David Chelsea's Blog, page 11

RIP, Liz Smith

I learned the other day of the death at 94 of Liz Smith, the gossip columnist who had been a long-running fixture of the New York media scene. Back during the 90s and Aughts when I was illustrating the New York Observer’s calendar page The Eight Day Week, Liz was such a frequent subject that she had her own folder in my clippings file:

David Chelsea is watching:

Shadow Of The Vampire

starring Willem Dafoe

My personal clippings file

(Many of these images come from Spy Magazine, which delighted in running unflattering pictures of her).

The sad news sent me to my digital archives, which coughed up four caricatures. The calendar items these illustrated are lost to history. No doubt I could have found many more if I had gone into the box of pre-digital originals in my closet.

This image misrepresents the lady’s height; I believe she was close to six feet tall.

Here Liz confronts her rival, fellow columnist Cindy Adams.

What’s this about? Some auction of dog art, evidently.

Liz celebrates Cinco De Mayo:

Hasta la vista, Liz.

Autobiographical Comics: The Artist Responds

Last week I got something unexpected in the mail, a copy of a new book from Bloomsbury Academic, AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL COMICS, by Andrew J.Kunka. It wasn’t totally unexpected, since Kunka had approached me last year for permission to reprint two pages from one of my comics in the book, but in the meantime I had completely forgotten about it.

Naturally, I turned to my name first in the index. Though DAVID CHELSEA IN LOVE is my best-known autobiographical comic, there is no discussion of it in the text, or of any of my work apart from the two pages previously mentioned, which appear as “Appendix 3”. These are the opening two pages from EVERYBODY GETS IT WRONG!, a 24 Hour Comic I drew in 2006 (which gave its title to my first collection of 24 Hour Comics from Dark Horse). This story was an essay in comics form, making the argument that an artist who draws him or herself in an autobiographical comic is false to experience, and that to really recount the story as the artist experienced it, it must be drawn “subjective camera”, as seen through the artist’s own eyes.

David Chelsea is reading:

Updike

by Adam Begley

This sequence is followed by “Appendix 4”, which consists of four pages from AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL CONVERSATIONS, a 2013 comic drawn by Ryan Claytor, in which a character representing Claytor, in conversation with another representing San Diego State University professor Dr. Harry Polkinhorn, rejects my argument, and defends the conventional comics practice of including a character representing the author within the panel. This, by the way, took me completely by surprise. I had never heard of Claytor’s comic, and had no idea it would be included in the book.

You may expect me to be offended by Claytor’s rejection of my argument, but really I’m not, and I’ll tell you why: I wasn’t entirely serious.

To back up a bit, let me tell you about the moment the whole argument occurred to me. It was when I was reading an interview in THE COMICS JOURNAL, which is the closest thing the comics industry has to an intellectual journal along the lines of FILM COMMENT or THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS. I forget the name of the artist who was being interviewed, but he was making a point about the difference between first, second, and third person in writing, and as part of the point he was making, stated that there was “no equivalent in art” for the first person. My immediate reaction was “THAT’S NOT RIGHT! The equivalent to first person is subjective camera!” (If this had been a few years later, I might have said “first person shooter” instead).

Contrary to that unnamed artist’s assertion, I reasoned that a story drawn from the point of view of the central character exactly corresponds to one told in the first person, and it follows logically that an autobiographical comic should be drawn that way, just as an autobiography is invariably written in the first person. Imagine if Richard Nixon had begun his autobiography with a line like “He was born in a house his father built.” My thought was that it is equally odd for an autobiographical cartoonist to draw his or herself in the panel, as if observed by a third person.

Of course, what is most logical is not necessarily the best way to tell a story, and I did not, for example, rush out to redraw the previously published DAVID CHELSEA IN LOVE from my own point of view. Claytor, in his story, quotes from a writer named Charles Hatfield: “Seeing the protagonist or narrator, in the context of other characters and objects evoked in the drawings, objectifies him or her. Thus, the cartoonist projects his or her inward sense of self, achieving at once a sense of intimacy and a critical distance.” Claytor is unwilling to give up that critical distance, and insists on preserving his double identity as both artist and cartoon protagonist. I concede as much in the last line of the excerpt reprinted in the book: “I can understand it- autobiographical cartoonists don’t want to live life over exactly- this time they want better seats!”

Despite the provocative title EVERYBODY GETS IT WRONG!, my aim in drawing the story was more modest: to get autobiographical cartoonists to think harder about what strategies they use to tell their own stories, and to put another tool in their arsenals. I am actually immensely flattered that Ryan Claytor saw my story and felt the need to respond.

Looking back on the way I drew my own autobiographical comic DAVID CHELSEA IN LOVE, I can see things I might have done differently if I had been more aware of subjective camera as a possibility. I did use it for comic effect on one page where a sulking “David” is peeved at a roommate who has rejected his pass, and decides to retaliate by not looking at her:

I might have made more use of it, even popping inside the heads of other characters to show the scene from their eyes.

There is also a disembodied interlocutor which pops up at a few moments to interrogate David (and even, at one point, his girlfriend Minnie). I used this device sporadically, without thinking much about it, but clearly this is none other than the artist himself, looking back with eight years of critical distance at his earlier self. If I had been more aware of what I was doing I might have made this more obvious, possibly pulling out at times to show the page on the drawing board, surrounded by drawing tools, all from the subjective camera viewpoint of my present-day self.

I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest where a subjective camera strategy might have worked in another autobiographical comic. Chester Brown’s THE PLAYBOY is a coming of age story, published in 1992, recounting the adolescent Chester’s history of “reading” (mostly jerking off to) the magazine PLAYBOY, and his guilt over it. Brown literalizes a present-day perspective on his own past by introducing a winged alter-ego who flies above his adolescent self, and occasionally interacts with him. To my mind, this adds an oddly Tinkerbelle-like note to what is otherwise a very soberly told story, and it might have been more in keeping with the story’s tone for the present-day Brown to remain off-camera, and show the adolescent Brown through his eyes. (I don’t know if Brown considered this approach and rejected it, but he clearly didn’t have the benefit of reading EVERYBODY GETS IT WRONG!, which didn’t appear in print until 2008).

In the years since I drew EVERYBODY GETS IT WRONG!, it does not seem that autobiographical cartoonists have been following my lead. On the other hand, subjective camera has become default mode in video games:

I have continued to draw myself as a character in contexts that are not autobiography, as the perspective expert schooling the art student Mugg in instructional books, and as a devil tempting the lovelorn Mugg in my webcomic ARE YOU BEING WATCHED? I have also drawn two longish autobiographical stories, THE GIRL WITH THE KEYHOLE EYES (originally a 24 Hour Comic, later redrawn in color for DARK HORSE PRESENTS), and ROUND BLACK GLASSES (my most recent 24 Hour Comic, currently serializing on Patreon). In both of these stories I have tried to stick as closely as possible to telling them entirely subjective camera, which has been an education in both the possibilities and limitations of this method.

Both stories end up rather undramatic, more like mini-documentaries about my life than acted-out stories. The story is told mainly in captions, with only occasional bits of dialogue (and the subjective camera David hardly speaks at all):

</

For ROUND BLACK GLASSES, which is after all about my personal appearance, I couldn’t get away with not showing myself AT ALL, but I solved that problem with the occasional mirror shot:

All of which may leave Ryan Claytor with the better end of the argument. Nonetheless, I plan to persist in trying to tell stories through my own eyes when I can. And I am conceding no ground on the part of my argument that AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL COMICS choose not to reprint, about how dream strips should be drawn subjective camera. Perhaps I will get into that in a future post.

Want to know what all the fuss is about? Click this link to order AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL COMICS, by Andrew J. Kunka:

Read EVERYBODY GETS IT WRONG!, the title story in my first collection of 24 Hour Comics:

Read THE GIRL WITH THE KEYHOLE EYES (the 24 Hour Comic) in Sleepless and Other Stories: David Chelsea’s 24-Hour Comics Volume 2:

Read the book that started it all! DAVID CHELSEA IN LOVE:

Read the first four installments of ROUND BLACK GLASSES on Patreon:

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

RIP, Fats Domino

Trading card from BLOCKBUSTERS OF RHYTHM & BLUES set, 1994

Round Black Glasses Begins!

Today I begin serializing ROUND BLACK GLASSES on Patreon, my 18th and most recent 24 Hour Comic, which I drew 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. This was my first ever digital 24 Hour comic, drawn and colored in Photoshop and laid out and lettered in Adobe Indesign. This week’s installment posts pages one and two out of 17 (I fell somewhat behind on my plan, but I did manage to complete a “Gaiman Variation”, what is what you call it when you work for 24 hours, but produce less than 24 pages).

David Chelsea is watching: Don’t Breathe

starring Stephen Lang

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:

The comic further goes on to explore the meaning and significance of Round Black Glasses as worn by iconic cultural figures such as Harold Lloyd, Sigmund Freud, David Hockney, Mr. Peabody & Sherman, Waldo, Harry Potter, and Herbie Popnecker. I have been meaning to draw a story like this for at least five years, from the time when I began posting images of Round Black Glasses as my Facebook profile picture. This screenshot will give you some idea of the scope of the nearly 800 such images I have posted:

You can check out the entire backlog of Facebook profile pics here.

The comic will continue in installments over the next nine or so weeks. 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!

Recently on Patreon: Palindromes And A Date With Jesus

I haven’t posted about my Patreon page since I posted my one hundredth End Strip a few weeks ago, but I’ve been steadily adding material. After I finished up the 24 Hour Comic THE CRUMB BUMS, I serialized my rhyming parody of a Jack Chick comic from 2011, Chastity Blasé, in two parts. Just this once, I turned the drawing duties over to the talented Chad Essley:

David Chelsea is reading: Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

by Kurt Andersen

I reverse the usual Jack Chick trajectory of a heedless sinner dying only to discover the hell they scoffed at is real, by having a Christine O’Donnell-type chastity lecturer who has just died in a sudden accident meet Jesus, who tells her the afterlife doesn’t exist and that her years of celibacy have been wasted. To make things more fun, all dialogue is in rhymed tetrameter: “You’re not going to Heaven- it doesn’t exist./ But then neither does Hell.” “I am royally pissed!”.

My one hundredth End Strip was a short stack of palindromes devised by my son Ben, and since then I’ve posted several more, including this Presidential summit:

But it hasn’t been all palindromes. Here is a little strip based on figure poses from the YouTube series Croquis Cafe:

I’ve also posted a couple of strips drawn on library call slips. This one reviews a DVD of RuPaul Drag Race, Season Five:

Here are links to some recent posts on Patreon:

Chastity Blasé, Part One

Chastity Blasé, Part Two

End Strip #101: Palindrome Plethora

End Strip #102: Palindrome Parade

End Strip #103: Palindrome Pizzazz

End Strip # 104: Palindrome Panorama

End Strip # 105: DES CROQUIS

Call Slips: Giant Of The Senate

Call Slip: RUPAUL DRAG RACE, SEASON 5

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!

American Bystander #5!

Breaking news- my personal copies of the fifth issue of the recently resurrected humor magazine AMERICAN BYSTANDER (editor Brian McConnachie produced a prototype issue in 1982; regular publication began last year) just arrived. This edition continues its peerless tradition of fine quality in excellence, with humor pieces by Jack Handey, Merrill Markoe, and Ron Hauge, a cover by the late New Yorker cartoonist Jack Ziegler, as well as comics by M.K.Brown, Howard Cruse, Ron Barrett, Randall Enos, Thom Hachtman, and others. It also makes space for my own full page illustration to the humor piece All STAFF-PLEASE READ by Steve Young. The illustration depicts a pair of very particular restaurant patrons, the Pauloofs:

David Chelsea is reading: My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by Emil Ferris

Pencil rough
Color painting
Coquille board drawing
Final art

This piece uses my typical method of combining a pencil drawing on textured coquille board with a watercolor and acrylic painting in Photoshop. For those who are interested, I reversed my usual practice of painting over a faint version of the pencil drawing printed on watercolor paper, and instead did the painting first, and drew in pencil on a faint image of the painting printed on coquille board.

The latest issue of the AMERICAN BYSTANDER can be found at only the most discerning of newsstands, or you can order an issue to be delivered to you by mail here.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

We’re well into the fall, and I have posted only sporadically the entire summer, so it’s time I caught you loyal readers up on what I’ve been doing. One big thing was that I concluded my webcomic ARE YOU BEING WATCHED?, which I have been serializing on Patreon for the past two years. You can read the entire run of the strip on Tumblr here, at least for a while- there are plans in the works for a book version, and I will most likely take down the archive when that comes out.

David Chelsea is reading: Someone Please Have Sex With Me

by Gina Wynbrandt

Panel from ARE YOU BEING WATCHED?

A lot of the summer was taken up with events publicizing 24 HOUR COMIC, a documentary film featuring me along with my daughter Rebecca, UNDERSTANDING COMICS author Scott McCloud, BOILERPLATE creator Paul Guinan, my colorist/assistant Jacob Mercy, and a host of other talented cartoonists. Here is a photo from an event at Wild Things Games in Salem:

Good times!

At an earlier event at Tonalli’s Donuts in Portland, we were really pushing pre-orders of the film on iTunes. Here was Rebecca’s drawing in support of the cause:

The BIG event for the film was a screening at the San Diego Comics Convention Film Festival. Director Milan Erceg, Producer Ryan Sage and me all traveled down for it. Here’s a shot of three of us outside the convention hall:

Here, Milan has a close encounter with Alfred E Neuman:

ROAD TRIP! Milan and I actually drove down from Portland to the convention together. I didn’t have a lot of chances to take pictures along the way, but I did take this shot of a light fixture in San Francisco which shows The Three Ages Of Lightbulbs, incandescent, flourescent, and LED:

Also, this summer, my latest book, PERSPECTIVE IN ACTION, was published by Watson-Guptill. In case you missed it, here’s a link to a blog post with some of the reviews.

I picked a LOT of fruit this summer. My favorite blackberry patches on the Sandy River were threatened by the Eagle Creek fire in the Gorge, but I managed to get a couple of buckets anyway. I also picked salals to freeze for pie at the Coast, and in Cathedral Park. For unknown reasons it hasn’t been a good year for apples, but we did get a good crop of Asian pears from the tree on our property, and while harvest is a week or more away, it promises to be a good year for Concord grapes and figs. We had a spectacular harvest of Methley and Beauty plums from our trees in July:

Methley and Beauty Plums

I should have painted some still lifes, but both varieties are so juicy that they must be eaten quickly before they go bad. Here’s a photo of some of the pits:

My family took a number of trips to the Oregon Coast, and since the place near Newport that we share with nine other families was within the path of totality, of course we had to be there for the Eclipse on August 21st. We ended up viewing it from the parking lot at nearby Ona Beach. There were early morning clouds that threatened the view, but they had mostly dissipated by the moment of totality. Here I am a few minutes before, with my mother and my daughter Rebecca (photo by my sister Teresa).

Ben has been in college at the University Of Washington for two years, and this summer he was mostly in Seattle working an intern job, but he did come home for a few weeks in September. While here, he added one more painting to his Presidential portrait series, William Howard Taft:

Here are some sketchbook drawings done over the summer at various spots, including Neakhanie Mountain seen from Manzanita Beach, a favorite spot on the Sandy River, and Beaver Creek near Ona Beach. I hope YOU had a great summer!:

THE AMERICAN BYSTANDER Blog Is Online!

To regurgitate the headline, THE AMERICAN BYSTANDER blog is online! The formerly print-only humor magazine has graciously condescended to share some of its content on the interwebs, including my Rockwell-inspired illustration from last November. Check it out here!

David Chelsea is listening to: A Pentatonix Christmas

My illustration is for a piece by former David Letterman Show head writer Merrill Markoe about defusing political differences with your families during the holidays. It was drawn late last year in those innocent days when most of us assumed it would be the MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN crowd who would be feeling the post-election pain. The classic Norman Rockwell image it riffs on is more of a Thanksgiving scene, but it still applies to Christmas:

End Strips: The Definitive Catalogue

This week I posted my 100th End Strip on Patreon (actually, 102nd- I mistakenly gave a couple of strips the same numbers). End Strips are short comics drawn in a vertical format on random strips of paper, usually ones trimmed from larger sheets by my daughter Rebecca for some school project or another. These have tended to fall into a few main groups: drawings of celebrities from my various clippings folders:

David Chelsea is watching: Alien

starring Sigourney Weaver.

(These came from my ST folder: from the top, Richard Strauss, Lena Stolze, Adlai Stevenson, Rod Steiger, Jean Stapleton, Woody Strode).

short strips featuring my characters Sandy & Mandy:

drawings of Facebook friends who share the same first name, rhyming song lyrics that happen to have an anapest meter:

nude figure studies drawn from the YouTube series Croquis Cafe:

and clerihews- short comic poems about famous people with my caricature illustrations:

There have been occasional one-offs as well, like this screed about David Lynch’s 1990s comic strip THE ANGRIEST DOG IN THE WORLD:

For my hundredth strip, I decided to go with something new, a pairing of some killer palindromes written by my son Ben with my illustrations.  Since Ben has written a lot more of these, this promises to become another series:

Patreon does not make it easy to click through and read the End Strips as a series, because they are interspersed with the other stuff I have posted. Just to be nice, I have painstakingly assembled all the links to all the strips posted so far in one place. You’re welcome:

End Strip #1: Random Portraits From My GU Folder End Strips #2: Random Portraits From My SA Folder

End Strips # 3: Agnewanagrams

End Strips #4: Random Portraits From My KR Folder

End Strips #5: Croquis Cafe

End Strips #6: Random Portraits From My FE Folder

End Strips #7: Agnewanagrams

End Strips #8: Anapest Mashup

End Strips #9: Croquis Cafe

End Strips #10: Anapest Mashup

End Strips #11: Random Portraits From My CR Folder




End Strips #12: Just Random Doodles

End Strips #13: Random Portraits From My ST Folder

End Strips #14: Agnewanagrams

End Strips #15: Anapest Mashup



End Strips #16: Croquis Cafe


End Strips # 17: Smelt Sands


End Strips #l8: Ben Lost His Shoe In The Surf


End Strips # 19: Faces In The Rocks


End Strips #20: Things I Saw From The Porch



End Strips #21: These Are The Daves I Know On Facebook





End Strips #22: The Davids I Know On Facebook


End Strips #23: These Are The Davids I Know On Facebook, Part Two





End Strips # 24: Randomly Generated Plots #1


End Strips #25: Persimmons



 
End Strips #25: These Are The Heidis I Know On Facebook (OK, I lost my place in the numbering here)

End Strips #26: Sandy & Mandy

End Strips #27: Sandy & Mandy A Look Back

End Strips #28: Don’t Blame Sandy & Mandy

End Strips #29: Testing Pens With Pictures Copied From The New Yorker

End Strips #30: Pens Tested With Pictures Copied From The New Yorker

End Strips #31: Four Views Of Rebecca’s Gingerbread House

End Strips #32: What I Saw At Wordstock

End Strips #33: Sandy & Mandy

End Strips #34: Ben’s Marble Run

End Strips #35: These Are The Lindas I Know On Facebook

End Strips #36: Sandy & Mandy

End Strips #37: Random Portraits From My LY Folder

End Strips #38: I Give Trump A 50% Chance Of Finishing His Term


End Strips #39: Just In Case My Comic From The Other Day Gave People The Wrong Idea:



 End Strips #40: What I Bought At Scrap


End Strips #41: These Are The Sams I Know On Facebook

End Strips #42: Anapest Mashup


End Strips #43: Croquis Cafe


End Strips #44: 2016 Was Not Like My Dreams

End Strips #45: emPHAsis on the WRONG sylLAble songs that drive me up the wall:

End Strips #46: Anapest Mashup

End Strips #47: These Are The Dons I Know On Facebook

End Strips #48: Donald Trump, Film Critic

End Strips #49: Views From My Windows, 11 January 2017


End Strips #50: More Views From My Windows, 12 January 2017

End Strips #51: Random Portraits From My WA Folder

End Strips #52: These Are The Susans I Know On Facebook

End Strips #53: Anapest Mashups

End Strips #54: Sandy & Mandy At The March

End Strips #55: Anapest Mashup

End Strips #56: Anapest Mashup

End Strips #57: Clerihews For Our Time

End Strips #58: Showbiz Clerihews


End Strips #59: Cartoonist Clerihews


End Strips #60: Cartoonist Clerihews

End Strips #61: Cartoonist Clerihews


End Strips #62: Random Doodles




End Strips #63: Showbiz Clerihews

End Strips #64: Brush Doodles

End Strips #65: My Last Day In The Guest House, Washington DC

End Strips #66: Doodles Drawn On The Plane While Listening to Joe Frank’s Work In Progress

End Strips #67: Doodles Drawn On The Plane While Listening to Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow

End Strips #68: Croquis Cafe #137

End Strips #69: Showbiz Clerihews

End Strips #70: Anapest Mashup

End Strips #71: This Is The Shannon I Know On Facebook


End Strips #72: Random Portraits From My TO Folder

End Strips #73: Political Clerihews

 

End Strips #74: Random Doodles Drawn From My Facebook Feed

End Strips #75: Random Portraits From My ME Folder

End Strips #76: Anapest Mashup

End Strips #77: These Are The Barbaras I Know On Facebook


End Strips #78: Dog Cartoons

End Strips #79: Left-handed Doodles

 

End Strips # 80: Croquis Cafe # 247

End Strips # 81: Anapest Mashup

End Strips # 82: Hestia, Hearth-Tender Of The Gods


End Strips # 83: Croquis Cafe # 131, Posed By Dwayne


End Strips # 84: These Are The Michaels I Know On Facebook

End Strips # 85: Croquis Cafe # 263, Posed By Caitlin

End Strips # 86: More Political Clerihews!

End Strip #87: Croquis Cafe # 87, posed by Thomas Franco

End Strip #88: Anapest Mashup

End Strip # 89: Toothbrush Doodles


End Strip # 90: These Are The Amys I Know On Facebook


End Strip # 91: Fly, Clown, Banana

End Strips #92: DAVID CHELSEA, ANGRY CARTOONIST

End Strip # 94: Random Portraits From My CH Folder

End Strip #94: Croquis Cafe # 266 With Greg (Yeah, it happened again)

End Strip #95: Des Croquis

End Strip #96: Sandy & Mandy Sit & Stand


End Strip #97: Anapest Mashups


End Strip #98: Croquis Cafe # 267


End Strip #99: Croquis Cafe #264


End Strip #100: Palindrome Potpourri

Also this week: two new pages of my 24 Hour Comic THE CRUMB BUMS, a story of a 1960s rock group. In this installment Skins the drummer snip about a dream he had:

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!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

24 HOUR COMIC Now Available For FREE To Amazon Prime Subscribers!

Exciting news!

But I’ll let Milan Erceg tell it:

David Chelsea is reading: Winsor McCay: The Complete Little Nemo, 2 Vol. XL

“24 Hour Comic” is now available for FREE to Amazon Prime subscribers!

Though it costs $0 on Prime, your views are still hugely beneficial to the film. If you’ve already seen the film, here’s some additional great uses for playing the film on Prime…

1) Deter thieves from breaking in by making it seem like someone is home.

2) Keep lonely plants and furniture entertained while you’re away.

3) Use it as a screen saver to prevent screen burn.

Another huge thanks to everyone that has been supporting the film. Because of you, this film has had great opportunities, and hopefully more in the future!”

24 Hour Comic is a documentary in which I appear, which had its theatrical premiere this June. In the film, 8 Artists confined to a comic book store partake in Scott McCloud’s 24 Hour Comic Challenge. Each attempting to write, draw, and complete a 24 page comic in 24 hours. The film is the debut feature from filmmaker Milan Erceg, and features, among others, Paul Guinan, Rachel Nabors, Sera Stanton (now known as Opal Pence), Jacob Mercy, Pete Soloway, and Tom Lechner, and also has some delightful footage of my daughter Rebecca at 13, making her first attempt at a 24. Special guest appearance by comics guru Scott McCloud!

In case you don’t know it, Amazon Prime is the video streaming service that carries Transparent and The Wire, along with most the good movies you can’t find on Netflix anymore. Can Netflix be far behind?