David Chelsea's Blog, page 10

Round Black Glasses On Tumblr!

For anyone who wants to read my latest 24 Hour Comic straight through, I’ve posted a new, navigable version of ROUND BLACK GLASSES on Tumblr.

David Chelsea is reading: Conversations with Mary McCarthy

ROUND BLACK GLASSES tells the history of my eyesight and the various pairs of glasses I have used to correct it, culminating in my discovery of the perfect set of round black frames, and continues with a general meditation on the semiotics of round black glasses and the various fictional and real-life figures who wear them. I drew it on 24 Hour Comic Day 2017 between 9 am Saturday October 7th, and 9 am Sunday October 8th, at the Enthusiasm Collective in Portland, OR. Since I fell behind on the schedule and only completed 17 pages, I drew seven more pages in December to finish out the story. This was my first ever digital 24 Hour comic, drawn and colored in Photoshop and laid out and lettered in Adobe Indesign. Featuring guest appearances by cartoonists John Weeks, Stuart Hample, Bob Sikoryak, and Scott McCloud!

This comic was originally serialized on Patreon. If you like it, consider supporting my Patreon page.

RIP, Steven Abrams

I have sad news to report. My old friend Steven Abrams died late last month of a heart attack at the age of 54. I first met Steve in 1992 at the San Diego Comics Convention when he was an intern with my first publisher Eclipse, and when he moved to New York shortly afterwards he became my assistant and letterer on Welcome To The Zone. After I moved to Portland and Steve moved to LA, we kept in touch by mail, even when everyone else had switched to pixels, and actually Steve was my last regular snail mail pen pal.

Steven Abrams, date unknown

David Chelsea is watching:The Little Hours

starring Kate Micucci

Steve had a vexed history with paying work- Eclipse declined to hire him for a paying job after his internship ended because he refused to learn to type, and he worked at a number of other comics publishers and publications for a very short time before finding his longest tenure at the Jimmy Kimmel Show in LA, writing summaries of what the other talk shows were doing.

Steven Abrams with other Jimmy Kimmel staffers

I have posted a number of the decorated envelopes I sent to Steve over the years on my Patreon page:

Steve had more confidence as  a writer than an artist, but he sent me a few envelopes of his own over the years,

He also sent me this page from his sketchbook, evidently drawn in 1989:

When I put out an appeal to friends to send me fan art for my Patreon page, Steve came up with this portrait of Shroom, from Welcome To The Zone:

One of my most recent call slip comics (these are little book or video reviews drawn on the call slips that come with reserved material on the hold shelf at the library), about Andrew Garfield’s book To The Letter, ended up being a memorial to Steve:

Tomorrow would have been Steve’s 55th birthday. For years, I had a bad habit of sending Steve’s birthday gifts late, because I could vaguely remember that his birthday was in February, but I could never remember that it was the FIRST. This time I’m not going to miss the deadline. Happy Birthday, Steve. You will be missed for a long, long time.

RIP, Mort Walker: Canned Funnies

Next stop, the Army

The recent death of BEETLE BAILEY and HI & LOIS cartoonist Mort Walker brought back memories of my first job for The Portland Monthly in 2004. The trigger event was The Oregonian‘s controversial decision to drop Hi and Lois from its comics page after 50 years (it was displaced by Berkeley Breathed’s brief revival of Opus; Cathy was dropped at the same time). Think about this for a moment. Imagine that in 2004, Frank Sinatra’s Swing Easy (released in 1954) had just dropped off the charts, The Pajama Game was finishing a 50 year run on Broadway, and a local television affiliate was catching flack for dropping Father Knows Best, which first appeared the same month as Hi And Lois, from its lineup (Cathy, a relative stripling, made its debut in 1976, the same year as Frampton Comes Alive! the musical Annie and Charlie’s Angels.). On the other hand, The Tonight Show and Face The Nation started that same year and are still going strong, so network television is hardly a paragon of dynamic change.

David Chelsea is reading:Conversations with Mary McCarthy

As was usual with this client, the concept came entirely from the editors, though they left the script up to me. The final panel, in which the Flagstons enlist at Camp Swampy, hinges on a pretty obscure piece of comics trivia- that Lois is Beetle Bailey‘s sister- but the editors had nixed my original ending, in which the newsprint family is exposed to Portland’s rain, dissolve into mush and wash down a storm drain, on the grounds it was ”too depressing”.

Postscript: both Hi and Lois and Cathy were eventually reinstated, and as of this writing they are still running in The Oregonian comics section.

You can view this strip large at Comics Lifestyle.

Palindromes In Print! American Bystander #6

The latest issue of AMERICAN BYSTANDER, America’s freshest humor magazine, is out, by which I mean I’ve finally gotten my contributor’s copies in the mail. Issue #6 has a cover by the legendary Arnold Roth, as well as some choice humor, illustrations, and comics from a stellar stable of regulars: MK Brown, Rick Geary, Ron Barrett, Randall Enos, Mimi Pond, John Cuneo, Peter Kuper, etc.

David Chelsea is reading: Night of Camp David

by Fletcher Knebel, Co-Author of Seven Days in May

It also features the first national appearance in print by a promising new comics writer- my son Ben Celsi, who contributed some of his off-kilter palindromes, which he writes during gaps in his demanding schedule as a junior at the University Of Washington. Matched with my art, this maiden effort appears on page 60.

Here are multiple stages of the art process for a panel featuring a couple of characters named Amy and Tony:

Pencil rough
Line art
Watercolor art
Final art

(You may remember that Ben & I have been collaborating on palindrome comics for some time on my Patreon page. Here is a blog post about some of them).

The palindrome comic is not my only contribution to Issue #6: I also illustrated a humor piece about the various levels of service on The New MTA by Joe Keohane:

I’ve submitted some more palindrome ideas for issue #7, due out in a few months. No word yet from the editors, but I’ve got my fingers crossed.

Order a copy of the American Bystander #6 by clicking on this icon:

End Strips: Plenty O’ Palindromes!

I blogged a few months ago about reaching #100 in a series of “End Strips” on my Patreon page– these being short, vertically-formatted comics drawn on random strips of paper trimmed from larger sheets for various reasons, usually some project my daughter Rebecca is doing for school. These have cycled through a number of themes, including portraits of friends on Facebook, nude figure studies drawn from models posing on YouTube, short comics featuring my characters Sandy & Mandy, travel sketches, and so on. At the time, I was just beginning a series illustrating palindromes written by my son Ben; the first of these was #100 (Palindrome definition: a word, phrase, or sequence that reads the same backward as forward, e.g., madam or nurses run.):

David Chelsea is watching: The Room

starring Tommy Wiseau

Ben Celsi

Well, I’ve been in a heavy-duty palindrome phase ever since. The panels below give some idea:

Most of these have been written by Ben, but occasionally I come up with one on my own, such as this one from an all-yarn themed strip:

A lot of these palindromes are on the raunchy side, and I put the smuttiest of them in a single strip, which Patreon’s rules required me to put behind a paywall, so you’ll have to become a Patron to see the rest of this one (Not expensive. You can pledge at the $1 level, then quit right away):

Here are links to the palindrome strips posted to date:

End Strip #100: Palindrome Potpourri

End Strip #101: Palindrome Plethora

End Strip #102: Palindrome Parade

End Strip #103: Palindrome Pizzazz

End Strip #104: Palindrome Panorama

End Strip #106: Palindrome Picnic

End Strip #108: Palindrome-A-Palooza

End Strip #110: Palindrome Psychedelia

End Strip #112: Palindrome Perversity

End Strip #113: Palindrome Panoply

End Strip #114: Palindrome Paradise

End Strip #115: Palindrome Paterfamilias

End Strip #116: Palindrome Pictorial

End Strip #118: Palindrome Pornocopia  (this is the one that costs a dollar to see)

End Strip #117: Palindrome Paella

End Strip #119: Palindrome Palaver: The Needle Arts Edition

End Strip #120: Palindrome Panic!

End Strip #122: Palindrome Potluck

End Strip #123: Palindrome Pandemonium

End Strip #124: Palindrome Pizzicato

End Strip #125: Palindrome Poppycock

End Strip #126: Palindrome Pastorale

Patreon is a reader-supported site, but all comics content is free. If you like what you see, tell your friends, and $how Your $upport!

ROUND BLACK GLASSES: The Reboot

This week on Patreon, I wind up the serialization of my most recent 24 Hour Comic, ROUND BACK GLASSES, with the 17th and final page. In it, I come face to face with a neighbor whose glasses are even cooler than mine:

David Chelsea is reading: Who Is Rich?: A Novel

by Matthew Klam

This was my first ever digital 24 Hour Comic, drawn and colored in Photoshop and laid out and lettered in Adobe Indesign. This comic tells the story of my history with eyeglasses, from my earliest nondescript pair of squarish wireframes that I got at age 13, through the not quite circular enough pairs of roundish frames I wore in my 20s and 30s, to the perfect pair of round black Polos by Ralph Lauren that I found at a Lloyd Center optometrist in the mid-1990s:

I had meant to draw 24 pages, but as I fell farther and farther behind in the wee small hours, I determined to go for a “Gaiman variation”, named for author Neil Gaiman, whose first and only 24 Hour Comic clocked in at fourteen pages. What tripped me up was adding the gray tones, which dependably put me ten or fifteen minutes over time. I could have chosen to drop them, and draw the last batch of pages purely in line, but I was too invested in having the story look consistent, so I went for fewer pages instead. After I finished this story, I decided that I had more to say on the topic, so I made a plan to go back to my computer and draw seven more pages to make it a full 24. This week I drew those pages in a straight seven hour session (well, seven and a half- I had to break for lunch). The first of those pages went up this week as well.

I invited fellow cartoonist John Weeks to explain why he draws his cartoon self in round black glasses, even though in the real world he wears contacts:

ROUND BLACK GLASSES, ROUND II will run for the next four weeks on my Patreon page. Patreon is a reader-supported site, but all comics content is free. If you like what you see, tell your friends, and $how Your $upport!

Modern Love Podcast: Sasheer Zamata Reads ‘Was I on a Date or Babysitting?’

The Modern Love Podcast is again reusing one of my old illustrations from the New York Times column. On this week’s podcast, the actress and comedian Sasheer Zamata reads “Was I on a Date or Babysitting?”, a column from 2008. In it Julie Klausner shares her story of playing second banana to a musician’s young son and his guitar and everything else in his life.

David Chelsea is reading: Who Is Rich?: A Novel

by Matthew Klam

Sasheer Zamata

(I think this particular illustration is not one of my better ones, but I didn’t feel strongly enough about it to not give permission).

Holiday Shopping List

In doubt about what to get your loved ones for the holidays? Who isn’t? Well, here are some timely gift suggestions to fill those empty stockings:

David Chelsea is reading:The Clancys of Queens: A Memoir

by Tara Clancy

First up, my latest how-to book, PERSPECTIVE IN ACTION, published this June by Watson-Guptill. “Author and artist David Chelsea takes readers through the major perspective-related developments in history, teaching them how to re-create these same experiments by leading artists in all fields (including drawing, painting, and sculpture). Covering a wide-range of mediums (pen and ink, paint, chalk, digital art, woodwork, and more), Perspective in Action gives readers a more hands-on approach to perspective, as opposed to the usual theoretical presentations found in other books.”

Next, why not get someone a DVD copy of the acclaimed documentary 24 HOUR COMIC? 8 artists confined to a comic book store (one being me, and another my thirteen year old daughter Rebecca), partake in Scott McCloud’s 24 hour comic challenge. Each attempting to write, draw, and complete a 24 page comic, in 24 hours. Directed by Milan Erceg. Also available streaming on iTunes, Amazon Prime, and Hulu, but won’t that special person on your gift list want a physical copy to stick on a shelf?

The next item is a bit specialized, which will make it the perfect gift for that theater director friend who is so hard to shop for. When stage director Will Weigler analyzed nearly 100 stories from people about their most unforgettable experiences at the theatre, he realized that even though the plays were very different, they all had one thing in common. After discovering just what it was that made them so astonishing, he turned the results of his research into a vocabulary of staging strategies that anyone can access to powerfully express the stories they want to tell through theatre. Combining theory with application, THE ALCHEMY OF ASTONISHMENT is a useful resource for scholars, educators, students, theatregoers, and theatre artists of every kind. For those who facilitate devised theatre with communities, this book and its supplementary deck of teaching cards offer professional artists and the people with whom they work a shared language that will allow them to meet as equitable partners in the creative co-authorship and staging of dynamic and compelling plays.

Will’s book makes the list because his book comes with an accompanying set of “teaching cards”, some of which I illustrated, using a digital technique approximating the look of 19th century wood engraving:

Autobiographical comics fans (and who isn’t one?) will delight in the following title from Bloomsbury Comic Group, a critical analysis by comics professor Andrew J. Kunka of all the giant figures and seminal works of this burgeoning genre. Two pages of my own autobiographical work EVERYBODY GETS IT WRONG! arguing that autobiographical comics should be drawn from a first person shooter viewpoint, are included in the appendix, along with a four page comic by a cartoonist named Ryan Claytor arguing the contrary:

Lastly, why not catch up on THE AMERICAN BYSTANDER, the newish humor magazine which just put out its fifth issue? I have comics or illustration work in every issue, beginning with #2. Current and back issues can be ordered from their website, or get a subscription!

Click these links and order stuff! Thanks to the Amazon Associates Program, a small portion goes to the Feed And Clothe Ben And Rebecca fund:

THE ALCHEMY OF ASTONISHMENT is not yet on Amazon; order it here.

RIP, David Cassidy

Distressing news today- actor and singer David Cassidy, best known for the 1970s TV series The Partridge Family, has died at 67.

David Chelsea is watching:

Detectorists

starring Mackenzie Crook

David Cassidy

I can’t say that Cassidy ever meant that much to me; however as a 1970s teen idol, he meant the world to certain adolescent girls of my own generation. One of them was British writer Allison Pearson, who wrote a novel inspired by her own teen crush on Cassidy, I Think I Love You, in which a middle-aged housewife discovers thirty years late that she had won a Go On A Date With David Cassidy contest, and sets out to meet her idol. I happened to be reading the book on a vacation in the summer of 2012, which is how a Cassidy-inspired plotline made its way into the comics story I was working on at the time, which eventually became SANDY & MANDY, a three-part comic which ran in DARK HORSE PRESENTS.

David Cassidy

The SANDY & MANDY character is named Leif Pigeon, a play on Keith Partridge, the character Cassidy played on TV. Here is a model sheet:

In SANDY & MANDY, “Leif Pigeon” is a young man Mandy is supposed to meet on a blind date. The sequence of panels below shows my working method, from sketchbook rough to pencil to inks to watercolor to the final assembled frame:

Mandy and Leif share a brief psychedelic moment before it all turns out to be a case of mistaken identity:

Turns out Leif isn’t Mandy’s blind date after all- she’s supposed to be meeting someone named “Heath Ptarmigan”!:

Viewers unfamiliar with The Partridge Family may not get the punchline. Mandy’s actual blind date is modeled on Danny Bonaduce, who played Keith’s less crushworthy kid brother. Danny, by the way, is considerably easier to draw than David.

SANDY & MANDY can be found in back issues of DARK HORSE PRESENTS. Perhaps one day it will be collected in a book.

Call Slips Turn Thirty!

I blogged some months ago about the series of “Call Slip Comics” I have been posting to my Patreon page. These are reviews of material I’ve checked out of the library- DVDs, books and audio books- drawn on call slips, those little white strips of paper stuck into items on the hold shelf to identify which library member it is being held for. For years, those slips have come in handy as bookmarks, but once a book was finished my habit was to throw them away- until now!

David Chelsea is reading:In the Great Green Room: The Brilliant and Bold Life of Margaret Wise Brown

by Amy Gary

Call Slips in their natural habitat

I’m blogging again just to announce I’ve been keeping on with the work, and now have thirty examples- twice as many examples as I’d posted the last time I blogged.

Here are links to all the Call Strip comics currently on Patreon:

Superman, The Unauthorized Biography

Purity

The Peanuts Movie

Enough Said

Disturbia

Wild Palms

Batman 66

The Nice Guys

The Fury

Pnin

The Meddler

Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!

Defending Your Life

Grunt

Girl with a Pearl Earring

We Told You So: Comics As Art

Our Brand Is Crisis

Twenty-six Seconds: A Personal History

Strangers With Candy

The War That Ended Peace

1941

HAIR

Giant Of The Senate

RUPAUL DRAG RACE, SEASON 5

Call Slip: Fire!: The Zora Neale Hurston Story.

American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst

Cien años de soledad

Forgetting Sarah Marshall

The Stories Of Vladimir Nabokov

Death At A Funeral

Most of the newer examples review DVDs I’ve watched, like the forgettable comedy FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL:

However, I still do read the occasional book, or listen to an audiobook in the car, such as Al Franken’s memoir GIANT OF THE SENATE:

This strip was drawn before the latest story about Senator Franken broke. These days, I would probably write a very different letter.

Patreon is a reader-supported site, but all comics content is free. If you like what you see, tell your friends, and $how Your $upport!