Jacquelyn and a few others were curious if I was attending the big ol’ Comic-Con jamboree in San Diego in these upcoming days. The answer is “nope”, but I will when HABIBI is finished (couple more years). And in the meantime, the organizers of the Stumptown Comics Festival wanted me to note that they’ll be

I took a couple of days off when my buddy Alessandro visited from Italy. Here’s a doodle from a front porch conversation: And here’s a little jumble of chapter five progress. It’s coming along! Thanks, as usual, for the blog comments. And on that last round, lots of useful self-preservation tips. For those in Portland,

All my favorite pages of HABIBI are too spoiler-ish to share, so instead here’s a fairly innocuous/boring page that can be broken down into various stages of development. It’s outright shameful the lapse of time from the first draft free-form journaled in my sketchbook in October 2004 and the final inks laid down a couple

Quick follow-up to that last entry. Peter asked how big the sketchbook pages are. They’re 9″ x 12″. Here’s another sketch with today’s page of HABIBI laid behind it. The HABIBI pages are drawn within an 8.75″ x 12.5″ live area, but you can see how detailed they are compared to the sketchbook. Because the

There’s dozens and dozens of figure drawing sketchbooks on my shelves, so I’d thought I’d occasionally post a drawing. Almost all of them are executed with those Pentel pocketbrush pens straight to paper with no pencils or erasers or fussing like my comics pages. And the subjects are admittedly almost always pretty girls/women. Occasionally I

My advice to young cartoonists is that the biggest and most important challenge is simply seeing a project to completion. I’d draw ten pages of a story, get bored or distracted, then dump ’em in the drainage ditch, leaving a wake of unfinished books — until finally sticking with CHUNKY RICE. Below is one of

It seems a lot of artists prefer the drawings that come from their pens when they aren’t thinking or paying attention.

Finally, the fourth chapter is finished. It took six and a half months, but it’s over a hundred pages long — begun on October 20th, after returning from tour with Menomena — and completed on May 8th, a couple of weeks after Stumptown Comics Fest. In between, there were a handful of out-of-town guests, a