Kickstart Some Postcards!

Have I mentioned that I'm running a Kickstarter campaign, trying to finance the publication of some postcards based on last year's Animal Alphabet project?

This is what one of the postcards is going to look like, featuring Ben Towle's "O is for Ostrich" and Rich Barrett's "O is for Octopus."

It's going well already. The project has enough backers that I am surely going to take the postcards to the press. I mention it here in case it's news to you, because if I get enough support I'll be able to publish the postcards in a larger edition and more nicely.

Late Update: If you've located this post and are interested in buying a set of the cards, please visit the Satisfactory Press Storenvy site, where the cards and a selection of other goodies are available.

The Scuba Santa of Christmas Island

Okay, so for almost two years now I have been participating in a hobby called Postcrossing, which uses the web to arrange one-time, one-way postcard penpals for you, mostly from international and faraway destinations. It's pretty fun.

Sometimes the postcards I get are really awesome, and sometimes they come with awesome stamps on the back. Case in point:



It's Christmastime in Australia, too, even though they're a week into summer. And you have to figure that if your country contained Christmas Island, you'd do a stamp for it at this time of year.

Doodle Penance: "new haven postcards"

This week's "Doodle Penance" post originates in a search that I've seen a few times in our Google logs: "new haven postcards."

And, to tell you the truth, there's already a perfectly adequate post on the site here about postcards of New Haven. I still have batches of them for sale, too, if you want some. But apparently that didn't satisfy this Google searcher, so we're going to draw some more.

So: if you've driven up Whitney Avenue in the past couple of years, you may have noticed that Yale has installed a life-size sculpture of a torosaurus outside of the Peabody Museum of Natural History. It's really pretty cool.



What you may not realize is that every year on October 29, zealous Elis adorn the torosaur with a nude male mannequin:



The mannequin usually stays in place until some time in the afternoon of October 29th. Police and museum officials have been lenient about the running gag, chuckling that a college just isn't a college without a few traditional pranks.

Edit: I couldn't resist tinkering a little with the color in my doodle. This isn't much better, but it does at least get the background to recede a little bit. I encourage anyone with better color sense than me to tell me what I did wrong with this drawing. Click to enlarge; leave a comment down below.



Mike, what have you got?

—Well, Isaac, I thought I'd contribute an image of one of my favorite spots in New Haven, the banks of the Mill River near the Orange Street bridge. The missus and I took frequent walks down to this calm oasis at the end of our neighborhood, and we loved that a mere twenty-minute stroll could bring us to a spot where it was possible to see nary a building nor a wire (though the sound of the nearby streets was always audible).

Of course, we also had to be careful on our walks owing to the occasionally unruly animal life. I once got bitten by a dog (prompting Becca to shout indignantly to its owner: "Your dog bit my husband!"). More worrisome, though, was the genuinely wild life, such as the most famous denizen of the lower Mill River; of course I mean Millie, the New Haven Crocodile:

While Millie could indeed be fearsome if caught unawares (or hungry), she was as much to be pitied as feared. No Connecticut native, this creature belonged in the Africa from which she hailed and for which she pined (that tear should show how much she misses the Nile). I myself am no native of the Elm City, but I do catch myself pining for it on occasion, huge reptiles and all. And with this living relative of your statuesque torosaurus, I conclude this postcard salute to New Haven!

Highbrow Kirby Character Collage

Not much time today. Maybe my last "Swansea Find" post will come next weekend.

But this floated (electronically) across my desk today, and I thought it was worth taking out of context:



There are two Simon & Kirby heroes, The Fighting American and The Guardian, both of them variations on Captain America. (To me that looks like fanzine art, maybe even traced from a couple of different comics, but not Kirby.) In the background, the Smithsonian Castle, in an old postcard image (printed badly, with seriously off-register color).

The creator of this little collage? This man:



Here's the New York Times article, to provide some context.

Discuss.

Jesse Reklaw's Slow Wave

I've been a fan of Jesse Reklaw's weekly Slow Wave comic strip for at least eleven years now. It used to run in the New Haven Advocate, and it was one of the features in the paper that I always looked forward to. Then I met Jesse, some time in the summer of 1998, and I can say without exaggeration that he has been an inspiration to me ever since.

Slow Wave is a sort of collective dream diary. Each week, Jesse adapts someone's dream into a four-panel comic. The dreams often feature odd encounters with celebrities, small animals of unusual importance, the dreamer gaining strange powers or responsibilities, or the dreamer behaving cruelly or perversely. Reading a bunch of these dreams in a row, which you can do in the archives of Jesse's site, or in his collection Dreamtoons, or in the forthcoming The Night of Your Life (available now for pre-ordering), you start to see the terrain of these dreams as something shared between the dreamers, a world we all live in while we're asleep. I'm not sure if I'm imagining a "collective unconscious," exactly, or just an otherworld like Oz or Narnia (but more deadpan and perverse) to which we all have nighttime access.

Anyway, I bring this up in part because I contributed this week's dream:



Since I started my postcard regimen ten years ago, I've been writing to Jesse at least once a week, often sending him one or more of my dreams. He probably has almost five hundred of my dreams on postcards now, many more than I can remember. Although I'm not really sending them to him in order to submit them to Slow Wave—I think of it more as just our peculiar method of correspondence—I am always happy when he chooses to use one of my dreams.

Back when I first met Jesse ten years ago, he gave me a couple of issues of his comic Concave Up, a sort of antecedent to the Slow Wave collections, and—here's the crucial part—a few copies of his minicomics. A little inch-wide micro-mini called Mime Compliant was my first introduction to the world of minicomics, and I think that if Jesse hadn't given me that comic, I never would have had the notion to self-publish or to draw minicomics myself. I've been conscious of this debt for a long time, but this might be the first time I've spelled it out. Not only are Jesse's ideas (like Shuffleupagus, for example) a continual source of inspiration for me, but he gave me my actual entrance to the community of minicomics cartoonists. I'll always be grateful for that open door, whether it was a gate of horn or of ivory.

Here are two earlier strips that Jesse drew from my dreams years ago. They're old enough that they've disappeared from his online archive, but even in the digital realm I'm a packrat, so I had them stashed away somewhere. This one takes place in the basement of my aunt's first house in Washington, DC:



... And this one takes place in a town I never lived in. I know that in the dream I belonged to a housing co-op, but I've never lived in anything like a co-op.



Maybe it was someone else's dream. On the other hand, I know where the image of the Prince robot came from, and I don't think many people would have this image percolating through their unconscious world:



That's a panel from Mr. Miracle #16, in which young Shilo Norman comes face to face with a group of tiny insectoid monster-villains. They capture him under a stone wall (by making him grow, Alice-in-Wonderland-like, too large to move) then use a "fuser" to put his molecular essence into a pupating larva, so that it looks like him. (Young Shilo looks sort of like a teenage James Brown.) Only it turns out the whole thing was only sort of a dream: Shilo wakes up after three panels of screaming.

Somehow, my unconscious mind decided that if Prince turned into a giant robot in a dream, that's what he would look like.

Anyway, I heartily recommend that you check out Jesse's site for lots more droll, peculiar, and funny dream comics. Also, I exhort you to drop over to Global Hobo distro and pick up copies of the three comics he has on offer there. The latest issue of Couch Tag is one of my favorite comics of all time.

Ten Years of Postcards

So, while I was away from my computer on a trip, I turned over an interesting point on my personal odometer: I've been sending several postcards a day for ten years now. I started keeping track on July 17, 1998. (At first it was four a day; that rapidly turned to five a day.) Today I'll send number 18,650.

I'm still planning to design, print, and send a special tenth-anniversary postcard, but that's going to wait until I'm done unpacking.

I wasn't going to say anything about my little anniversary, because it's really not comics, and not Satisfactory Comics either, but this morning I discovered that an artist in Los Angeles has also been doing a daily postcard project for ten years, and many of her postcards are cartoons or comics.



Here's a postcard she drew on Feb. 23, 1998. This one from a couple of years later also involves a cat-headed person, though I think that's just a coincidence:



Julianna Parr has been drawing or painting a postcard a day (on most days) for ten years, and she not only has a gallery show that opened yesterday, but a web gallery of the Timestamp project that shows all ten years of postcards.

I've never met Julianna Parr, but I salute her. Here's to the power of a daily routine!

Moving Weekend Hiatus

Poor Matteu. It looks like I'm going to have to face the fact that I won't draw the next strip for a couple of weeks. In a day or two, I'm going to have to pack up my drawing supplies for the big move to Vermont, and I don't foresee having time to draw anything before that happens. (I'm too busy packing books, recycling unnecessary papers, and writing my moving cards.)

But digging through all of my stuff in anticipation of the move has turned up some treasures, and I'm going to share a few of them in this post. More will be forthcoming, though I think they may have to wait until I figure out the internet service in the new place—so you might not hear much from me until it's nearly July.

Anyway, in keeping with the theme of the week, here's a little gallery of the postcards I've sent around, over the years, to announce a change in my mailing address. All of these images can be enlarged with a click.

The first one was drawn by our friend and sometime contributor Jesse Reklaw, way back in the summer of 1999, when I switched apartments in Baltimore.


(Drawn by Jesse Reklaw and hand-colored with watercolor, clumsily in this case, by me.)


When I moved back to New Haven after that summer, I asked another friend (and sometime contributor), Scott Koblish to provide me with my favorite dinosaur, the parasaurolophus.


(I think this would have been watercolored, too, if I had sent this copy out, but I don't have any color copies.)

I stayed put for a few years, and when it came time for me to change apartments in New Haven, I circulated four different designs, all of which I watercolored once and then color-photocopied:

This one's by our fellow Mapjammer Damien Jay, and it features a few creatures I created for the Demonstration book and Elm City Jams.




This one's by sometime Elm City Jams collaborator Jon Lewis.




...And surely you recognize the hand of my collaborator Mike, even if you might not recognize every single one of these Satisfactory Comics characters.




Finally, Tom Motley drew me getting help in the move from some of my creatures from the Demonstration sketchbook. Oddly, I did not hire these movers the next time.




This year's moving cards are both on a Burlington theme. Both of these were colored by the artists and printed on real postcards instead of plain cardstock paper.

Here's one by Shawn Cheng, of Partyka, featuring Champ, the lake monster native to Lake Champlain. Shawn was working from life here, not from photo reference.




... and here's one drawn by Shawn's co-Partyker, Matt Wiegle.


Doesn't Vermont look like a lot of fun? Personally, I can't wait to get there. I just wish these all these comics of mine would pack themselves.

Possible topics for the comment section: which cartoon is the best likeness, and does that matter?

Satisfactory Comics #8 (June 2008)

At long last, I am happy to offer you a way to buy the story that Mike and I were working on all last fall and winter, now in full color and easily portable:



This story will debut at the MoCCA Festival this weekend, and after the convention it may turn out to be in short supply, but I can always print more if I need to.

We've dubbed this story "Stepan Crick and the Chart of the Possible," and we're also calling it Satisfactory Comics #8. At ten pages, it might seem short for an issue of Satisfactory, but they're dense pages, and I think it's really the best story we've told yet.

As you can see, that tidy little packet contains a lot of color and a lot of incident:



(You can click that to enlarge it.)

For more information about the story -- for all of its elaborate constraints and conditions, for the alternatives we considered, for the thumbnails and the pencils, and, indeed, for the black-and-white version of each page in turn -- you can read the posts in this category in reverse order. But wouldn't it be more fun to read it in your hands instead of here in your web browser?

This version of the story comes on ten unbound postcards, each of them ready to read or to send.

Yes, we've left room for your message on the reverse of the postcard: if you buy a set to send to a friend, you'll also be able to put in some correspondence. (I recommend spacing them out, about a week apart. The end of each page is designed as a point of narrative suspense, so the reader who receives the cards slowly should get plenty of twists and surprises. If you've got several friends and you'd like to order several sets, please read the post on ordering multiple comics.)



As I said, the cards are in full color. I think they've really turned out nicely. They come wrapped in a little band (printed in two colors and sealed with a sticker of one of the characters from the story -- not necessarily this guy).



UPDATE (NOVEMBER 2012):
I'm afraid that this issue is, at least temporarily sold out. You can still read the comic (in black and white) here on the blog, but for now all the in-print copies of SC8 belong to other people.

New Haven Postcard Sketch from Dupuy & Berberian

Shortly after Isaac posted about his "Twenty Minutes from Home" postcard series, I received one of his cards--number 17,676 in his years-long routine of postcard sending. It's always a pleasure to get to read a card in Isaac's handwriting (as opposed to his lettering, similar though it be), and occasionally he'll throw in a little doodle. This time, though, he asked a couple of ringers to provide a doozy of a doodle indeed:



My thanks to Isaac for procuring this memento of his recent encounter with Philippe Dupuy & Charles Berberian, two of our heroes in the pantheon of collaborative cartoonists--and thanks to the artists themselves for their friendly cartoon greetings!

My Odd Postcards of New Haven

For a while last summer and fall I occupied myself with a project I called "Twenty Minutes from Home," which was partly an art project and partly just an excuse or exhortation to get me out of the house. I'm planning to start it up again soon, now that the weather is softening a little bit, to get my last long look at New Haven before I move north to Vermont.

The rules of the project were as follows: I would walk away from home for twenty minutes, exploring and wandering, and at the end of twenty minutes I would stop, look around, find something interesting, and take a picture. Sometimes I'd take another picture or two on the way back home. The best of these pictures got turned into postcards and sent around to my friends and correspondents.

It was a good project. I got to know New Haven better (even after living here for more than a dozen years), and I got to know my camera a little better, too. And, as I said, I got out of the house.

Now I've got a bunch of extra postcards of New Haven, enough to write to nearly everyone I know and still have leftovers. So I've decided to offer some of the extras to anyone who's willing to pay me a little for them (mostly to cover the cost of shipping). Let's say I'll send you a dozen for $3.00, or all twenty-four different cards for $5.00.

Here's a look at what you'll get:

A lot of the cards are what you might call "urban archaeology" shots, like this image of the underside of a small railroad trestle, out east of State Street:


And here's a shot of some of the crumbling masonry on the side of the Winchester Repeating Arms plant, which has been derelict for years.

Those are pretty images, I think, but not the sort of thing you'd see on a typical picture postcard.

Some of the images are more specifically New Haven, like some of my shots of Yale buildings, or this image of the annual New Haven Road Race in progress down Whitney Avenue:


I like to try to juxtapose different sorts of things, like the old headstones of the Grove Street Cemetery up against a background of a Yale building. (I think they learn Engineering in there.)


I also like little architectural details, which New Haven has in abundance, since it's an old town. Here, for example, is a satyr leering from the base of a flagpole on Beinecke Plaza:


... And here's a second-floor wrought-iron dragon's-head finial from a building on Orange Street.

The building displays the name Emerson in the same ironwork, but I don't know whether that's still the name of the building.

,,, And sometimes, just to remind myself that it's not all urban archaeology, I go for a walk in East Rock Park.


Here's a nice shot of nature and architectural detail overlapping. I saw pictures on the front page of the Register recently that looked a lot like this, but I was there first. It's the nest of a red-tailed hawk, I think, in the frieze up near the roof of the courthouse building, facing the Green.

So: the images are things like that. I haven't posted all of the best ones.

Now, wouldn't you like a dozen of those? Here's a button that'll let you buy 12 for $3.00, postpaid.

If you want more of a particular KIND of card, let me know, and I'll skew the random sample over in that direction.

And, in case you want the full set of 24, here's a button to get you those for a discount ($5.00, postpaid):

Awesome Cartoons of Basque Folklore Characters

My friend, former student, and sometime Satisfactory contributor Grace Meng, that epicurean Korean, has been traveling around in Spain and, recently, in Basque Country. I've been enjoying her food-blog, One Fork, One Spoon, since she was in Oaxaca (a totally different cuisine, there). Reading her food notes in my RSS reader, I've felt like I've been in touch with her, even though she hasn't had a stable address to which I can send postcards.

Well, when I checked the mailbox today, I found a real treat: a postcard from Grace covered with a complicated, detailed, and really lively set of little cartoon drawings of strange, fantastical figures. The only English printed on the card identifies them as "Folklore characters in the Basque Country." In Spanish, all we get is "Personajes del folklore vasco."

But there's lots of Basque on the card, as you can see if you click to enlarge this image.

Of course, I can't make head or tail of it. That's the astounding thing about Basque: no cognates; no kinship to any other living language. I bet even Mike, with all of his linguistic smarts, can't crack the code here.

But I'm sure we can enjoy these cartoons. In fact, since Jesse Reklaw insists that we use a found image for one of our last panels in the story we're working on, I think this postcard might turn out to be useful to us. Or, maybe, we'll just enjoy the cartoons.

My favorite in the bunch might just be this guy, who I think is named "Katximorro."

He'd be funny even if he weren't swinging a bunny by the ears.

On the other hand, I'm also really pleased with this hairy, horned heap: "Hartza"?

Boy, these are fun.

The card says that was designed by La Fábrica de Dibujos ("The Drawing Factory"), in Pamplona, for Kukuxumusu (what a great name!), and I'm linking to their website, even though I haven't explored it much yet, just because I feel a little guilty appropriating their stuff without being able to read it.

The Power of the Daily Routine

I'm working on a post about Tales from the Classroom, a comic that Mike and I produced back in 2003 for the Graduate Teaching Center at Yale, but a shiny thing drifted into my view, and it got me thinking about something else.

Some of you reading this will already know that I send a lot of postcards. In fact, I send five postcards a day, and have been doing so since the summer of 1998. (If you get a numbered postcard from me, that's what the number is for: I'm counting them. Later today, I will write postcard #16,615.)

You may not know that I was once interviewed on the radio program Weekend America about my postcard regimen. (You'll have to scroll about halfway down that page and have RealOne Player or something like that to listen to the four-minute interview.)

I've never done this calculation before, but if you collected them all up into one stack, it would be at least seventeen feet high. Maybe more like twenty.

Why do I send five postcards a day? I don't know. I've been doing it for a long time now, and some of my original motivations have been lost or modified, but now it's a large part of how I process my day. It's a way for me to keep in touch with my friends about the small stuff of my life.

But that's not what this post is about. I wanted to talk about the power of a daily routine. You can accomplish a lot in small bits, day by day.

When Mike and I were working on our Demonstration project, I really did draw one demon a day for a hundred days straight. After only a couple of weeks, the sketchbook was taking on a nice heft: it took a little while to look at it. By the end of the project, it was more than you could really take in at once. Since you've been so patient, and since I've been going on for so long without a picture, here's a demon that didn't make it into our booklet.

That's a to-do list and, under it, a not-yet-written postcard that he's urging me to rock.

Around the same time, I think, and unbeknownst to us then, our pal Ben Towle had undertaken a similar project, doing a demon a day for (almost) 100 days. All of his demons are online, but you can also get them in a handsome minicomic for only $3.50 direct from Ben's website store, where there are lots of nice goodies to choose from. (I recommend his cartoon alphabets.) Ben's demons really showcase his awesome inking and his sense of light and shadow -- here are a couple of examples I nabbed from his site:


The Partyka comics collective has a daily drawing feature on their website -- it ought to be the first thing you see when you click over there. I don't think that requires a drawing a day from each of their members, but it's definitely in the same spirit.

I'm not sure whether he's got a daily drawing routine, but the inimitable Eddie Campbell, author of some of my favorite graphic novels, has been blogging daily for quite a while now. (In his blog, he proves himself not only an excellent raconteur, but a whip-smart theoretician and a voracious reader.)

Some of my other favorite comics bloggers also work on a daily routine. Mike Sterling, a comics store owner in southern California, has been posting every day since I started reading his blog, and I think it's because he posts daily that his ruminations on the comics industry have become so interesting to me: I've gotten to know his personality, his store's history, and even some of his employees and regular customers through those daily updates. Chris Sims not only posts every day, but has regular weekly features, chief among them a Thursday-night roundup of his week's comics purchases. It's because of Chris that I now usually go to my local comics store on Fridays and not on Wednesdays (when each week's new comics arrive). Finally, Bully, the Little Stuffed Bull, who seems to post at least daily, has several terrific weekly features, including a "Separated at Birth" post comparing comics swipes (though this week's is a little dubious, as a swipe), his really fun "Ten of a Kind" comics-cover posts, and, recently, a review of one P. G. Wodehouse novel per week. And yes, he at least pretends that he's a little stuffed bull.

That's him in San Diego last month, about to triple his weight with a plate of fish tacos.

And then there's the daily comic strip. I don't think anyone can doubt that working on The Sketchbook Diaries every day for years has helped James Kochalka hone his craft, even though he used to say that craft is the enemy. Drawing the syndicated Zippy every day has certainly made Bill Griffith an incredible draftsman. There are more daily webcomics than I could even try to list. Probably you already have a favorite.

But none of these is the new shiny thing that distracted me from the post I was planning. I also found out, this week, about an artist (in the DC area, I think), who is making a skull a day, for a year, each of them out of a different material: scratchboard, wire-frame, linocut print, chalk on a sidewalk, watercolor, carved watermelon (worth looking for)... One of my favorites is the one made from soy sauce on a plate:

Some of these images are really gorgeous, and the project as a whole is super impressive. When it's all finished, what an awesome coffee-table book (or set of postcards) it would all make.

Which brings me back to what I wanted to discuss: the power of the daily routine. Setting a small artistic task for yourself once a day -- some discrete thing you can finish, or some quota you need to hit in a larger project -- is a wonderful way to make the steady advance of days amount to something.

(I have always been a big procrastinator, and the moment I started really making progress on my dissertation was the point when I set a daily quota for myself. First, it was just twenty minutes of free-writing. Then, when I started drafting chapters, it was a thousand words a day. That's not so much, but it quickly adds up.)

Maybe once a week would work for you better than once a day. Maybe you need to focus on the large chunks; maybe it can be something small that you finish in twenty minutes or an hour. But if you've looked around, with summer waning, and been amazed at how much time has passed without much to show for it, stop thinking (for a minute) about how many months it will take you to realize your long-term goals. Instead, think about how much you can accomplish in a day. Then do it every day.