MORE PAPERCUTZ SLICES COVER ART I CAN’T TALK ABOUT

WARNING: The following information should be of little value to you.

Well, he did it again. After informing me by telephone that Papercutz needed yet ANOTHER cover for a new book they’re publishing next year, the Old Editor, Jim Salicrup, called and described the premise for the next cover in the series we laughingly refer to as “Papercutz Slices”. You might not think that’s so strange, but what if you hadn’t even started on the INTERIOR PAGES which accompany the LAST cover you did for a book that’s now scheduled to be released even BEFORE the one I just did the cover for. Confused? You should be. As anyone who knows me will attest, I am one of the most disorganized people on the planet. Whenever I sit down to work (and sometimes I have to work standing UP, because I can’t find my chair) I almost always have to look around for a pencil and a piece of paper. You’d think after all these years I’d keep some pencils nearby. Actually, there are plenty of pencils nearby, unfortunately most of them are totally useless and have names like CRAYOLA /MAGENTA on them. I think maybe they must be leftovers from when my children were young. What they’re doing in a WITCH CITY SALEM MASS Coffee cup is beyond me. And where did that cup come from? Anyway, not just any pencil will do. It has to be an HB pencil with a decent point on it. I’m superstitious and like to use the same kind of pencil all the time. This makes life more difficult, but keeps me from feeling anxiety. I don’t like to feel too anxious. A little anxiety is okay, though, and keeps me on my toes.
Oh, um….so….I really wanted to tell the editor that I’d prefer to do the cover AFTER I drew the interior pages because that way, I’d be familiar with the character and could, theoretically, anyway, do a better job. Makes sense, right? But that’s not the way they do things in publishing. And it’s not really professional for the artist to tell the editor how to proceed. The covers have to be done FIRST so that they can appear in a catalog many months in advance so that the buyers at the stores can look at them and decide which books and how many copies they want to order. So I kept my mouth shut, which as anyone who knows me would tell you is hard for me to do. But, to be asked to draw a cover for an issue that comes out so far in advance BEFORE the interior pages have been drawn for the PREVIOUS issue is too confusing for a guy like me. I’m so confused right now that I don’t even know if that makes any sense. Also, to further complicate matters, the content box  here is only one inch tall and I can’t go back and see what I’ve written to see if there are any mistakes in it or whether it makes any sense. So if there are mistakes, I apologize. Perhaps someone will leave a comment about them. I know that you were probably expecting me to say something about the cover I drew today which I’m not allowed to tell you about. I will just say one thing about it. It has a COW on it. It’s the first time I have ever had to draw a cow on the cover of a book, so I hope it looks like a cow. And not a big dog or water buffalo. There is something inherently funny about cows. So I hope when you see the cover I drew with a cow on it it will make you laugh. If it does, please buy the book. If it doesn’t, please buy the book anyway. That’s all I can tell you now.