ACCION MUTANTE

Here is the poster I did for  this week's screening of ACCION MUTANTE at the Trylon micro cinema.
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secret of the ooze

Awhile back I noticed a proclivity amongst the cartoonists of the APE,MOCCA,SPX,TCAF convention circuit to always be drawing gloppy slime monsters. these days I think it can be a little tiresome, I am conscious of it so I try and draw it less. In college I had a character I'd make mini comics about called Jelliot Plopson who was entirely made of slime. I think somewhere I have a 16 page of a story with him that I never bothered to print. I don't think cartoonists who draw slime are all doing it to be cool or bite down on some slop n' glop based trend. but I have to admit it just kind of happens. I'm not sure exactly why. when I pick up a pen or a brush and follow my natural impulses, I feel inclined to draw sloppy blob creatures. My only guess is it's generational. when I was a kid in the 80's, slime was a very popular toy and one my own personal favorites. You'd find that stuff everywhere. often in the entrances to grocery stores in those little eggs you get out of gumball machines. Also there was higher priced slime available too, officially licensed as part of the Ninja Turtles/Ghostbusters/He-man toy lines. There is something satisfying about letting that stuff drip on your hands and glop onto your toys.
Slime was even the official mascot of Nickelodeon! There was however a sinister side to slime. the 1980's remake of the blob is one of only three movies ever to give me reoccurring nightmares. one of the other movies to have that effect on me was Creepshow 2, specifically it's own blob based lake monster segment. As a kid I was the type who, whenever possible, spent my time under water. It was an easy thing to do growing up in the lake ridden cities of Richfield and Minneapolis.
I remember late in the summers occasionally finding weird golf ball sized orbs of green translucent slime floating in the water. The consistency of it was about that of tapioca. I didn't and still don't know what they were. I think I had been told conflicting explanations that it was seeds from lake weeds but also that it was the shells of fish eggs.
one day when I a friend and I were swimming through Richfield lake after it had flooded, and we saw that stuff floating everywhere. as we swam though the lake it was like swimming though a giant bubble tea, the globs were everywhere and in various sizes, some as large as oranges.
we had to scrape it off our skin and comb it out of our hair when we got out of the water.

sketchbook drill core sample

so this post is about my sketch books. a few years back I worked for this paper company. the place is basically a giant warehouse filled with paper and paper products. it made me want to draw all the time. during slow the moments as well as very busy times when I should have been diligently working, I would slack off and draw.
but I couldn't keep a regular sketch book in my pocket, not even one of these kind of small little ones. it was too bulky. and why would I?
I was surrounded by all these different types and colors of paper.
so I made these little 16 page pocket sketch books out of whatever materials were around, often decorating them with whatever samples of sticker stock were also laying around work.
I kept one in my pocket at all times and when I finished one I'd make another. I still like and have kept doing this with paper I find. it's fun for me to make books and to switch things up and draw on florescent pink paper once in awhile.
I wouldn't want to have to do that for 120 pages. Moleskine are nice and I love them but I could never exclusively use those. these days I wouldn't want to draw on only white paper for that many pages either.
however, it might be kind of pointless to talk about paper color when the samples I am showing today actually were all drawn on white.
I feel like there is something that lets me be more free and less precious with a folded and stapled mini sketch book. anyways, here is a drill core sample of my sketch book glacier. these are from winter 2007. there is definitely a running theme of vomit, but then again I've kind of had a lifetime love of drawing vomit. I believe we have here is possibly one of the first ever drawings of my character in the Intrepideers, Grimace Grimezone, as well as another one of my dungeons and dragons characters; Ganglion the Grim.

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disection of a photocopier

so on one very cold winter one night in 2009 I was leaving the Crescent Moon bakery on central ave with my very good friend Patty. we had Just eaten dinner. crescent Moon, as you might know, serves one of the greatest and strangest pizzas I have ever eaten. perhaps my mind was addled by the pizza, but while walking to the car I was struck by an unparalleled vision of beauty. it was a old discarded PHOTOCOPIER! specifically the old 80's type that used to have multiple toner cartridges in it. it allowed it's user to make xeroxes in yellow and brown and red and all kinds of colors. devices such as these are very rare today. when I saw it I thought had found my ticket to comic book printing easy street. of course it's power cord had been hacked off. my optimism got the best of me. I imagined a scenario where some office worker was casually playing with a weed whacker, or perhaps electric hedge trimmers in the office and accidentally chopped off the power cord.

"great job dilbert you've ruined an otherwise perfectly working vintage photo copier with your careless clowning antics! now come help me get this thing down to the street"

I figured that with a little soldering iron and electricians tape I could have this thing up and running.
anyways my optimism must have gotten the better of Patty too because I somehow convinced her we should drag this thing back to the printing studio which was located 6 blocks away. since this monstrosity was to heavy to lift I told her to take the car and meet me at me studio, and that I would simply push and drag it the rest of the way. eventually with much struggle we got the thing into the space and I felt triumphant. visions of two and perhaps three tone mini comics were dancing in my head. I was sure that this weapon would be the perfect addition to my arsenal in my unending personal comics based war.

cut to roughly a year later. and the thing just doesn't work, the ambition I felt the previous night was completely gone by the next day. the copier sat for months without me making any real effort to repair it. at one point I taped an old power cord onto the frayed wires and tried to turn it on. one light turned on but the thing didn't even make mechanical sounds or anything. eventually the people I share the printing space said it was time to get rid of it. so I rolled up my sleeves and got the big lug into my truck and we were on our way to the county hazardous materials disposal site.

when I got there I was informed that photo copiers are an item they will not accept. they referred me to a center that charges 35 cents a pound for materials like this. my estimate is this copier weighs at least 300 lbs, perhaps even 500. that's a lot of weight and cash I don't have. apparently the only solution I came up with was to dismantle it myself, hack it into to smaller portions, double bag it in heavy duty yard waste bags and throw it away in the trash. basically the same method one would employ to dispose of an unwanted body.
you, dear reader mist be thinking:

"thats crazy AND stupid"

I could have just dumped it by the side of the road near a college and some students would have taken it. I could have made a craigslist posting for it and some sucker like myself would have taken it.
this copier must have some time wasting psychic power over me. how else would it have convinced me to take it with me in the first place? I grabbed my screwdriver, my crowbar and my hack saw. I turned the radio to LOVE 105 and tuned my mind on to destructive cyclone setting. in about 3 hours I was much covered with toxic black toner dust (don't worry too much I was outside and wearing a dust mask) had the thing reduced to neatly bagged rubble. perhaps if this whole comic book thing doesn't work out I can relocate to one of those towns in china that are just huge electronic garbage dumps. where people of all ages hack away at computers and VCRs to get the platinum and gold and other reusable metals out of the circuit boards. all the while breathing heaping lung fulls of toxins till their internal organs are composed of more heavy metal than human flesh.
it makes me wonder if there are also towns were people dig through the corpses of the people who work and die in the hazmat towns. if some little kid is somewhere is straining the liver and lungs that used to belong to a hazmat worker in order to get the reuseable platinum fibers and gold dust and coltan particles. which in turn leaves me wondering if my cell phone or my laptop currently contains any materials that were harvested from a human body? I guess this is a large digression.

But back to my copier, at one point while removing whatever thing the toner cartridge connects to I found this child's toy wedged deep into the innards of the machine. guess now I know what broke it.

and I guess that's the end of this tale, I don't know what the point is. perhaps it's a cautionary tale, beware of dreams that include interchangeable color toner cartridges. I've been around this town long enough to know where all the desolate industrial areas are where all the unsupervised hazmat dumpsters are. so I loaded up my ride drove into the sunset and made the rounds.

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Drifting classroom poster

so lately I have involved in this project where myself and my good friends at Trash Film Debauchery (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2201031206) show movies once a month at this very small but extremely awesome Minneapolis theater called the Trylon Micro cinema.(http://take-up.org/)
the last 3 movies we've done have been a part of a series of rare disturbing movies for children. I have been producing a limited run of silk screen posters to give away at the screenings. this is the one I made for the Japanese movie The Drifting Class Room.
(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0125201/)
I didn't actually get to make a proper scan of the poster when it was done and now I don't have any left. I think the poster turned out nice. one thing is missing on the top there should be something saying Jan 27th at the Trylon Micro Cinema. that was something I forgot when designing the poster and had to be added in at the last minute when I printed it.

ok ok, so I've agreed to bring my blog back to life.

so this evening I sat around saying I wasn't interested having a blog, or a website. or giving people any opportunities to view my work. but I guess I must have decided that that was a bogus proclamation.
it's just that in this past decade my relationship with the internet, marketing, self promotion,making money on the internet, and the concept of having a website has been pretty unfulfilling. mostly just 2 large steaming piles of apathy on both sides of the monitor.
well maybe it's time to turn my oppositional defiant disorder on myself. should I give this fad called an "having an ambitious internet presence" just one more chance?

I've decided to bring this little dried up crusted old neglected blog back from the dead. who knows? maybe this will be a good restarting point. we might even see a return of my website. when I do perhaps we can have a little gathering, a custom that we in the later days of the 20th century called "website launch parties". complete with the traditional free stickers and t-shirts no one wants.

back in 2000 I was a part of the internet scam biz and we had ugly t shirts no one wanted and that seemed important to the process.
did any of you ever see undocumented kitchen workers and homeless people in Minneapolis wearing t-shirts that said: www.platinumpersonals.com on the front. and the phrase "WHAT YOU WANT, WHAT YOU NEED" on the back?

I was a part of that.

anyways, watch out internet, I'm back to add more content you never asked for to begin with.

any tips, or offers of advice will be gladly received. but do know that as I read them I will be squinting my eyes smugly smiling and slowly shaking my head in disbelief and disapproval.