My sweets: I’m chomping at the bit until I can announce the specifics (soooon) of the launch/location of my new series RED LIGHT PROPERTIES, but I can tell you that I wrote the first version of RLP back in 2001 and I’ve spent the years between honing my skills to tell it. Every book, idea and project over the last few years bringing me another step closer to this baby.
Actually, I’m stopping myself here… There’s so much I want to tell you, but I’m going to save it for when I don’t have to be so goddamn mysterious. In the meantime, I can share with you an early character study for RLP’s main man, Mr. Jude Tobin:
I’ll have solid news as soon as I’m cleared to drop it. Promise.
I did an Intelligencer piece for New York Magazine today on Obama’s conflict with NY Governor Paterson. Click the image to see my Simpsonsesque initial sketch and then the final piece:
This past spring during my visit to Ohio University’s Aesthetic Technologies Lab, I was kidnapped for an hour by Betsey Merkel, one of the brains behind the I-Open Foundation, which connects “thinkers” into a network in the hopes for problem-solving for social change.
Betsey ushered into one of the school’s screen-printing studios and showed me a diagram of beliefs and intents, then conducted one of the most original interviews I’ve ever had. She asked me fundamental but deep-drilling abstract questions about my core beliefs, my work, my perceived relation to the world, etc. In my defense, I was stuffed to the gills with antibiotics at the time, so enjoy my answers with a dash of salt, yeah?
I also love the YouCube presentation they used, where my interview is just a single facet of a 3D cube, talking simultaenously with five other interviewees. You can touch and play with it too; a fun thing I’ve never seen before:
More information on Betsey and I-Open can be found here.
In connection with this year’s absolutely top-notch Comica Festival in London, I’ve written and drawn a six-page story called “Take Two” for the Comica-exclusive Ctrl.Alt.Shift Unmasks Corruption anthology. Edited by Paul Gravett, the anthology is described as “a limited edition comic book which aims to highlight corruption as both the cause of poverty and a barrier to overcoming it, featuring original work from leading comic artists and creative figures from around the world.”
And as with Paul Gravett’s Comica, there’s some truly wonderful talent involved; frankly the prospect of being published alongside masters like Bryan Talbot and Pat Mills has got me all wiggly in the knees.
My contribution “Take Two” deals with injustice and manipulation here in the States, dressed as lifestyle; I describe it over at Comica’s site (in typically long sentences) as:
…a piece about the insidious and pervasive tango of the pharmaceutical/food industry and the media that sells it all to us as reality, how it affects/controls and even shapes culture… and the alternatives being kids quitting their “meds”, unplugging from media that dulls them, going outside, eating real food. I’m thinking more of a tone/image poem 6 pages in length, where we see these chains of manufactured consumer-reality from the point-of-view of a young man doubting who he is, where he comes from, and the possibilities inherent in breaking free of them.
You can hear me and some of my page-mates sounding off about our inspirations for our pieces here.
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