JANE'S WORLD RULES!

JANE'S WORLD RULES!

One of my favorite people in the comics community is Paige Braddock, the creator of Jane's World, an Eisner-nominated humor comic that focuses on a sweet but clueless dyke and her eccentric cast of supporting characters. One of these characters is a gay cop named Rick... and since there's nothing more fun than illustrating a man in uniform (well, a man with no clothes at all, I suppose), I sent her a pin-up of Rick that's being printed in the upcoming Jane's World volume 7.

The same issue also features Rick telling Jane a story about downing a fertility potion that contains a cobra's heart, which Paige based on the autobiographical story from my mini-comic Swallowing a Cobra's Heart and Other True Travel Tales. It's funny to have one of my tales adapted in someone else's comic, after doing the same to so many other people's stories in the pages of both True Travel Tales and Hard To Swallow. Turnabout's fair play, I suppose... Regardless, everyone should pick up a copy of Jane's World to check out Paige's special brand of funny, engaging character drama.

Here's a pic of me and Paige at this year's Alternative Press Expo (APE):

READING AT PEGASUS BOOKS

READING AT PEGASUS BOOKS

I'm doing a reading with a bunch of other fantastic, indy, Bay Area cartoonists at Pegasus Books in Berkeley! I'm really excited about this, and feel honored to be a part of such a stellar line-up. Check it out if you can...

The cartoonists featured are:
Scott Campbell (Hickee)
Justin Hall (True Travel Tales)
MariNaomi (Estrus)
Shannon O'Leary (Pet Noir)
Joe Sayers (Thingpart)
Jason Shiga (Fleep)
Geoff Vasile (Track Rabbit)
Julia Wertz (Fart Party)

Pegasus Books (the downtown branch) is located at 2349 Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley. The event is on Friday, May 18th beginning at 7pm, and is FREE.

The poster is designed by the uber-talented Fred Noland (Black Sheep).

GOING APE!

GOING APE!

On the evening of Saturday, April 21st is the first annual Going APE! event at the 3 Dollar Bill Café at the LGBT Center at 1800 Market St. It’s a reading and signing by five of the best, independent, queer comics creators around, all of them well-experienced in working a crowd… These are all personal heroes of mine, and it’s been a thrill to help put this together. The event runs from 7-10pm, with readings beginning at 8pm.

The event is planned to coincide with the Alternative Press Expo (A.P.E.) here in San Francisco, a wonderful, annual, indy comics convention that I'll be tabling at as well.

The line-up of talent for Going APE! is as follows:

Paige Braddock (Jane’s World)
Abby Denson (Tough Love)
Tim Fish (Cavalcade of Boys, YBIL)
Justin Hall (True Travel Tales, Hard To Swallow)
Robert Kirby (Boy Trouble, Curbside)

After the reading, you can also swing by Isotope Comics Lounge’s famous “APE Aftermath” and watch a bunch of cartoonists get raging drunk… It’s only a five-minute, stumbling walk away!

ALTERNATIVE PRESS EXPO 2007

ALTERNATIVE PRESS EXPO 2007

Oh, yeah, the time is upon us again. A.P.E. is coming up this weekend, on Saturday, April 21st and Sunday, April 22nd at the Concourse Exhibition Center at 620 7th St. in lovely San Francisco. It’ll be the usual raucous collection of independent creative types…

This is my favorite show of the year, and an amazing display of the vitality of the indy comic/mini-comic/zine scene. Each year the show gets better and better, and it’s been wonderful watching the convention evolve and mature in the 7 or so years I’ve been coming to it. It’s honestly the most inspiring weekend of the year for me, creatively.

I’ll be tabling during the convention of course, sharing a table with Steve MacIsaac and, on Saturday only, Dave Davenport. We’ll be in the gay ghetto overseen by daddy Tim Fish. Come by and say howdy, at table 344 on the ground floor. The new books I'll be showcasing that I've done since last year's APE are Hard To Swallow #2 and the Swallowing a Cobra and Other True Travel Tales mini-comic.

QUEER CARTOONISTS PANEL

I’ll also be moderating the Queer Cartoonists Panel for the fourth year now, on Sunday, April 22nd from 4:45-5:45pm in the APE conference area. Please come by! It’s a pretty stellar line-up of LGBT creators... Here's the APE program blurb for it:

For the fourth installment of this annual, popular panel, yet another gaggle of LGBT cartoonists gather to gab irreverently about weighty issues. Should artists be socially responsible? What's happening in the world of queer cartooning? And just how gay are comics anyway?

Abby Denson (Tough Love)
Robert Kirby (Boy Trouble, Curbside)
Andy Hartzell (Monday, Fox Bunny Funny)
Brad Rader (Harry and Dickless Tom)
Leia Weathington (Bold Riley)

Moderated by Justin Hall (True Travel Tales, Hard To Swallow)

JAPAN!

JAPAN

My partner Nash and I just went on an incredible trip to the land of the rising sun… which is also the land of shopping, superior sushi meals, black-suited salary men, cherry blossoms, cartoon mascots, shopping, rockabilly dance-offs, Buddhism mixed with Shintoism, spectacular high rises, wonderful wooden temples and raked rocked gardens, polite but reserved people, spotless subway cars which run on time, sculpted trees and elegant moss gardens, shopping, drunken ass-grabbers, married closet cases, pedophile porn, costume play outfits, nourishing noodle soups, tumultuous fish markets, technologically advanced toilets, spikey-toed shoes, big glam-metal hair, an exhausting degree of fashion consciousness, eel liver soup, shopping, obsequious waiters, bicycles riding on the sidewalks, hospital-style face masks, repetitive bowing, shopping, polite people, ethnocentrism and elitism, cleanliness, more shopping…

…and manga, of course. Japanese comic books make up nearly 40% of the national literary output, and are read by the largest (by far) comic book market in the world. Very, very inspiring…

Here’s me in front of the Kyoto Manga Museum. I was delighted to find in their small room devoted to American comics a copy of the Houghton Miflin Best American Comics under glass. So, I’m actually represented in the museum! How cool is that…

WALL O' MANGA

A wall o’ manga from a random book store in Kyoto. So many titles! And in so many genres… sports stories, fantasy, romance, sci-fi, historical fiction, toilet humor, erotic, spy thrillers, samurai stories, biography… Japan is so cool!

PRISM GUIDE

PRISM GUIDE

The new PRISM Comics: Your Guide to LGBT Comics 2007 edition is out, and it looks beautiful! It’s a square-bound, 144 page book, with plenty of full-color pages, and includes comics from me, Paige Braddock, Joe Phillips, Leanne Franson, Ellen Forney, and others, as well as interviews, reviews, humor, etc. You can pick it up soon on the PRISM website, or ask your neighborhood comic book store to order some.

PRISM has been publishing a Guide virtually every year since their inception, as well as the occasional Unsafe For All Ages (their adults-only book), and I've had pieces in all of them. They're a wonderful organization promoting queer comics, creators, and fans, and I really enjoy contributing to their publications and helping support their cause.

PERSONA NON GRATA

PERSONA NON GRATA

In a couple of months I’ll have the full version of the Cambodian Comics article printed in the German magazine PNG (Persona Non Grata). I’ve been a regular contributor to PNG for the last several issues, with comics and some prose, all lifted from my True Travel Tales series. The magazine is mostly about indy music, and is all in German except for my pieces. I think it’s an excellent publication… though of course I don’t read German and have no idea what they’re writing about…

I met Joerg, one of the guys running PNG, on a trip to Indonesia last year. We wound up on a harrowing motorcycle trip together on Flores, an intensely beautiful, Catholic island out past Bali on the Nusa Tegara chain. After that, we hired a fishing boat with a few others to take a trip out to see the komodo dragons for a few days, and by the end were good friends. I was even able to visit him and his girlfriend Antjie over in Tokyo (where they’ve been living for the last couple of years) last week. He’s intent on publishing a European collected edition of True Travel Tales, which I’m really excited about.

Oh, and speaking of European publications, my character Glamazonia: The Uncanny Super Tranny made a surprise appearance in the French lesbian magazine La Dixieme Muse. I warned them that Glams was really into men, and not even a real girl, but they didn’t seem to care. C’est un peu bizarre, mais c’est la vie...

PUNK PLANET

PUNK PLANET

Punk Planet #78, which features my article “Cambodian comics: Fading Stories,” is out on the shelves and for sale on their website. I’m pretty happy with the article, though they forgot to put in my references and “thank you”s… ah well. The article will also be up soon on ZineWiki, the Wikipedia site for independent publications.

TOILET SEAT LOVE!

TOILET SEAT LOVE!

I finally finished my toilet seat art for Isotope Comics Lounge... They have an amazing gallery of toilet seat covers drawn on by various comics creators, that they've hung along the top of the back wall of the shop. Apparently a soused cartoonist once went to their bathroom and drew all over the seat during a party, so James Simes (the owner of Isotope) promptly hung the thing on his wall, thus starting one of the world's strangest cartoon art traditions. I felt so honored to be given my own toilet seat cover! The image I drew is of 80's porn star Jon King... and the flowers were to make it more kid-friendly. I'm always thinking about the children, after all...

Isotope is really one of the best things about San Francisco, and I always send anyone who comes from out of town over there. It's a unique comic shop experience, with friendly, knowledgeable people, a beautifully designed space with couches to lounge upon and plenty of comics to read, and some of the best comics parties and events ever (if you enjoy watching cartoonists get shitfaced, and who doesn't?).