Five Push-ups for Blog

May 18, 2011

Poor Blog. Are you feeling old? Left behind? Still mumbling scathing invectives about Facebook and Twitter between gritted, coffee-and-cigarette-stained teeth? Still threatening to end it all, nobody cares anyway, what’s the point, anything beyond 140 characters or 2 minutes old is nothing but digital dust?

Don’t worry, you have one use left. A parking garage for aging, disparate bits and belches! Don’t cry, Blog. Here, read this to the people:

I drew a 11-page comic about my breakdancing days for the KIDS anthology. I’m pretty sure this is the funnest thing I’ve ever drawn. During the writing & inking, I spent a week watching ’80s breakdancing movies and only listened to the Breakin’ and Beat Street soundtracks and random hip hop dj sets recorded on the radio 25 years ago.

(I drew another 14 pages of LCB for CAKE and it’s now available for order in the Comics section! -nate 6/26/12)

Here are some random illustration jobs and jubilations:

T-shirt for my pal Alex’s birthday. Funny once you realize that “philately” is pronounced “phil-late-uh-lee”, which took me about 3 months to learn after drawing it.

This is a Japanese dragon, with three claws, for the great Free Comic Book Day kid’s activity book, Dragons!, put out by Tugboat Press.

I inexplicably drew a penis on Lisa Hanawalt’s girl dog, Indy.

draw comics faster

Urging my overbearded buddy Alec to finish Basewood postehaste.

I put together a website for my cousin Johnelle’s furniture and french funk boutique in Berkeley, mignonnedecor.com

.. along with a site for her awesomemom Kimberlee’s boutique, located in beautiful Brantome, France, thebohemians.fr

This is the year for weddings! My longtime friend Scott was among the newlies, and I designed and printed the invitation for him and Cat:

While in Portland, I also renewed my passion for an old flame of 20th century technology: film. Jake and I roamed around shooting photos of Bongmobiles and water towers which he developed over beers. Upon returning home, I developed, scanned and uploaded an annoyingly large number of photos to my flickr. Here’s a small sampling:

filmspotting, chicago theatre

torrential downpour hits food truck

rosalia swinging

greg means

more icy lake michigan

angee, helen

jeff mowing

chicago moire

chester brown at quimby's

There’s more as I’ve actually been quite busy despite the silence. But I’ll let you rest, Blog. You’re wheezing so hard, I’m afraid you’re going to keel over. Rest. More soon.