CowboyOrange

The Xeric book is out! And it has its own blog.

New banner as well. I need to color that…

Comics are here:
http://www.cowboyorange.com/marya

I know I promised to come kickin’ around my virtual clubhouse more, and give folks more reasons to join me. I haven’t been doing that lately. I kinda got kicked in the teeth by some kinda nasty disease that laid me out for a week. Fever, chills, nausea, a killer cough, and complete exhaustion. Not only was I too mentally tired to draw, I was too tired to watch TV. That’s right - I was too dumb to do the dumbest thing a man can do. Pretty lame, I know.

So, to catch up, I’m giving you a pair of recent comics pages, which I drew for my friend Joe Lambert’s birthday. He’s kind of a genius, so I felt a little dumb giving this to him; but what was I gonna do, spend money? Anyway, I don’t think it’s too bad for drawing it in one night.

A little explanation: during the summer, we play a lot of four-square up here at James Sturm’s School for Cartoonists in Butt-Fuck Nowhere. “Dodgeball” is one of the rules variants, wherein if one catches the ball before the bounce and yells “Dodgeball!” one can throw the ball at an opponent and knock them “out.” Joe is a particularly competitive player.

One other thing occurs to me about this story that I’d like to throw out there: I’m curious about the relationship between style and content. I’ve recently begun taking a more conventional animation/action-cartoon style in my work, and because I have literary pretensions and aspirations, this makes me nervous. I’ve never seen solid literary work pulled off in a conventional visual style; I worry about whether it’s even possible. Part of it, I suppose, is that “style” is to cartooning as “voice” is to writing, and that no literary “voice” characterized by cliché or formal conventionalism has ever been recognized as particularly worthy of critical attention. At the same time, though, I’ve read a lot of strongly literary books - masterpieces, I think - which aren’t deeply experimental in their approach to form, so I’m not convinced that the successful use of convention is a failing.

Anyway, I welcome your thoughts on the subject, or on the piece that prompted it. And I promise, more soon, including that pic of Penina!

My organization techniques are abysmal. I keep carefully balanced piles of papers on my desk, and my “files” consist of similarly chaotic boxes full of paper. It makes Colleen cry.

So, I was digging through these boxes the other day, looking for a missing page on my Ota Benga project, when I came across a bunch of old comics that I’ve never published, like the silent one I posted last week. I figure, “Heck, they’re shamefully bad, but folks can see my good stuff easily enough. It might be fun to put these up.”

I drew the comic below almost two years ago, during my first year at CCS. The class took a trip to the Montshire Museum, and the point was to use what one found there as the subject of a comic in which one would experiment with scale, making the protagonist either very large or very small. I chose the latter.

I chose not to color this comic for two reasons: 1) During the assignment, I was experimenting with black and white composition, and I think color would distract from that; and 2) it really isn’t good enough to merit the extra effort. So, with that said, here it is!

Enjoy!

From two of my favorite artists: Raymond Penet and Anne Cleveland.

Went thrifting this weekend with the intention of finding a lamp. No luck, but instead found this:

Candydish with Raymond Penet artwork! This is the lid to the dish…

…and this is the inside. His character are “The Lovers” or “The Poet and His Fiance”. I first found his work while working at the Schulz library- what first grabbed my attention was a little drawing of a mermaid on a rock, knitting the waves. His comics are usually one-panel silent “gags” like that- they aren’t really meant to be funny, just little plays on the drawn line.

These are from a book illustrated by Anne Cleveland I found at the Dartmouth Library, called “A Home of Your Own”- sort of a 1950’s housewife guide. I MUCH prefer Anne’s later book with Jean Anderson, “The Educated Woman”, which is a beautiful tribute to women in higher education, but it was nice to get a look at more of her drawings.

While “A Home of Your Own” did have a lot of very, very dated chapters (especially the ones concerning how to hire and manage “the help”) parts were also much more progressive than I’d expected. There were several chapters on how to manage being a working wife, and really seemed to encourage wives and mothers to work outside the home. That almost made up for this illustration:

Ugh…