CowboyOrange

So, some few of you may have noticed that I’ve been hard to contact lately. See, on top of all the work for school (which has kept us very busy), we’ve been moving in to town.

We used to live in Hartford village, this tiny little village a little under two miles up the river from White River Junction. It’s a nice village, and our old place had a beautiful view of the White River; we even had really nice roommates! All-in-all a good place to be. However, because the bus only comes out to Hartford from 6am to 6pm Monday through Friday, we spent a lot of time walking. Grocery shopping had to be arranged around the bus schedule, and we gave up trying to arrange work around the buses and just walked a couple of miles every night in the freezing cold. Kind roommates or school colleagues would occasionally give us rides, but all in all, we did a lot of hiking.

So a friend who’d recently moved in with her boyfriend (in the best apartment in town) offered to let us move in to her old place. It took a couple of weeks to make all the arrangements, but we finally signed the paperwork Wednesday night. We were at school and work all through Thursday, so we couldn’t move then; and our replacement at the old place was expecting to move in Friday. So Friday morning while I was at work, Colleen packed; then that afternoon, while she worked, I borrowed (our former roommate) Andrew’s truck and started moving.

Gradually it dawned on me that I couldn’t move a lot of this stuff by myself, even with the truck. Then, just as I began to panic, saintly folk came to my rescue. Alexis volunteered his truck, and more importantly his back, to help me move books and furniture; then, though I loaded the last load by myself, Caitlin (who is a tiny little slip of a cartoonist) helped me haul it all in to the new apartment! Even better, Ross (our replacement in Hartford village) came back later that evening and helped me gather up a bunch of odds and ends I’d missed earlier. Kudos to all, and beer! As soon as the boxes are off the floor, we’re having you all over for beer and pizza and heaps of embarrassing gratitude.

Now, we live on a street with my last name in the village of White River Junction. Our apartment is a cozy little place, just the right size for Colleen and me. Colleen walks a block to work, I walk about a half-mile; it’s only two blocks to school, pizza and the hardware store, and only a block-and-a-half to the co-op! Hopefully, this will free up some time for us, so we can focus a bit more on the drawrin’.

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Speaking of drawing, Sammy Harkham, Anders Nilsen and Kevin Huizenga will be at CCS this week. D&Q sent us all beautiful screen-printed posters to mark the occasion. Because I don’t have easy access to my regular comic book shop (the 3072.23 mile-drive is a bit much for me), I’m looking forward to buying some of Kevin’s stuff directly from him. Hopefully, I’ll get to take him out for a beer at some point and pick his brain.

I’ve said something in a public forum that could be rather embarrassing. Our local daily paper, The Valley News, ran a story about the recent trouble surrounding cartoons of Muhammed published last year in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. The reporter got a lot of context for his article (which I really appreciate) and spoke to a lot of people at the school, including me.

My point was that Jyllands-Posten was being unnecessarily abrasive, probably because of a political agenda. (To me, this isn’t a press feedom question; their right, or anyone else’s, to publish such material is to me fundamental and beyond question.) To illustrate my thinking I used a metaphor, as I tend to do. I tried to think of how to explain, how to find an image that was comparably offensive.

And then I said, “You wouldn’t see an American newspaper satirizing the culture war by showing Jesus sodomizing a cowboy.”

And they ran that (with a minor misquote). They put the words “Jesus sodomizing a cowboy” in the newspaper, and since I said it, they put my name next to it.

As proud as I am of that, I worry a little that I may have to go into hiding. Or convince the Valley News to run that cartoon. One of the two.

Colleen and I are participating in a gallery show at Kimball Union Academy’s Taylor Gallery. For those who don’t know, KUA is a college prep boarding school in New Hampshire with only 300 or so students – a world and a half away from my own high school experience. The gallery is a fairly intimate space (about 30′ on a side) and when we arrived for the opening last night it was packed – one of the advantages, I suppose, of requiring attendance from the art classes. But there were also faculty, parents and community members there; everyone we met was enthusiastic and engaged with the material. For my first gallery show outside of Evergreen, this was exactly the sort of crowd I hoped to see.

One of the stranger elements of the evening for me was answering student questions about my work. Even at Evergreen, I never before had anyone (student or faculty) examine my stories as serious literary undertakings; these students had questions about the symbolism in the stories and and the relationship dynamics among the characters. As you can imagine, I loved every minute of this.

It was also gratifying just to see my work in a gallery context. My originals for Ersatz were behind glass and spaced out along (almost) an entire wall. Colleen’s books were on a pedestal, and people had to put on gloves in order to touch them. People would walk by, lean in and study an image, or stand back and just stare thoughtfully. To think, a couple of weeks ago, these things were at the bottom of a drawer, getting scuffed up by last quarter’s homework. The whole thing has made me re-evaluate the value of my own work.

Since you couldn’t be there, we brought back a few pictures; and, as always, you can read most of the work here at CowboyOrange.

Some deadlines are just easier to meet than others. Especially the ones that involve digitally downgrading artwork I already had. Here they are; comments to follow.

Click on the image below for the whole comic.

The other day, I got a box full of wonderful goodies from my best friend, who clearly put a lot of thought and a lot of love into it. How do I thank him? I draw a cartoon of his young daughter playing bondage games. Aren’t I thoughtful?

I’m not sure how well I like these, but I’m pretty sure I hate the one with the New Yorker. On the other hand, I was pretty happy with the two girls, and with the wrestling strip (despite production difficulties on that one). Lemme know whatcha think.

So maybe I said or wrote a few things that indicated you might see comics up here soon. I should apologize. I never meant to give that impression, even when I said, “Check the blog in a few days - I’ll have new comics up then!”

The deadline pressure has been intense, to the point where I began my day with an anxiety attack. Three major assignments due this week - a short prose story (which I didn’t do a very good job on - I wrote a bland profile of a nonexistent cartoonist) and a series of renderings and light studies and a journalism strip for a local newspaper (mine was about a local professional wrestling exhibition). The story took three days to write, which (after my work schedule) left me with just over a day to draw the strip. Amazingly, I did it in two days, which is really fast for me, but not fast enough to meet the deadline. I ditched class yesterday and this morning to make the deadline for my afternoon class; this wasn’t quite enough, so I was late to my afternoon class, just missing the deadline.

James (the instructor) accepted the piece, but I don’t know if it’ll be critiqued with the others for the newspaper. It saddens me that I may miss out on this, and it kinda pisses me off that all this came down the pipe at once, and that I had no ability to decline to participate. (I couldn’t say, “Sorry, I’m booked solid right now, let me give you the number of another cartoonist who might be able to help you out.”)

I’m also kind of upset that I should have just phoned this one in - in fact, several people did - but I threw myself into it, and ended up falling flat on my face. Sadly, this is the way it works: bullshit that makes the deadline gets printed; if you miss deadline, the quality of the piece doesn’t matter.

So, now that I’ve finished that piece, and in the absence of any sort of doom on the horizon, I’m giving myself a new deadline: I will post my cartoons from the past two weeks on the website by the end of Saturday, February 11. I promise.

If I miss this deadline, then… I dunno. You can yell at me or something.