"Denali Zebra"

In all seriousness this came from the same place as my idea to someday stalk the tundra in Denali National Park wearing a panda suit, which would go over particularly well with one sizable demographic of Alaskan visitors.

In all seriousness though, that plan has a fatal flaw in that plan, since the most potentially dangerous and unpredictable instances of violent behavior are a hair-trigger away when it comes to Homo sapiens. In other words, I would make for a pretty sad specimen on a trophy wall.

After recently giving a series of lectures on the history of cartooning I am once again reminded of how grateful I am to have the opportunity to be in print at such a large scale when compared to the fate of most contemporary features with "syndication shrink."

"Rapunzel's Hare" (aka AK Fairy Tails)

What a let down... as opposed to a throwdown. Yeah okay so this ain't the first time I discovered an erroneous interpretation of what I thought was a common turn of phrase after looking it up online so as to have a handy hyperlink about what it is that I really mean. Except that it turns out I was wrong all along - not that that's necessarily a fatal flaw.

 
If you look at the last image posted here of the initial doodles you can see I even mixed up some Shakespearean references, which I think speaks more to the malleable power of evolving tropes that I remembered so wrongly about these half-buried archetypes of cultural subconsciousness (a fairly recent example would be the "Ghee" piece from a couple years back). Which is a another way to say I hope someone out there still gets it. Mostly it's all about the moat anyways.

I know just enough to seem clever but "jack of all trades, master of none" is my fate. Still, as these previous attempts at climbing the same creative wall illustrate, eventually the initial idea will give rise to a fruiting body from the mental compost heap of concepts, if left long enough to ferment.

Also on a closing note, this particular panel for some mysterious reason was one of the most popular in many years. Now that assessment is purely anecdotal, being based solely on only the opinion of two different folk's comments to me directly in person (one being no less an editor). Yes, that is a very small sampling of viewers, but it emphasizes the comparative, relatively outsized impact feedback has when a panel is published and people remember it afterwards whenever crossing paths in person ("Hey that was a good one").  In other words - thanks, it means a lot!

Sun Star: Cartoon & Comics Arts Course Article (+ Bonus Editorial Feedback)

A super article, penned by Nóra McIntyre, appeared in the last issue of the semester of the UAF student newspaper about the inaugural offering in the fall of 2023 of the Cartoon & Comics Arts course. It's not on-line at the moment, but if and when it does, it's rumored to perhaps contain many, many more of the sample works provided to the paper when they first wrote the piece, since the space constraints of the print media version logistically limited how many could appear in meatspace. My own humble idea to completely convert one entire issue to just comics (similar to what we did when I was the comics editor of The District at SCAD) still stands.

But in all seriousness, hopefully a couple more cartoonists will start submitting their work on a regular basis as a result of the course now occurring on a regular basis. As it was a handful of folks got to see print: strips by Renee Kurka, Karl Stevens, Jenae Matson, and an example of the collaborative page exercise.

Speaking of the student newspaper, while Googling my name and “Sun Star” to see if the online version had run, there was a post on Reddit about a recent editorial panel of mine that the paper had run. Of interest was a comment that highlit the death of irony. Specifically it's always a going concern, a fear that folks who are the target of satire are sometimes so dense that they might miss the point of a cartoon, and instead interpret the sentiment of it being in support of their position, ie too fucking stupid to get that it's at their expense. To be sure, one could charge the artist with being to witty for their own good, which I'm guilty of being convinced of my own greatness so it can't possibly be my fault someone doesn't get it.

"Room & Board"

I'd say I average maaaybe about one of these every three to five years, one that's "so bad it's good," where I wonder why and how the hell I ever managed to miss this. Guess that's what keeps me cartooning. Far be it from me to ever overextend my welcome, there are days as of late I still sit back and wonder where I'm going because I feel like I'm just now hitting my creative stride, and every time I try something new and different it starts the creative juices flowing again. Still playing with a new palette.

Also, I hate pastels. Dry ones, like chalk pastels are almost deal-able, but never oil pastels. Here's a classroom demo I did using the original line art for this panel, the last one being done back in 2017 - nice to know I haven't improved in seven years. Actually, in all seriousness, this is a perfect example of how you won't ever improve without constant practice. Can't think of any more crucial lesson. I think it's important for students - especially the advanced ones/art majors - to see firsthand the limitations of anyone's skill set, as in, just because I won't wind up with a Work of Fine Art doesn't detract from the playful impulse to experiment and "...let's see what happens" (one of my favorite lines to say during classroom exercise). Far from feeding the imposter syndrome negative feedback loop, it's a reminder that making art, and teaching too, is an awful lot like attending a 12-step meeting: There's always goona be someone doing better than you, and there'll always be somebody "worse." Work through any inner doubts by ignoring them, because nobody's gonna ever do you.

"AK Body Positivity" + Bonus Demos

This cartoon panel was done as an inking demo for the cartooning class, while we were working on out second critique pieces: four gags + two editorial panels. I think I penciled & inked it in under twenty minutes, which must be a new land-speed record, though coloring (both digital + watercolor versions) took another hour. I admit that I pushed myself to knock out the print version within a day of doing the demo. After all, when leading by example one has gotta continually prove that you can walk the talk when it comes to meeting deadlines. "It's called artWORK!"

And yep, this is yet another example of the reoccurring walrus motif that will take some time to get out of my system after Demo Day 2024. I was also advised I might want to give the portly pinniped a distinctive goatee.
In other words, I am the walrus.

Bonus Meta: While sketching this demo (posted below) during a drawing class field trip up at the the UAF Museum of the North, some tourists were up in the "Thinking Made Visible" exhibition where a looped video of me drawing the same bear froze, and when they went to complain at the desk, they just pointed them down the hall to where I was doing it live. Same bear. Same hat. Just to mess with the guy I froze in the middle of my demo.

But seriously, right after that amusing incident, the nicest thing to happen to me all year occurred after meeting one last time with the students at the end of the day's session for a quick sketchbook review. I was still sitting at my table in the lobby working up these sketches, an elderly woman from New Orleans came over and told me that she couldn't help but notice how kind and attentive I am to my students. Since I routinely worry about how I could have done so much better when first starting out teaching, which in turn lingers into the occasional imposter syndrome, that was so incredibly validating and humbling to hear from a total stranger. It made my day. Whole semester in fact.

Another sweet spot about this particular panel is how it appeared in the middle of a series of other pieces, making for a memorable day of making art. It started out in the morning Beginning class with 20-minute  demo drawing a "subtractive selfie" in-class exercise with charcoal from an enlarged portrait (current variation of this assignment). Since I was rather sick of drawing myself, I instead used an absent student's image as an example. Then in-between classes I did the Nuggets panel (20-minutes pencil > ink + another hour for coloring). Then for the afternoon field-trip with a class of Intermediate + Advanced folks, I cranked out a few demo sketches (approx. 10-minuutes each + another hour of texturing/color) for their pen & ink assignment. What a day, and I'm gratefully aware of how lucky and rare it is to get such an opportunity.

"Endsong" Demo: Macro Texture Swatches

It occurs to me that back in December I teased out a mention about a brand-new studio course I developed for the drawing department, "Pen & Ink," and since then have never posted any samples of the incredible work that's been produced in the class. I'll catch up over the upcoming break, but in the meantime here's a sample of a demo page I did during an in-class exercise.

Students were tasked with sampling from the semester's work to date and recreate macro textures onto twenty approximately 2" squares on a sheet of Strathmore 500 series Plate Bristol. So a super slick surface meant rendering with superfine tools like crow-quill dip-pens + o1/02/03 Microns. 

The words were sampled & remixed into the panels after the sample textures were randomly rendered, with only one frame specifically designed for an accompanying image ("It's all gone"). Somewhat similar to last year's comics poem of a Lamb of God + Gudetama demo page,  the inspiration for the text came from one song in particular, "Endsong," off the first album released by The Cure in sixteen years, "Songs of a Lost World." Other reviewers have done introspective, insightful reviews on this masterpiece of melancholia, but for me it means more than the usual nostalgic navel gaze: a mutual favorite band (along with Depeche Mode) with a long-gone dearly loved family member who we would often share mixtapes of adolescent longing. The faint penciled sentence reads: "and if you  think a fifty-something year-old man who still listens to The Cure is sad wait until you see him lose it over a new song of theirs (first in sixteen years or so." While I'm not a goth per say, it can look somewhat funny to see someone of my age not only singing along to some classic hits, let alone crying at how hard the lyrics hit. I mean, at his age when he sings about such things as loss and sadness, he really fucking means it now, which I can deeply relate to now more than at any other time in my life. To me it's simply their best song ever.

"Dipnetting on the Styx"

Usually I reserve the "process" label for a post hat's a bit more detailed, but I thought that the examples of evolution from initial doodle to thumbnailed rough (ie ballpoint pen in sketchbook) to printed version is a great illustration in the gradual refinement of a panel. This as opposed to what many others in the field do - have the finished cartoon magically appear out the other end of the pen, springing full-formed in an Athenian style of inspiration. Myself however, muddle along with multiple manifestations, revisions, tentative penciling followed by even more tweaking and editing. Still, it's one of the best of the year, and a fitting closure in contrast to the holiday cheer of last week.

Continuing the fraudulent posturing in this charade, I depict myself in the scenario, when in all actuality I have never fished while residing in Alaska. I was an avid fisherman growing up in New York, but mostly lowly carp and bullheads, along with panfishing (and some brief adventures with muskies in Canada at an Auntie's campground). But I have yet to indulge in any of the requisite residential subsistence activities like hunting (aside from forays into foraging) or fishing. I also don't particularly care for the taste of salmon, which is a disqualifying sacrilege. No wonder I suffer from imposter syndrome.

And finally, to make things even worse with this particular panel, once again I fell victim to misremembering and mixing up the mythological reference. Technically Charon is more typically associated with the river Acheron, and I additionally mashed him up with common portrayals of the Grim Reaper, not to mention a lake of fire more associated with a Judeo-Christian vision of Hell. Speaking of which, laboring with excessive amounts of scumbling is somewhat of a sentence, at least in Limbo.

On a final note, as I was inking in this panel at the office, with a soundtrack sampler playing in the background, an un-equalized/auto-volume controlled Darth Vader’s Imperial March theme (specifically from my favorite Rogue One) swelled up from the speakers REALLY REALLY LOUD, and in a brief, rare moment of self-awareness it briefly occurred to me to act my age, or at least maybe turn it down, but then when I looked at what I was drawing, I had a good laugh at myself. 

“Tundra God/Miyazaki ‘Boo”

Another class demo done for the Pen & Ink course (similar to a recent one of a buffalo), where I experimented with more tools + techniques; using India ink with brush, dip-pen, also Micron/Copic markers + Sakura Gelly Roll white ink pen, and wash with Derwent brand Inktense water-soluble colored pencils, and lastly a dose of varnish to bring out the details and lay on some luster. Since the evening class is after hours and most of my usual go-to community resources are closed (like the Museum of the North, Fish & Game etc) so for the first time in a decade I took the class on a safari field sketching trip to capture some textures in the wild at an alternative site Sportsman's Warehouse. I first focused on one mount on display in the store, then kept incorporating multiple other animal's antlers so as to evoke Miyazaki's iconic creation the Forest God from my personal favorite Studio Ghibli movie ever, "Princess Mononoki." I was obviously still under the influence of seeing only a couple days earlier the official 4k remastered IMAX version that was re-released and ran for a few days in Fairbanks. Having never before seen it on the big screen it was a thoroughly transcendent experience, on par with "Flow" and "The Iron Giant," which incidentally rounds out my top three animated movies of all time.

Showdown: Last Month of "Thinking Made Visible"

A quick note that the extended exhibition "Thinking Made Visible" that's been up almost an entire year will come to a close in a couple of weeks - a couple backlinks here and here for more backstory on a wonderful show with so many outstanding artists from our creative community, and a bonus demo day. Also of note I will at last be reunited with my man-purse. Special thanks again to all the folks at the Museum of the North!

"Them/Their" (aka "The Non-Binary Sourdough")

I had some trepidation about releasing this one into the wild as it were. As a long-standing ally and vocal supporter of confronting these issues in the comics industry, I strongly feel that humor helps to heal, and plus anything that promotes a positive spin on queer culture is a bonus. And so more than likely most of any negative pushback will come from the usual sources for the usual reasons. These are very scary times, and the hatemongers always seek to demonize and inflame the culture wars as a way to distract and divide.

    

Still want to be clear as possible, since postmodernism dictates the artist's intent is no longer a valid critique (usually adopted by folks who don't make art, much less draw cartoons). Even an ad hoc review committee ie showing it to some friends for their takes was somewhat biased as they know me and my opinion on such matters ("consider the source"). Ultimately I relied upon the professional perspective of an editor, and so it ran, and has received much positive feedback since.

Lastly it is of note the unfortunate development with the author of this - still succinctly savage - tweet. I'll let Tori Amos speak upon the sad frustration I share.