Source material, Ft. Lauderdale, Halloween, new job

SOURCE MATERIAL
The Christmas card I made for my uncle Joe Choy is a collaboration for sure. Even funnier than the final product is Joe's prompt for me to draw from, reproduced below:

My true pitiful bathetic holiday card has the following elements:

Me in a "wife beater" or more perversely "italian dinner jacket t-shirt (filthy with stains of course) in my equally filthy and torn boxer shorts, sitting on some box or broken chair eating "house brand" or generic tuna fish (not albacore) out of a can. The plastic fast food type fork should be have missing assymetical tynes. I'm watching a portable black and white TV (and this is where technology and time f's things up) with aluminum foil 'rabbit ears' fashioned into a jury-rigged antenna. The TV should itself be tilted a la a scene of one of Batman's arch nemesis criminal's hideout. The TV should have "It's a Wonderful Life" scene on it I. My best guess would
be with Jimmy Stewart at the end or Donna Reed and Stewart. The TV should be propped on a cluttered giant Con Ed spool. The room should be an imagined disaster cartoon-ish ghetto.

The caption should read simply "Happy Holidays"
I'm trying to think of something funnier.

After I sent him a sketch with letters, he said:

I like the 'retro' font for happy holidays - it should have a syrupy feel contrasting the recessionary horror of an exaggerated life

And then, in an instruction to zoom out, make him smaller to see more of the hovel, as you see in the final product, he said:

im thinking of a cornucopia of recessionary items -

I think he should write more.


I scanned a whole bunch of sketchbook drawings from the past months when I finally got to a scanner the other day. I'll try to post them in related batches.

FT. LAUDERDALE

Flag-draped coffin (he was a Purple Heart-awarded WWII vet) - notes for Nils on back of page

Cousins on the rocks on the beach overlooking the pier.

More Nils notes, palm trees, bignose guy a la early Harkham, Trondheim's bird-self

Last month my grandfather died (Moorman, my dad's dad, "Grandpa Mo" as we called him in my house), and my cousin Stephanie and I flew from Chicago to Ft. Lauderdale to attend the funeral and be with our family. He lived in Coral Gables, a suburb of Miami, most of the time - and that's where my dad and his brothers and sisters grew up - but he lived part-time in Ft. Lauderdale, as well as North Carolina. Coincidentally, my main stable of friends here in Chicago are mostly from Ft. Lauderdale, and I spent the evening with them the night before I flew out, as I had planned to before I got the call from my mom the day before.

It was of course very hard, but it was comforting to remember that it is something that everyone in the world goes through. I was a pallbearer at the ceremony. My dad delivered a beautiful eulogy at the funeral (along with a crowd-pleaser eulogy from my cousin David - one of the many pleasant tall men I know), which I will never forget. You can read it here at the blog made in his honor.

I realized that my grandpa, Robert Moorman, looked like Cool Hand Luke when he was younger... and then looked like Luke's friend Dragline when he got older!! Insane!!!

My grandpa and I didn't always agree about everything, but he was a real good man and I miss him.
And he was real funny. When I went to my cousin David's wedding in Nashville, it was the first time I'd seen my dad's side of the family in some years. Upon seeing me, my grandpa threw up his arms and said, "Kill the fatted calf! The prodigal son has returned!"


TUMBLR
I still love tumblr!! I love it like crazy!! It's so much fun! I post to mine every day. Check it out, make one of your own, then tell me where I can find it.


HALLOWEEN

My first Halloween in Chicago was a lot of fun, though I miss Abby's come-in-character parties. I was a robot (the name on the plate comes with a nod to Tom K.) with buttons on a control panel that you could push to make me do things. My friend & roommate Kirsten went as an old Jewish lady. Our bus rides there and back are sure to be the most entertaining we'll ever take.


NEW JOB
I have, thanks to an interview today and starting tomorrow morning, a new part-time job as a Gallery Assistant at Atlas Galleries in downtown Chicago. This of course means I'll have to learn how to dress myself. It should be worth it.
They sell original - I mean original, signed, for real - prints by Rembrandt (!!), Chagall, Mirò (!!!), Degas (!!), and others.
Thanks to Kelly, Julia, and Will for the job advice. It's been a fun two months of unemployment, but it'll be good to have a routine again. Best of all, I can finally draw without guilt! I can finally let myself draw comics again! (I haven't been doing so because I knew that if I started on a big drawing project, I would get wrapped up in it and not look for a job.)

Taking the Brown line (the "Chicago Epcot ride" as I call it) home, listening to Robin McConnell interview Gary Panter on Inkstuds on my iPod, watching the evening sun set over the trees losing leaves, seeing little blips of people's windows as I pass by... It was a real good moment. Good to breathe a sigh of relief. My first real job after college. I thought it was gonna take a lot longer.

And now that I have a job, it's time to go to sleep at a reasonable hour for the first time in a long time.