David Chelsea's Blog, page 22

RIP, Garry Shandling

Caricature from the New York Observer, 2007

While I was looking through old discs looking for pictures of Garry Shandling, I found this one of Donald Trump with Al Sharpton:

ARE YOU BEING WATCHED? on Patreon: Cellar Dwellers Concluded

The latest page of my Reality TV webcomic, ARE YOU BEING WATCHED?, is up on Patreon. This page concludes a sequence set on Cellar Dwellers, a program in which Mugg owns a comics shop. A visit from a fetching female comics fan has inspired Mugg to make some changes at the store, and this week the transformation is complete. Will it end well?:

David Chelsea is reading: Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World

Simon Garfield

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!

Secret Stash: Some More Letters To Mom

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.

David Chelsea is reading: Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me: A Graphic Memoir

by Ellen Forney

My mother, Lolita Marie Celsi, has been doing a lot of house cleaning lately, and keeps finding old letters with decorated envelopes I sent her and other members of my family over the years. Two months ago I posted a batch from the time she was getting a degree in English As A Second Language in Honolulu a few years ago; last month it was a bundle mostly from the 1980s and 1990s. Now Mom has pulled another batch from dead storage, a mixed bag ranging from the 1970s to the 1990s. Included is this watercolor portrait of Mom from the 1970s:

Mixed in with the batch are a couple of letters to my grandmother and my sister Teresa. In this one I had fun with a couple of 2¢ Thomas Jefferson stamps:

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

And, once more, a plug for Mom’s painting website. Wouldn’t this landscape look great over your fireplace?

Emergency Announcement!

I just got word from Philip Simon, my editor at Dark Horse- due to human error, my latest book, SLEEPLESS, went on sale a week early! It’s on sale today, March 16th 2016, in comics shops everywhere, even as we speak! Portland peeps- why not drop by Things From Another World and pick up a copy on your way to Fred’s? You were going by there anyway, right?

Mugg Makes Some Changes

I posted the latest page of my serialized webcomic ARE YOU BEING WATCHED? on Patreon yesterday. In this installment, Mugg is managing a comic shop on the Reality TV program Cellar Dwellers, and has decided to make some changes in the store, inspired by a visit from a fetching female comics fan (Mandy in her nerd girl guise). Mugg’s partner is dubious:

David Chelsea is reading: Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found

by Frances Larson

Sharp-eyed Chelsea fans may notice the presence of Lady Goddess, (from my latest SNOW ANGEL story), and the Virgin Valkyrie (a video game character from my story THE GIRL WITH THE KEYHOLE EYES, who also recurs as a judge in the 24 Hour Comic ALL DAY AND ALL OF THE NIGHT) among the questionable posters on the comic shop wall.

Mugg’s partner bears a SLIGHT resemblance to my colorist and sometime assistant Jacob Mercy:

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!

Archive Comics On Patreon- David Chelsea In Love: The Flyers.

So, it’s Second Thursday again, when I post comics from the archives to my Patreon page, as well as the latest installment of my webcomic, ARE YOU BEING WATCHED?

David Chelsea is reading: Little Things: A Memoir in Slices

by Jeffrey Brown

This month it’s something pretty damned obscure, a trove of flyers featuring early versions of my autobiographical comic strip DAVID CHELSEA IN LOVE.

My mid-1980s career as an East Village version of Weird Al (I sang my own lyrics to familiar rock instrumentals like TELSTAR and WIPE OUT) has left little trace, thankfully so; I never made any recordings, and so far no performance tapes have surfaced to embarrass me on the internet. What I do have left are a handful of self-drawn performance flyers, which I used to glue with wheat paste on lampposts around the neighborhood (gosh known if they attracted any paying customers to my shows; usually the crowd was made up mostly of friends I had guilt-tripped into showing up). I was working on sketchbook versions of DAVID CHELSEA IN LOVE at the time, and I eventually wound up using sequences from the strip as flyers.

These early drawings have a more blunt, punkish look than the ornate, Winsor McCay-influenced style of the version eventually published by Eclipse in the early 90s, and are drawn mostly with a brush instead of a pen. My co-performers tend to be singers from the East Village Anti-Folk scene like Lach, John S. Hall, Paulette Ray, and Roger Manning.

I was just beginning my decades-long preoccupation with perspective, and occasionally I would attempt something ambitious, like this isometric view of my apartment:

(Note the icky menstrual stain, hand-drawn on each copy of the flyer in red marker.)

Eventually the flyers evolved into a serialized strip which I distributed at performances, and little by little, the cartooning supplanted my performing ambitions entirely (I’ll be posting that serialized strip version at some future point).

Years later, after DAVID CHELSEA IN LOVE assumed its final form as a graphic novel, I produced a series of flyers to promote the book at comics shops in Portland, New York, Chicago and Las Angeles. Each flyer was tailored to the specific city, but followed the same pattern- I am looking high and low for my best gal Minnie, I wander through a few local landmarks, and eventually find her in the pages of DAVID CHELSEA IN LOVE, available at a local comics store. This is the version drawn for Portland, featuring the independent store Looking Glass Books, which was run by my old friends Bill Kloster and Katy Radditz:

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!

RIP, Nancy Reagan

Sketchbook caricature, Mid-1980s

Fan Art: The Flintstones

It is the first Thursday of the month, when I post Fan Art on my Patreon page. This week, I am digging deep in the archives for some of my earliest drawings, pictures in crayon and pencil of the cartoon caveman Fred Flintstone, his friends and family, drawn when I was four and five. These come from an album compiled by my aunt, Anita Marquez (now Sherman), and presented as a Christmas present to me in 1986.

David Chelsea is listening to: Career of Evil

by Robert Galbraith

These include many images of Fred, but also his wife Wilma:

And, of course, his best friend Barney Rubble:

Many thanks to Anita, (who is now the editor of Culpeper Times in suburban Virginia.) for compiling the album. In months to come, I plan to post more images from it, including Fan Art of Woody Woodpecker, Alvin and the Chipmunks, and Fred Flintstone’s Space Age counterpart, George Jetson.

While this album might have predicted a bright future for me drawing licensed characters at Hannah-Barbera, it was not to be. Instead I have made a comics career mostly drawing my own characters, including Mugg and Mandy, who are featured in this week’s page of my continuing web comic about Reality TV, ARE YOU BEING WATCHED?, also posted on Patreon.

Mugg and Mandy appear as clerk and customer on Cellar Dwellers, a Reality TV show showing life in a comic shop. Mandy has come in looking for graphic novels drawn by indy female cartoonists, which the shop unfortunately doesn’t carry. However, Mugg is DETERMINED to make a sale:

One of the pleasures of working on this comic has been depicting Mandy in various guises. So far, in addition to her default persona of a couch potato obsessed with Reality TV, she has been a scantily-clad castaway on Expulsion Island, a pregnant and zaftig newlywed on Nest Quest, a trashy junk dealer on Locker Pickers, and a frontier gal in a Wild West sequence that has pretty much nothing to do with the plot:

Many Mandys

For Mandy’s latest incarnation as nerd girl, I referenced photos I had taken at the last Stumptown Comics Fest, where nerd girls were rampant:

Mandy as nerd girl
Nerd girls photographed at Stumptown Comics Fest, 2013

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!

SNOW ANGEL in April!

I just got a copy of my newest book, the SNOW ANGEL collection from Dark Horse, in the mail. You will have to take my word for it, but it looks beautiful– kudos to editor Philip Simon, designer Ethan Kimberling and all the Dark Horse team on a superb production job! The book itself will be hitting bookstores on April 27, but it can be preordered here:

I hope to arrange a signing for this book, and for my newest 24 Hour Comics collection SLEEPLESS, at around that time.

Cellar Dwellers Invaded!

On Patreon this week, the latest page of my continuing webcomic ARE YOU BEING WATCHED? In recent weeks, Mugg has been starring on Cellar Dwellers, a Reality TV show in which he is co–owner of a comic shop. This week, Mugg and his partner get an unexpected visit from a new customer:

David Chelsea Is Listening To: Wilson

by A. Scott Berg

This may not end well…..

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!

Also today, at about 2:30 pm PST, I plan to hold my monthly Video Hangout. In this one I will demonstrate drawing in 3D, as in the example below, so get out your red/blue glasses!:

Don’t worry if you miss the live vidcast; it will be archived on YouTube.