Good old Lancaster, PA becomes Big Brotherland. Damn, I thought it was depressing when they put metal detectors in the high school.

(via BoingBoing)

ps. I laughed though, because this reminded me of a great accidental-prank moment in high school. A friend had somehow gotten the job of filming random man-on-the-street interviews for some promotional thing—can’t remember if it was for the school or the town or what. So we were walking around with a video camera and stopping people and asking whatever ditzy question we were supposed to ask. It all went pretty well until we went up to a middle-aged businessman type who hadn’t looked like he was in a hurry, but seemed awfully jumpy. “Hi, would you mind if we asked you a quick question?” “What? What is this for?!” We tried to explain but he just kept looking around in a panic and then took off. We shrugged and turned to move on—at which point we realized we were right in front of the inconspicuous book and novelty item outlet, “Adult Den of Pleasures.”

Thursday 6/25 at 7, the wise & hilarious local cartoonists Joey Alison Sayers and Melanie Lewis will be reading stories for you at Modern Times. I presume that means they'll be reading them out loud and showing you the pictures, but if not, maybe you can at least watch their lips move.

Also listed as "special guests" are Tessa Brunton, Hellen Jo, Calvin Wong and Jason Shiga. Don't know if they're reading stuff too but if so, that just makes this even more of a good thing.

After a long delay, due to a drastic increase in ambition resulting in a successful quest for a Xeric grant, Ed Choy Moorman’s anthology and nonprofit benefit project Ghost Comics now exists! I was one of several non-Minnesota artists that Ed kindly invited to contribute to this, and I’m really happy with the story I did for it (and happy that he didn’t mind me putting it out as a separate minicomic in the meantime).

As with all small-press anthologies, I think everyone will call it “uneven” and be blown away by some stories and hate others, but no one will agree on which ones were good. I think the very diverse assortment works better here than it does for most theme books; I’m not sure why that is. I know there’s a lot of it that I’ll want to revisit. The only thing I’m sure of is that John Hankiewicz and Warren Craghead make me feel kind of inspired and kind of overwhelmed, and Kevin Cannon’s strip made me laugh out loud embarrassingly on a bus.

Here’s a nice review of the book, though I was puzzled by the implication that I have fans.

While B. is trekking through Infinite Jest, I’ve finally picked up Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, which was sitting on my shelf for years. Holy wow, am I glad I did. The pseudo-18th-century language seems like a stumbling block at first, but as long as you don’t worry too much about not knowing some of the historical & nautical references, it reads just as smoothly as Gravity’s Rainbow—so, not really very smoothly, but tons of fun, because he can stuff three philosophical digressions and 33 jokes and 333 weirdly perfect choices of word & image into a few lines. I keep having to put it down every few pages like a strong drink, from surprise.

The unapologetic mix of straight history with bizarre bullshit is also the kind of thing I like. One of my favorite parts so far is where Mason, sick of having to explain to people why they didn’t really “lose” eleven days in the calendar reform of 1750, starts telling them that the government actually hid the 11 days away as a strategic reserve, and secretly colonized those days with an army of strange immigrants from countries where there’s no concept of time so the days will never pass; you never see the colonists because they’re living in the old calendar, except if you think about it, you’ll always remember having seen them 11 days ago. It’s a typical Pynchon effect where you can just go with the flow and just enjoy the goofy riff, and at the same time be creeped out by how people are responding to Mason’s story, and how close this is to the kind of thing people really do fall for. (And also be weirdly moved by the other digression inside that story: that in the culture these people come from, there are three genders: men, women, and the dead.)

I’m learning a few real things too. I’m sorry to say I never knew two of my former hometowns—Lancaster and Millersville, PA—were the sites of an infamous vigilante massacre against the Conestoga tribe. There’s a lot more here.

Covering some of the same years and longitudes, but about as different as can be, there’s a great French comic that’s out in English now: Bourbon Island 1730. I always liked Lewis Trondheim’s art but there’s an extra oomph and life to it here, partly because of how he draws all the trees and bushes and houses (with sort of a Tove Janssonish quality sometimes) and partly because of how really grim Appollo’s script is underneath the light touch. Anyway, read this if you want to read about some pirates.

More than a year ago I made a few cryptic references to “the book illustration project whose name cannot be spoken yet,” and posted some really random-looking excerpts of stuff I’d been doing on spec. I didn’t want to say much because I knew I’d feel bad if the book pitch fell through... which it did, and I did. Still, the drawings were a lot of fun to do, and they still work pretty well just as decoration on the awesome website that the unsold book was based on: Jutta Degener’s Halfbakery.

So I’ve been putting the drawings there, on the pages for the inventions they’re about, and there are links to them on my art blog Error Bar—first batch here, more to follow. When you click on one of the thumbnails, it goes to the full drawing, and the “Back to...” link at the bottom left of that page goes to the text of the invention.

I’m thankful to Jutta for thinking of me for the project (and for giving back the art to do with as I please), and to the crazy funny people who wrote these things. It’d be great if some of this stuff made it into print somehow some day, but that’s life.