The Bacon Strip for April 2009

Here's another comic for the Bacon of the Month club. It's included in their April package.


The club is a division of The Grateful Palate, and is a must for serious carnivores.

Bizarro meets Wayno, again

Today's Bizarro comic is another collaboration between the artist Dan Piraro and me. I wrote the gag and Dan drew it in his distinctive, twisted style.


This is the second one to be published, and there are at least a couple more to come. One of them will be a nice, big Sunday panel.
It's a real treat to work with one of my favorite cartoonists.

My first published Bizarro gag can be seen here.

Recombinant Timmy

While rummaging through my disorganized "filing system," I ran across the pasteup for Recombinant Timmy, an experimental dada/cutup comic I published in 1989 as a "secret publication." These were oddball books that I distributed to friends, but never advertised or sold. This one was one of my favorites from that group.

To produce the comic, I dismantled a copy of Timmy #715, a Dell children's comic published in 1956. I cut about half the pages into individual panels, and then cut out the word balloons from the remaining pages. I put the panels and balloons into separate bags, shook them up and pulled enough to make a minicomic. I pasted up the balloons and panels in the order that I pulled them, and printed up the resulting mess.

Surprisingly, it produced a nearly linear story, complete with what could almost be a punchline at the end.

The cover is an "intentional" collage made from the original comic's cover.

Here's the front of Recombinant Timmy:


...and here's the cover of the source material:


The minicomic was simply Xeroxed onto colored bond paper, but the original pasteup was, of course, full halftone-dotted color. After twenty years, it's aged and yellowed quite nicely. It's pretty fragile, and I'm going to scan it for my archives.

I'm considering doing a 20th anniversary laserjet reissue, in color. It would probably be very limited, and would be signed and numbered. If there's enough interest, I'll look into it seriously.

Alter(c)ations

I recently found a small stash of my old self-published minicomix, including this one from 1988.

Alter(c)ations was one of my "secret" publications. These were printed in editions of 50 copies and were never advertised or sold. I gave them away to friends or sometimes threw them in with an order of other comix.

The images were made from magazine pages (and one "McHale's Navy" bubblegum card). I defaced the source material with white-out, X-acto blades, correction tape and ink. That's a little rubber stamp image of Hedorah (the Smog Monster) in the corner of the next-to-last page, and it looks like the background on the final page is an enlarged photocopy of a Pep Boys ad.

Bizarro Meets Wayno

Today's Bizarro comic is a collaboration between the artist Dan Piraro and me. I recently wrote a few gags that Dan liked enough to use in his panel, and this is the first to be published.

Dan's one of my favorite cartoonists, and it's a kick to see my joke rendered in his style.

Thanks, DP!

Name that celebrity

Here's a first attempt at a caricature of a celebrity. It still needs some work.

Is it recognizable?

Bacon! Again!

Here's the completed version of the bacon-centric strip I previewed in an earlier post.

It's included in the March 2009 Bacon of the Month club package. The club, a division of The Grateful Palate, is highly recommended to all serious carnivores.

NORTH: A guide to Pittsburgh's North Side

I'm one of many local artists who contributed to North, a visitors' guide to Pittsburgh's North Side.

Here's an edited excerpt from the press release, followed by my page.

Pittsburgh's Northside has a new visitors guide. The book, called North, features short comic vignettes of great Northside destinations such as The Warhol, PNC Park, and The National Aviary. North offers visitors and locals alike the opportunity to find new places to visit, or to be reminded of old favorites. The guide is available by request for personal use, or for mass distribution.

Funded by a grant from the Charm Bracelet Project, the ToonSeum partnered with 18 cartoonists (plus three writers) and 15 organizations to create a comprehensive visitors guide to the neighborhood. Each artist covered a popular venue or historically rich area. After countless pen strokes and hours of researching, North is ready to launch. Distributed free of charge to Pittsburgh hotels, visitor’s centers, schools, and more, the guide will allow Pittsburghers new and old to enjoy the experience that is our Northside.

The official release date is April 3. I'll have some other breaking news to report on that same day.

Ralph Carney's "Serious Jass Projekt"

Here's the final version of an illustration I did for my friend Ralph Carney's new band, Ralph Carney's "Serious Jass Projekt". As far as I can tell, the quotation marks are supposed to be there as part of their name.
I'd posted an early version today, but took it down after I saw how much better it looked with the colors rearranged a little.

Ralph's got a long and illustrious resume, and he's still going strong. I've been a fan since getting the first Tin Huey records back in the late '70s, and am truly jazzed (or jassed) to have a chance to work with him.

Ugly American Archive Item

When Scott Smith of East End Brewing Company first invited me to draw a label for his Ugly American brew, we met to discuss our ideas before settling on the concept.

Here's a scan of my "meeting notes" from that first discussion, followed by the final design. The sketch in the upper left is pretty close to what we ended up with.



We revised the label for the late 2008 release: