Seth Kushner's Graphic Novelists Project

Photographer Seth Kushner came over to our house yesterday. Some of you may have seen photos elsewhere online from his series-in-progress of portraits of New York cartoonists. He is planning to make a book out of all this.

You can see two of the photos he took of us—as well as his other subjects (check out Nick Bertozzi and Gabrielle Bell especially)—on Seth's blog.


This version is a bit too lo-res to be able to see, but I tried to art direct (at the last minute) a kind of self-portrait in the books stacked around me. You'll find everything from the Oulipo Compendium to Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking. The book I'm reading as I sip my martini (not too dry and with a dash of orange bitters) is Raymond Queneau's novel Pierrot mon ami.

Here's an alternate shot:


Both photos are Copyright 2008 Seth Kushner. Read more...

Happy Birthday WFMU!

Cartoonists' radio par excellence for 50 years today. Read more...

DWWP preview in TCJ 289

Drawing Words & Writing Pictures won't be on sale until June 10 but in the meantime you can see previews on the :01 First Second Books site and also in the new issue of The Comics Journal (#289). Isaac Cates's blog has some scans of the excerpted pages as well as a report of our recent visit to his comics-as-literature class at Long Island University. (Note that the pages were printed in black and white but the book has an orange spot color.)

Also, we got our first review and it's a beaut! Ben Towle wrote it for PW Comics Weekly.

And speaking of The Comics Journal, Gary Sullivan conducted a long-ish interview with me which will be published in an upcoming issue, either #290 or #291. I'll announce here when that issue is out. Read more...

Three-day comics workshop in Portland

Starting at the end of May, Jessica and I will be doing a bunch of traveling in support of Drawing Words & Writing Pictures (and also Jessica's two other new books, Life Sucks and the paperback of La Perdida). Most places--and I'll post an itinerary here soon--we will be doing bookstore signings, but from June 21-23 we will be leading a comics workshop at The Pacific Northwest College of Art. It will be an intensive three-day course in creating comics. It will be followed by a four-day drawing workshop with PNCA faculty member Daniel Duford and then a two-day publishing workshop by none other than Peter Bagge.

You can get all the specific details here.

If you can't make the workshop, we will also be doing a book signing at Powells Books
on June 20th at 7:30pm (1005 W. Burnside, downtown Portland). Read more...

A few recent sketches

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My Studio Set-Up

This post is a bit of a preview of Jessica's and my debut at Best American Comics. Lynda Barry is the guest editor for the 2008 edition and she encouraged all the contributors to send in photos of their workspaces so we can put them all up on the website in the fall. It inspired me to take a few photos of my own set up so here you are...


A click on the photo should take you to a Picasa album. (Again, I'm just starting to experiment with this so let me know if you have any trouble accessing or navigating the images.) Read more...