I’ll be at the Portland Zine Symposium this Weekend
Just a personal update: this weekend I will be tabling at the Portland Zine Symposium in PSU’s Peter W. Scott Main Gym. If you are in Portland, OR (and honestly, why aren’t you?), stop by and pick up one of the three zines I will have for sale at $1 each:
Wakey-Wakey is a short anthology of various comics and illustrations I’ve done, most of them while I was interning at Periscope Studio, and some of it previously published in Stumptown Underground. There is nothing in this zine you haven’t already seen on this blog.
The Savage Nobles Preview Zine includes pages 26 through 51 of the comic you are reading right now. (That’s right, if you buy it this weekend you’ll be able to see page 51 a full two days before it hits this site!) This is mainly intended to serve as a “gateway drug” for the website. At 5.5×8.5″, it’s a little smaller than I’d like to publish it eventually, but it still looks durned good in print if I d.s.s.m.
Flight of the Flightless is the 24-Hour Comic I drew in (one day of) April of this year. It’s based on a true story as comically reimagined by me and my ex-roommate Turhan Sarwar about evacuating the penguins from the New Orleans Aquarium after Hurricane Katrina. (yes, a comedy about Hurricane Katrina – it’s about time!) It’s got cute animals, madcap action, and has a super-happy ending with a wedding and a rainbow; it will one day make me a millionaire and relaunch Cuba Gooding, Jr.’s career.
See y’all at the Symposium!
Read MoreByrdSeed
Hey internet stalkers – sorry I have been so delinquent in posting. August has proven to be a crazy month, singing for the William Byrd Festival and prepping for the Portland Zine Symposium. The only time I’ve had to draw is between rehearsals! (see below)
Read MoreWhite Sands Missile Range
Lest you think this immense desert “missile range,” located a short car-chase outside Las Cruces, NM is a convenient fictional concoction of mine, let me assure you that not only is it real, it is the largest military installation in the country (3,200 square miles!), as well as the site of planet Earth’s first ever nuclear explosion. I’ve driven through it myself!
(The sign reads “You Are Now Leaving White Sands Missile Range; Drive Carefully.” I think it’s a very odd statement.)
By an amazing coincidence, the previous occupant of the room in which I am now living is a native of Las Cruces, Mark Smith. He and two of my other housemates went to college in Santa Fe. Mark tells me that, because Las Cruces is a dull town with very little to do (unfortunately, “Molotov Latte” is not a real place), the primary recreation for young troublemakers is to drive out into the desert to listen to music and drink beer. The home-grown Las Crucians apparently know the unlabeled back-country roads well enough to navigate them in the dark.
I hasten to add:
OUR PROTAGONISTS DO NOT!
Theo’s Tattoos: Four-letter Word
Now and then I will post short entries about Theo’s tattoos – not the scholarly treatment they deserve, just a little background information. Because the tattoos have to be roughly the same every time I draw them, and on roughly the same part of the body, I had to plan them out fairly carefully – though if it had occurred to me at the outset how many times I’d have to draw them, I would have planned them even more carefully. My friend Ben Bates, who draws Sonic the Hedgehog for Archie comics (among with many other things) and who has one of the keenest minds for character design I’ve ever come across, says that having a character covered in tattoos who spends most of the comic shirtless is already in itself a horrible idea. I totally agree, but unfortunately for me and my right hand, it’s also crucial to the plot.
On the underside of Theo’s left forearm is the instantly recognizable Tetragrammaton. No, that’s not some kind of giant Japanese robo-warrior, it’s the Hebrew four-letter name for God. Because this word is all consonants, with the vowels varying or implicit, there’s a lot of confusion as to how it ought to be pronounced. But this isn’t actually a problem, since to Jews “The Name” is actually too sacred to be pronounced, except perhaps by one person in one particular place, once, on one particular day of the year… and even that, not so much lately. Needless to say, getting this tattooed on your arm is probably pretty risque, if not downright offensive, since Judaism does not generally allow tattoos of any sort in the first place.
It’s possible, however, that Theo got the tattoo when he was a Christian. After all, the Christians use many of the same texts – whenever you see the phrase “the LORD” in all capitals in an English-language bible, it often holds the place of the tetragrammaton (although the frequent Hebrew euphemism “Adonai” is also translated as “Lord”). This brings me to an Interesting Personal Anecdote:
I’m thrilled to be singing in the 13th Annual William Byrd Festival with the early music choir Cantores in Ecclesia. At one service we will be chanting Psalm 68, which contains the line “magnify him that rideth upon the heavens as it were upon an horse; praise him in his Name, JAH, and rejoice before him.” Here, “Jah” is a shortened, two-letter version of the Name (incidentally, a root of the word “Hallelujah,” and name of God used by Rastafarians). This is the only instance of the name “Jah” in the entire King James Bible. For some unfathomable reason, it was translated as “JAH” just this one time. Unsurprisingly, we singers are baffled as to how to pronounce it.
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