I’m terrifically proud to be a member of The Bureau of Drawers, a Seattle-based sketchgroup of cartoonists and comic artists. We’ve been busy as bees lately – we recently appeared at the Seattle Art Museum’s outdoor REMIX project, and we’ll be at Bumbershoot this weekend - and coming up on Friday, September 10, we’ll be having our first-ever gallery show AND we’ll also be debuting a box set of minicomics from more than fifteen individual artists! (I’ve got two minis in the set, ’cause I’m an overachiever!)

 You can find more info about it at our group’s blog – BureauOfDrawers.net – Spread the word and and I hope to see you there!

A couple of weeks back, we were meant to be treated to a nearly unprecedented display of the Northern Lights, courtesy of the sun going berserkoid and hurling big fiery baseballs at our picture windows. Sadly, for some reason or another – space confusion, gremlins, an act of God – we didn’t get the show in our part of the country so – to mitigate our disappointment – I made our own batch of Northern Lights for my wife and myself.

For the record, the only time I have ever seen the Northern Lights – minus some crackling lightning-like flashes in the sky during the recent solar hissyfit – was in Arizona. The world is nutcakes.

Just a couple of things to mention tout suite: First off, I wanted to let folks know that I now have a DeviantArt account (inasmuch as I’m finally catching up to 1998). I don’t have anything up there at present, but I’ll be adding art – old and new – over the next couple of weeks.

If you’ve got a DeviantArt account, please do let me know, I’d love to start adding folks to my contacts over there and see what everyone’s up to!

Next up, I’ve added the last of my Marvel 30-In-One original drawings up to my Etsy shop. including MODOK and Ben Grimm, the ever-loving blue-eyed Thing! All the rest are gone, so give these a looksee while they’re still available.

And lastly, Lulu.com is offering free shipping on my first book, Jeremy: The Complete Strip Collection, which collects all 170 original Jeremy strips, plus some short stories and sketch pages (and add “Jeremy: Frankenstein Begin Again” – containing four stories of Jeremy and his friends – to your order to get that with free shipping, too. Whoopee!)

Seriously, it was midday on the weekend in Redmond’s Town Center. This was the last thing we expected – although I was prepared!

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Episode 79 of the Wasted Words podcast went up last night, hosted as always by RJ White, with guests Leonard Pierce (avclub.com) and Dan McQuade (philadelphiawilldo.com) and regular panelists Shek Baker and Olivia Todd to discuss crime, Kanye West, and a visit with Baltimore’s favorite bartender, Deke Zbinski.

Wasted Words is the panel discussion program where everyone is drunk and nobody knows what they’re talking about. Offering up a less sober perspective on any and all topics, ranging from politics to popular culture.

This is a thing I contribute to, you should lissen!

Anudder strip about my girl and I, and I promise that we were only making that much of a racket on account of we were the only people in the theatre. I don’t remember what we were seeing. It might’ve been “House Bunny”. I say that without shame. 

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Digging up some old comic strips and art for the purposes of re-posting to this-here blog, I found a cache of strips about my wife and I which I’d doodled up in my sketchbook. 

And to answer your questions before you ask them, yes, our names are Jon & Kate and, actually, yes, we enjoyed it when those two were in the papers all the time, because we got to pretend that all the tabloid headlines were about us. “Oh, look, sweetie – I’m apparently dating my production assistant. Well, that’s it for you!”

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Whew! I lost the better part of last week to a bout of bronchitis, so what should have been time spent cartooning and writing was time spent sleeping and trying to navigate to the lee-side of a NyQuil-assisted fever haze.

Although not quite back up to snuff by Friday, I was at least within sufficiently few bus-stops shy of snuff to doodle up the image below for the Dueling Banjo Pigs blog, the brainchild of artists Stacy Curtis and Guy Francis. More than a few of my fellow members in the Bureau of Drawers had already contributed, so I wanted to get in my licks sooner nor later:

 
(click for the enlargipated version, or here for the DBP blog entry)

I drew this while watching Back To The Future II, and now I can’t look at it without imagining that this was the letter which Joe Flaherty delivered at the end of the film. “Dueling Banjo Pigs? 1885? DOC’S ALIVE!”

Right, anyway, back to work!

Any excuse to draw Metamorpho, that’s my stance on things.

It’s Nate Bellegarde’s birthday today, and he suggested via Twitter that by way of celebration a whole heckuva lot of people should be drawing Metamorpho. Who’m I to argue? Here you go, Nate, Metamorphoes!

I’m only sorry I didn’t have time to draw Rex Mason’s younger sibling Samantha, from Franz Kafka’s Metamorpho fanfic “Metamorpho’s Sis” …

On Saturday, my wife and I hosted a Taco Party as a sort of belated birthday get-together for my recent be-agening. We’d been dying to treat our friends – most of whom have never been anywhere near the Sonoran Desert – to some of the recipes we’d either brought with us from Arizona or had cobbled together on our own.

Since these treats were all new to just about everybody at the party, I made little cards to identify some of the less typical taco fare for the uninitiated. I call them “The Taco Party Pals”, here they are in their entirety:

Since brevity started overcoming my descriptive prowess – please note that Sangria is identified solely as drunk-making material – here’s a set of brief CVs for the Pals:

AppleSaulca: A salsa of my own invention, three types of peppers, onions,
garlic, red apples and cinnamon, roasted and pureed. His Taco Party Pal name is “Patches”, he likes sports!

Carne Seca: I’ve never met anyone in Washington who has heard of this. Dried beef cooked thrice, seasoned with loads of lime and garlic. His Taco Party Pal name is “Doodles”, he’s a computer whiz kid!

Cinnabero: Another one of my own inventions, as advertised on the tin – vodka infused with apple, cinnamon and habanero. We mix it with a splash of lime and ginger beer for a nice Summer drink, or with horchata (see below). Her Taco Party Pal name is also “Doodles”, she resents Carne Seca for that.

Horchata: Rice, water, milk, vanilla and cinnamon. You can get this out of soda fountains in Tucson. It’s super-easy to make, though, so you never have to do without. His Taco Party Pal name is “Pepper”, he’s got a mouth on him.

Triple Chocolate Mole’ Ice Cream: Where I would be without my KitchenAid, I just don’t know. Three kinds of chocolate and pasilla negra pepper creates a smooth ice cream with a little spice on the end. It’s quite good. Her Taco Party Pal name is “Hot Rod” and she can out-skate anybody!

Polenta with Green Chiles: Frankly, I was throwing a bone to the vegetarians. The next morning, my wife and I finished off the polenta with fried eggs and leftover Carne Seca. Take that, people who don’t consume living things! Her Taco Party Pal name is “Specs” and she loves to read!

Sangria: Loads of sweet fruit in cheap red wine, this makes ladies turn talkative we found out! It’s like a sodium penthatol cocktail, evidently. ALso it makes people not be able to pour a second glass without splashing, which is why Horchata is splattered with little red dots as though it had committed the murder act with a rusty knife. Her Taco Party Pal name is “Peaches” and she’s a pirate, arrrrrr.

Tacos Al Pastor: Slow roasted pork butt (tee hee) marinated in peppers and pineapple. Guys, this is … this is so good. His Taco Party Pal name is “The Commodore” and he likes airplanes.

That there was the fun! It really was a terrific party, I’m so glad everyone was able to make it, and it was a blast cooking as much as my wife and I did. I’m also thinking of putting together a Taco Party Pals cookbook, to spread the joy. It’ll be the new Eat Pray Love, and you may consider that the terrible threat it sounds like it is.