I am just pleased as punch to announce the release of OPT11, which as you might suspect contains all Optimist comics published in the year of Our Lord 2011. It will be premiering at the Maine Comics Arts Festival this weekend, and is available for sale on this site NOW. 52 pages, black and white, glorious looking, five dollars.
<-- Look at the psychotic cover. NEAT!
Oh, the jet-set life of the self-employed! I’ve been keeping busy and hustlin’ to pay off our recent house remodeling project. On the multimedia front, there’s been a bunch of animation work and even some audio/radio work, but I’m not posting any of that because I’m lazy. Instead, here are a few of the freelance print projects I’ve been working on for the last few months. Read more
I was just poking through a folder of already-published Optimist comic art and saw the file for this strip from January. I remembered what a mess the artwork was & how much Photoshop-futzing around I ended up having to do to get it where I wanted it to be. Sometimes I carve up and edit my sloppy pen work so much I wonder why I bother drawing on paper at all. AND SO DOES EVERYONE ELSE. I’ve decided to show you my Photoshop clean-up process via animated GIF to confirm your suspicions that I’m a no-talent slob. Read more
The other night I was messing around with some high-quality scans from the Library Of Congress archive for a freelance project. Zooming in on the 86MB negative scan of Doctor Evermann,U.S.F.C. (circa 1890 to 1910-ish) reveals that the photographer was trying to downplay the doctor’s graying eyebrows and mustache with a few well-placed brushstrokes. Read more
Here’s a nice little profile in that Hampshire Life insert that comes in the Friday Hampshire Gazette. You know the one. I had a very pleasant phone interview/chat with Margot Cleary, who writes the HOMEmade column. We talked about the Hello, Darkness print and them TIMBERRR! critters I’ve been making. Anyway, read it with your eyes.
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JCPenney! Does anyone give a shit? Not sure I do, but I wrote a blog post about ‘em anyway! They’ve retooled, rebranded, spent a lot of ad dollars, and issued a bunch of press releases about how fresh and bold they are now. How’d they make out? THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY: Read more
I was in three gig-playing bands previous to The Demographic: TALLER THAN gOD (early 90s), HAPPY (mid 90s), and then The No-Shadow Kick (1998-2007). I used to make all the gig posters, because making the flyers was more fun than playing the shows. Funny thing was, I never put a whole lot of effort into making them (as you will surely see in the images below). I’m definitely not posting these because I’m proud of them, that’s for sure. I post them as my own little visual record of the non-existent music scene of early ’90s Haverhill, Mass. and the actually-pretty-cool Northampton music scene of the late ’90s/early aughts. Read more
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