Festus the Cat

Lately, ever since our trip down the Shore, I have been spinning yarns for my daughter about Festus the Cat, an obese feline with blue polka dots who walks the Seaside boardwalk and gets into trouble. Yesterday I sketched him for her while we were drawing on her easel. Behold the terrifying results (she added the purple specks of what look like blood or something, and colored the nose).

Clone Wars

Me wife and I watched the awesome flick "Moon" last night. I feel like the "old-school" special effects were more real (to the eye) than the computer stuff they do in most movies, since it lets actual light play off surfaces in genuine 3-D (the eye knows when it's being duped, more often than not). The story was really emotional and awesomely acted--I won't spoil the whole deal for those who haven't seen it, but it brought to mind the storyline I was starting to develop in the late run of Bobu Leene.




Above, one Bobu Leene trades punches with another.


The gist of the Bobu Leene arc was this: in the superhero world, the superhero--or anti-hero, even--has to conceive of himself as a hero on a quest. But given that there are a million and one heroes out there (The Hero with a Thousand Faces, eh), what if this impetus, to think of oneself as a hero, is just narcissism, or, in Bobu Leene's case, replicated memories? If I ever get to doing Bobu Leene #13, I think I will take up these reins again.

The wife and I previously watched Jim Jarmusch's "The Limits of Control," which was also awesome. I love Jarmusch's sense of texture, his use of color, his choice of music, and his pacing and cinematography. His can make even the most seemingly mundane acts portentous.

Belleville Nocturne

A tribute to some of the "wiseguys" in our neighborhood. Another Saturday night well spent, fellas. The squirrel is, of course, the ringleader.

Where Are They Now?

In this image, a Wolverine-haired Bobu Leene takes his espresso in a cafe somewhere along a cobblestone street in Europe. Fancy threads.

The Workaday World

This here's a sort of editorial cartoon I did about the noisome beasts that encompass us all these days. Why rabbits? Why not?

Radio Monstrosity

Here's a sketch I churned out for no particular reason promoting WFMU, still the best radio station on the dial. Sent it to Station Manager Ken, but no word (such is life). I originally came up with this grotesque guy well over a decade or more ago as part of a WFMU contest to design the station mascot. I won the contest, but never collected on the prizes, and the original plan to create plush versions of this brute never happened. Maybe Ken feels I am some ghostly apparition from beyond the grave coming to collect on past contest wins, who knows.

Note to self: WTF was I drawing with here, some frickin' faded marker? Cripes.

Me an' art.

As an artist I was almost comically obsessed with meaning, as if the churning cosmos gave a whit about the lines and scratches I made on paper. Yet it is admirable and wonderful to be temporarily transported by art, a bulwark against the terrible onslaught of time. Just let's not get the idear of transcendence. Lines fade, paper decays, electricity fails. My great folly was thinking I was somehow separate or above nature.

The plan.

Gonna post more about my ill-fated, self-published comic book, Bobu Leene, in this space. It was distributed by Diamond Comic Distributors, and didn't sell many copies, though it had a handful of readers. I'd be interested in hearing from anybody who remembers the book. It ran about 10 issues starting in January 1997, and the following year I published an unrelated one-off of comic strips called "Lone Killer."

I'll probably be posting some artwork here. I was hoping at some point to put together a hardbound version of all the issues, graphic-novel format and all, showing how they should have appeared (but didn't because I didn't have enough money to print them up right). But first I've got to find a large scanner to scan all the artwork in.