newyorkette

Tony Millionaire is one of my favorite comic artists, even though the gross-out factor is sometimes a bit much for a sissy like me. If you love his Maakies strip, or his Sock Monkey and Billy Hazelnuts books, or his Drinky Crow show, this interview, on The Sound of Young America, is required listening!

Related: Sunday Comics: Tony Millionaire

Bear mountain always fascinates me. It looks so grumpy!
And here’s an awful, unfinished attempt to colorize it! So embarrassing! But it’s useful as a color study.

Taking a break from some jobs I’m working on, I found a photo of Sam, (aka Big Lug), and decided to draw him, since he never sits still long enough in real life for a portrait. I like images of dogs all rolled up into a ball.

This one is a pencil drawing, scanned, with color added in by photoshop. Excuse my naive use of the paintbrush option, but it was fun! I like the way it looks, though I should probably make my own custom brush strokes up next time.

Below, the original pencil sketch:

I saw this on the back of an ice cream truck on Spring Street. Hypnotic, isn’t it?

This is my first drawing for the Style Bestiary, which is a bestiary of things I have seen, people-wise on the subway, at work, in the mirror… There’s the woman here, for example, who will notice that hair eventually and hope nobody else did. There’s the fashionista with the grey-stained underarms (stained by her black leather jacket, no doubt). There’s the man who didn’t think to un-tack the vent in his jacket, maybe he didn’t realize he should. The woman with the pedicurist’s toe-separators still in her toes. The lady with the hair wrapped around her head and secured with bobby pins: the in-between hair-do.

All these moments of inadvertence intrigue me. They’re “looks” that nobody actually aspires to, and yet they happen all the time. In between looks, looks that only happened because someone forgot to do something, or thought nobody would notice if they didn’t do it. We pretend not to notice them, but I do, and I love them.

Anyway, this specimen has not gone as I had hoped. While I have a long list of plates I want to draw, I’m still arguing with myself about the application of color. This is a scan with the (awful, incompetently applied) watercolor removed by Photoshop. This is pretty much what the drawing looked like till I ruined it! Sigh!

The style is illustration-y in this example, but I may yet go for a more Audobon-esque reality (what ambition!), so a different version of this specimen may rear its head ere long. I’m going to decide how the thing will look as I go along, and you’ll see it develop in real time.

A friend has promised to show me the watercolor ropes on condition I stop whining.
More TK!

I have frankly been having trouble concentrating because of them. I mean, you put the TV on with the Olympics in the background, and then someone starts running and leaping and twisting and throwing themselves around a mat in a monstrously inhuman way, and you’re totally transfixed! You say, I’ll just watch this one. Next thing you know, it’s one o’clock in the morning and you’ve gotten nothing done.

(And his ass!)

So, this is what happens. Sam, the dog, doesn’t like thunderstorms, see? So he freaks and runs off into the woods, bursting beyond his “invisible fence” in his disarray.

Everyone comes home, wonders where Sam, the dog, is. Sam! Sammy! Where are you? Woohoo, Saaaaaam! This goes on for a while. I decide I’m a guest, I better help, even though Sam has annoyed me, covering me in algae by paddling around me while I try to swim in the pond, and also chasing my fishing lure whenever I cast a line, unless I throw a log in the other direction to satisfy his irrepressible, if not insane, urge to fetch all projectiles in a frantic manner. I join in with the “Saaaaaam-ing.”

I’m “Saaaaaaam-ing” back and forth along the side road, but no dice. I have a feeling I’m on the right track, but a person earnestly searching for a lost labrador ought to eventually hear a distant hopeful bark, or a rustling of branches.

Nothing.

Along the road leading to the mailboxes, I notice there’s these three cats watching me, all “look at her, we’re glad we don’t have to be polite like her,” like. I’m getting tired of “Saaaaam-ing” already, and they all look so sardonic. So I ask them, with a note of provocation: “Well? You seen Sam?”

They perk up at this question and look at eachother. “Seriously, you seen Sam?” I ask. One of them sort of heaves a little cat sigh, and gets up and stretches. His friends follow, and they walk sarcastically (as all cats do) to the road, get in front of me, now and then doing that thing cats do when they want your attention, you know? Rolling around a little on the ground at your feet to show you how cute they are? “Okay, yeah, yeah, you’re cute but I’m allergic,” I say.

They lead me in this leisurely manner to the far end of the drive, and stop at the gravel just before the trees. I say, “Okay, then. Where is he?” They look at me like: this is it, kid. So, I look up, and there, about thirty feet into the woods, stands Sam with his flag-like red tongue flapping out in contrast with his hairy black mug as he pants hysterically, looking all embarrassed. Sam, you big lug! He stands there looking at me as if he would not blame me if I pretended not to have found him.

What does a dog like this do in his spare time? Why, he lies in the middle of the road, just so.

I’ve been wondering what I’ll wear in the winter when my summer thongy birks or slide-ons won’t do anymore. Another winter of painfully throbbing feet I am not looking forward to! So I’ve designed myself a couple of booties. A girl can dream! The bikerbirk (above) would look great with skinny jeans or with black winter shorts and black woolen tights.
And the suede bootie:

(above) would be very cool under the right skirt with very thick woolen tights, or bare legs if you can take it. The suede booties could also be in fake suede for the vegans. And I wouldn’t be averse to wearing a knee-high version as well as the calf-high. In black, of course.

So, Birkenstock people? What do you think?

This rough little cartoon was inspired by an exchange in which I friended someone on Facebook, forgot, then thought I had been friends with them all along, and then realized I had not. We are friended now.

In related news, I will be unfriend anyone who joins those Facebook ad networks that put every goddam purchase you make in my newsfeed.

I snapped this on my way to the subway at the end of the day, after having a “Catch of the day” sandwich. See those circles of light behind Nathan’s that look a bit like the pretty spaceships from Close Encounters of the Third Kind? That’s Keyspan Park, where my little brother was watching the Cyclones game!

This morning I woke up early, slid my coveralls over my nightie, and sat down with my tea to wait for the exterminator, as I do every second Saturday of the month. He is very important to my tranquillity and peace of mind. Some people don’t mind the pitter-patter of multiple feet, but I prefer my guests to be upright-walkers. The cartoon is one of Crawford’s latest.
Now, where is that exterminator! I want to go to the beach!

And it rained! So, all I have is this upstate roadkill-inspired cartoon, and the only two drawings I did indoors while it rained cats & dogs.

I needed something to draw, so I drew Crawford as a redneck while he was drawing:

Then, disappointed that I had not drawn anything much during my visit, I drew these Queen Anne’s Lace blossoms during my last five minutes on the property, to make hay while it rained:

I almost forgot! I did snap this pic of the thunderstorm chasing (and overtaking) my train back downstate:

(photo by Carolita Johnson)

And, unrelated to the weather: Jason Polan’s “Breaking and entering,” the (true, and now illustrated) story of Jack Spade’s rather dedicated burglar.

(Girl in tree, Central Park, July or August 2008, photo by Carolita Johnson)

Central Park, by the rowing pond.

Previously, the worst things about summer.

If you have a sharp eye, you may already have noticed the link in the sidebar pointing to the Cartoon Lounge, the cartoonist’s blog on The New Yorker’s website. If not, surprise!

This is a cartoon I sent in for the “Worst things about summer” post, which is in excellent company with fellow cartoonist’s illustrations of the worst of summer. I was really glad to send it in, because only the day before found me riding the subway with a friend when a fellow commuter rose to debark, and I felt impelled by some premonition of discovery to look down at his seat to the left of me, whereupon I noticed he had left behind the surprisingly well-defined outline, in microscopic moisture droplets clinging to the orange plastic seat, of his buttocks.

“Look! Butt-condensation!” I said to my friend. Who ignored me. “Look!”, I repeated, generously forgiving him for ignoring me, “Butt condensation!” My friend barely turned halfway around to me and said, “Only you would notice that.” Oh yeah? Well, now maybe a few other people will notice it too, and have a name for it! I can’t wait till I hear someone else pronounce the glorious words, “butt condensation.” It’ll make me so proud.

I sympathize with Evan Forsch, whose main complaint about summer is that he can’t wear his home-made goose down vest, but I beg to disagree: he could wear it. It would just be unbearably hot. Me, I have the opposite problem (see photo to the left): I have to wear parkas all summer (for my day job), and it’s no fun but it pays well. For desperate moments I have one of these.

BTW - thanks to Zach Kanin for perpetuating the stereotype that portrays us cartoonists as always drunk. It’s bad enough people think all we do is sleep all day when we’re not drawing or drinking. Now I’ll never be able to convince people that my flask is only filled with water. (It really is only filled with water. I mean it.) Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go back to bed.

I thought of this rejected cartoon when I read this article, but it took me ages to dig it up! It was at the bottom of the bottom of a pile on the bottom of another pile.

Steve Wolfard’s Monstro-Draw, where you’ll also meet Cat Rackham.