David Chelsea's Blog, page 24

Locker Pickers and 3-point Perspective.

It’s Thursday, time to post another page of my continuing webcomic, ARE YOU BEING WATCHED? This week, it’s the conclusion of Mugg’s time on the Reality TV show Locker Pickers, in which he and wife Mandy search abandoned storage lookers for valuable items. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t 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, because it’s Fourth Thursday, I am also doing another of my monthly hangouts. This month, the plan is for me to demonstrate setting up 3-point perspective in PhotoShop. It all begins at, or near 3 pm. PST today:

If you miss the live event, not to worry, it will be archived to YouTube.

RIP, Abe Vigoda

When I saw the posting on my Facebook wall yesterday, I at first thought it must be a gag: RIP, Abe Vigoda. The veteran Godfather and Barney Miller actor had lived with persistent, Paul McCartney-ish rumors that he was dead since at least the Mid-1980s. This caricature I drew for The New York Observer in the Mid-1990s alludes to it:

David Chelsea is reading:

SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Mary Beard

Here’s what a caricaturist did for reference back in the day before you could call up hundreds of pictures of Abe Vigoda on Google Images. I rented a VHS copy of Jury Duty (in which Vigoda played a judge), and sketched from freeze frames:

Yesterday, Death caught up with the rumors. Abe Vigoda, dead at age 94.

RIP, Bingo The Cat

It saddens me to report the death of Bingo, our family cat for the past twelve and a half years. Although he was already pretty old by cat standards, Bingo’s last illness came on very suddenly. Last Saturday, Eve noticed that his belly was strongly swollen. It was more so on Sunday. Instead of purring, he was cooing like a dove, which was odd. Monday, Eve called for a vet appointment. Since it did not seem to be an emergency, they gave her a Tuesday appointment. When they took his temperature, the nurse thought it was a mistake because it was only 95.5° The vet said it was cancer causing fluid to build up, which explained the swelling, and that Bingo’s temperature meant that his body was actively shutting down, and he might not last to the weekend. Quite a shock, since we had vaguely thought this might be worms or a bowel obstruction. The vet recommended euthanasia on the spot. Eve decided to have it done at home, so Rebecca would have a chance to say goodbye. Bingo had not seemed to be in pain before, but he spent Tuesday night squirming around on the floor, yowling piteously. The end of life vet arrived Wednesday morning. Eve and I had a chance to hold him one last time before she stopped his heart. We buried Bingo in the yard that afternoon.

Bingo

Here is a photo of Bingo from last year, patiently tolerating being giftwrapped for some reason, though his expression indicates that he is plotting his escape:

Bingo made many appearances in my comics over the years, beginning with this Palm Pilot Comic from 2004:

He is also to be seen in the first SNOW ANGEL story:

Bingo starred in his own 24 Hour Comic (creatively titled “BINGO THE CAT”), which is a loose wordless remake of Alice In Wonderland. In the sequence below, Bingo meets The Cheshire Girl:

Bingo reappears in the 24 Hour Comic I LIKE TO RIFF (in which I riff on all my previous 24 Hour Comics):

An animated Bingo stars in BINGO’S FANTASTIC JOURNEY, a stop-motion video by Rebecca, with music by Ben, which you can watch on YouTube.

If you’d like to read more Bingo comics, BINGO THE CAT appears in the collection EVERYBODY GETS IT WRONG!, from Dark Horse, which you can order from Amazon:

By coincidence, Bingo died the day after Betty Mayther, who was the longtime art teacher at Metropolitan Learning Center, which I attended from 1968 to 1976.

Drawing of Betty Mayther, circa 1976

In addition to being a teacher, Betty also owned the Bizarre Gallery in Cannon Beach for many years. It is in that guise that she makes her own appearance in my work, in the 24 Hour Comic ID (which appears in the forthcoming collection SLEEPLESS, also from Dark Horse):

Betty was a dear friend for many years, and my sympathies go out to her family.

It’s Starting To Get Real

I just got a preview copy of SLEEPLESS, my second 24 Hour Comics collection from Dark Horse, in the mail yesterday. The book itself drops on April 5th, 2016 (not, as I previously reported, in February). It includes six stories:

David Chelsea is reading:

The American Bystander #1

edited by Michael A Gerber

1. SNOW ANGEL: the original 24 hour comic version. I later reworked this story about a little girl who becomes a crime-fighting angel when she makes an angel in the snow, and added color to it for the version which ran in Dark Horse Presents, which later became its own one-shot comic book. I am now at work on a book-length collection of stories about this character.

2. SLEEPLESS: A story told entirely through the eyes of a character who can’t sleep. Comics reviewer Henry Chamberlain called it “the best 24 hour comic I’ve ever read” (I don’t know how many of my OTHER 24 hour comics he has read).

3. ID: A woman has her identity stolen by a mysterious tormentor. Featuring an all-animal cast, until I changed my mind halfway through the story and made them all humans.

4. NOW OPEN THE BOX: A married couple receive a mysterious package, which they must hide from their young son. Drawn entirely on isometric grid paper.

5. THE GIRL WITH THE KEYHOLE EYES: Drawn as a benefit for, and as something of an homage to ZAP cartoonist S. Clay Wilson, this series of reminiscences about various women I’ve known (mostly NOT old girlfriends), mixes real stories with outright fabrications, all centered on the eponymous “girl”, who is variously described as an old roommate, a character in a video game, a cartoonist colleague, my grandmother, and a Courtney Love look-alike. It ends with a real groaner of a pun. This story was also eventually redrawn for Dark Horse Presents.

6. I LIKE TO RIFF: This comic is something of a victory lap, both for myself and for any reader who has made through all the previous 24 hour comics. I constructed the story by putting the names of the eleven previous comics in a sack and drawing one out at random every two hours. See if you can spot all of them!

As I said, you have to wait until April 5th to get your copy, but Amazon is taking preorders:

The Secret Stash: Letters To Mom

The Third Thursday of the month is when I post Secret Stash material to my Patreon page; sketchbook drawings, old decorated envelopes, and other ephemera. This month I have a gallery of envelopes for letters I sent to my mother, Lolita Celsi, when she was getting her degree in Teaching English As A Second Language at Hawaii Pacific University.

David Chelsea is reading:

SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Mary Beard

Mom had gotten a bachelor’s in Fine Arts back in the 1950s, and spent many years working as a graphic designer, but felt the need to add to her skill set, and so went back to school at the age of 74. She got her degree in January 2010.

Lolita Celsi, ESL Graduate

The decorated envelopes I sent her in the year and a half she spent in Hawaii include this ballpoint portrait of my late father, Dick Celsi:

At the time, I was working on my comic for Dark Horse Presents, THE GIRL WITH THE KEYHOLE EYES, so I sent along this watercolor of a panel from it:

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

Also on Patreon this week, the latest page of my serialized webcomic ARE YOU BEING WATCHED? In this installment, Mugg and Mandy manage to sell their Lunar Excursion Module to a dealer- or do they?:

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!

The Last Of SANDY & MANDY

Today, Wednesday January 20th, Dark Horse Presents # 18 goes on sale at your local comics shop.

David Chelsea is reading:

Between the World and Me

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

The latest issue of this Eisner, Harvey, and Stumptown Award winning anthology features the next chapter of Rich Woodall and Craig Rousseau’s Kyrra: Alien Jungle Girl, paranormal podcaster deals with a personal possession in Barbara Randall Kesel and Marc Olivent’s Sundown Crossroads.

This issue also features new chapters of Paul Levitz and Tim Hamilton’s Brooklyn Blood, Carla Speed McNeil’s Finder, and Dennis Calero’s The Suit!

Most pertinently, this issue features the third and final installment of my story SANDY & MANDY!

Cover for Dark Horse Presents # 18

By the way, if you don’t have time to go to the comics store, you can buy the digital version of Dark Horse Presents #17 here!

Here is a repeat of a post from 2014, on the men of SANDY & MANDY:

SANDY & MANDY, the story I drew as an upcoming series for DARK HORSE PRESENTS, was designed specifically to pass The Bechdel Test, cartoonist and MacArthur Genius Grant recipient Alison Bechdel’s set of rules for determining if a story is sexist or not. To wit:

1. It has to have at least two women in it,

2. Who talk to each other,

3. About something other than a man.

Some people amend the rules to require that both women have names.

Bechdel formulated The Test to apply to movies, but I see no reason why it can’t work with comics- a story is a story. A list of films that fail The Test would incorporate most of the video shelf, but here are the top-grossing films of all time that pass it:

1 Titanic

2 The Exorcist

3 Jurassic Park

4 Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace

5 Grease

6 Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

7 Independence Day

8 Transformers: Dark of the Moon

9 Shrek 2

10 Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

A quick tip of the hat to COWGIRLS AT WAR, a 1970s National Lampoon story combining dialogue which Michael O’Donoghue seemingly wrote to pass The Test decades before it was devised, with matchlessly titillating girlie art by Russ Heath. Who says guys can’t be nonsexist?:

Page from COWGIRLS AT WAR

There’s not a lot of plot to SANDY & MANDY, just two friends walking around a cityscape that looks much like Venice, window shopping, drinking wine, fishing for crabs, and talking mostly not about men. They do encounter a few men along the way. At one point Sandy has an appointment with a male escort:

I originally drew this story while on a trip to Europe, mostly during plane hops and while waiting for trains. I incorporated elements from books I was reading or had recently read. I took the prostitution theme and the conceit of never showing the escort’s face from Chester Brown’s memoir PAYING FOR IT.

I made a number of changes when I redrew this story for DARK HORSE PRESENTS. “Candy” changed her name to “Sandy”, and I moved the scene underwater, which entailed giving the escort a makeover. I took inspiration from this sequence in Winsor McCay’s LITTLE NEMO:

Frame from LITTLE NEMO by Winsor McCay

Mandy has her own encounter, a blind date which begins promisingly:

One of the books I was reading at the time was I THINK I LOVE YOU by Allison Pearson, a novel about a Welsh girl infatuated with David Cassidy. I therefore based the blind date’s appearance on Cassidy:

David Cassidy

A psychedelic, Peter Max-inspired sequence gave me a chance to indulge my interest in kaleidoscope tiling:

The original story was fourteen pages long, and I added a few scenes to bring the length up to twenty-four pages. One was this encounter with a seemingly blind man, which I took pretty much verbatim from a review skit I wrote for The Storefront Theater in 1977:

I based the character’s appearance and body language on the original performer in the skit, veteran Portland actor Ross Kerr:

Ross Kerr

To keep the character’s appearance consistent from frame to frame, I virtually molded a head in the 3D application Sculptris, based on photo reference of Ross:

Head modeled in Sculptris

It’s a date! I just got word that SANDY & MANDY will begin serialization in Dark Horse Presents Vol. 3 #15, appearing in December, 2015.

Previous blog post about SANDY & MANDY

Another one

Second Thursday On Patreon: Locker Pickers Continued, CANDY & MANDY Concluded

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: Crime Does Not Pay: City of Roses

by Phil Stanford

This week finds Mugg and Mandy as the stars of a reality TV show reminiscent of Storage Wars, trying to unload a possibly counterfeit Lunar Excursion Module onto a collector friend.

Storage Wars is a program in which dealers buy the contents of abandoned storage lockers at auction, after a very cursory first look, then hunt through the pile for hidden treasures, like a set of Hummel figurines, or a framed poster from the Fillmore East. I used to watched the show with my family until one of the regulars, Dave Hester, quit and accused the producers of cheating by sweetening the lockers with valuable “finds” found elsewhere. (He also accused them of paying for breast enlargement for one of the female stars). Hester later recanted and rejoined the program, but for me there was no going back.

I borrowed many features of the show’s stars for my own version (titled Locker Pickers). Mugg and Mandy’s testy relationship is reminiscent of the show’s bickering young couple Jarrod Schultz and Brandi Passante, though Mugg’s tank top-and-jeans ensemble derives from the show’s resident roughneck, Darrell Sheets:

Brandi & Jarrod
Darrell Sheets

The collector’s brusque style and black ball cap are taken from Dave Hester, though his t-shirt and black shorts are more Jarrod’s style:

Dave Hester

Meanwhile, the archive comic is the second and concluding part of CANDY & MANDY, the sketchbook precursor to SANDY & MANDY, the three-part story now running in Dark Horse Presents. Warning- Wagner jokes!:

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!

Fan Art On Patreon: Action Figures!

It’s the First Thursday of the month- and year,- when I post Fan Art on my Patreon page.

David Chelsea is reading: Out on the Wire: The Storytelling Secrets of the New Masters of Radio

by Jessica Abel

This week, I decided to do portraits of various three-dimensional representation of licensed characters; plush dolls, action figures, and the like, working in acrylic on canvas and gesso panels, and using the camera lucida or mirror to copy the features exactly. I meant to use figures that have belonged to my kids, but recent yard sales and spring cleanings have depleted our supply of character icons to such an extent that I actually had to buy a couple at Goodwill. In case you don’t recognize the characters, they are Buzz Lghtyear from Toy Story, Feathers McGraw, the penguin from The Wrong Trousers, and Dora the Explorer:

Also this week, a genuine piece of fan art, this Sol Steinberg-esque

portrait of David Chelsea sent in by fan Bob Levin:

And also this week, the latest installment of my continuing web comic ARE YOU BEING WATCHED? After his adventures on reality shows reminiscent of America’s Funniest Home Videos, Survivor, and House Hunters, this installment finds Mugg in business with Mandy on a show based on Storage Wars, that one where people buy storage lockers at auction, and look for valuable items amid the junk.

This was a show that I used to watch all the time with my family a year or two ago, but we stopped watching after one of the regular buyers on the program, Dave Hester, quit and then revealed that the producers had cheated, sweetening the lockers with valuables bought elsewhere. Even though Hester later recanted and rejoined the program, there was no going back for us, and now I routinely skip past the channel when I see the program on.

Say it ain’t so, Dave!

This sequence is pretty much unchanged from the way it was in the 24 hour comic version of ARE YOU BEING WATCHED?; The item that Mugg and Mandy are staring at is a Lunar Excursion Module. (The LEM in my story is three quarters of actual size- a full-sized model would have required an impossibly huge locker to contain it).

Panel from the 24-Hour comic version of ARE YOU BEING WATCHED?

For reference, I set up the scene in the CG program Lightwave, using mostly free models found on the Internet, including the lunar module:

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!

ARE YOU BEING WATCHED? Rings In The New Year

It’s New Year’s Eve, and time to post the last two pages for the year of my webcomic ARE YOU BEING WATCHED? on Patreon. This episode finds Mugg back in the office, where the Devil is up to his usual routine mischief. It’s amazing how many people don’t know how to shut off their laptop cameras:

David Chelsea is watching:The Imitation Game

starring Benedict Cumberbatch

I have an announcement. These two pages are not just the last for 2015, but the last two-page installment of ARE YOU BEING WATCHED? for a while. While I have been working at the webcomic, I have also been at work on a new instructional book for Watson-Guptill, PERSPECTIVE IN ACTION, which is intended as a sequel to PERSPECTIVE! and EXTREME PERSPECTIVE! That book is due in June, and I am finding it increasingly difficult to keep up a reasonable pace on it, while meeting a weekly deadline on ARE YOU BEING WATCHED? I will therefore be switching to a one-page-a-week schedule on ARE YOU BEING WATCHED? for the immediate future, most likely through June. That should be much more manageable. I hope my Patreon subscribers will be patient with me. I will still be posting Fan Art, Archived Comics, The Secret Stash, and Video Hangouts on a regular basis (though no Hangout this month- too much holiday stuff going on).

Page from PERSPECTIVE IN ACTION

Also, this week on Patreon, I’m posting a looping gif of Mugg’s mug, intended to evoke this classic pre-credits image of Mickey Mouse:

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!

Straight Out Of 1975: The Lost Sketchbook

It’s the Third Thursday of the month, when I post The Secret Stash on my Patreon page. This category covers a wide range of material- decorated envelopes, reference photos, sketchbook roughs- from the depths of my archives. This month I’m posting drawings that I hadn’t seen in forty years, from a notebook belonging to Marcia Lepley.

David Chelsea is watching: The Painting

directed by Jean-François Laguionie

Marcia Lepley

In 1975, Marcia (then known as Marcia Hudson), and I were members of the Storefront Theater, an experimental company in Portland, Oregon. I was a cast member in Dreams, directed by Ric Young, a kind of avant-garde vaudeville on the general theme of, well, dreams, and Marcia was the stage manager.

Poster for ‘Dreams’.

The show itself was fittingly surreal, with copious nudity (hey, it was the 70s), and I was somewhat out of place in it. At the time I was sixteen, a virgin, and a high school student at the Metropolitan Learning Center (but I wasn’t even the youngest cast member- one of the actresses had a six year old daughter who was also in the show). Because I was only in two scenes, I had a lot of backstage down time. Apparently, I spent much of it doodling in Marcia’s stage manager’s notebook.

Drawing by Henk Pander

Marcia and I recently reconnected by Facebook, and a few weeks ago we met for coffee. She had held on to the notebook all these years as a keepsake, and was eager to show me my work. Interspersed with production notes, rehearsal schedules, and company phone numbers were a dozen or so drawings.

Cartoon by M.K. Brown

I kind of knew what to expect, because I have plenty of other sketchbooks from that period. My style at that time was heavily influenced by Portland poster artist Henk Pander, and National Lampoon cartoonist M.K. Brown, so you see a lot of Pander’s twisted hybrid creatures and Brown’s stipply textures. Hardly any of the drawings refer to the show itself, though there are a small number of portraits of fellow cast members. For unknown reasons, Marcia is shown hugging Jonathan Winters, fellow cast member Richard Vidan plucks off a devilish horn , and other cast member Dolores Ashkar has a monkey on her back (even in this very druggy crowd, Dolores stood out- hey, it was the 70s).

Richard Vidan

Just to show you how small a town Portland was and is, one of the other cast members, Lew Frederick, taught at my school, The Metropolitan Learning Center (and married the Principal’s daughter). Lew is now my State Representative, and running to become State Senator. It’s also his birthday today. Happy birthday, Lew!

Lew Frederick

When I moved to New York a few years later, I shed the surreal trappings and went in a more realistic illustration direction. However, with forty years of perspective, some of these scribbles aren’t bad, and suggest that I might have become a second Henk Pander if I had persisted in this macabre style. Fortunately, Henk has two sons who are carrying on his legacy.

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

Many thanks to my sometime assistant Jacob Mercy for scanning all the drawings.

Also on Patreon today, I’m posting two more pages of the continuing webcomic ARE YOU BEING WATCHED? In this installment, Mugg and Mandy are newlywed house hunters on the Reality TV program Nest Quest. It turns out there are a few things Mugg is only now finding out about his new bride; that she likes to grow pot in a closet, for one, and also that she has been paying rent on multiple storage units. Most of the two pages consist of Mandy listing all the stuff she has in storage: “There’s floppy discs, zip discs, compact discs, jaz discs, disc drives, screwdrivers, screwguns, popguns, corn poppers, eyedroppers, bottle stoppers, copper kettles, metal detectors, pump injectors, floor tiles, nail files, file folders, candle holders, earring backs, carpet tax, sealing wax, wax lips, licorice whips, tin snips, potato chips….”

Because so much of the story consists of two characters standing around talking, I was able to reuse one frame multiple times. However, in order to give my Patreon subscribers their money’s worth, I decided to make tiny changes in the drawing so that adjacent frames could be viewed in stereo. The middle row on the first page are designed for “free viewing”, diverging your eyes as you would for a random dot stereogram (something most people can’t do). The bottom pair is designed for cross-eyed viewing, which most people find easier to do.

For those who can’t do either, here is an anaglyph version which can be viewed through red/blue glasses:

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!

On the Spencer Watch, if you didn’t see last night’s incredible three-hour finale, you must not be a Survivor fan! This season has been among the most hard-fought and suspenseful ever, and several players have said this is because they were voted on to this season by fans, not just selected by the producers, and felt an obligation to give the folks at home a good show. On the first hour, Kimmi Kappenberg, who had been cruising happily along as the fourth member of the Jeremy, Spencer & Tasha Alliance, went rogue and attempted to blindside Jeremy, but was more or less instantly found out. After Spencer won immunity, a byzantine series of maneuvers followed. Both Jeremy and Kelly, sensing danger at Tribal Council, played hidden immunity idols, resulting in the very first Council in which NONE of the votes cast counted. This was followed by a re-vote which resulted in a tie, then a few more steps which I couldn’t follow, all with the ultimate result that the treacherous Kimmi was ejected. Two more councils followed, eliminating Keith and Kelly (not a good season for people whose names begin with K), and the final three were Spencer, Tasha and Jeremy.

In my opinion, Spencer and Jeremy both played smart and strategic games, deftly steering between loyalty and treachery to hit the sweet spot, and both deserved to win (Tasha seemed to be more cruising along in the slipstream). However, as a working-class Black fireman with two kids and one on the way, Jeremy had class sympathy cards to play that privileged college kid Spencer couldn’t match, and in the end the Jury’s vote was unanimous. However, Spencer’s second-place prize should help pay off his student loan!

Spencer: A Strong Second On Survivor