STUDIO IN A CAR

If you happened to be in Maplewood, New Jersey on the afternoon of October 3, 2010 and noticed a guy sitting in a blue Volkswagon bug, drawing away with pen and paper, that was me. I’ve discovered the perfect place to storyboard pages of graphic novels– behind the wheel of my car! Not while driving, though. I managed to get pages 36-47 done in about three hours. Probably would have taken me twice as long at home. Only once did the telephone ring and it wasn’t even mine, but my son’s. It was in his backpack on the back seat. I have no idea how to use his phone, so I let it ring and buzz. Best of all there is no chance of compulsively checking e-mail or falling prey to other distractions. You can park pretty much anywhere you want and it’s great having the sunlight streaming in over my left shoulder. It was the perfect day. Not sure what I’ll do in the winter time, however. Now I wonder if I can draw the story there, too….

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.

How Not To Draw a Graphic Novel

When Papercutz Editor Jim Salicrup told me earlier this year that he’d chosen me to illustrate Stefan Petrucha’s hilarious new 50-page full-color graphic-novel parody of the Harry Potter series I nearly flipped my wig! I told Salicrup: “No artist could ever do justice to THAT—especially ME!” I immediately hung up the phone and locked myself into the bathroom and wouldn’t come out! I told my wife, “If the phone rings again, don’t answer it!” I made her slip plastic-wrapped slices of American cheese under the door. In the afternoons I asked for and received Premium Saltines– slipped under the door one at a time– on an old postcard with a picture of a moose on it. Since I was in the bathroom, I had plenty of water. All went well for several months. There are hundreds of old comic books on a shelf in the bathroom and I idled away weeks at a time in heavenly bliss—reading old copies of Mad and eating cheese and crackers with not a care in the world. The phone rang a few times, but whoever it was gave up after a dozen or so rings. Life was GOOD!! Then one day, at about 2 o’clock in the afternoon, there was a heavy knock at the door. More of a pounding, actually. I had been expecting a near mint copy of PLOP#3 (with the Wally Wood Cover) which I bought on E-Bay for $76.84 plus $3.95 shipping. So I crept out of the bathroom and tip-toed barefoot down the long, dark hallway to the door (trying not to step on any tarantulas or disturb the bats hanging from the rafters). I cracked open the door just enough to reach my hand out and sign for the package. The FedEx girl eyed me suspiciously. Once safely locked back inside the bathroom, I used an old piece of broken window glass to cut open the package. DANG-IT!! It was NOT the copy of PLOP that I had been expecting– but a copy of a script called “Harry Potty and The Deathly Boring!” I had been out-smarted by Jim Salicrup yet again!! Now what could I do…? (what would YOU do?) –but illustrate the darn thing and get this guy off my back so I could go back to doing what I like best, which is hiding in the bathroom and reading old comic books.