Sinatra experiment, Other Cartoonists, Tumblr

I THINK IT'S GONNA BE OK

My religion. An experiment. Original file is 12x12", size of an LP cover.
(For the record, I checked, this is the font used on the cover of the Queen News of the World LP.)

I sang "New York, New York" yesterday as I walked down Rush on Black Friday, on break from my job. Shoppers swarmed Gold Coast. I looked up, and what did I see?

Image from Wikipedia

THINGS BY OTHER CARTOONISTS
CHRIS WARE
As I reported recently, I attended the Ware/Barry/Feiffer/Groening lecture here in Chicago at the UIC Forum recently. After Jules Feiffer's solo talk beforehand, I got a chance to meet Chris Ware and finally give him a copy of my Chris Ware: Paper Musician zine. PM talks about Ware's work in an essay-format comic. He was very gracious. Then two days ago, I receive a letter from someone in Oak Park. "I don't know anyone in Oak Park," I say...
I open up to find a letter and this. Chris's lettering from The New Yorker. I was surprised to see how much white-out he uses, and how thick of a paper stock.
Thanks Chris!

FROM THE IVAN BRUNETTI ARCHIVES


When Brad and I saw Ivan at his signing at Third Coast Comics by Loyola, he was handing out these little packets of his randomly chopped-up sketchbook pages. A neat way to purge.
Thanks Ivan!

I first met Ivan years ago at the Off-Kilter Comics show he curated, which included work by
ZAK SALLY
(how's that for a transition?)

Congrats to Zak and Anne on Isaac's new little sister, Flossie Sally.
That Flossie happens to have a particularly awesome birthday, shared by... someone.
I'm glad cartoonists are spawning and breeding what will hopefully become a new super-race.

Zak has a new book of uncollected stuff out. It's called Like a Dog. It's good. Real good.
I wanted to use a picture instead of a grabbed scan because as I talk about below, there's a lot of care taken with the production. Then I did this and I'm not sorry.

Zak explores his journey with cartooning in the varied, often experimental material chosen, the order it's presented in, and in the copious notes at the end.

The book presents the material with a reverence to the physical objects they were before being scanned, dropped into Photoshop and then InDesign, plunked down on a large-format printer in Asia, shipped to Seattle, then ending up in a bookstore and your hand.
The first two issues of Recidivist include front and back covers, endpapers, indicia, even a little diagram explaining how the flaps would look in the original zine format. This sounds like overkill to describe it, but like Einstein said, "God is in the details, especially with book production."

Rob Clough posted a well-written review on his High-Low blog. Rob will soon be joining The Comics Journal's new blogging team, which can only mean good things for people that like comics criticism (AKA nerds).


TUMBLR
DO YOU HAVE A TUMBLR YET? If so, leave a comment and tell me what it is. If not, you should probably start one.
Why do I like it so much? Like Twitter (which I don't like as much) it provides restrictions. There's a limited amount of things you can do with it, and it provides a perfect vehicle to collect cool stuff on the internet. It's the easiest way I've found to keep and share a reference file.


AND WHY NOT
Another favorite birthday present. Thanks, mom.