Newt Gingrich illustration

My latest drawing is featured in Newt Gingrich's new blog post, The Newt Gingrich Lunar Plan for American Prosperity, on jacobmercy.com. I offered Mr. Gingrich the below version, but he decided to go with an earlier, partially-colored draft. His reasons are his own.

Face-In-Hole

Earlier this week I got a last-minute commission from the Portland office of Yelp.com to paint them a portable face-in-hole board (no, there doesn't seem to be a better term for that) that they could carry around Portland's Holiday Ale Fest. They're posting all the results on Facebook, and here's one of my favorites so far:

I'll be at the fest myself this evening, so come get your picture taken with me! Just make sure you put your whole face through the hole, or won't come out very good.

(acrylic on foam core, 37.5"x28")

Birthday Card for Maria Montoya

Our friend Maria has a very strong and specific pet peeve... so Kari had the idea of an interactive present to bring her the kind of satisfaction she'd otherwise never get. She handed me the concept and let me handle the execution, so here's what we got:

Front cover:


Pull on the tab at top:

(you can pull on the bottom tab to reset)

Open the card:


Open the small envelope tucked into the left flap, to find closed-mouth stickers:


Position the stickers over the corresponding faces:


Here's Maria working on the stickers:


Here's the finished card:

...and, I'm back.

Wordpress is real great and all, except nobody told me about the security holes by which someone can apparently hijack your admin account and pump your whole site full of malware. I managed to export all the posts and comments that went on there, so the archive you see here is an unbroken run.

Here are a few chalk drawings I did on construction paper at other people's houses, while I could have been wasting my time being social:

SIX: finished

Did this months ago, but my blog was down so I never posted it here. Inking was very rushed, but at least you can almost tell what's going on now.

Full disclosure: I stole all the dialog for the above comic directly from NBC (it is the first few minutes of the first episode of Friends) and combined it with characters which I stole from Marvel Comics (the original Sinister Six from The Amazing Spider-Man.) I believe this is fair use of both properties, but let me know if you feel otherwise.

SIX: a work in progress.

I went to the third annual 24-hour drawocalypse at Cosmic Monkey Comics this past weekend, and I didn't draw 24 pages in 24 hours per Scott McCloud's challenge but I did draw and start to ink the first 12 pages of a new comic starring the original Sinister Six -- which is a super-villain team from Spider-Man comics.

I scanned it and threw in some very temporary lettering so you can read what I've done so far — but it's still a work in progress, so I've left the blues in to let you know that the art's exactly as I left it at the end of the 24-hour time limit.

Cover design for a rain-themed comics zine

I submitted this design as a proposed cover for this month's issue of Stumptown Underground, but they declined to print it. Oh well -- I'm pretty happy with it myself, but the cover they chose is pretty nice too, and Katy Ellis O'Brien is a very cool person, so no hard feelings I guess. I should mention that I didn't know what the name of the zine would turn out to be, so I just put "Pouring" in as a placeholder to suggest a lettering style.



It's pretty dark, so you might need to adjust your monitor to see the good parts.

Superman vs. OK Cupid

I drew this for a Portland comics anthology called Stumptown Underground. The theme for last month's issue was "Flight". The excellent dialog is by Jacob Mercy. Thanks, Jackie!



Oh and here's the alternate ending, which is funnier by most accounts but didn't win editorial approval.

Superman is Copyright/TM DC Comics & Time-Warner Entertainment 2009, and is used here without permission or legal justification.

Of Nightmares and Morticians: a nonfiction 24-hour comic in two parts

The first 6 pages recount a recurring nightmare that my friend Liz Spavento really had, and it serves as the first chapter of a semi-biographical book that we hope to eventually complete. If we pull it off, it'll have romance, deceit, premonitions, and more -- so, you know, fingers crossed!








The next 13 pages are based on three guys that actually used to frequent my friend Amy's tea shop in NYC. She insists not only that the events shown here more or less happen on a regular basis, but these these are the morticians' actual names. Squengl, if you're reading this, please let me know if we got the spelling right on yours.

Vacation Comix #2

Last night I was at a party at Jason Van Glass' house, chilling in his hottub and chatting him up about assorted nerdy shit. After a few drinks I pulled out my tablet PC and asked for something to draw. Apparently he'd had this script in his head for a two-page silent comic, and I could have it for free.





Jason Van Glass is a member of the burgeoning "aspiring screenwriter" industry, and I'm looking forward to reading these spec scripts he wrote for It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia.

P.S. I used Manga Studio since I've been meaning to make myself comfortable with its interface. Long way to go there, but it does do a relatively nice Speedball impression with no effort and I even managed to make it do my panels for me.

Did a guest strip for Jacob Mercy's "Nausea"

Jacob keeps a regular journal in webcomic form over at jacobmercy.com. Last Friday he experienced an unusual lapse in his memory and, since I was present during the missing span of time, he asked me to fill in as the temporary chronicler of his exploits.