#2 – Vincenzio "Fingers" Paganini
Relax, he’s a concert violinist… you racist.
By the way, I’ve started reading Yo, Is This Racist? on tumblr. Worth a look!
Read More#1 – Slam Aleikum
This year I’m participating in The 30 Characters Challenge, where you try to design thirty characters in the thirty days of November. Character design is definitely one of my weak points. This is something I just realized after spending two years drawing characters I designed in a few hours.
All my entries won’t look like this. Some will be cartoonier, some will be in color, some might be all-digital. I’m hoping to branch out a lot this month. Stay tuned!
The one thing I know for sure is that I want 15 of my characters to be female. Or I might do 14/14/2 or 13/13/4 if I decide to include characters of ambiguous gender. I wanted to start off with a strong Muslim woman character – I think there’s a huge dearth of these in popular media.
Read MoreRelease Party Re-cap
A big thanks to everybody who came out to my release event at Cosmic Monkey. It was wonderful to see/meet you all! Here are some pictures from Saturday night, taken by my friend Matt Cruz.
There aren’t a lot of pictures of me here because my head was constantly bent over as a I drew doodles on people’s title pages.
Here are some celebrities holding my books – click the images for giganto versions.
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| Stumptown Underground editor and zinestress Katie Ash. | The one and only Hopskotch SunDAY! In the background you can see my housemate (and caterer) Katy Ellis O’Brien. |
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| Hereville author Barry Deutches. Barry led the Comic Creators meetup group that workshopped many of SNitLoE’s later pages. | Jake Richmond, who draws an adorable/horrifying webcomic called Modest Medusa. He also led the meetup with Barry. |
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| Kevin Wilson, who draws Titanzer and also provided my button-making supplies. | Ron Chan, who hangs his hat at Periscope Studio where I used to intern. |
So BY THE WAY there was an error in the printing that I didn’t notice until after the release party. Page 176 is where page 176 should be, but it’s ALSO where page 76 should be. I am 90% sure this was a mistake on the part of the printers, but they have been so accommodating I’m not going to give them a hard time about it. Anyway, all the copies I sell from now on will have the correct page 76 inserted discreetly in the proper place – you probably won’t even notice unless you feel the scotch tape.
Lastly, here is a picture of me being happy and a picture of my friend Alan doing his best Kafir impression:
Book Release!
Hey guys, I just wanted to make sure that everyone who reads this blog knows about my book release party on Saturday, October 1st.
Cosmic Monkey Comics was already my favorite comic store in Portland long before they agreed to host this event. I will probably be spending my money there as fast as people are handing it to me!
If you are on facebook, RSVP to the facebook event page. It doesn’t actually matter, but it strokes my precious ego and lets your friends know that you read good comics. Hope to see y’all there!
Biscotomancy
I drew this picture for my old friend Elliot Kaplan, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. If anyone I know can answer the timeless question “Magnets, how do they work?” it’s probably Elliot. He currently works with the Madison Dynamo Experiment. My understanding of this is limited by my own feeble brain and not by Elliot’s lucid explanatory skills, but here’s the gist: The earth has a magnetic field. The earth’s mantle is full of circulating molten metal, and its circulation is what generates this field. In Madison they’ve built a large, hollow globe, which they fill with liquid sodium (a convenient approximation of the earth’s mantle, which I think is mostly silicon and magnesium).
They blend the sodium around with fans and pass magnetic fields through it, measuring the results. And here’s where I get a little shaky. Lightning crashes and all the scientists start laughing maniacally, God get furious, Galactus shows up hungry, and before you know it the Dynamo kills your wife on your wedding night.
Okay, so what’s this have to do with my drawing? Apparently, it’s a tradition for Elliot and his crew to get Chinese food before every run of the experiment. In some cryptic way, the fortune cookie fortunes have so far always predicted the outcome of the day’s run. Elliot commissioned a cartoon depicting physicists divining the future from fortune cookies, suggesting that their safety gear would make for good “cultish regalia.” I couldn’t agree more!
… in bed!
