Man, majorly victorious find at Half-Price Books. Everyone wants to find an insanely trashy pulp novel with a sexy, violent cover in the clearance bin for twenty five cents. Bonus!

Found this at the Value Village about a year ago, but just got around to scanning it. Classic pre-BusyTown artwork from the inimitable Richard Scarry, in a book of obnoxiously anal retentive etiquette reminders evidently regurgitated from rote memory by put-upon grade schoolers. Poor kids, the rule about when to remove your hat was probably sufficient to spark nervous breakdowns in half a generation.

The set, containing the whole book, is here.

From the plethora of Star Wars-spunoff novels and story collections, what sticks out to you as the most iconic covers?

I ask out of curiosity, and because I have two choices. When I was just a little shaver, I was pretty obessed with pulp novels, and I gladly welcomed into the same circle as Tarzan and John Carter the trilogy of Han Solo ... er, solo adventures (well, he had Chewie with 'im, anyway), They were awful, mind you, but I loved 'em, and despite (or perhaps 'because of') drawing its central pose from a pretty famous movie still, I always thought Han Solo and the Lost Legacy was really striking.

Then there is, of course, Splinter of the Mind's Eye, which does have a really strong cover image, and earns some gravitas as being the first original fiction written for the Star Wars universe.

Outside'a those two, though, none come to mind - I only ever read Splinter and the Han Solo books. So, above-referenced nerds, what cover art from the multitude of Star Wars stands out as iconic to you? There's gotta be some, there's like a bazillion of those books.

I took a week off from my artwork leading up to Halloween, so I'd have time to work on my costume, and I'm just now cleaning up and scanning some of the pieces I've drawn since then. What's up above is a Where the Wild Things Are illo for katie_can_draw, one of the commissions from the Multiple Sclerosis benefit a month back and of which I'm now halfway through. Hope to have everyone's in the mail by the end of November.

So, speaking of Where the Wild Things are, Kate and I finally got around to seeing it last week. That it's a weird film pretty much goes without saying, and that it's arguably not a film for kids almost goes equally as much without saying - mind you, it's not a movie I'd avoid taking a kid to see (although the children in the audience when we saw it were thoroughly bored about halfway through), it's just very much a recreation of a child's perspective and logic clearly written by and for adults.

The most insightful review I've seen of the film so far comes from the infamously eponymous Vern, who notes rather adroitly that it's a miracle that this film could be made the way it was made, rather than some 3-D musical abortion where Max brings the Wild Things back to the real world, and they have wacky misadventures at the mall to the tune of a Smashmouth song and there's a looney-tunes chase scene and a stirring farewell at the end, with some tacked-on teaser about Where the Wild Things Are 2: Wild Things In Space. I mean, honestly, that is legitimately amazing, and you do have to admire it in that respect, if nothing else.

I will say this: I went into the movie hoping to love it, and I definitely did love it, but it was certainly nothing I expected. I'm disinclined to extrapolate at all on the film, because I think that going in with any preconception as to the qualities of the thing will diminish what it a truly immersive film.

However, I also say with certainty that the last ninety seconds comprise possibly the single most touching moment I've ever seen committed to film...

Hey, cartoonists! Holmes, of the truly excellent vintage comic strip site Barnacle Press, needs your help! I know that all of us who are familiar with BP love the site (and are all big fans of Everett True!) and I have a feeling that those of you seeing it for the first time are going to fall in love. BP does a great service for fans of classic cartooning, and now they could use some help with a very fun project (which is both on a very tight deadline and nonexistent budget).

Here's the deal: Barnacle Press has a really neat project coming out, for which they need 45 spot illustrations. And they can't pay. And they need it by this upcoming Monday. But trust me when I say that it is a very awesome project - I had to turn it down just because of the amount of work currently on my plate, although I may try to find the time to do one or two myself, depending on the response.

The drawings do not need to be complex, just small spots based on information which Holmes will provide you. If you're interested, drop him a line at holmes -at- barnaclepress.com, and spread the word!

I had my first experience with absinthe a couple of weekends ago, and it turns out that I love the stuff. I've always been a closet black licorice fan - sharing a bag of Jelly Bellies has inevitably been a shaming experience, for my part - so I aboslutely love the flavor. (I've also figured out that the Black Lagoon cocktail I wrote up a few weeks back, which I also dearly loved and which I snapped up from a Martha Stewart magazine is, itself, an attempt to replicate the color and flavor of absinthe. So go figure)

Heavens forfend that I fail to do something with the requisite amount of signature class, and bereft of an absinthe glass, I made do (made due? Which is it, anyway) with this recent thrift store treasure. I find the Cooper Black typeface just screams "absinthe" to me ...

In other news, I experienced a recent cheese bounty, and I furthermore submit that no one has ever used all three of those words together at the same time ever before. "Recent cheese bounty". I dare you to find documented evidence to the contrary.

Hey, Happy Almost Halloween everybody! I carved another pumpkin earlier this week, on accounta my turnip ghost jack-o-lantern basically burned up into a charred nodule, and besides I wanted to carve them horrible teeth again, because it's fun. There's a full-light pic of this guy here, and also you can see that I carved a Pac-O-Lantern and friends ...

Speaking of Halloween, I have a new article up at Heavy.com: Halloween Costumes For People Who Aren't Really Trying. It's handy advice for you folks who don't give a ding-dong for costumes, you unlovable wretches. Also important is that I'm slowly learning what cusswords I can use in my articles and still make them funny, which I have to do because I perform blue.

And lastly, I actually kind of forgot these were up, but Brodie reminded me of BOO!Halloween Stories being online - the 2006 collaborative project is here, and then there's also Manning Krull's and my inaugural BOO! project. Lots of great stories out there - may I specifically recommend Seven Little Devils, the art on which I think Manning knocked out of the park?

Okay, phew, that's enough of this from me - go enjoy your Halloweens, folks!

Did you know that the tradition of carving Jack O'Lanterns began with turnips rather than pumpkins? I guess so! Anyway, I gave it a try, and carved this little weirdo.

Wanna know why they don't do that anymore? (A) It's hard and (B) turnips smell kind of awful after they've been sitting around a while.

Carved this over at thespus' place on Sunday, where much fun and good food was had, and also ... Adam? We stole your breadknife. If you ever want to see it alive again, put forty cents in a brown paper bag and leave it under the third stall in the men's room at Gasworks Park.

Here it is ON FIRE (with an LED light. Later on I'd put a proper tealight in there, and have the top burned up into a rotten black mess).

So, on Saturday, Justin Ison and his girl Erin, and Mark DeJoy and his girl Missy came by our place for a cloudy day of Eastside Yuppie famland fun, which primarily consisted of petting pygmy goats and alpacas, a little bit of thrift store shopping and then a huge holy buttload of Mediterranean food and pumpkin banana bread. I also prepared some cocktails, two of which I'm slightly embarrassed to admit out loud that I got from the latest Martha Stewart Halloween issue, one I'm definitely embarrassed to admit I got from Emeril Lagasse, and a hot toddy of my own invention which I thought would be a nice thing to drink if the day got cold, but it didn't really, so I have quite a bit of bourbon whiskey in the house (or, since the party was four days ago, nowhere near as much bourbon whiskey left in the house as I had four days ago).

( Food! )
( Cocktails! )

And there's the whole shmear! Thanks to Justin and Mark and their Livejournal-less ladies for coming over, it was a blast!

Hey there, I want to spread the word on something drewgilbert is doing:

The short story is this: With a child on the way, I have decided that before being a father takes up all of my free time, I need to try running in this one insane race I have wanted to do for years now. To keep me on this path, I am doing it for the non profit arts program Free Arts NYC.
To convince you to give me money for this charity, I am offering to do a portrait of you or a loved one for donations of $35, or two portraits for $50. If you would like to get some slick, professional art for yourself (or as a gift to someone you love) on the cheap, now is a great time for you and me to make that happen :)


Click here to see samples of what I have done, and to read more about the whole shebang

The Tough Guy race is a ridiculous eight-country-mile obstacle course(obstacle course is honestly not at all coming close to describing the race, but it's the only phrase that really fits. Go here to see what the people who do it go through). I am in absolutely no shape whatsoever to run in this race yet. I hope people will be entertained by my training progress videos, the first one of which I posted on my youtube page earlier this week. Another one should go up tomorrow.


Free Arts NYC helps create arts programs for underprivileged kids and underfunded school systems in the New York City area. I would have preferred to find a nationwide program that does the same thing, but could not find one that was as comprehensive as this, and I hope by showing some love to this one, it might help other places realize the value in doing these types of works. My life has been pretty great, in part because I was able to discover art in grade school, so I chose this charity to give other kids who like me, were not great at academics, to be able to find something that can enrich their lives.


I have never been the best at being charitable, so if you are unable or unwilling to donate for this, I certainly won't hold it against you at all, but if you would like to see me go through hell trying to reach my goal here (I really do promise to make this process as hellish on me as possible and as entertaining as possible for you who might be watching me do it), then it would be AMAZING if you could pass this email, or my website and goal around to friends and family. I look at raising this money much like a high school dance - if you only ask a few girls, you might not get anyone to dance with you. It's a numbers game, so I need to get as many people seeing this message as I can, so like I said, if you can't donate enough for a portrait, it would still be great to get a dollar or two. Again though, I won't hold a lack of donation against anyone, but if you could please pass it around to
someone who might be able to do so, I would really appreciate it.


I am documenting the whole journey, training, portraits, etc collectively on my website,
drewgilbert.com

With training videos on Youtube
youtube.com/user/drewgilbert


You can also follow me on twitter:
twitter.com/drewgilbert


View my portrait drawings on Ustream:
thedrewreview

and see final images on Flickr:
flickr.com/photos/drewgilbert/


If you made it this far in the email, thank you! I knew there was a reason I liked you enough to bother you this badly :)

Thanks again!
Drew
drewgilbert.com

Ah, get your bricks ready, friends: My wife has posted photos and a description of my anniversary gift.

Remember how I said you'd shit a brick when you found out what my wife got me for our ten-year anniversary? Well, I forgot to take a picture of it this weekend, so you'll either have to hold onto your unshat brick for another day or encourage her to post her photos. I'd hate to make her wait to crow about it, because it is an amazing thing she did, just mind-blowing.

I have a good excuse for forgetting to get the photo; we hosted a small get-together on Saturday with snowman, famousmark and their ladies which therefore required a truckload of cooking, baking, cleaning and prepwork on Friday night, and resulted in some after-party stunned sitting-around-and-falling-asleep-in-our-seats action afterwards. I intend to post at length about the dishes I cooked, the fun we had, and particularly the cocktails there mixed, but, um ... I forgot to write up those descriptions, too. Forgetting is the new remembering, as far as I'm concerned.

So, while I have nothing new of my own, please to check out:

• One of the things I miss most about Tucson is the All Souls Procession parade conducted downtown courtesy of Many Mouths One Stomach, and which features no end of awesome costumes, floats, fire-dancing, stilt-walking, and other general mania. I have photos of 2008's event on my Flickr, and more recently I was asked to contribute one of those photos to an article about Tucson's Seven Pipers Society which ran on the MMOS website.


• All around awesome dude Manning Krull has launched a new website cataloguing his experiences with all the cool things in Paris. I believe it's called "Awesome Stuff In France's Capitol City." This is totally fascinating stuff, and I'm pretty happy that I got to see at least half the stuff in the header image the last time I visited, including the now-closed Catacombes. Manning is pretty much the only guy I trust for tourism advice, so now you should go trust him too.


• While I'm pimping the awesome stuff my friends are doing, the extremely talented Jason L.Blair's creepy-as-hell RPG Little Fears Nightmare Edition launched recently, and is available for sale as a book or download. It's an inspired concept for a game, and Jason's been getting all sorts of acclaim for it, so check it out.

Also, comics I've been reading that you haven't but you ought to be: Let's Be Friends Again (Great Jemma Salume guest strip here) and the sublime Ellie Connelly.

There, that ought to distract you until I get caught up with my livejournalling ...

I just got back from my anniversary dinner. Your assignment this weekend is to crossbreed a plumber and a mason, because on Monday when I show you photos of what my girl got me for our anniversary, you're going to shit a brick.

Today is my wife's and my tenth wedding anniversary. This is us:



Here's us again.


Anyway, I really didn't know that about the dogs and also those are pretty great socks, and also I originally intended to do that top strip as part of my "twelve weekly webcomics intended to coincide with DC Comics' Wednesday Comics Project" which turned out to be "One weeekly webcomic and then I got a job", so, you know, lucky for me that the marriage has turned out so well and I don't have to get by on my reputation as a cartoonist.

You know what my perfect day is? Sleeping in with my wife 'til one in the afternoon on a blustery Sunday. And it has been for ten years...

Getting through more of the MS Benefit commissions, this one goes to my pal in France, Dan Christensen, featuring tiny deformed versions of many of the characters from his series, Paranormal. He asked for Rat-Face (see if you can pick him out of the line-up), I figured I might as well do the whole lot of 'em.

(Sorry for the crummy scan, the paper's bigger'n the scanner, so the edges were bent upwards and light got in ...)

These're based on a drawing I did of Paranormal's protagonist, The Ogre (well, "L'Ogre", I reckons), which I can't recall if I posted here before or not.

Okay, more to do! Thanks again for contributing, Dan and everyone else!

We were clearing out some leftovers from the fridge, and they ended up in this casserole that ... well, I'm positive that there's a specific name for the thing I made, but I don't know what it is.

This is a baked egg-and-cheese dish with sauteed black olives, yellow onion, (purple horseshoes) and squash blossoms, with crumbled tortilla chips on top. I whipped our last seven eggs with about five ounces of ricotta cheese until they'd taken on a custardy texture, then folded in the ingredients and baked at 350 for about thirty minutes.

So, what exactly did I make? It was freaking delicious, whatever it was, but I assume that a baked egg-and-cheese dish is a "thing" and not that I'm the first person to ever conceive of such a dish. If I am, though, I insist on calling it "The Letterman", in honor of beleagured late-night tv host David Letterman, who's been having a rough time of it lately and seems like he could use a kindness.

I had some things I really wanted to write about today, but first thing this morning I see Obama receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, the increasingly insane developments of the American Police Force Corporation con story, Marge Simpson following up last year's weirdo sex kitten pinups in Maxim with an appearance in Playboy and that today is apparently Pro-Life Cupcake Day and I thought, you know what, you win today, the rest of the world. I can't top what the rest of the world's bringing to the table this morning (i.e. pro-life cupcakes), so well done, you. Touche.