David Chelsea's Blog, page 34

Cartoonists On Radio 8

I’ll be dropping by Matt Clark’s show The Monday Sampler on KBOO-FM again this Monday, June 17th between 2 and 4pm PDT. I’ll be discussing my new book Everybody Gets It Wrong! And Other Stories: David Chelsea’s 24-Hour Comics #1, published by the fine folks at Dark Horse. and I’ll spin some records from my collection, many on the original vinyl. This time I’ll concentrate on weird and strange acapella recordings from the 1930s up to whenever, including songs by Tete Noires, The Modern Barbershop Quartet, The Songbirds Of The South, and Zap Mama, and as many more as there is time for.

David Chelsea is watching:

Moonrise Kingdom

Portland listeners can tune in on 90.7 FM, and the rest of you can listen online at the KBOO website.

Best Sketchbook Ever

Not necessarily the best, but certainly the biggest. This sketchbook was given to me by Gloria Moyer, the art director at Longman Publishing. I had been illustrating one of their English As A Second Language textbooks, and Gloria had noticed that I carried a sketchbook with me everywhere. She presented me with one of Longman’s dummy dictionaries, a bound book with blank pages made to give them an idea what the real dictionary would eventually look like. I have never counted the pages, but they must number in the thousands. To give you some idea of its dimensions, I would ordinarily go through three or four sketchbooks a year in those days. This book I carried around for about five years, 1984- 1988. Having so many pages kind of unleashed the floodgates for me,and the book contains a wide variety of drawings.Eventually I constructed this jacket from cardboard and masking tape to protect the covers:

David Chelsea is listening to:

Little French Songs

by Carla Bruni

I hadn’t looked inside the book for several years, until an old New York friend recently asked me to send her copies of the caricatures I used to draw of poets, performance artists, and folk singers from Open Mike Night at the Lower East Side performance space ABC No Rio (a real misnomer; the room was too small to need a microphone), so she could post them on her Facebook page. After scanning a bunch of those images, I decided to scan some of my other favorite drawings from the book and put up an album on Comics Lifestyle (which joins other albums such as Juvenilia, Letters To Geoff, and Camera Lucida Drawings)

The ABC No Rio caricatures are kind of the least of what’s in there, though there are an awful lot of them. Most of the performers are as unknown now as they were then, but a few went on to modest fame. Poet John S. Hall, founded the band King Missile, best known for their song Detachable Penis:

Open Mike host Matthew Courtney is now a familiar fixture on Soho streets, selling paintings done on newsprint. He was the subject of this documentary.

During those years I lived in New York, but made many trips to my home town of Portland, where I drew the newly erected Portlandia statue and this portrait of my grandparents:

I also visited Mexico, France, Italy and Canada:

I did a yearlong study of anatomy at the New York Academy Of Art: part of it was drawing from cadavers:

As an exercise in anatomy, I had some fun getting under the skin of images taken from porn magazines:

I met my future wife Eve in 1986, not at ABC No Rio, but at a similar performance space called Brainstain Basement Theater. This sketchbook contains my first drawings of her:

There are many early celebrity caricatures which prefigure eventual work I did for the New York Observer and other clients:

A lot of the drawings are sick cartoons, often about the news of the day. This cartoon drawn after the Challenger disaster in 1986 is one of the better ones:

I also used the book as my appointments calendar:

There are many early drafts of the strips that eventually became my first graphic novel David Chelsea In Love, including this exercise in isometric perspective:

I began a prequel to David Chelsea In Love about a previous romance, but dropped it largely because the woman in it , unlike Minnie, was far more into me than I was her, and I ended up treating her very badly indeed. Perfect candor is a lot easier to pull off when you feel yourself to be the injured party.

Gloria Moyer never did see the sketchbook entirely filled. Presumably if she is still alive she is long retired. I owe her a deep debt of thanks.

Longman’s English As A Second Language materials are now issued through Pearson Publishing, but there is still a Longman Dictionary in print. In years since, I have looked for another dummy dictionary without success.

 

Three From The New York Observer

Developer Anthony Malkin, March

David Chelsea is reading:

Al Capp: A Life to the Contrary

by Denis Kitchen

New York Mayoral Candidates including Anthony Weiner, this week

Everybody Gets It Wrong Today!

The long wait is over! Today is the day you can walk into your local comics shop and buy my new collection, Everybody Gets It Wrong! And Other Stories: David Chelsea’s 24-Hour Comics #1 , published by the fine folks at Dark Horse. In the unlikely event that your local comics seller doesn’t carry the book, you can take your business online through Things From Another World or Amazon.com.

Order through Amazon Associates:

As implied by the title, the book collects my first six (of sixteen so far) 24 Hour Comics in one volume. My tagline: Six Days In The Making- Just Like Creation!

The stories included in this book are:

THE HAROLD PROJECT, an off-kilter interpretation of Harold Lloyd’s silent comedy Safety Last.

AUGUST 29TH 2004, a suite of four shorter stories, including an adventure in which twin tomatoes Singar and Mingo tunnel to Australia.

JESUSLAND, a religious satire with an all-animal cast.

EVERYBODY GETS IT WRONG!, an essay in comics form advancing the argument that all autobiographical comics should be drawn “subjective camera”- as if from the artist’s point of view.

BINGO THE CAT, a wordless adventure,

and,

FROM AN INFINITE DISTANCE, an extremely random story concerning global warming, a father-daughter reunion, and Dick Cheney’s hunting accident, drawn on graph paper in vertical oblique projection.

Thanks to my editor Philip Simon, and everyone at Dark Horse!

The reviews are in! Well, two of them, anyway- both favorable:

Henry Chamberlain at Comics Grinder.

Steve Paugh at Comics Bastards.

I’ll be posting quotes from these and any other reviews that appear soon. In the meantime, what are you waiting for? Those copies of Everybody Gets It Wrong! And Other Stories: David Chelsea’s 24-Hour Comics #1 won’t stay on the shelves long!

The Future of Comics Begins Thursday at WebVisions

Tomorrow is your chance to see me and a distinguished panel of colleagues (including Axe Cop cartoonist Ethan Nicolle, who drew the above image) speculate on The Future of Comics at WebVisions Portland, the annual conference on all things Web (spoiler alert: The Future Of Comics is probably going to involve the Web). Here’s copy from the Website:

While blockbuster films based on comic book characters have been a box office bonanza, the comic book industry as a whole has experienced radical change. Industry powerhouses like Marvel have diversified their non-print offerings by unveiling Infinite Comics, a new digital format targeting mobile devices. For smaller publishers and independent artists, the future of comics will be built on the shifting sands of change, but opportunities abound for self publishing, crowd sourced funding and digital distribution.

The Future of Comics Panel

Speakers: Arnold Pander, Richard Bruning, Jacob Pander, David Chelsea, Ethan Nicolle, Rachel Nabors

Thursday, May 23 2013 at 10 am

Room D139/140

WebVisions Portland at the Oregon Convention Center.

777 NE Martin Luther King Jr Blvd Portland, OR 97232

(503) 235-7575

RIP, Ray Manzarek

Caricature for the New York Observer, 1990s

David Chelsea is listening to:

The Interestings

by Meg Wolitzer

David Chelsea On Comics Grinder

Just in time for today’s 24 Hour Comics session at TFAW, an interview with Henry Chamberlain (with a nice shout-out to my latest, ARE YOU BEING WATCHED?) on Comics Grinder:

http://comicsgrinder.com/2013/05/18/24-hour-comics-interview-david-chelsea/

David Chelsea is listening to:

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

 

This Saturday: 24 Hour Comic #16 At Things From Another World

Come see me draw my SIXTEENTH 24 Hour Comic (a World Record until someone tells me different) this weekend. After jaunts to Eugene and New York, I’m back on home ground. The 24 Hour Comics – Portland Edition is taking place from 10:00am on Sat., May 18th to 10:00am on Sun., May 19th at Things From Another World (2916 NE Broadway St.).Things From Another World is easy to find if you know Portland- it’s just at the spot where you turn on Broadway to go to Fred Meyer’s.

David Chelsea is reading:

Life After Life: A Novel

by Kate Atkinson

I’ll be sharing spare with seven other talented artists; Paul (Boilerplate) Guinan , Pete Soloway, Jacob Mercy, Sera Stanton, Tom Lechner, Rachel Nabors, and my daughter Rebecca Celsi, who is taking on the 24 Hour challenge for the first time. Here’s copy from the TFAW blog:

Artists David Chelsea (Welcome To The Zone), Paul Guinan (Boilerplate), Pete Soloway (Pizza Gun), Jacob Mercy (Pizza Gun), Sera Stanton (Sera Stanton Illustration), Tom Lechner (Nightlife), Rebecca Celsi (Kelso’s Choices), and Rachel Nabors (18 Revolutions) will take on the challenge of creating an entire comic book in 24 hours at the 24 Hour Comics Portland Edition May 18 at the Portland TFAW — and you’re invited to come watch! The entire event will be filmed for an upcoming documentary by Milan Erceg.

24 Hour Comics is an event where illustrators and artists have 24 hours to create a comic, including the story, finished art, lettering, color, paste-up, and proofreading. The Portland Edition is part of a two week-long event called The Wild, a series of events that takes on the world of artists, makers, writers, and cultural iconoclasts who juice up Portland’s awesomeness. The Wild takes place May 11-25 and is sponsored by the Portland Mercury, WebVisions, and more!

The Portland TFAW will stay open the entire 24 hours to host this exciting event — which takes place from 10 am May 18 to 10 am May 19 — but will close the register to sales after 7 pm. Make sure to stop by to see comics created right before your eyes all night long!

TFAW blog page

24 Hour Comic Website

And don’t forget to pre-order the upcoming collection of my first six 24 Hour Comics, Everybody Gets it Wrong! and Other Stories: David Chelsea’s 24-Hour Comics Volume 1

Extreme Perspective! In Japanese

Newly arrived from my publisher: here are some sample pages from the new Japanese editon of Extreme Perspective!:

David Chelsea is reading:

The Artist Himself: A Rand Holmes Retrospective

by Patrick Rosenkranz

 

Hey, Japan, I look forward to seeing more Manga in curvilinear perspective!

 

Stumptown 2013

So here’s what I did at last weekend’s Stumptown Comics Fest. I sold some comics:

David Chelsea is listening to:

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

by Steven Johnson

I bought some comics:

I did my Perspective Police! PowerPoint presentation:

Photo by greyaenigma

I got thirsty and posed for pictures:

Photo by Ocean Yamaha

I drew this heavily stippled envelope during down time. I wonder who I’ll send it to?:

I spent a lot of time being interviewed by my filmmaker friend Milan Erceg, who is shooting a documentary about 24 Hour Comics. While Milan shot me, I took his picture with my Palm Pilot:

With all that activity, I didn’t have time to take as many photographs as in years past. Instead, I concentrated on getting as many shots as I could of a suddenly prevalent type, the Nerd Girl With Glasses (my wife tells me that Nerd Girls have been around for ages, but this is the year they seemed to reach critical mass at Stumptown):

Mayim Bialik should be collecting royalties

Thanks to the staff and organizers. Thank also to my table-mates, Jacob Mercy and Pete Soloway of PIZZA GUN, for being such good company,  and especially for processing my credit card orders. My next convention appearance: Wizard World Comic Con in Chicago in August.