had a light dusting of snow overnight. i would say it's nothing terribly exciting except that it's snow and therefore by default it's terribly exciting.

after a breakfast of pears i am trying to wrap my brain around the day, though i suspect it will get swept away in busyness the way the rest of the week has gone before.

so much to do, so little time. but first: cocoa.

with marshmallows.


Snow Scene at Argenteuil (1875)
Claude-Oscar Monet

From the National Gallery, UK

i've been holed up writing and whatnot (and making paper dolls, sure ~ and reading comic books). it's been very...therapeutic. and educational as well. and i emerge from this chrysalis with some perspective, i hope. and fresh energy to create cool stuff.

i know you ain't holding your breath out there, but soon i will be back to regular posting and have all new shiny shiny to share with you. meanwhile, here's a cover of sorts (reduced), just by way of proof that i have been working.

hope everyone is enjoying their weekend. i have the four ps: pears, pizza, popcorn, and pomegranates. can't get any better than that.

: D

Huge and mighty forms
that do not live like living men,
moved slowly through the mind by day
and were a trouble to my dreams.

        ~ William Wordsworth
                "Growth of a Poet's Mind"

i dream in black and white. sometimes i can perceive color (i know a truck is red, for example), but usually that's just a perception ~ the dream itself usually has no color. occasionally it will have spot color (i dreamt of being a photojournalist trying to break some story in Iraq and being chased inside a huge scientific military complex. there was an escalator and as i descended, a giant koi was swimming in the air before me. the koi was every color of the rainbow ~ stuff like that). i know other people dream this way too. i wonder if is has anything to do with my inability to learn color theory....

but i digress. the point of this post was to make an announcement.

it's official: my long violent war with color and color theory and coloring is at an end.

in case you are wondering, nobody won.

meanwhile, we have to bury the dead ~ which amounts to six pages of art that i will be posting in installments starting tomorrow and running daily through November 7th. these are very much tweener pages in which the coloring style is going to do some mutating. at the end, the new style will hopefully not be too much of a sudden shock but it will possibly be somewhat more monochromatic (which is about all the color i can handle). Fortunately this is not an art style change in terms of the drawing ~ just the coloring, i promise.

also, the good news is: if all goes well, Reconstruction will continue to post daily instead of just M-Th from here on out.

please remember ~ in spite of my cartoony art style, this series is intended for mature readers and even though it's been pretty pg-rated tame since i began in august, it won't always be SFW (ooo, i used a blogging acronym. i feel so hip). if you need warnings for weeks in which stuff is NSFW, let me know and i will post cautions in advance. if you need to know all the ways in which this story is going to turn down dark paths, please read this.

questions? qualms? wondering where that newly named pony is? i'm so far ahead in the drawing, you won't see the pony until november (sorry!).

hope everyone is having a happy weekend!

: D

When I moved from my hometown, I left all my comics behind. This is probably shocking and horrifying to those of you who collect and cherish and coddle comic books. But I was moving to a place of high humidity and anyone who appreciates truly loving their comic books knows that I did what was best for them at the time, difficult though it was for me to make that decision.

So I packed up a couple of reading copies of my favorites and said goodbye to the rest of them. I visited them at Christmas most years and that was sufficient. But then I moved up north and coming home at Christmas became impractical and I began to miss my comics. I called my brother and told him to send me some ~ just a "surprise me" variety. For a while that held me. And I bought a couple here and there and was gifted some as well, but then some dark days came: I was gravely disappointed by Garth Ennis's redux of Ghost Rider (blargh ~ why, Marvel, why???), and last summer Azzarello's Loveless was a huge bust (boo!), and then I missed my comics even more because I remembered loving them and collecting them and choosing each one for its own special self from the comic boxes at the comic store (don't fergit, people, I'm old, back then there was no internet or online ordering). I missed the yellowing tape on their crinkled baggies, their stubborn little gooey orange and white price tags: .60, .80, $1.25. I knew exactly from which store each came from by their distinct packaging and pricing and by golly, I recollect buying every single dang one of them.

All this nostalgia, coupled with returning to Comic Con after some years away, made me miss my comics even more, but it finally dawned on me: I no longer live in the land of the sweat and mung. So I called my mother and told her to send my comics "home".


This past week I received three boxes of comic books. I'm still missing part of my collection, but the bulk of it has arrived. it contained a few surprises (I had no idea I had read Hellblazer for so long), and a few cringe-worthy recollections (Midnight Sons? gaggg!). But most important, among them were cherished volumes I haven't set eyes on in quite a few years and many of which I haven't read in over two decades.

I quit collecting comics during the 1990s comics bust. Hellblazer no. 87 (1995) was the last comic I made a conscious effort to buy off the stands (if I remember correctly). Interestingly, Eddie Campbell was the artist drawing the title at the time.

My collection is very small (about 300 books) and very specialized (about 5 titles), but most of it has kept its value over the years and many particular issues have continued to grow in demand. I have no idea how much my collection is worth (haven't assessed it since the 80s boom), but I'm guessing it's probably at least $1,500 without blinking (assuming much of it is generally worthless, but a handful of books tip the scales heavily). Possibly it's worth much more. Not too shabby for something I nickeled and dimed together throughout my teenage years. But I've no intention of selling any of these precious darlings, so their worth to me is really in the joy of placing them back among my embarrassingly overflowed collection of books and ephemera.

I guess I am telling you all of this as a warning. You might have to suffer endless posts about these little darlings while I reacquaint myself.

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despite a decided advantage to Othello, it looks like Chiron has taken the day.

thank you to everyone who submitted names ~ !

i would have been happy with any of the choices since they were all uniquely apropos, but Chiron must have been fate burbling to the top since the name has now inspired me to rewrite the scene a little to include some information that will actually introduce the one theme in this story i hadn't touched on yet ~ so thank you bachsoprano for a great submission! for more info on this great name, check out the king of all lazy-easy references: wikipedia!

i will likely file away some of these other names for other horses/dogs/possibly people ~ so consider your contributions never in vain! and of course, there will be more horses!

: D

p.s. i have also created a tag for "burning questions" (to include calls for names such as this one) since it's more fun to let other people populate and build up your imaginary world sometimes. i get stuck in the staleness of naming everyone John or Bill, thinking in monochrome, and being positively uninspired about certain detail work that i ought to pay more attention to. you all have fresh eyes and fresh perspective ~ why not take advantage of it!

there was a question as to the horse's gender in my previous post, so i am extending the deadline until tomorrow morning. meanwhile, the horse is a gelding (which is male for all you non-horsey peeps).

name that horse <~ !

p.s. yesterday's post was the dreaded corn, as promised. and today is drowning ~ a fun recurring theme (or maybe not so much fun).

i'm drawing page 42 today (sloth that i am) and it's the first page with a horse on it (which is a crying shame that it took 42 pages to get to a horse, but i guess that's the way it worked out). anyway, the horse in the above picture is a fuzzy winter version of the horse in the story ~ dark, sleek, friendly, gentle. nothing particularly flashy ~ just a nice horse that belongs to a very angry schoolmaster.

and it needs a name!

i am notoriously bad at naming horses. to date, the horses in this story have included: Spot, Sport, Dottie, Patches, Dandy, Big Jim, Fiona, Jersey, General Washington, Bitch, and Dung. pretty embarrassing. so yeah. i am no longer going to name any horses in this story. i won't rename the ones who have already been cursed, but i am going to ask you all to name the rest of them (and there will be plenty eventually).

so what do you think? keep in mind, for this one, the year is 1861. the owner of this horse, Clayton Randolph, is 28 years old, unmarried, unattached, fastidious, probably likes w. c. bryant and shakespeare. he's had some college education and he is stern, fearless, and pragmatic. this particular horse is only briefly featured in the overall story, so if you have a favorite name burning a hole in your psyche, you might want to wait for another opportunity for a horse with more story longevity.

i'll throw all responses into a hat and choose one on tuesday morning, October 13th.

i haven't finished inking this image (you can see my pencil scribbles all over it), but here's a picture of the horse in question if it'll help. and yes, it's smiling, but at least i didn't give it eyebrows.

this week i begin posting the section with my first marker-color experiments (mostly successful, i think). yesterday's not so much, but from here on out things are looking pretty decent. i hope you enjoy!





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i went ahead and spent some money and got a handful of markers to give 'em a go. i have mixed feelings of joy and trepidation.

things i like:

1. consistency of color.
2. no streaks/ease of blending.
3. no buckling on the paper.
4. it gives my work polish that i just can't seem to get with paint because of my tentativeness.

things that concern me:

1. Learning to use them. they color pretty no matter what you do with them, which is great, but i don't want to get too sloppy. also, while i like the brush nibs very much, somehow i can't control them as well as an actual brush with paint. i keep wandering out of the lines.
2. cost (?). i bought more colors than I probably really need, though ~ over time i will figure out a palette.
3. colors! zooks, i'm bad at choosing colors. i chose out of the "sepia" family, figuring i'd trust it to be, well, sepia (as i know it), but it's awfully bright. it's not that big of a deal because i can adjust the saturation on the computer (as i did above), but i'd like to figure out a truer color match eventually.

this is all so bizarre. i could color for (technically) free if i just did it on the computer, where i have bajillions of colors at my disposal and can erase my mistakes. but...

it's all about the artifact.

if i don't have something i can hold in my hand, i don't love it.

at any rate, i colored four pages this morning before noon ~ fastest coloring job ever. that alone is worth a lot. now i can spend the rest of the weekend working on totally new stuff! yay!

hope everyone is having a great weekend!

: D

p.s. the panel above is from a page you won't see until october 12th, i think. please note the dreaded corn field!

i really want some markers.


i'm not entirely sure why. i've never had much interest in them before. found some Design markers (a discontinued brand) from about twenty years ago (i'm not kidding, i'm pretty sure i bought them in 1988). not only do they still work (God loves alcohol-based markers!), but they're kind of cool and i was playing with them and thinking about all the possibilities.

and the colors! oh man, the colors are so dang vivid!

the copic markers (above) are professional-quality and super expensive (yarg!), but i was thinking about getting a cheaper brand just to play with. Blick makes a very cheap student-grade set and i have a 30%-off coupon and i am very tempted. i want something that doesn't streak, blends well, and doesn't bleed.

unfortunately, i have learned the long way around that there are some things you shouldn't skimp on. hair products (especially when you have as much hair as i do), and art supplies. a Blick set of 24 would cost me about $30. a copic set of 36? $125. it sounds horrendous, but these babies sell for more than $5 a pop, so a set of 36 for $125ish is a pretty fabulous deal. i could just buy a handful of singles, but my coupon is for one item only, so a set would make better sense. prismacolor also makes sets....

and then it just gets too confusing.

sigh.

yeah. purty.

had trouble sitting still this weekend. painted couple of pages (really need to do more, though), scanned some stuff, rearranged a few of my books (they may start cannibalizing each other at any moment due to overcrowding), and came up with at least twenty ideas for cool things to do or make that aren't exactly on my schedule, like adapt the über-ridiculous overblown, gratuitous, slightly nauseating poem The Praesidicide for the stage.

Hylton's 6,000+ line epic poem (in the first-person voice of J.W. Booth himself) may have the dubious distinction of being the first piece of Lincoln Assassination fan fiction published (within the year of the deed ~ beating out Townsend's Katy of Catoctin by decades). if anyone knows of any literary effort on the subject published in that period, feel free to bring it to my attention ~ the more, the merrier, right?

in other Pursuance news (it's been a while since i've blogged about this temporarily dormant project), over the course of the summer i acquired yet more books on the subject for my ever-growing collection, including the prize find of a copy of George Porter's prison diary (The Surgeon in Charge). it's incredibly rare and i got it for an absolute steal ~ $15 on amazon. someone wasn't minding the store, i guess). i've only ever seen one other copy for sale and it sold for $75.

i also bought Geary's Murder of Abraham Lincoln at ComicCon. I would have got Geary to sign it (he signed my Jack the Ripper), but alas he was nowhere to be found this year.

finally, i found a cheap copy of Jampoleer's Last Lincoln Conspirator, which i still think is pretty dang solid book for being an overwritten subject.

i continue to keep my eyes peeled for a cheap copies of the various histories of the 4th Pennsylvania Cavalry (alas no luck and they seem to be getting rarer, fetching about $40-$60 a piece), as well as Arno Press's published transcript (which i've only ever seen one volume for sale ~ for $100, though someone bought it). the copy of John Wilkes Booth, Himself that i have been eying for some time also jumped in price this past year, up $85 to a whopping $375 (geh! i'm crazy, but i'm not that crazy!), and no cheap copies of Kimmel's Mad Booths of Maryland nor Bates' Lincoln in the Telegraph Office have presented themselves (the going price on each is about $60 for a decent copy). if i weren't so dang picky about the editions, i might have already bought copies of some of these things, but, well, there you have it. all too rich for anyone's blood, frankly. i paid $70 for my first copy of Doster's Lincoln and Episodes of the Civil War (and much less for the second copy), but only because it's my favorite non-fiction book ever and i still intend to be buried with it.

and yes, occasionally i buy food and clothing. i bought groceries this weekend, though i confess i haven't really bought many new clothes except the occasional pair of jeans and a shirt in years. i flinch at paying more than $10 for a blouse, but waft a $20 book of my desire under my nose and it's a bargain!

and i need another bookcase so bad, but if i spend money on a bookcase, how can i buy more books???

it's all a conundrum.



"In Memory of Abraham Lincoln:
The Reward of the Just"
D. T. Weist, 1865
from Lincoln at 200

so in case you haven't noticed, I'm trying to get back into the swing of blogging. a while back i suggested (to myself) that i would try to give myself a blogging schedule and have different topics every other day or so.

one of the obvious choices of topics is my desk. i can't imagine torturing you with a weekly image of the rats' nest that it is (yes, we've recovered from the empty void that was last may ~ yikes! what a difference a season makes, eh?). but a monthly post might be in order (in lieu of me rambling on about working on x, y, or z, perhaps). so here it is for September (late in the month, but this picture was actually taken about two weeks ago).



other obvious choices for blogging are book reviews, film reviews, historical blitherage. i'm hoping by the beginning of october, i will have it figured out.if any of you have idea about what you would like to see blogged about on your flist, i'll surely consider requests!

~ * ~

p.s. i am still working diligently on Reconstruction, though bogged down around p. 34. whatever i was thinking when i made Gwilym Fletcher a corn farmer, i clearly wasn't considering what torture it would be to have to draw all that frakkin' corn. is it too late to switch the Antietam cornfield to some other battle as one of the pivotal moments of the story?

i think i hate corn.

the weather is finally deciding to turn (at long last and alleluia!). of course that means my brain is kicking into high gear over a dozen projects i want to get cracking on. among these projects, i had this idea that i would really love to adapt s. weir mitchell's Summer of St. Martin into a comic form. i have blogged about this story before, and while there's nothing particularly exciting about the basic plot, the story sticks with me because it's sweet and very autumny, and so just right for the season. it also appeals to me as a challenge because it's nothing but a conversation between two people who are sitting on a bench in a forest in which the leaves are falling all around them (it's all very romantic). it would certainly give me an opportunity to work on the nuances of character expressions, etc.

like i have the time.

filed away in my "big list of graphic adaptations" are a number of horrifically complex projects. In Pursuance of Said Conspiracy remains among them ~ along with this demented fantasy i have had since a long time ago in which i am determined to do a graphic novel adaptation of the Jesuit Relations ~ which i still think would be awesome and i have all manner of ideas for it, but oh my! what an undertaking that would be!

so yeah. i don't know where mitchell falls into this. it would be a short piece (24 pages would cover it, i think), so maybe more reasonable than those larger, more ambitious projects. but still, it's not as though i don't have a ton of work already on my plate.

oh sigh. if i had millions of dollars i would hire an army of artists.

guess i better go get a lottery ticket.

Last night I read Eddie Campbell's Black Diamond Detective Agency, which is fairly new from First Second Books (which produces some really amazing works!). I was too overwhelmed at Comic Con this year to visit Campbell (I think my brother said he was there, but I never crossed paths with his table). So alas, I did not get a signed copy, but I'm glad to have bought a copy at all. Campbell was the first "comic" artist who inspired me to think that I could actually draw (probably From Hell was one of the first graphic novels I ever saw aside from Spiegelman that had a distinctive art style that wasn't traditional superheroes. I immediately fell in love with his inks and washes and later developed a similar affinity for his watercolors. Black Diamond Detective Agency is one of only a few full-color books of his, and I love the gritty palette he's chosen for the end of the 19th century ~ it goes well with the industrial aspects of the storyline and keeps the tone somber and noirish) like a detective book should be, right?

There's problems with the script, I think. I mean, the story is good: exploding train, missing wife, framed mystery man, even a good old-fashioned chase in a gas-saturated mine. But given another twenty pages or so, some of the more crashing scene changes and bafflingly curt dialog might have flowed more smoothly. There's also some lengthy explanations at the end: wherein the villain explains all ~ very Victorian in construction so I'll give it props for the formula, but as Campbell was working from a script by C. Gaby Mitchell and perhaps either as a difficulty of editing or a limitation of space, certain information and character development feels a wee crammed up. Or it could just be that I wanted to savor the book longer (or ghoulishly wanted more 'splosions, which is always a possibility).

Nevertheless, this is a beautiful little book and I hope we'll see more like it. I tried (perhaps in a desultory fashion given my awareness of my own personal artistic limitations), to emulate this style in at least one incarnation of Reconstruction. It didn't work out. But I'm glad to be able to admire the work here ~ even if it's something I can't reproduce, it continues to inspire.

Thank you to the guys at Forbidden Panel who came around to our booth and got me on the spot to offer a short promo podcast about our work with Here There be Monsters press. This was about the most coherent I was for the whole show ~ fortunately I sound like I know what I am talking about!

Click to listen!

For those of you who don't know me personally, this is your chance to hear my bizarre voice (ack!). Yes, I talk funny. Everyone says so.

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