Some sketchbook pages I’ve been meaning to upload to my sweet Flickr site. If you’ve never been to a Barack Obama rally, you can FEEL THE EXCITEMENT by looking at the back of this gentleman’s head, which I drew while waiting 3 hours for my man Obama to show up. If you’re having trouble getting revved up, just play Michael Jackson’s “Man In The Mirror” in your head, which should do it. Whew! I’m getting excited right now!

This one from a show I went to last night with my friend Kelly at the Patchwork Playhouse, a room in the back of Century (a local vintage shop) which is covered walls and ceiling in quilts and generally soft stuff. Instead of chairs there’s a ridiculous profusion of sofas everywhere, and everyone kind of squeezes in to watch. What’s so great is that all the fabric and upholstery everywhere COMPLETELY deadens the sound, so they almost never mike anything and everything sounds pretty crystal clear. I love it.

This band was called “Arrive”, and hail from Chicago. Pretty good, although sometimes when trained musicians make random noises it’s hard for me to tell if it’s good or not. Using all those brains and training to make all these “found” sounds seems a little histrionic, although it by and large sounded really good. The vibes player sounded especially sweet, although the more that I think about it it was the sax player who did the coolest stuff. He was so unassuming, and moved so little, that it was easy to forget him. But he had a really amazing sound, and never overplayed at all, which is refreshing from younger musicians. I know if I could play like that I’d be soloing all over the place.

Afterwards we saw them out at Snug Harbor, where we missed no opportunity to say the name of the beanbag-pitching game they were playing (“Cornhole”) over and over and over again.

Last night I went up to Dish, a local restaurant/bar, where my friend Kelly was hosting an art opening for a guy named John Prichard. I can’t find a website for him anywhere, or I’d link to it.

The best part, though, was listening to the band, Ten Speed, and trying to draw them. I’m not sure how successful the drawing was per se, but listening to live music and drawing was surprisingly fun. Ten Speed is “out” jazz, or “free” jazz, or whatever–a lot of improvisation and a little dissonance, with some real sweet bits peeking through from time to time. It’s not the easiest music to listen to with all of your mind, if you’re not a musician or a student of the form or something. But listening to it with part of my mind while drawing was PERFECT. The music part of my brain would zone out while the drawing part did its thing, and then when that real sweet part would come around, they would switch for a little while.

Doubly perfect as this has always been something I struggle with: disengaging the part of my brain that wants to fill everything with lines and details and tomfoolery, rather than just loosening up and thinking less about the end product and more about the PROCESS of drawing. I think it’s especially apropos for listening to jazz, especially “out” jazz, or any musical with an experimental compositional scheme. The making of that music, the idea that what you are hearing is a unique one-time event combining the ideas of several people into one whole, the PROCESS, is as much a part of things as the product that you hear. It doesn’t always work as well in a recorded form, because you’re only seeing the product, and the process is less evident. But in a live setting, you can’t help but notice it–the musicians are nodding to each other, biding their time, planning their moves.

Anyway, Ten Speed was super good. Also John Prichard’s drawings were really good. The whole night was pretty great. That’s my report.

I love where this story is going. I only have one more page to post from the contributions I got at HeroesCon, although I’m thinking about mailing this to some other cartoonists who I might not see before this fall’s SPX in Bethesda.

This page features Liz Prince (top), whose book Delayed Replays recently came out from Top Shelf, and it is even better than her first book Will You Still Love Me If I Wet The Bed? Liz, the answer is a resounding YES. Below Liz’s panel is Aaron Renier’s, who did Spiral Bound (also for Top Shelf), and is now working on something awesome-sounding entitled The Unsinkable Walker Bean, which I cannot wait for.

Click the image to view it bigger on my Flickr page. You can also get to the whole sequenced set that way, or just click here. More soon!

My man Todd Harlan, who has worked with me at the comic book store (excepting when I was not working at the comic book store)for about five years, is quitting this week. Todd and I have shared an office for the last year, and in honor of his impending last day (Friday), I have adapted one of the MANY MANY conversations we have had about flatulence into comic form.

Why is Todd so FASCINATED with farting? Good question–I would never stoop to discussion of so base a topic, but in this case I have lowered my usually Olympic-class standards a little in honor of my buddy’s departure. Not to mention my subsequent increase in workload. Jerk.

When I was a kid, our house was full of plants. On every flat surface there was something in a pot, something which needed water, something that would get you yelled at if you got caught pulling it’s leaves off. My mother would bustle in with a spray bottle and mist her plants, humming to them, occasionally explaining to us how much her plants loved these little baths.

This was all Mom-stuff–I don’t think my father has the slightest interest in this sort of thing, at least not inside of the house. Today their house, the house we lived in throughout my high school years, and which they still live in today, is jammed full of houseplants. In fact, the seven or so acres are pretty jammed with flora of all kinds–my mother has practically terraformed their property, including a small man-made mountain covered with flowers and shrubs, numerous ponds small and large, each surrounded with rocks and statuary, and paths going every which way, all lined with carefully husbanded plants.

You hear about people getting older and hoarding newspaper clippings, or books, or just whatever, but my mother is hoarding plants. Trees, bushes, flowers, vegetables. Junipers, oak, azaleas, apple trees. It’s crazy. But it’s crazy beautiful. When I go to visit, and she walks me around the yard to show me her most recent additions/corrections (there are always corrections, always), it is always stunning the sheer volume and variety of what she has wrought in her vast yard. And it’s humbling, in a way, to see so clearly the underpinnings of my own occasionally obsessive behavior, mirrored in the garden of this small woman who’s pushing seventy.

Slowly I trickle these out, treasuring each one like Uncle Scrooge with his many gold coins.

The fun thing about this kind of narrative corpse experiment (see here for the whole thing) is that apparently each cartoonist seems to want to restart the story somehow. Which is funny; I would probably do the same. But I like that here Laura Park (top) and Kazimir Strzepek (bottom) are in perfect sync. I love these guys’ stuff a lot, so it’s a huge thrill to have something–especially something so focused on ME ME ME–by them.

Man, I have really enjoyed working on this page. It took longer than I initially thought, but they always do that. It was just fun to get back into drawing cartoons, after so many months of thinking about work at home. Very pleasant; as a matter of fact, as I type this I’m sitting at home on the 3rd day of a 4-day weekend, where I have done no work at all. Thrillingly pleasant.

These are all people I have met in the last year or so, although most of them were either at this year’s HeroesCon or last year’s SPX. If you’re not familiar with the artists’ work, in some cases I’ve attempted to make some nod to it, either stylistically or via some symbol (for instance, Julia Wertz gets drunk a lot in her comics), which has often saved me from having to worry about a likeness (see Julia Wertz).

You can see the art at a much larger size at my Flickr site.

My parents have a famously (for us kids, anyway) contentious relationship. Not the sort of thing where they hate each other or anything, but definitely the sort of thing where they have fought constantly all my life. Throughout my childhood I constantly expected them to get divorced at any time. I still remember vividly my older brother explaining to me that “that’s just the way some people communicate”, when I expressed this idea to him. He was right, though, and it was a good lesson.

I mean, 50 years! Whoa!

So to celebrate, there was a big post-service burger-and-hotdog dinner after church last night, so I drove down to Monroe to sit through church with my family and celebrate. Super weird, highly emotional, with a bunch of crying all over the place, localized mainly in the two Harbin pews. You could hear sniffles all around you in a diminishing Doppler effect.

Once the main crying was done, everyone dried their eyes and repaired to the gymnasium for some grub and fellowship. I had a great time hanging out with my family, although my brother and I almost edged into a political discussion (“Dusty, Obama wants to REDISTRIBUTE THE WEALTH! I heard the guy say it! That’s Marxism!”), but I edged back out of it somehow.

Speaking of edging out, the night’s sermon was on how everyone should be doing more to witness to people and just generally put the people around you into awkward positions by stressing how hot and fiery Hell will be for them. Much emphasis was put on family members, which I am one of, so all night I kept expecting people to corner me by the water fountain so they could talk earnestly to me about my soul. I wanted to take pictures of the gym (here’s one here:)–

–for posterity’s sake, but I seriously was worried whenever I’d get too far away from the crowd, as I knew that’s when a proselytizer would strike! You can never be too careful.

Anyway: if this is thoroughly uninteresting to you, then DO NOT go look at the entire set on my Flickr page, which has even more tedious description and reporting. No extra charge!

Okay, so during the recently completed HeroesCon 2008, I was able to get some really super additions to my little themed sketchbook, the first of which I have posted in my AUFAUXBIOGRAPHY Flickr set. It’s fab, check it out.

If you’re just tuning in, this is a themed sketchbook I’ve taken to a couple of comic conventions, asking artists to contribute a panel of an evolving story of my life. I make no suggestions other than a few rules in the front (no boobs, swearing, etc.). I got some really primo additions at HeroesCon, which I’ll post over the next couple of weeks or so.

I’m also finishing a new one-page strip now, featuring 26 sweet cartoonists. I’m inking it with Rapidographs, which are even more frustrating than I remember. Dang! I’ll probably post that in the next couple of days, once I get all the lettering done.