Threadless in Space-Time

Today's the first day you can pick up the new "Comics-On Tees" series of Threadless shirts written by Jeffrey Brown and drawn by Anders Nilsen, Jeff Lemire, Mr. Brown, and myself. The group of four shirts is available as a pack or as individual shirts, but be sure to get them all: the shirts tell one continuous tale. If you only get one, you'll never know what happens next! Egad. So either get three of your friends to go in on this with you and constantly hang out as a group for the rest of your life OR buy the shirts and sew them into one madman's toga. Either way, you come out a winner.

To see the shirts in the wild, check out some of the shots people snapped at C2E2 this past weekend, where the shirts made their debut.

Shirt Time

Tomorrow night I'll be attending this Threadless/C2E2 event. In addition to fundraising for the very support-worthy Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, this will be the first glimpse of the Threadless "Space Time" comics shirts, written by Jeffrey Brown and drawn by Anders Nilsen, Jeff Lemire, the aforementioned Mr. Brown, and myself (a tiny peek of my shirt is above).

If you're in town for the convention, get to this event. In addition to it being a good time, it's for a good cause. I mean, even you don't like t-shirts, you have to like free speech, right? I hope?

Farewell, Earwax

After a long history in Chicago, I was saddened to hear that Earwax Cafe is closing. In addition to having some of the best milkshakes and vegetarian burgers I've ever tasted, Earwax served as a meeting place for myself and countless other cartoonists over the years. Earwax, whose walls were adorned with circus sideshow banners and oddities, could lay claim to logos and ads designed by a couple generations worth of funny book people, including Daniel Clowes (who I just saw has a functioning web site, another sign of the progression of time) and Jeff Brown. Jeff and I used to meet up there with some regularity (one such get-together is pictured above), back when we lived in the area, and I know Jeff drew there all the time (with scenes from the cafe featured in some of his books).

I hung up countless posters over the years in this place, went there when I was depressed about this or that, made plans with The Holy Consumption there, and my second date with my wife nervously took place there, before our first kiss on a nearby playground. When I heard Earwax was closing, it was surprising to me just how many memories came back. Sometimes a cafe isn't just a cafe.

Goodbye, Earwax, you'll be missed.

New Chicago Comics at MCA, Closing Sunday

If you haven't had a chance to get to the Museum of Contemporary Art for the exhibit New Chicago Comics, make haste: the show will be taken down this Monday, January 31st. So this Sunday is the last day to see all the work on display there.

If you can't make it to Chicago (or can't make it by Sunday), I took a panoramic shot of the displays on the walls, so you can scroll across this and imagine yourself in the middle of the room (and given the blurriness of the digital composting my phone did, maybe imagine yourself a little drunk). My apologies for the fact that Jeff's display (which was in cases in the middle of the room, seen below) isn't in that shot.

Below, a picture of the four cartoonists in the show: Anders Nilsen, myself, Lilli Carré, and Jeffrey Brown (a hat tip to Anders, from whose blog I stole that picture).

Dressing the Walls

Here are a few shots from the last couple days of Anders Nilsen, Lilli Carré, curator Michael Green, and me preparing New Chicago Comics at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

If these shots don't give a clear picture of what's in the show, that's intentional: no spoilers for the opening Friday. But I will divulge that the hanging of my portion has been routinely slowed by my breaks to admire Anders', Lilli's, and Jeff's work. It's a staggering collection from three of the best people around, and it's certainly an honor to be working alongside them to put this together.

New Chicago Comics at MCA Chicago

When Chicago offers up flesh-stripping winds and sub-decency temperatures, you really need a reason to force yourself out the door. On January 7th, the good people of the Museum of Contemporary Art are endeavoring to do just that, by opening a show of four Chicago cartoonists titled New Chicago Comics.

I'm honored to be included in the show alongside Lilli Carré, Jeffrey Brown, and Anders Nilsen. The show will be up for the remainder of January, but the opening (happening concurrently with the always raucous party environment of First Fridays at the museum) is on the 7th... so strap on your stiletto snow shoes and pleather parkas and come see some bleached walls adorned with mopey doodlings.

Here are all the specifics:

January 8 – 30, 2011

Exhibition preview in conjunction with First Fridays
January 7, 6–10 pm
21 and over only—strictly enforced!
$18 general admission, $13 advance tickets, $10 MCA members

Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
220 E. Chicago Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60611
312.280.2660

Nancy, Interpreted

I was happy to stumble across this collection of Nancy drawings by various artists (and was surprised to find out I had contributed to it, having no recollection of doing the drawing). Zack Soto's Sluggo is a favorite, and Kevin Huizenga's drawing is oddly disturbing. Have a look at – as Jeffrey Brown's drawing points out – everyone's favorite man-girl.

Comic Symposium of Chicago: Tomorrow

If you're in the area of downtown Chicago tomorrow or Friday, The School of The Art Institute of Chicago will be hosting a series of panel discussions on comics featuring a gaggle of cartoonists, myself included. I'll be saying things I won't recall afterward in the following environment:

Thursday, March 11th
Comics, Art and the Between
5:45pm-6:45pm
SAIC Ballroom, 112 S. Michigan Ave.

Moderators:
Bad @ Sports and Guest Jason Dunda

Panelists:
Paul Hornschemeier
John Porcellino
Christa Donner
Bernie McGovern

For information on all the panels and panelists (including, among others, Jeffrey Brown and Anders Nilsen), visit the Symposium's site.

Strange Tales Convergence

Tomorrow, two great comic shops, Chicago Comics and Challengers, are teaming up for a two-event signing royale featuring Becky Cloonan, Michael Kupperman, Jeffrey Brown, and myself. We all have work in the newly collected Marvel Strange Tales and we'll be signing copies of that book (which I've not yet seen) and whatever else you decide to haul into the stores. Stop by and listen to us wax dorkish and complain about this Sharpie running out of ink.

From Chicago Comics blog:

Schedule of Events:
Daytime @ Challengers
1pm – Formal Q & A Panel at Challengers with Strange Tales contributors Becky Cloonan, Michael Kupperman, and Jeffrey Brown
2pm – 4pm – Signing with the artists**

Nighttime @ Chicago Comics
6pm – 8pm -Signing with the artists at Chicago Comics**
8pm – ?? Official After-Party
**Purchase of the Strange Tales hardcover from EITHER store (with proof of purchase) the week of the signing is required to attend the signing!!!

Strange Tales and Lip Balm

The interview I gave (conducted by Sean Collins) for the third issue of Strange Tales is up on Marvel's web site. I digress about everything from British mysteries to ALL detergent. Sort of. My apologies for the inaccuracy in the interview: when the interview was conducted I had planned on Wolverine being the recipient of the lip balm, but for reasons that escape me and hopefully everyone else, I transferred the chapped lips' ownership to Cyclops. I've also never won an Eisner award as the lead-in states, but I will accept this pretend award with hypothetical pride.

Marvel has a couple pages from my story accompanying the interview, or you can see those pages (in a bit easier to view format) along with an exclusive peak of one of Jeffrey Brown's pages for the same issue on Publisher's Weekly's comics blog, The Beat.

More Things Like This: More of Everything

I recently received my copy of More Things Like This from the good people of McSweeney's (though the book was published by Chronicle), and I was trying to figure out how to summarize it. I can't. But at the very least I'll say it's overflowing with work by people I grew up admiring, and seeing a cartoon of mine on the same spread with Shel Silverstein's art is humbling (to put it mildly).

The book is an expansion of the aforeposted gallery show and catalog Lots of Things Like This and includes works from Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Vonnegut, Edward Gorey, Henry Darger, David Mamet, David Byrne, Basquiat, Leonard Cohen, Robert Crumb, and too many others to list. Fellow Holy Consumptionites Jeffrey Brown and Anders Nilsen are in there as well, on pages 199 and 187 respectively. Pick up a copy at your earliest convenience, then buy another when you damage the first from passing out and falling on top of it, ruining the spine and dog-earing the pages.

Ulysses in The Parisian Summer

With a nod to Anders, who posted some of his drawings for this show some time ago, I thought I'd post a few of the drawings I'll be presenting at our group show (Anders, Jeffrey Brown, and myself) at Galerie Anne Barrault this June in Paris.

Most of these are on the larger side (around 20x30") and serving as conceptual drawings for a planned book on Ulysses S. Grant. The book is years down the road, but when I was worrying over what to do for the show (the general theme of which is "Midwest"), I could think of few people more thoroughly Midwestern than good ol' Ulysses.