David Chelsea's Blog, page 20

Second Thursday: PalmPilot and Kibble Kitchen

It is the Second Thursday of the month, when I always post comics from my archive on my Patreon page. I had hoped to be able to post some pages from WELCOME TO THE ZONE with revamped art, but I am lagging a bit on the schedule, so that will have to wait until next month. Instead, I am posting more PalmPilot strips from 2004-2005, my first foray into digital comics (and, since these were posted at the time on the Comics Lifestyle website, I guess they qualify as my first webcomic series). These strips are a bit of a time capsule, including a lot of topical material about the 2004 election:

David Chelsea is watching: Room

starring Brie Larson

(If you can’t put your finger on exactly who Paul Hamm is, you are not alone– I had to Google him myself. Turns out, he was an Olympic gymnast).

Due to the limitations of the Notepad drawing program these were done in, the drawing is fairly crude, and the lettering even more so. However, they do have one unforeseen virtue– the vertically stacked format is ideal for displaying on contemporary phones. Pulling these old strips out of mothballs has inspired me to begin another vertically stacked comics series, which I have been posting intermittently over the past two months on Patreon. “End Strips”, are short comics drawn on strips of paper trimmed from larger pieces, which I had saved over the years and not found a good use for before this. I will do a blog post on this series very soon, but for now this one example will have to do:

Meanwhile, on ARE YOU BEING WATCHED?, Mugg and Mandy are cooking for cats on the Reality TV show Kibble Kitchen. Given the clientele, Mandy is having a SLIGHT problem explaining the charity she’s cooking for, which advocates keeping domestic pets indoors to spare songbirds. Which “domestic pets” exactly?:

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!

By the way, if you are coming late to ARE YOU BEING WATCHED?, or missed some weeks and want to catch up, check out the Tumblr archive, starting here.

Facebook Posts: A New Crop

Scrambled egg,

My baby used to cook me scrambled egg,

But now it seems that I’ve come down a peg,

Oh, how I miss her scrambled egg…..

David Chelsea is watching: Spotlight

Starring Michael Keaton

 

 Major mindfuck of my childhood: when I first saw a picture of Laurel & Hardy. I had known them as animated characters on CARTOON CIRCUS and had no idea there were real guys who looked like that:

Separated at birth?:

Could this Felix lighter have inspired Ian Fleming?:

A pretty low bar, apparently. You don’t even need to have finished your degree:

My website gets comments! Mostly from James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, seemingly….

First Thursday On Patreon: Fan Art Illustration And The Return of ARE YOU BEING WATCHED?

Yesterday was the First Thursday Of The Month, when I post fan art drawings on my Patreon page, and it also marked the return of my continuing web comic, ARE YOU BEING WATCHED?

David Chelsea is watching: Frisky Dingo, Season Two

In months past I have been posting crayon drawings of cartoon characters like Fred Flintstone and Alvin and the Chipmunks, done when I was four or five. This month, I reach into the more recent past, and post some illustrations in which I depicted familiar characters, mostly pieces illustrating the Eight Day Week column for the New York Observer. Here I show the stop motion character Gumby next to Eddie Murphy’s Saturday Night Live version of the character:

I can’t remember why exactly Barney The Purple Dinosaur is standing next to actor John Lithgow; possibly they were doing a concert together?:

Some of the other pieces depict Snoopy, Pippi Longstocking, Dora the Explorer, and The Cat In The Hat.

I hope my readers have been entertained by the eight-page Snow Angel story that I posted over the last four weeks, but this week my continuing web comic about Reality TV, ARE YOU BEING WATCHED? is back with a sequence set on a cooking show, Kibble Kitchen. The basic premise comes from any number of popular programs such as Iron Chef, America’s Top Chef, and Chopped– a pair or group of cooks compete to make the best dishes from a random assortment of ingredients– with my twist on it being that Mugg and Mandy are competing to make the best cat food for a panel of feline judges.

The host of the program is yet another incarnation of my devil character (the round black glasses are a dead giveaway), in this case a cat puppet named Chef Chat:

I worked very hard to make this character’s design as sinister as possible. My main inspiration was the creepy/cutesy look and manner of Ron Ben-Israel, host of a now-canceled cooking show about desserts, Sweet Genius:

Ron Ben Israel

I also borrowed some features from Cornflake S. Pescially, the creepiest puppet (against heavy competition) on the children’s show Misterogers Neighborhood:

Cornflake S. Peciailly

Here are some character designs I tried out for Chef Chat. The winning design at bottom combines what I think are the best features. Bon appétit!

Prospective Chef Chat designs

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!

What I Posted Last Week On Patreon

Last week was Fourth Thursday on my Patreon page, and I posted some work in progress from my upcoming book PERSPECTIVE IN ACTION, this time a sequence showing me copying a photograph using an angled mirror, a method borrowed from the film Tim’s Vermeer:

David Chelsea is reading; Society is Nix: Gleeful Anarchy of the Dawn of the American Comic Strip 1895-1915

by Peter Maresca

This is a terrific copying method, and kudos to software designer and inventor Tim Jenison for devising it. As you move your head around, you can match the tones of the picture you’re copying to those in the painting exactly, so that the edge of the mirror virtually disappears. This is me copying a photograph of my sister Anny:

And here’s the final result, side-by-side with the original. Not a bad match!

I also posted the fourth and final installment of a comic which Snow Angel flies to Pluto, and saves Earth from a comet. Well, actually, THAT story finished last week. This week it’s a two-page coda featuring the REAL Snow Angel. Attentive readers of this blog will remember the post in which I speculated that, if M.K. Brown had drawn Snow Angel, instead of a little girl dressed as as angel, she would have been an angel-shaped depression in the snow that stopped criminals by tripping them up. Since Ms. Brown has shown no interest, I have finally drawn that strip myself:

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!

Next week: The Return of ARE YOU BEING WATCHED? !!!

SLEEPLESS Stories: ID

Here is another in my irregular series of posts about stories in my new 24 hour comic collection SLEEPLESS from Dark Horse. This story is ID, and it is about a woman who has her identity stolen by a mysterious tormentor. Featuring an all-animal cast, until I changed my mind halfway through and made them all humans. Based partly on a story I was illustrating that week for the New York Times, with elements drawn from the Rock Hudson movie SECONDS, this is one of the few comics stories I’ve drawn, 24 Hour or not, which manages to generate genuine suspense. Possibly this is because I had no idea until an hour or two before I finished how it would end.

David Chelsea is watching:How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

starring Robert Morse

Because the protagonist, Aurora Dove, has had her identity stolen, she must get a new identity. This involves implanting a whole new set of memories:

The sequence of implanting her new memories went on for several pages, which gave me time to try to think of an ending for the story:

And here is where I changed my my mind about the animal characters:

Aurora becomes “Gertrude Goose”, a painter living in a seacoast town. Like Rock Hudson in SECONDS, has “her” work is mailed to her:

Betty Mayther, who was my art teacher at the Metropolitan Learning Center, (and who died this past January) makes a guest appearance in ID. Betty owned the Bizarre Gallery in Cannon Beach for many years, and it is in that guise that she appears:

Want to know how it ends? Buy the book:

SLEEPLESS AND OTHER STORIES: DAVID CHELSEA’S 24-HOUR COMICS, VOL.2

Publisher: Dark Horse

Publication Date: March 16, 2016

Format: b&w, 168 pages; HC, 6” x 9”

Price: $19.99

Age range: 16

ISBN-10: 1-61655-884-9

ISBN-13: 978-1-61655-884-0

Order the book from Amazon here!:

The Secret Stash On Patreon: BLOCKBUSTERS OF RHYTHM & BLUES- Plus SNOW ANGEL!

It’s the Third Thursday Of The Month, the day that I post The Secret Stash on my Patreon page– that is, sketches, reference photos, old flyers, and other ephemera from my files. Today it’s the first nine of thirty-six illustrations I did for the trading card set BLOCKBUSTERS OF RHYTHM & BLUES, published by Eclipse in 1993.

David Chelsea is reading:Patience

by Daniel Clowes

These portraits of famous musicians like Chuck Berry, Louis Jordan, and Fats Domino were done in a strange mix of media- I first drew them in pencil, then transferred xeroxes of the drawings to Arches hot press watercolor paper with acetone, and then painted that over with a combination of watercolor, acrylic, and colored pencil.

The present set of nine includes Louis Jordan, Johnny Otis, Huey “Piano” Smith, Chuck Berry, Larry Williams, Fats Domino, Clyde McPhatter, and Bo Diddley. l did not include the artist biographies on the back, written by Pat and Barry Katzmann, but if you are curious to read them, the set is out of print but comes up fairly regularly on Ebay.

Membership has its privileges; all Secret Stash material is viewable by Patreon sponsors at the $4.99 level and above.

Also this week, two new pages of a story featuring my all-ages superhero character Snow Angel. In our story so far, Snow Angel has been making snowmen on Pluto, but is called away to stop a comet about to slam into the Earth. She has the bright idea to have the snowmen help her:

Read the comic and find out!

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!

While we’re on the subject, I would like to get something off my chest about Pluto. I think the way that astronomers, Neil deGrasse Tyson most prominent among them, have reclassified Pluto as an “icy body”, a not-quite-planet, is deeply unfair. For 70 years Pluto’s credentials were good enough to admit it to the planetary club, until it was discovered that there were MORE icy bodies like it in the outer regions of the Solar System, hundreds of them, some of them bigger than Pluto even. So what do they do? They move the goalposts! Now, you only get to be a planet if you “clear the neighborhood around your orbit”.

Pluto

It reminds me of Chris Rock’s riff about racism in Hollywood:”Everyone wants to know: Is Hollywood racist? Is it burning-cross racist? No. It’s a different kind of racist. Hollywood is sorority racist. It’s like, ‘We like you, Rhonda, but you’re not a Kappa.'”

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Tyson and his fellow astronomers are, in effect, saying to Pluto “We like you, Pluto, but you’re not a planet.”

Archive Comics On Patreon: THE ZONE, Plus SNOW ANGEL!

It’s the Second Thursday Of The Month, when I post archive comics to my Patreon page. This month, it’s THE ZONE, a xeroxed minicomic from 1989, originally drawn as part of Madi’s Mail Club, a series of booklets put out by East Village zinester Madi Horstman. THE ZONE was later expanded into my second graphic novel, WELCOME TO THE ZONE.

David Chelsea is reading: Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus

by Chester Brown

Among my works, WELCOME TO THE ZONE is the redheaded stepchild, a book even people who say they are big fans haven’t read. Cursed in its timing, the book was acquired by Kitchen Sink right around the time it was taking over the list of Tundra, a far larger comics publisher that was going out of business, and WELCOME TO THE ZONE got somewhat lost in the shuffle editorially as a result. By the time the book appeared in 1995, Kitchen Sink itself was on its last legs, I was too preoccupied by my move from New York to Portland to do much in the way of promotion, and the book was quickly remaindered.

The basic situation is the same in both versions- a musician pasting up flyers at night and the encounters he has- but readers will notice a number of differences: the winter setting was changed to muggy summer, the mutant-looking Toehead became a more human figure based on King Missile frontman John S. Hall, and the crew of do-gooders forcibly feeding the homeless morphed from school kids in Guardian Angel berets led by a nun in overalls to the freakish trio of Invert, Shroom and Mugg (who later became my interlocutor in PERSPECTIVE!, and is now the protagonist of ARE YOU BEING WATCHED?). I also added a multitude of new characters and additional plots, as well as a climax based on the Tompkins Square riot. The 1995 version is out of print but widely available, for example, on Amazon.

I have a vague plan to rework the stippled art in WELCOME TO THE ZONE in a more tonal style and post the results to my Patreon page, possibly as early as next month. The Trumplike character Ronald Duck makes the story more timely than ever. Keep watching this space for details.

Ronald Duck

Meanwhile, I have posted two more pages of a serialized Snow Angel story on Patreon. Snow Angel has made a crowd of snowmen, and organized them into a mass snowball fight, when she gets a signal. A comet is about to crash into the earth! Can she stop it in time?

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!

First Thursday On Patreon: SNOW ANGEL and Jetsons Fan Art

Today is the First Thursday of the Month, when I post Fan Art and a new page of my continuing webcomic ARE YOU BEING WATCHED? on Patreon, except this week I’m not- instead, I’m posting the first installment of a new story featuring my tween superhero character Snow Angel. In this one, Snow Angel leaves Earth behind to visit Pluto:

David Chelsea is watching: Drunk, Stoned, Brilliant, Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon

starring Chevy Chase

The reason why? Due to the work needed to complete my latest book, PERSPECTIVE IN ACTION, I am suspending my webcomic ARE YOU BEING WATCHED? for the next four weeks to present another story featuring Snow Angel (which, not to put too fine a point on it, takes me less time to draw). Since this style of art takes me less time to draw, I will be able to post two pages a week. The story begins today and will continue through May 26th. ARE YOU BEING WATCHED? will resume on June 3rd.

Also this week, some more fan art from the single digit years. This time, I’m featuring Fred Flintstone’s Space Age counterpart, George Jetson (and family):

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!

And check out Snow Angel’s new all-ages, all-color collection from Dark Horse!:

New Patreon Posts: The Devil Cooks, Work In Progress, And A Sneak Peek At Snow Angel!

It’s the Fourth Thursday of the month on my Patreon page, when I ordinarily do a video hangout, but I am finishing up an important phase of my new book PERSPECTIVE IN ACTION, and haven’t had time. Instead, I’m posting some work in progress from the book, specifically the chapter on motion perspective:

David Chelsea is listening to: Doctor Zhivago

(Original Broadway Cast Recording)

Also this week, the latest page of ARE YOU BEING WATCHED?, My continuing web comic about Reality TV. In this transitional scene, the devil confesses that he likes to cook:

You guessed it! The next Reality TV show that Mugg visits will be a cooking show! Loyal readers will have to wait a bit longer to see it– because of my workload, I am taking another break from the webcomic, and posting a new Snow Angel adventure (which, because of the style, takes me far less time to draw), beginning next week. In this story Snow Angel visits the planet Pluto:

If you are coming late to ARE YOU BEING WATCHED?, or missed some weeks and want to catch up, check out the Tumblr archive, starting here.

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!

Wednesday Heads-up: SNOW ANGEL and Modern Love Podcast

It’s Wednesday, when new comics go on sale at all comic shops across America, and today is the first day that you can buy the newly published collection SNOW ANGEL from Dark Horse. This book includes the original 24-page Snow Angel story from Dark Horse Presents, the eight-page Halloween story that appeared in DHP last October, and five more stories that have not appeared in print before, as well as an introduction by my daughter Rebecca, the original inspiration for Snow Angel!

David Chelsea is reading: Creepy Archives Volume 13

by Bill Dubay and others

Also today, the second of my original Modern Love column illustrations from the New York Time appears in conjunction with the new Modern Love Podcast. In this week’s episode, the comedian and actress Sarah Silverman reads Angela Balcita’s 2006 essay, “Beneath the Modest Alter Ego, I See My Superhero,” about getting a kidney transplant from her boyfriend.

Oddly, a truncated version of the illustration appears on the Google search page for Modern Love Podcast, and in banners on the Modern Love website, but not on the podcast page itself. Here it is in full: