David Chelsea's Blog, page 27

ARE YOU BEING WATCHED? On Patreon: Expulsion Island Immunity Challenge!

Apologies to followers of my Patreon webcomic, ARE YOU BEING WATCHED?; this week’s installment is two days late. I have an excellent excuse, however- Eve & I spent two days this week engaged in the bittersweet task of helping our son Ben move into his freshman dorm at the University of Washington. Here he is, comfortably ensconced with his portrait of President William McKinley:

David Chelsea is watching:

Skidoo

starring Jackie Gleason







In this week’s ARE YOU BEING WATCHED?, we find ourselves on the popular Reality TV show Expulsion Island, where Mandy faces the Immunity Challenge, stacking a precariously balanced pile of seashells in order to win a necklace that will save her from being voted off the island:

The main subject of this comic is Reality TV, but one nice thing about a long-form story is that I have plenty of chances to throw in references to things having nothing to do with the topic. Beat The Clock type contests are the typical fare on Survivor, (the model for Expulsion Island), but I’ve turned MY Immunity Challenge into a tribute to the Rube Goldberg Machine, named for the newspaper cartoonist best remembered for cartoons like this one:

Cartoon by Rube Goldberg

Goldberg’s influence is wide-ranging; the popular board game Mousetrap is a three-dimensional Rube Goldberg Machine, as is this video for the band OK Go. My favorite Goldberg tributes are the sly little machines that regularly appeared on the Japanese Children’s TV show Pythagoras Switch.

These panels should give you a taste of the Immunity Challenge; for the rest, here’s another link to the comic:

Gray tones by the talented 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!

The real Survivor had its season premiere on Wednesday, but Eve & I were otherwise engaged, and had to miss it. We still haven’t had a chance to catch up online, so no spoilers, please!

Oh, and I’m supposed to do a video hangout on Fourth Thursday, but that fell by the wayside, too. I’ll try and do two next month.

ARE YOU BEING WATCHED? On Patreon: Mugg Goes To Expulsion Island

Another week, another two pages of my continuing web comic ARE YOU BEING WATCHED? on Patreon. This story features parodies of various popular reality TV programs, and this week I take on the Big Kahuna– Survivor, just in time for the premiere of the current season next Wednesday. In the story, Mugg finds himself on the popular program Expulsion Island, where he meets and falls in love with Mandy, who is another contestant.

You might assume that I am one of those people who think Reality TV is The End Of Civilization, or The Death Of Entertainment, or A Sign Of The Coming Apocalypse– in any case, something that must be erased from the culture before it’s too late. You couldn’t be more wrong. I LOVE Reality TV. Given the choice, I would almost always rather watch something like Hoarders or Face Off than Game Of Thrones or Mad Men, or whatever sitcom people are talking about at the water cooler. Why? Well, despite the fact that I consider myself a professional entertainer, I actually think that most of the time, people are more entertaining when they are caught in the act of being themselves (the pioneering reality show Candid Camera happens to be the first non–cartoon program I can remember enjoying).

For the most part, programs I spoof in ARE YOU BEING WATCHED? are the ones I watch and enjoy myself, and Survivor is a prime example. My wife and I have watched every season since the first one in 2001, and we now make it a family ritual, inviting my mother and sister over to watch every Wednesday night. My favorite contestants over the years include Kimmi Kappenberg, the airhead vegetarian (now back on the current season), Russell Hantz, the slimy oil millionaire who schemed and backstabbed his way to the finale, only to win not a single vote from the jury, John Cochran, the pasty-faced college kid who had written his dissertation on Survivor, and who won the big prize on his second attempt, then parlayed his TV fame into a job writing for The Millers, and the lovably piratical Rupert Boneham. Of course, in the coming season I am rooting for Spencer, the University of Chicago grad, who is returning for his second go-round, because he was my nephew Ivan’s roommate at the University of Chicago.

Go Spencer!

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 is the Third Thursday of the month, I am posting Secret Stash material on my Patreon page. This week, it’s self-portraits on envelopes, like this anaglyph image:

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

ALL DAY AND ALL OF THE NIGHT on Patreon- Plus Routine Mischief!

Today is the Second Thursday of the month, and time for me to post some comics from the archives to my Patreon page. This month I begin serializing ALL DAY AND ALL OF THE NIGHT, a 24 Hour Comic from 2013, which continues the story begun in ARE YOU BEING WATCHED? Having used up all his previous wishes, Mugg finds himself stuck on one last Reality TV show, in which the contestants compete to draw the best 24 Hour Comic. Naturally the program is hosted by the cartoonist who holds the record for the most completed 24 Hour Comics, David Chelsea:

David Chelsea is listening to:

Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night

by Harry Nilsson

The session for this comic took place in May 2013 at the comics shop Things From Another World in Portland. Also present were cartoonists Paul Guinan, Sera Stanton, Tom Lechner, Jacob Mercy, Pete Soloway, Rachel Nabors, and Rebecca Celsi (my daughter, then in seventh grade). Paul’s comic was a sequel to his popular book about Boilerplate, a robot soldier:

Documentary filmmaker Milan Erceg filmed the entire proceedings for his upcoming feature about 24 Hour Comics. Just to add another layer of self-reference, I included a director character with a slight resemblance to Milan:

 

This story gives Mugg a chance to spend all day and all of the night with his not-so-secret love Mandy, who is part of the crew:

It also reunites Mandy with her best friend Sandy, from the upcoming Dark Horse Presents story, SANDY & MANDY (though they seem to have forgotten that they know each other). Unlike the story ARE YOU BEING WATCHED?, in which Mugg appears in every scene, this comic passes the Bechdel Test!:

Eventually, this story will become part of the revised webcomic ARE YOU BEING WATCHED?, which I’m serializing now on Patreon.

Also new on Patreon today: two more pages of the aforementioned webcomic version of ARE YOU BEING WATCHED?, which I have been serializing since June. In this one, Mugg returns from his adventure on AMERICA’S OUCHIEST ACCIDENTS! to find the devil engaged in some routine mischief:

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: Fan Art Vs. Looping Gifs

I made something of a format shift on my Patreon page a while back, without actually announcing it- when I began serializing my webcomic ARE YOU BEING WATCHED?, I switched from posting new comics in a big eight-page pile on the first Thursday of the month to posting two pages every week. All well and good, but that left me without anything particular to post for First Thursday. This month, I am experimenting with two ideas to fill the gap- looping gifs and fan art.

Blog Post about my Patreon page

David Chelsea is reading:

The Boundaries of Desire: A Century of Good Sex, Bad Laws, and Changing Identities

by Eric Berkowitz

I have long had an interest in animation, but fate and opportunity steered me toward a career in illustration and comics, and I have never been able to get into animation in a big way. Posting looping gifs, those short animated clips that are all the rage online these days, would give me a chance to get involved in a small way. This month I’m showing simple computer animations of one of my spherical perspective paintings rotating in space, but I hope to do more elaborate animation, possibly involving motion perspective, in coming months.

My friend and sometime assistant Jacob Mercy had another idea to make First Thursday special- posting fan art. I thought he meant drawings of my characters sent in by fans, but he actually meant drawings by me of other artist’s characters. I’m posting both- although a call for fans to draw my characters has been less than overwhelming, bringing in only two examples so far, one of them the Mugg poster at the top of the page by documentary filmmaker Milan Erceg. Mostly it’s my own drawings of other characters, either recent private commissions or charity pieces like these Spider-Man and Wonder Woman pieces-

or TV cartoon characters drawn when I was around five years old, like this Woody Woodpecker:

I’ll be putting the question of what to post on future First Thursdays to my Patreon donor base. Become one, and you can have a say! Donation levels start at $.99.

And yes, I know that it’s actually First Saturday. It’s been a busy month. Word of honor, next month First Thursday will be on a Thursday!

ARE YOU BEING WATCHED? On Patreon: Mugg Goes On AMERICA’S OUCHIEST ACCIDENTS!

Time for another two pages of my serialized webcomic, ARE YOU BEING WATCHED? on Patreon. In this one, we continue a sequence set on the popular Reality TV program AMERICA’S OUCHIEST ACCIDENTS! Despite the name, it’s not just accidents- like other shows that feature home video clips, this one leans heavily on comical animal antics and people frightened out of their wits:

David Chelsea is listening to:

Depression Cherry

by Beach House

Fans of my extremely intermittent web series ANAPEST will appreciate the all-rhyming dialogue. Mugg turns up at the end as a grand prize winner. Next week? You’ll have to see.

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, Dean Jones

Dream sequence from my 24 Hour Comic EVERYBODY GETS IT WRONG!

BTW, you can read the rest of that comic, and five other stories, in Everybody Gets It Wrong! and Other Stories: David Chelsea’s 24-Hour Comics Volume 1, published by Dark Horse, and available here.

ARE YOU BEING WATCHED? on Patreon: AMERICA’S OUCHIEST ACCIDENTS!

It’s Thursday again, and time for me to post two more pages of my serialized webcomic ARE YOU BEING WATCHED? on Patreon. It’s been a long wait for readers of this comic, what with loads of exposition and a side trip to the Old West, but we finally are at the main reason I’m doing the story in the first place- to give me a chance to riff on popular reality TV shows. For this first excursion, I’m taking on the long-running show America’s Funniest Home Videos– only, my version is titled America’s Ouchiest Accidents!:

David Chelsea is watching:

Nightcrawler

with Jake Gyllenhaal

AFV logo

As an extra challenge, and just to make the whole thing more fun, I decided to do all the dialogue in this scene in my favorite poetic meter, rhymed anapest:

By the way, don’t be too puzzled by the absence of Mugg in this week’s installment– he will appear in the continuation of this scene next week.

This episode of ARE YOU BEING WATCHED? is free for anyone to look at, as are all previous installments, but if you like what you see, feel free to $how your $upport!

Next week: More of America’s Ouchiest Accidents!

Oh, and because it is fourth Thursday, I will also be doing a live video hangout on Youtube today at 2 PM PDT. I’ll read a few more letters, do a short drawing demonstration, and respond to live input, if there is any. For those who miss it live, it will be archived as well.

David Draws The Donald

Donald Trump continues to lead the polls, but responsible pundits keep telling us that his moment in the sun can’t last, and that Republican voters will eventually come to their senses, so I figure that I had better get this post up posthaste.

My memory is that I was constantly drawing Donald Trump during the years I illustrated the New York Observer’s Eight Day Week column, from 1995 to 2008, but in fact I was only able to find three examples in my archives. What the items they illustrated were about is anyone’s guess, but the second probably dates from one of Trump’s periodic bankruptcies:

I included a Donald Trumpish character named Ronald Duck in my 1995 graphic novel WELCOME TO THE ZONE. I sculpted plasticine maquettes of all the 20-plus characters in the book, and photographed them as reference. Here is his:

Like his model, Ronald Duck is a boorish, boastful real estate developer. His nefarious plans to develop “The Zone”, the East Village-like neighborhood where the book is set, form one strain in the plot. The nonsense gibberish he spouts requires a bit of explanation; it is actually English as perceived by his Japanese guests (and translated by the Mayor’s Japanese-speaking representative):

Another Trump clone named Darnell Krupp appeared in THE HAROLD PROJECT, my very first 24 Hour Comic, drawn in 2004 (and collected in the Dark Horse anthology EVERYBODY GETS IT WRONG!). Krupp has bet the hero that he can’t climb all the way to the top of a tall building, and throws everything he can at him to make sure he doesn’t:

My method for constructing this story involved incorporating one piece of photo reference pulled from a sack every hour. Here is how I used a photo of a movie alien:

Who knows what the future holds for Trump and me? The loyal Democrat in me is horrified at the prospect of a Trump Presidency (put a gun to my head, and I guess I’ll say that the least-bad Republican in the current field is either John Kasich or Chris Christie).The cartoonist is not so sure.

The Secret Stash On Patreon: Coquille Board Caricatures

It’s the third Thursday of August, and time to post some Secret Stash material on Patreon. This month, I’m posting a whole lot of caricatures, mostly drawn for the New York Observer’s Eight Day Week column, which I illustrated from 1995 to 2008.

David Chelsea is watching:

Quick Change

with Bill Murray

All of these pieces were drawn in 2B pencil on coquille board, a paper with an embossed eggshell texture. When shot as line, a pencil sketch will resemble a stippled pen drawing. My technique at the beginning was to make an enlarged photocopy of a coquille board sketch on bristol paper, and add final details in ink. Because the Observer printed the drawings very small, I made the originals as tiny as possible. While I was still in New York, I delivered the art in person; later, when I moved to Portland, I sent the images by fax. When I got a computer in 1999, I switched from photocopies to scanned files that I would refine in Photoshop, and from fax to e-mail.

What I am posting on Patreon is the pencil drawings in their raw state, before they were tinkered with for publication. A lot of them have empty white areas that would later be filled with black using the bucket tool in Photoshop. Occasionally I would draw on the ends of paper cut from a larger sheet where another illustration had left some empty space, but most often I would cram as many drawings as would fit on a single 11 by 17 inch sheet. Typically I would be filling several sheets at any given time, adding a new drawing where there was an appropriately shaped space, and so one caricature may be separated by years from its closest neighbor.

Here is an example from the photocopy days that I found while looking for material for an upcoming blog post on Donald Trump, along with the final version on bristol:

Pencil drawing on coquille board

Final art

For most of my run at the Observer, drawings ran in black and white, but eventually the paper switched to full color (though still printed on its familiar salmon-pink stock). At that point I added another stage, printing a pale copy of the original drawing onto watercolor paper, applying color to that, then combining the color piece with a bitmapped version of the original drawing in Photoshop, as in this caricature of Isabella Rossellini:

Pencil drawing on coquille board

Watercolor

Final art

The celebrities depicted lean heavily towards the New York fashion and publishing worlds of the time, with figures like Norman Mailer, Donna Karan, and Tina Brown prominent. In the batch on Patreon, which I pulled more or less at random from a drawer, there happen to be two each of Audrey Hepburn, Martin Scorsese, Joan Didion, and Isaac Mizrahi.

Other celebrities who appear include Rudy Giuliani, Bill Clinton, John Travolta, Minnie Driver, Donovan, Marisa Tomei, Keanu Reeves, and Mel Gibson:

Detail, actual size

Membership has its privileges; all Secret Stash material is viewable by Patreon sponsors at the $4.99 level and above. Today I am also posting two more pages of my ongoing webcomic series, ARE YOU BEING WATCHED? In this scene, Mugg gets a good look at his soul:

(In the original 24 Hour Comic version of this story, Mugg’s soul takes the form of a garbanzo bean, a detail borrowed from the Paul Giamatti film Cold Souls. I changed it because I thought a demitasse cup is cuter).

Many thanks to the gifted Jacob Mercy for his work adding grayscale to my line drawings.

This episode of ARE YOU BEING WATCHED? is free for anyone to look at, as are all previous installments, but if you like what you see, feel free to $how your $upport!

Next week: Mugg’s first wish!

Second Thursday: A Double Mugg Of ARE YOU BEING WATCHED? on Patreon

It’s the second Thursday of the month again, and time for me to post two more pages of my serialized web comic ARE YOU BEING WATCHED?, to Patreon, along with a selection of archived comics– in this case the third and final part of my 24 Hour Comic version of ARE YOU BEING WATCHED?, which serves as something of a first draft for the webcomic.

David Chelsea is watching:

Rewind This!

with Atom Egoyan

In the webcomic, Mugg concludes his adventure in the Old West, and finds himself back in the devil’s office with some paperwork to complete. The 24 hour sequence is considerably further along in the story, and includes scenes which riff on familiar Reality TV shows Hoarders and Honey Boo-boo, as well as an imaginary show in which cartoonists compete to draw the best 24 Hour Comic. If you smell sequel, you’re right– the next 24 hour comic I drew, titled ALL DAY AND ALL OF THE NIGHT, takes place entirely at the taping of that reality show. I will begin serializing that comic next month.

All my comics content on Patreon is free for anyone to look at, but if you like what you see, feel free to $how your $upport!

Meanwhile, I think this morning’s live radio interview on KBOO-FM went well. I’ll know for sure when the archived version appears on their website. If it’s not a total embarrassment, I will post about it here.