• We saw almost every single cartoonist in North Georgia at a pretty cool art show the other day. Did we bother to get off our asses and submit something to the show? No. No we did not.
• Best two mincomics we’ve gotten in the mail this week: Dregs by Coleman Engle, Hey Four-Eyes #2 by Robyn Chapman et al. WOW!
Hey, does anybody who’s versed in Macs and iTunes know if it’s possible to throw a bunch of music onto a DVD and delete it off your computer, but somehow let iTunes know that the music is going to be on that DVD from now on? Quickly and easily?
