Oops...

Apologies for missing a week people. I've been working straight through, doing no personal, postable drawings. This is the only viewable thing I've done, a proposal for an App company for whom I've been doing intermittent character sketches.

His name is D.T. Squeedler (The People Needler.) His bio reads thusly:

An accident in a deep-south Fertilizer Plant transmorphes our hero, D.T. Squeedler, from mild-mannered cowpoke into maniacal hillbilly-lizard. He now hungers for only two things: revenge against all humans and delicious, delicious grasshoppers. 

It was only after submitting said blurb I realized it could poooossibly be offensive given recent events. Hmmm.

Nextrum 20

Checking my email-box this morning I found that Spectrum (SciFi/fantasy yearly competition) has again welcomed me into the fold. The above comic page (another Space Creep excerpt) will be included in Spectrum 20, which is cool. I mean, it's not cool in classical sense, not like James Dean or Musician boyfriends, but rather "another round of my illustrative excrata being published alongside artists of actual note" type of thing. In any case, I appreciate the arbitration of the Spectrum judges (dubious as it is munificent) and may once more suckle the increasingly desiccated tit of my petty successes. Nostrovia.

Comics Eclectic

Salutation art lovers, y'all go to Mocca this weekend? Mocca, for the uninitiated, is the Indie Comics extravaganza centered in NY. It's held in the 69th Regiment Armory, the interior lined with booths n' tables à la NYCC. As with past years, it ends up being more of a crafts fair than anything, like some corporeal outgrowth of Etsy. Knit animal caps, buttons emblazoned with your favorite hard candy, posters, prints, patches of all kinds; a Sargasso Sea of the New Kitsch. If Williamsburg drowned, this would be its flotsam.

Not that I'm necessarily denigrating it. The rise of Faux-Folk eclectica in the last 5 to 10 years is really a net positive. I can't speak for the consumers (what people do with objects of pure aesthetic value I'll never know) but it provides for its creators a relationship with the doing, a relationship to the act of production otherwise unavailable in an information economy. And while I don't see any evidence of people actually needing more stuff, the hocking of said wares allows for a community (and by now a legitimate micro-economy) built around the personal, generative spirit. It is, at least in theory, a petard lobbed into the Capitalist monostructure, the reassertion of some kind of differentiated cultural identity, brothy and self-conscious though it may be. While it's still a form of commodity fetishism, it's not Marxist commodity fetishism, so that's something. If we could just do away with fiat exchange, get into a whole barter thing....oh god, then it'd be Burning Man.

Authors Note: I'm only speaking of my reaction to the DIY phenomenon as a whole, not of its practitioners. All the participating artists were talented and made extremely admirable art objects.

Also, here's an old man I drew for a comic. It's the only thing I did this week open for public consumption, so.....yeah.