My good buddy J. Bone gave me a present this week. Using the Japanese art of amigurumi, he made me a yarn Princess Christi. For good measure he threw in a little sock monkey too, I guess so she has a pet. Awesomes!!! Be sure to check out his blog to see more great creations. I threw an original page of art in the background for scale, but now I realize that I’m the only one who knows how big I draw the comic. (I use Strathmore bristol pads 11×14.)

Every year I scan in some of my favourite scribblings from my sketchbook and make a little book for my family members. I don’t really think about fonts, so the one here is pretty poorly chosen, maybe I’ll fix it before I print them out.

Seriously, before Halloween I saw Christmas decorations up in my local mall. That boundry has been broken! But for those of you who are into getting ready for the holidays ahead of time, I’ve got a small store open at Cafe Press that sells holiday cards. Today I added a couple Hanukkah cards to my available options because, really, there are not many out there. This one I actually did some research on what an ancient Israeli lamp and traditional garb would look like.

The gag line is: The real miracle of Hanukkah is that they spent 8 days with family!

I also have my Christmas card from last year that was well liked enough that I had requests to start the shop, although last year it was too late to get them before January.

So if you’re looking for something a bit awesome to mail out to your loved ones this year, check ’em out!

When some people are on long trips, trapped in a vehicle of some sort, they play a game called Geography. I came up with my own nameless game where you have to take the name of a famous person (real or fictional) and add it phonetically to other famous people. For instance we could start with comedian Chris Rock. The next person would add another famous person’s name on the front or the back. Like actor Rock Hudson. So it becomes Chris Rock Hudson. The next person might add one on the front by using Kiss dummer Peter Criss. You can’t use group names, like Kiss or Colombus Blue Jackets though. Only individuals. So you’d now have Peter Criss Rock Hudson. Then, let’s say you don’t know the totally fun heist movie, Hudson Hawk, you might say Sonny Bono and make it Peter Criss Rock HudSonny Bono. This goes on until you can’t add another name on it, or you get sick of the game and go back to telling stories about the time you got suspended from school, got chased by some guys by the railroad tracks or were challenged to a fight by a small one-armed man (you can’t win, because even if you win, you’re a loser!).

Andy B threw another haunted Halloween hell house hulaballoo last weekend and last night I enjoyed even more Halloween hijinks. There were candied apples, pumpkin carving, chocolates, cheese and other fun stuff. The part I enjoy least is dressing up but here are some people who really got into the spirit and fun…

Nimrod from the X-Men (my memory failed me at first and I thought it was a GoBot (which is basically a car with a face on the bottom marketed as a Transformer)).

Frye from Futurama:

The Fly and Zombie:

The twins from the Shining:

Landshark!

With Obama

John Saxon from Enter the Dragon and Sarah Palin

Another Palin and Mormon zombie:

The old batman costume gets revamped:

This year’s movie faves:

The Neverending Story’s Childlike Empress and the guy from No Country For Old Men

Van Gogh listening to Van Halen:

Last chance to dress up as a Watchman and be ahead of the curve:

And I dressed up as one of the followers of the Economicon, one of the background characters from my own strip. Lame? Fun? You decide.

The city as art. That’s kind of the idea behind Nuit Blanche, the annual, all night downtown art fest that Toronto has adopted from France. Corporately sponsored installations of strange things happen all over the city, often on a grand scale. Here’s a photo from the first year where a gymnasium full of balls were whipped by visitors at each other while children DJed records. I got one thrown at my face so hard that it literally knocked the snot out of me. Still, good fun!

This year featured the glass windows of our city hall projecting pixelized art and messages, a giant horde of roaming zombies, a sports stadium where you cheer on a field of super hyped mascots who gradually get less pumped as 6am nears and a waterfall pouring out of a 3rd story window… interesting stuff. There’s an estimate that a million people came out to wander the city and experience art, even if they didn’t understand it. It’s usually a pretty good time if you can find the places without the huge lineups to get in. This year, instead of joining the throngs of underwhelmed, but fairly well entertained citizens, I decided to set up my own art thing. I basically live across the street from one of the biggest centres for exhibits that night (the Art College and Art Gallery) so me and a few friends did our own guerilla art thing that was meant to be more engaging and accessable than the sort of stuff we were used to seeing. But most importantly, we just wanted to have some fun. I made a sign that promised HIDEOUS CARICATURES and then tried to deliver.

I drew ’em fast and furious, probably over 100 people between 10pm and 3am. I not only exaggerated their prominant features but added spiders out of people’s noses, ragged teeth, crossed eyes etc. to make ’em extra ugly. It was interesting to see how people would react, since people are often more vain and sensitive about the facial feature that got them picked on in school, big ears! Only one person all night long was saddend by my drawing. Everyone else was laughing and having a good time. I think the atmosphere and the promise that I was trying to make them look ugly made them more easy going. My compatriots did awesome caricatures as well. Matt Collins drew a group of 5 people as the rock band Kiss and on another occasion , after having drawn someone’s jacket, he decided “Your head is going to be a house”.

Another buddy, Peter Mohideen, tried to actually sketch people earnestly. Another friend, Pete Thorne, really went against the grain, often just handing people a drawing of a question mark or grape soda after asking them their name, hobbies, how they were enjoying their night etc. If someone was hanging around behind us and liked Pete’s work he’d actually draw that person a real caricature to just kept thwarting people’s expectations. They’re art was super funny and played well against my semi-earnest attempts to do likeknesses. Of course the drawings seemed better at the moment and I didn’t get photos of the best ones but here’s a simple example. They were usually ugly and even weirder.

I must acknowledge the idea of drawing “Hideous Caricatures” is not my own. My friend Steve Manale (often mentioned on the blog) had his done by an artist at the San Diego Comicon a few years ago. I think the artist was Trevor Alixopulous but I can’t be sure. I hope he’s cool with me sniping his idea for a night of fun.

This month’s Nick Mag features a pull out comic section with a cover of Charles Christopher and a bunch of bigfoot comics, including one of mine which is a Lose Your Way Adventure. I’d done a couple of them for kid’s textbooks and they’re super fun. Here’s how one of them turned out…

If you think it’s fun, too chcek out the magazine. A few pages later there’s another one of my one panel gags too, about ghosts in a theatre.

This weekend was the Fan Expo in Toronto. Other than Karl, all of the TX creators were there along the back wall doing sketches, selling wares and admiring costumes. That’s me in the foreground with some of the prints I’ve made of The Princess Planet characters being awesome.

I, of course, made some time to rifle through the dollar bins for more hidden treasure. This Ghost story looked promising. Disco Ghosts? Fantastic! But like so many of the horror comics, trying to pack 3 stories into one issue leaves all the stories wanting. It starts with a fantastic story about a pirate captain cursed to eternally chase a water elemental spirit that ends on a totally un-satisfying note. Then there’s a stupid detetctive story and finally 3 pages of Disco Ghost that’s so lacking in pesonality it could take over hosting the Tonight Show.

Now this looks like a winner!

The Last Unexpected comic was so good that I’m looking forward to time travelling Abe Lincoln.

Fumetti is apparently the art of taking black and white photos of people, adding word balloons and then printing it on newsprint so that the cheap paper makes all your hard work into blurry masses of smudge.

You might all be excited to know I found the next 3 issues of Brute Force. The first issue was as hilarious a read as the cover suggested. All of the animals have had their intelligence boosted, but are still really dumb. At the end of the first issue we discover there’s an evil cyborg force of animals who are out to ruin the environment! Check out the shark with buzzsaw wheels… he’s totally going to ruin your floors!

And I also managed to find a horror comic that scared the jibblies out of Cameron Stewart when he was a kid but had since been lost to time. He made a blog post about it which includes a new sketch he did of the main character.

By Odin’s beard! An awesome fellow has made a space ship for dwarves in the shape of Thor’s hammer, Mjolnir! Check out his Flickr page and enjoy all his little details inside the ship. It’s fan-feaking-tastic.

Here’s another batch of some of my favourite old comics I’ve found in the dollar bins.

Romance comics are always so bad and hard to read but I keep buying them because of the fanatstic art. In fact I think all of the original comic art I own is from Romance books.  Tom Williams was kind enough to send me a page from the romantic comedy graphic novel we did together, No Dead Time. My awesome friend J Bone was also great enough to give me a couple of pieces. One is the first page of a Spider-Man book he did with Darwyn Cooke set on Valentine’s Day and the other is a cover to an issue of Three Days In Europe another Oni Press romantic comedy. And in San Diego last year I got a couple pages by an unknown artist from Secret Hearts.

The cover already has enough amazing text. I can’t add anything more to it.

I got a couple issues of this for gifts, but since this if the one where they visit a princess in a castle I had to keep it.

Spider-Man was like the Missy Elliot of comics. He’d team up with anyone. Even sketch comedians. Spidey even had his own book for cross promoting every month.

But some times he’d guest star in comics for licenses of sit coms that I loved in middle school but were cancelled faster than a spider-sense could tingle.

This must be where Tarantino got his Kill Bill jump suit from. Right? Huh?

Super Cops is my favourite all time find. The book was hilarious. I couldn’t believe it was based on a movie by Shaft director, Gordon Parks, that was based on two real guys. They had an add for the Super Cops wrist watch you could order. I bet those are real collector’s items now. The last story in the book is done by one of my favourite artists, Frank Thorne, who kicked butt drawing Red Sonja for many issues.  A couple months ago a friend of a friend had a secret screening of this film that’s not available on DVD and maybe not even VHS. It was so amazing. It was like Serpico except it was totally entertaining instead of deadly boring.

I think that’s Mike D on the right?