Thursday March 29, 2007 -- 11:18 p.m.

It's official. I am now actually listed on the SPX web site on the list of exhibitors. You can check it out right here, just scroll down through the alphabetically arranged list and you will see "Kish, Matt." SPX, which stands for Small Press Expo, will be taking place in Bethesda, Maryland on Friday, October 12th and Saturday, October 13th of this year. I will be sharing a table with the talented Ms. Stephanie W. of Ruffled Bird Productions. How do I feel about this, you ask? Nervous as hell. Well, not nervous about having to share a table with Stephanie. She is awesome and super nice and a whole lot of fun to hang around with, plus way supportive of me and my work and probably also a bit nervous herself. No, I am sick to death with nerves over actually showing my own art and comics at SPX, which is arguably one of the biggest hugest most importantest small press and independent comics shows in the country, ranking right up there with New York City's MoCCA Art Festival in June and San Francisco's APE (Alternative Press Expo) which takes place in April. So far, the only show I've ever exhibited at has been Columbus, Ohio's own SPACE (Small Press and Alternative Comics Expo) in 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006. Those were some really wonderful experiences and I had an enormous amount of fun every year. Bob Corby, the man behind SPACE, pretty much handles every aspect of the show on his own and with the assistance of a small army of volunteers who donate their time, skills and services to help the con get off the ground every year. Bob and the volunteers do it all for absolutely no money and total love for small press comics in general. It's staggering what they've been able to accomplish every year, and the show just keeps getting bigger and bigger.

But for me, exhibiting at SPACE was a pretty easy and stress free affair. Until last year, when Rudy and I moved to the Dayton area, the show was pretty much right in my back yard. There were no worries about travel or lodging. All I had to do was wake up, eat some breakfast, throw my boxes of comics in the car, and drive 15 minutes out to wherever it was being held. Even better, a whole bunch of my friends were also exhibiting at the show, so I could spend nearly the whole day talking to Johnny Ampersand and Alice (whose table was always next to mine), Sean McKeever, the whole PANEL collective and even good old Gib and the Ogre crew. Plus friends who didn't actually make comics but did read them would come out and inevitably swing by my table to spend some time chatting. Through SPACE I even ended up making some great new comics friends, like Dougie Ray Meyer (who is like the West Virginia- based equivalent of madman Bwana Spoons) and the ridiculously talented Justin Madson from Wisconsin. My memories of SPACE are nothing but good, and since I almost always sold out of the comics I brought and made money over and above my table costs, I really enjoyed every bit of it and the nerves wore off almost entirely after that first year.

This year, in a very wise move, Bob Corby has made SPACE a 2 day show instead of a Saturday-only affair. This was smart because it encourages more out of town and out of state talent to exhibit at the show since now there will actually be a justification for a hotel stay and of course more of an opportunity to sell books. For me, though, in a strange twist, the move to a 2 day show was a bit of a liability. Since I now live a little over an hour away, if I had wanted to exhibit at SPACE I would have to either drive early and late on both Saturday and Sunday or stay overnight in someone else's home or the World's Most Uncomfortable Bed back in our old home. Additionally, even though the shows were always a blast, they were a little exhausting even on only one day, so the idea of spending the entire weekend sitting at a con table, selling comics, talking to all kinds of people, and staying up late to hang out with friends seemed too daunting. Rudy and I work pretty long and hard during the week, so we've come to cherish some of the down-time we can enjoy on the weekends and we didn't want to lose that, even for this one single weekend. So I reluctantly made the decision to shift my ambitions to the much scarier SPX and see how "Spudd 64" will do there. And now that I see it's official, I am hyperventilating with fear.

One of the things that is so intimidating about SPX is the level of talent that will be there. Creators whose art and comics are so incredible to me that I would probably be speechless in their presence might be sitting right next to me. Seriously, take a look at some of the people on that exhibitor list. One of my heroes, Shawn Cheng of Partyka and the awesome On The Road Of Knives... will be there. Fuckin' Roger Langridge will be there! If you haven't read his "Fred the Clown" you are seriously missing out. Dan Nadel of PictureBox Inc. will be there. Joel Priddy will be there. Even Brian Chippendale will be there! And that is just the tiniest handful of exhibitors. So I'm kind of stressed and nervous and really want to make sure that what I bring with me and put on my table for sale is good stuff that can at least not look like trash next to theirs. Luckily I have all spring and summer to not freak out.

In other news, the MySpace thing seems to be going better than expected. True, I did get some spam-type friend requests, but I did end up with 3 requests from people I had never met but actually seemed like real live people who shared some of my interests, so that was nice. One even directly mentioned seeing my site, so it's always cool when you correspond with someone like that. Best of all, I found out that more of my real actual friends than I would have ever imagined were actually on MySpace so I was able to get a whole bunch of friends that were really, well, friends. So we'll see how it goes. I think now I need to start putting some stuff up on that page that might get some of the viewers to come back to this site. All in good time.

In other stuff, somehow (I can't remember how or where and I wish I could) I recently came across the art of Daria Tessler, which you can see for yourself on her site animalsleepstories. The site is really beautifully designed, all full of collage and cut-n-paste marvelry. I'm really a bit envious at what she's managed to put together, and am a bit baffled at all the mysterious roll-over presto changeo type goodness. I exchanged a few brief emails with her and she was really incredibly gracious and nice and interesting which is also always a pleasant surprise. I guess I've gotten so many brush-offs or one word e-mail responses (something like "Thanks" when I send a compliment or order a print) that I am still always surprised when an artist takes the time to write a real and thought-out response. Her art and prints seem to combine the best of classic children's picture book illustrations with a marvelous sense of dread, wonder, and fancy. And best of all, these prints, in spite of their almost lace-like linework, are all silkscreened, not computer generated giclees. She even mixes the media, occasionally using spraypaint to enhance the images. Below are two of my favorites, the first of which is 9" by 12" and titled "Sleeping By The Factory"...



And the second, which measures 5.5" by 7" and is delightfully titled "Strange Lillies"...



When I was young, I spent seemingly endless hours looking at picture books. And since I am a 37-year-old man, most of these picture books I was fortunate enough to spend my youth with had been published in the 60s and early 70s. Most of them were full of dragons and spaceships and goblins and aliens and swords and forests and candles and beast people and weird machines and delightful evil as well as terrible beauty. There was definitely a different aesthetic then, and a different level of craft applied to illustration. Daria Tessler's work does more than simply remind me of those illustrations, it actually makes me feel the way I did when I was young and would open a picture book for the first time knowing that I was about to spend hours on a strange and wonderful visual journey through a fantastic place. I haven't been this smitten with an artist's work in quite some time. I don't want to seem like I am unfairly using any of her images of taking any attention away from her, so please visit her site and take a look around. She's got quite a few really wonderful prints for sale, a few small books, some stationery, some wearables, and even a mix CD exchange thing going on. Trust me, it will be well worth your time, only maybe don't do it while you're at work or you'll get all caught up in daydreaming and forget to finish those reports and then your boss will come holler at you and you'll get some disciplinary action. animalsleepstories are best on a lazy sunny afternoon when you can just stare and stare and not worry about the clock.
Matt K.

Friday March 23, 2007 -- 5:44 p.m.

Well, I finally did it. Against every shred of my better judgment, and almost directly because of the urging and urging and urging of one Aaron M. Fitzwater, I have created a MySpace page for myself. To be honest, this will be my second attempt. I had a profile on MySpace about 2 years ago but I very rarely logged on and paid very little attention to the site. I very quickly grew really disillusioned with the fact that some people I actually knew and had spent time with somehow seemed to have 718 friends while it was painfully obvious that they had never even met the vast majority of them. Soon after, I started getting quite a few friend requests from very stereotypically attractive and very overtly available girls who, magically, had "just moved" to my geographical area after they had finished school and were giving the "modeling thing" a try for a while. And even better, sometimes they had even set up a web cam! Awesome! How could I possibly turn down a friendship request from them? On top of that, it seemed like every single band, movie, corporation and brand also had a page with thousands of friends and they wanted me to join the fun. In truth, it really was little more than an online popularity contest and marketing push, sort of the like bastard child of AmIHotOrNot.com and MTV's TRL. So I yanked my profile and enjoyed many months of internet peace and tranquility.

While I had my profile on MySpace, one of my 18 "friends" was the abovementioned Aaron M. Fitzwater, and we would periodically leave comments on one another's profile. I didn't at all feel strange about adding him to that friends tally since we worked together for quite some time, and saw or spoke to one another regularly. He was the first to ask why I took my profile down, and the first to keep encouraging me to put it back, even if just to draw interest to my art, comics, and my own web site. I'm still not sure if he's got me convinced that it's not a total waste of time and a lot of internet wankery, but I decided to put it back and be an attention whore. So please, I'm begging you all, if you're not a hot girl with a web cam who just moved to my area, and you're not some incredibly lame-ass whiney alterna-shit band that'll let me download your two crap mp3s for free if I get hyped about your upcoming CD, please be my friend! All you need to do is go to my profile page at www.myspace.com/spudd64 and add me as a friend. I promise that even if I don't know you or maybe never met you, if your profile is legit I'll add you. Please don't let me end up like one of those losers that only has 6 friends that he actually knows! I want triple digits too.

Alright, enough of that. In all seriousness, I hope that a presence on MySpace does draw a few more people to this site and gets my art and comics out to a few more eyes. If it does that, then it will have been worth my time.

In more interesting news, I wanted to share a few things about artist Renee French. She's done some really marvelously sickening work, especially "The 9th Gland" which I first read in her now out of print and hard to find but well worth tracking down collection Marbles In My Underpants. More recently, she has illustrated some children's books and put out a full length graphic novel called The Ticking which is the tale of a monstrously deformed little boy named Edison Steelhead and how he finds acceptance and even love. It's available from Top Shelf as a beautiful cloth bound hardcover with gold gilt trim and cover elements. Astoundingly enough, Newsarama actually ran a semi-decent interview with Renee right here and she spent some time discussing her next collection. It's called Micrographica and it's a print collection of her unusual online strip of the same name, which you can and should check out here. The strip concerns 3 rat-things that really enjoy playing with feces, a hulking lummox with itchy nipples named Nubbins, a dead body, and more. The print version will collect every strip that ran online as well as additional story material, new drawings, and more art. It too is being published by Top Shelf and should be out in April.

The interview contained tantalizing hints of even more exciting projects from Renee though. Near the end, she mentions an as yet untitled upcoming book from Sparkplug which she says will contain "drawings of little girls and rabbits with various prosthetics and orthodontics and physical deformities" which should be out by late summer. Some diligent online searching turned up the image below, which is one of many nauseatingly wonderful drawings that this book will contain...



Even better, in a plug that really got my heart racing, she mentioned a project called "Towcester Lodge," which will be yet another collection of her drawings and photographs and will be designed and published by the milky geniuses at my favorite publisher and yours, PictureBox Inc. A brief Google search turned up a simple but exciting site devoted to "Towcester Lodge" ("where your mind meets the back of your face") which you can check out here. Nothing much there yet other than a drawing, but it seems that there is a Flickr set showing what could be more of the art and some of the photographs that will be included in "Towcester Lodge." I've said it before and I'll say it again...PictureBox just cannot be stopped.

That's all for now. I will post again briefly tomorrow, although Rudy and I will be hanging out with our good friends Fre and Caro for a bit, and maybe eating some sushi too (it's been a really long time), so it should be a pleasantly busy weekend with much warmer (although much wetter too) weather. Nice!

Matt K.

Thursday March 22, 2007 -- 5:52 p.m.

A few years ago, while the Wexner Center Gallery Space was closed for remodeling and all of their exhibits were off site, Rudy and I were invited by several of our friends to attend the opening of a new touring exhibit. While I can't remember the exact wording, the name of the exhibit was something along the lines of "Biff! Bang! Pow!" followed by a phrase that said something about the intersection of fine art and comic book art. The "Biff! Bang! Pow!" thing was certainly very tired, and about as clever and perceptive as the endlessly recycled headlines shrieking the fact that "Comics Aren't Just For Kids Anymore!" which have been annoying nearly everyone ever since Alan Moore's Watchmen and Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns appeared way back in 1986. For all I know, those headlines may have been around long before that and I was just too young to know or care. But I digress.

Rudi and I attended the opening and met our friends there, including some members of the PANEL collective that I seem to be referring to a lot these days. The exhibit itself was really quite fascinating, at least to Rudy and I. There were an astonishingly wide variety of art and artists represented, including Mel Ramos, Raymond Pettibon, Yoshitomo Nara, outsider artist Henry Darger, Kenny Scharf, Ida Applebroog, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Sigmar Polke and David Shrigley, all artists whose work I had seen and was relatively familiar with. However, the exhibit was especially memorable for me since it was the first time I saw the work of Trenton Doyle Hancock, Inka Essenhigh and Julie Mehretu. Trenton Doyle Hancock has since been the subject of an absolutely fascinating and truly beautifully designed monograph by PictureBox Inc. titled Me A Mound which collects lots of large full color reproductions of many of the paintings, drawings and etchings that illuminate his bizarre and enormously funny personal mythology. I can't recommend his work, and this book, highly enough. You may have heard or read the phrase "book as object" which refers to the idea that a book need not simply be a method of binding pages but can also be a work of art in and of itself, challenging the conception of what the box truly is. Me A Mound exemplifies this notion in a remarkably affordable and available way. There is also a slender but very lushly illustrated monograph collection of Inka Essenhigh's curiously sinister and fluidly biological paintings available from most online book retailers. Julie Mehretu, however, was another story.

What I remember most about that opening, and the Julie Mehretu painting that was part of it, is the outcry it caused with so many of my friends in PANEL. But first, perhaps a bit of information about the painter might be in order. I know very little about her, and her work is still very new to me, so I will confess that much of what follows was culled from a few biographies I found online as well as a short Wikipedia entry. Julie Mehretu was born in Ethiopia in 1970 and spent much of her life in Michigan, although she spent time in several different countries. In her painting, she has created an elaborate personal language of signs and symbols, largely drawn from the imagery present in architecture, maps, planning diagrams, public signage, and urban space. Her paintings tend to be very large works, dense with linework, color, and space, and in some ways they represent an attempt to negotiate concepts of both public and fictional spaces, identity, culture, ethnicity, colonialism, and globalism. I am certainly not well-versed enough in painting or fine art to be able to intelligently elaborate much beyond that. However the painting that Rudi and I saw was really very powerful, compelling, and visually fascinating. It was one of the most challenging works in the show, and something that we were both immediately drawn to. The title was "Looking Back to a Bright New Future" and I was able to find an image of it online. It's obviously much smaller than the original painting, so a great deal of the detail and color is lost, but this will at least give you an idea what her work looks like.



As we reached the end of the exhibition space, we came across our PANEL friends who were discussing their impressions of the art with one another. Rudy and I joined the group and while overall most of the PANEL enjoyed the show immensely and found a lot of inspiration from what they saw, there were some pieces that really seemed to trouble them. The work of Sigmar Polke rankled one or two of them quite a bit because of his Benday dots in the painting. The contention seemed to be that simply using common comic strip tropes in a painting does not inherently indicate that the painting hews close to comics or illustrative art. But Sigmar Polke was only the beginning. For some reason, Julie Mehretu's pieces, the one that Rudy and I liked so much, seemed to outrage several of the PANEL guys. A few other good friends who attended the show with us also lashed out at hers in particular, calling it pompous, pretentious, and infuriatingly meaningless. It seemed like the "legitimacy" afforded that piece by its inclusion in the show was more than they could bear, and they were really strangely critical and angry. Neither Rudy nor I said much other than to mention that we liked it, but sometimes I feel like since neither of us has a fine arts degree and many of our friends do, our opinions are judged as a little less informed and valid than theirs. I have just never forgotten their reaction to her work, or the venom that some of them directed at her. It was strange to me then, and strange to me now. I suppose that provoking such visceral and emotional reactions with her paintings might even please Julie Mehretu, but at that time I guess I was a little naive and perhaps too polite because I was just pretty stunned. I think the hardest part of that night was the subsequent internal searching and questioning that I did. I mean, I really liked that painting, but everyone else seemed to actively loathe it and have what seemed to be pretty valid critiques of it. Was I simply an idiot? Or utterly ignorant about painting and fine art? You don't know how many times I have asked myself why so many people seem to hate or ridicule things that I really enjoy. Rather than getting arrogant and simply thinking that they are all lowbrow morons, it almost always really bothers me, depresses me and makes me doubt myself and my own tastes, in spite of the fact that some of my good friends would probably contend that I am pretentious and a snob.

Rudy and I spent some time after the show trying to find more information about Julie Mehretu, but it was difficult. A small monograph had been published, probably as an accompaniment to some other gallery show, but it was out of print and prohibitively expensive. Perhaps since she was a younger artist and her popularity was growing, there were quite a few articles about her in several art periodicals, but they too were difficult to find outside of an academic library and what we were really looking for was a good visual document of her work.

Finally, after a wait of a few years, publisher Hatje Cantz has put out a massive 208 page hardcover monograph called Julie Mehretu : Black City and it looks amazing. Rudy and I were able to flip through an open copy at the Wexner Center Book Store and were really astounded. Additionally, in November, Rizzoli will be publishing an additional 176 page hardcover titled Julie Mehretu : The Drawings which sounds very intriguing as well. Our copy of Julie Mehretu : Black City is on the way to our door even now, and we are quite excited to spend some more time with her work. I'll write more of my thoughts when the book arrives and I've had some time to reflect on it.

So yeah, this whole post was just to talk about a new art book by an artist that we really like. Maybe you'll like it too?

Matt K.

Tuesday March 20, 2007 -- 6:43 p.m.

A few more amazing things to share with you...

So, last Saturday, when I was reading through Aquarius Records' always awesome bi-weekly new arrivals list (which you really should check out sometime because they have wonderfully descriptive and immensely clever write-ups of pretty much everything they stock, plus nice long clips of lots of tracks that you can listen to before you buy) and I came across a small art book they were selling called Apenest, only this was volume 1. Their write up, in part, read...

The latest ass kicker is the strangely titled Apenest. A 100+ page perfect bound tome, featuring 23 artists from the North East United States... Not a single artist we had heard of, but almost all of them amazing. The art is all over the map, from photos, to pencil drawings, collages, elaborate oil paintings, bizarre squiggles, abstract, lifelike, pretty, ugly, all fantastic.

The concept behind the book is pretty remarkable as well. It's incredibly difficult for artists to have a book of their work published, so for Apenest, each artist contributed an original piece of artwork, which were all assembled into a single portfolio and sold to a private collector. The money was then used to pay for the book. Simple. And now we all get to see some totally kick ass, and off the beaten path art.

Some of our favorites: James Quigley's grotesque cartoon monster drawings, Cody Hoyt's gorgeous and scary snake/rainbow/skull assemblages, Brandon Nastanski's mysterious numbered and patterned figures, Anabel Vasquez's super abstract color drenched photos, we could go on and on. Gorgeously laid out, and lovingly assembled, bits of text interspersed with the artwork, almost all of which is totally great. And so cheap! You spend so much time catering to the whims of your ears, it's high time your eyes got some serious love! Essential.

Well, I was intrigued. So before deciding on whether or not to order, I did some searching to see if I could find a web site or something for these Apenest people. Sure enough they had an online presence with a few more tantalizing glimpses of the book and the art contained within. And for only $25.00, or a measly $10.00 over the cost of the regular old edition, they were selling a super deluxe edition of the book, which comes with some kind of DVD of short films, a silkscreen poster, an offset print poster, a t-shirt, a silkscreened bandanna (fucking awesome) and a passel of stickers. The kicker, though, is that the art is really pretty damn amazing, especially that super-fly Cody Hoyt cover. Check out the goods...



It is always so amazing and wonderful and empowering to see other artists finding ways to bust their asses and put out absolutely amazing art, music, comics, films and other endeavors. I get so weary of the tyranny of the Oprah Book Club and the Billboard Top 200 Albums, so finding little oases like Apenest truly help me feel a bit more alive and hopeful.

But it gets even better from there.

One of the things I often do when I discover a new artist or a new publisher or a new project online is check out their links, figuring that if I liked what they were doing, I will probably like what I see on the artists they link to. Apenest had a "friend" called the Melted Mailbox Record Club! Seriously! WTF? How could I not check that out? So one click to some crazy colored pencil drawing of a bearded cowboy and a hamburger eating bear (try it, you'll see) and I stumbled on what could well be the most incredible and ambitious musical project of the 21st century. Simply put, the Melted Mailbox Record Club has created a 700 edition subscription-only collection of experimental electronic psychedelic music in the most amazing packaging I have ever seen. There are seven 12" LP releases on colored vinyl, music on one side, some kind of etching on the reverse (blank) side of the disc. The performers are out of this world. Sunroof!, Dino Felipe, Arrington De Dionyso, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Ariel Pink, Carlos Giffoni and the enigmatically named OOO round out the first series. Amazing. All seven LPs come in a handmade box with stickers (everyone makes stickers nowadays, I really have to make some Spudd stickers or something), a series of postcards by photographer Tim Guillen, a limited edition CD-R called "The Land of Nope," a bunch of pins and buttons, and a mystery slab of art. What do I mean by that? Well, further investigation of the Melted Mailbox site turned up this interesting nugget. Apparently, anyone and everyone who makes anything at all artistic or visually creative was (and still is) invited to send as many or as few copies as they want of their work. These can be drawings, prints, photos, pins, buttons, fabric art, t-shirts, stickers, cassettes, CD-Rs, DVDs...pretty much anything that can fit in a box without destroying the other contents. This loot is then divided into roughly equal piles and randomly included with each and every subscription to the first series of records. So no matter where you fall on the subscriber list, you are guaranteed to get some fresh and new and amazing creativity along with some ear-melting sounds and some incredible design and packaging. Oh yeah, and check out these seven LP covers crafted by the genius Cody Hoyt. First up is the Dino Felipe LP...



Followed by the Sunroof! LP...



And next is the Arrington De Dionyso cover...



Keith Fullerton Whitman is next...



Here comes Ariel Pink...



Carlos Giffoni's LP...



And finally the mysterious OOO...



And I just stumbled across this all online today. I'm a bit stunned. Music I actually like, in incredibly beautiful and unique packaging, with stickers (heh)...it's just...wow. That turntable can not come fast enough. Seriously. They are asking for submissions of art and stuff for the second series of albums right now, so by all means, anyone out there interested should check out their site and send something in, whether it's just a handful of doodles or a complete series of photographs. I am thinking of perhaps sending along a batch of comics or maybe some copies of "Taproot" but right now I am still just way way too nervous and embarrassed to do that, so maybe later. I don't know. Plus I worry they would say no.

One last item of note. Tom Spurgeon, the Comics Reporter, does this thing every Wednesday where he lists books of note that will be arriving in comics shops that day so I thought I'd do the same. Maybe you'll find something you like. Really though, tomorrow there is only one book of note, but it is so important and so beautiful to gaze at that you simply need to find a copy. Most know Lyonel Feininger (a nice Wikipedia article about him here) from his paintings and his other fine art endeavors, but Mr. Feininger was the creator of the simply sublime early American comic strip called "The Kin-Der-Kids" (another Wikipedia article about that strip here) which has been favorably and justifiably compared to Winsor McCay's colossally influential strip "Little Nemo." At long last, Fantagraphics is reprinting a very affordable oversized softcover collection reprinting the complete comic strip work of this seminal American figure. Titled The Comic Strip Art of Lyonel Feininger it is a slim volume, but worth every penny. Just take a look at this incredible page of art from "The Kin-Der-Kids" telling the tale of how the Jimjam Relief Expedition set out. I left the image large so you could see every gorgeous bit...



What a beautiful beautiful book this will be. If that doesn't get you excited then you're definitely reading the wrong web site.

Matt K.

Monday March 19, 2007 -- 6:49 p.m.

Rudy and I received some exciting news today. We will both be traveling to San Francisco for a few days in late May and early June! She is participating in a conference on race and ethnicity in higher education, and I get to tag along and see the city. There are so many awesome things about this trip. First, we get to go on an airplane. That is always fun. Second, I get to see the Pacific Ocean for the very first time in my entire life. I am strangely thrilled about that. Third, I get to spend lots of time, and surely lots of money, at Aquarius Records, the greatest music store on the entire planet. I mail order from them all the time. Seriously! Like twice a month. They have such incredible music and their customer service is so bizarrely suspiciously great that you won't believe it. I cannot wait to spend some time poking around in their CD bins. Their store is only 2.43 miles from our hotel. I can walk! Awesome! And last, the best thing of all, I will get to see one of my dearest friends in the world, Inky Black! She moved to Cali last summer and I feared I might never see her again. So it will be wonderful to hang out with her and have her show me around her neighborhood for a day or so. Wonderful wonderful wonderful! Let's celebrate with what is sadly the only photo I have of my dear friend Inky...



And this is kind of lamely public, but there are a few people I owe emails to and I promise I will write you in a day or so. This means you Kyle, Fred K. from the DML, Aaron, Chasmos, Inky and my dear old dad. But now, Rudy and I are off to celebrate a bit. There's hard hard work ahead for her, but this is also a great opportunity for her professionally and intellectually, and she is far more excited than nervous. Go Rudy!



Matt K.

Sunday March 18, 2007 -- 11:15 a.m.

In a previous update, I alluded to a comics project that Johnny Ampersand and I were working on. I wanted to share some of the preliminary sketches here, hopefully to whet your appetite a bit. Keep in mind that these sketches are the roughest of the rough. Most of them were drawn over a period of a week, generally at work, occasionally while I was on the telephone, using that meekest of drawing tools, the ballpoint pen, on a yellow legal pad. So yeah, they are really rugged and look kind of crappy. They get the point across though. While I can't say too much more about the project here, I can say that Johnny and I hope to debut it sometime in late April, and that it will involve someone named Hank Ferguson. Yes, Hank Ferguson.

The drawing below was the first one I did. I wanted to create some kind of exploration suit that didn't look anything like a spacesuit. Unfortunately, it ended up looking an awful lot like the drawing of the spacesuit that Spudd 64 wore in his first issue, so Johnny and I ditched this one. I did kind of like the crazy pipes coming out of the back though.



For a bit, I wanted something that looked rather old-fashioned and very simple, so I hammered this out. Ultimately it just looked a little boring, and also looked too much like the suit in the aborted "Spaceman" strip, so we passed on this one as well.



We liked this suit below but decided not to use it for Hank because...hey, wait! This guy looks familiar!



I thought that it might be interesting to have a character functioning in some hostile environment in a completely static suit, something that was solid and didn't really move at all. Almost like a spaceship for the body, maybe with appendages that could move around and function but an overall form that didn't. I roughed this out, but neither Johnny nor I really liked it all that much, especially for something we wanted to do long-term, so this one fit the cutting room floor as well.



There's a lot going on in this sketch, but the actual suit that I ended up liking quite a bit is the most finished sketch in the middle of the page. The one that the name "Hank Ferguson" is pointing to. My thinking for this was that since Johnny and I were initially going to launch this project within a fairly science-fictiony type environment, I wanted something that would contrast a bit with that. Almost an anachronism, I suppose. I started thinking about knights and how they generally wore chain mail or scale mail for protection, and that the oversized mail shirts occasionally draped their thighs almost like skirts. It's harder to tell, but the arms and legs of this one are made up of tiny little fishscale-like crescents. I liked, and kept, the big hands and the boots that looked like sneakers. The glass helmet was a hit too, but both Johnny and I thought the horns (which were added as an homage to my favorite videogame of all time, the wondrous "ICO") were too much. In the end, even though we both felt this design had promise, we went with something else. I'm not sure I would have wanted to draw this a million times anyway since it was very labor intensive.



Casting about in my mind for shapes and images that inspired me, I remembered Jack Kirby's Celestials, which influenced this suit especially in the 6 round shapes on the front. There were some elements of this that Johnny and I liked, but we both felt that the combination of heavy, clunky metal on the top with sturdy fabric pants on the bottom wasn't working. It just didn't feel right for something that would be Hank's only protection in the most hostile environment imaginable.



We liked this one a lot, and we were THIS CLOSE to choosing it as our final design. We felt it was unique enough to be memorable and convey an identity, simple enough to be almost iconic and easy to draw over and over again, and really just kind of cool looking. The one thing it had going against it was that it looked a little too much like the Marvel Comics villain Terminus, a character who I will admit to liking a great deal, especially as a young boy reading John Byrne's great run on "The Fantastic Four" where Terminus first appeared. Here, side by side, are my sketch and an image of Terminus. I am sure you'll be able to tell who is who. The similarity is a bit embarrassing.



Finally, the image Johnny and I settled on. At first, this might not look so unique or even strike you as a particularly interesting drawing. What made this one so attractive to Johnny and I was that we both liked the giant shoes, the simple design, and the re-appearance of the Celestials-inspired disc designs on the chest. Additionally, I have been looking for an opportunity to significantly loosen up my drawings and the rougher more exaggerated feel of this sketch implied all sorts of possibilities for opening up my lines. It seemed to have everything going for it. I present to you the very first image of Hank Ferguson, explorer of the ParaRealities. You'll me seeing much more soon, and you'll be seeing it weekly. Oh, yeah, the head will almost certainly change. That's just a dummy head to take up space.



Matt K.

Friday March 16, 2007 -- 5:15 p.m.

As some of you may know, my birthday is June 4th. Unfortunately I believe that falls on a Monday this year. Suckola. Anyway, for quite some time I've been marinating on the idea of purchasing a turntable and whatever equipment is necessary to connect it to my computer and transfer vinyl LPs to digital mp3 files. I think that will be my birthday wish. I've found some information on how to do this online, so I feel pretty comfortable with where I stand, but if anyone out there has any guidance or experience with turntables, reliable models or manufacturers, price ranges, and recommendations for equipment and software I would certainly appreciate it immensely. Please send me an email and I will be eternally grateful.

Part of the incentive for this was the recent fan-supported re-issue of the soundtrack to Rene Laloux's amazing 1973 animated film "La Planete Sauvage," which was released English as "Fantastic Planet." Here's an image of the cover of the now very difficult to find US DVD release...



I remember seeing this on cable television way way back in the early 1980s and it really made a deep impression on me. There is a pretty informative Wikipedia article on the film here that is well worth reading. The film is certainly worth watching as well, although copies can be pretty elusive. Anyway, what I am getting at is that the soundtrack was suitably strange, and notoriously difficult to find but recently the greatest music store in the world, San Francisco's own Aquarius Records, scared up some fan-pressed copies in very limited quantities. I missed out on it the first time, but just a few weeks after that batch sold out they got a few more copies and I was lucky enough to snag one. Once it arrived, that kind of sealed it for me. I knew I needed to invest in a good turntable, and sooner rather than later.

After I made that decision, I started paying closer attention to some of the record label sites and music sites I visit, and I was simply stunned at how much incredible music there was out there, much of it available on vinyl only. I really admire the band Tarentel and most of their releases have been great swathes of warm drone and swirling sound. Recently and somewhat unexpectedly, Tarentel released, on vinyl only, a 4 LP set called "Ghetto Beats on the Surface of the Sun" and from the bits I've heard online it is incredible. Beats are the last thing one would expect from a group like Tarentel but each of the four LPs in "Ghetto Beats from the Surface of the Sun" is constructed on a framework of dense and complex beats, sometimes sludgy and doomy, sometimes paranoid and skittery, sometimes rhythmic and almost dance-oriented. I believe Tarentel only pressed 1000 copies of each of the four volumes of "Ghetto Beats" and they are currently available through Music Fellowship for $12.00 per LP. It's going to be very difficult waiting until June to be able to finally listen to the entirety of these.

And as if that wasn't enough, Japanese post-rockers MONO (who are coming to play at Columbus' own Little Brothers on April 17th) released a LP-only set of remixes of their 2002 album "One More Step and Then You Die" entitled "New York Stories." They enlisted some pretty amazing talent, from the incredible Loren Mazzacane Connors to Aki Onda to Jackie-O Motherfucker. Since it was only released on vinyl, that is one more reason to get this turntable thing going. I am rather embarrassingly excited about this all.

Matt K.

Thursday March 15, 2007 -- 11:32 p.m.

Awesome. 28 more minutes and I will have made it through the whole of the Ides of March without getting stabbed to death. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

We actually did not end up going to see the RJD2 show at the Wexner Center last Friday evening. Rudy...that's my new code name for my lovely wife and partner who most of you know and maybe have met. It's an old nickname actually, from years back when we both worked for a giant soulless corporate bookstore chain. We are being more discreet now on account of our professional lives and all of that stuff, plus we are both realizing that we are fairly private people and are sometimes uncomfortable with the level of visibility even a tiny little web site like this creates. Anyway, from now on, when you read the name Rudy, you know who I mean. And if not, here is a photo...



...Anyway, Rudy and I got a chance to listen to his new CD "The Third Hand" a little bit early and honestly we just weren't feelin' it. He's transitioned from the more electronic oriented DJ stuff to a decidedly alterna-pop thing, with lots of singer-songwriter stuff and verse-chorus-verse arrangements. It is always an artist's prerogative - well, really priority if you think about - to do what they want to do creatively, regardless of whether or not their longtime fans will "get it" or even like it. But in this case, the new sound kind of left both Rudy and I feeling a little, well, bored. So we opted not to check out the show which, since it also included local Columbus heroes Derek DiCenzo, Sam Brown and Harold "Happy" Chichester as openers and as part of RJD2's band (so weird to type that after the turntable and sampler based shows of the past) we kind of felt like it was going to turn into this big local scene lovefest with a billion other people crowding the spot and basically doing a lot of attempted starfucking. No thanks.

We did end up seeing Under Byen this past Sunday at the Wexner Center and it was quite a show. After a brief but charming opening set by Swedish pianist / singer Frida Hyvonen (who Rudi described as "Tori Lite"), Under Byen methodically walked on stage, sat at their instruments (a rather dizzying array consisting of 2 drum kits, a bank of guitars, a bass guitar, a xylophone, 2 stacks of keyboards, a cello and a violin) and without a word to the audience began their performance in a wash of horror-movie guitar moaning and feedback. Swirling patterns very reminiscent of Marimekko fabrics only in more visceral colors like menstrual-blood red, seaweed green, and ash black bathed the entire stage and all the performers in a quite eerie light and things just marched onward from there. After several bone-rattling songs they reached what seemed to be the depths of their subtly infernal performance and began the long climb back up to the light, with (relatively) sweeter, softer, sadder songs. When it was done, they quietly put down their instruments and walked off stage silently. It was odd, unsettling, impressive and remarkable, and rarely have I enjoyed a show where there were vocals and lyrics (entirely in Danish though) throughout every song. That's saying something. I highly recommend their only American release "Samme Stof Som Stof" which you can probably find at any decent music store, although if you can't then just send me an email and I'll hook you up. Here's a picture of said CD...



I think that you, Inky Black (and you know who you are), would quite like them, as well as Pob-E-Rob-E-Zob.

So I debated this next part of the update for several reasons. First, I had resolved, rather publicly, to keep the "news" part of my web site restricted primarily to art and comics, with perhaps some music and movies thrown in in order to maintain a greater sense of privacy, professionalism and discretion. Also, I felt that at times I was using this site and these updates to communicate with friends and family near and far when I should have actually been talking to them on the telephone, writing them letters and e-mails, and visiting if possible. Only after a short time, several of these very same friends sent me emails or called me asking what was up with the site and the long delays and was I dead, and telling me that they actually missed the somewhat personal peeks into my daily life and my thoughts. So I figured, what the fuck. Change a few names so at least my wife and good friends stay private, and just blog away like everyone else seems to be doing. So here I am again writing a big long post about basically nothing much beyond the music I've been listening to, the concerts I've been to, my job and my mundane day to day details. Hopefully those of you that have been curious will at least realize that I am indeed alive, healthy, happy, and doing fairly well.

The other reason I was somewhat reluctant to share anything beyond comics and art is that it has been a month since I posted anything on this site. I could have simply pretended that no time had passed. Lots of other artists update their sites only once every month or two and it doesn't seem to be an issue then. But I knew that some people would wonder why I had been gone so long, and that by pretending it never existed or ignoring it, it might somehow seem...well, weird I guess. So I suppose it is best to at least address it, although there is really not too much exciting or even interesting behind the long delay.

Really, for the most part, Rudy and I have just been rather busy with our careers and normal personal-life type stuff. We are fortunate in that we work similar Monday through Friday schedules and can share most of every evening together, but we generally don't get home and eat dinner until around 6, and no one can let the laundry and the vacuuming and the dusting pile up for long. Plus we do occasionally have to do a bit of work from home, and we also visit friends in Columbus or Cincinnati as well, which entails an hour drive there and an hour drive back. Mix that all in with making sure there is time to watch some movies, go to bookstores and museums, see a show or two, and put new CDs into the iTunes, and you can see that time very quickly disappears. So really, that's about it. I haven't been doing a whole lot of drawing lately because there has been little time, I am feeling a bit frustrated with my art and comics in general, and when I have free time for some reason all I've really wanted to do lately was hang out with my wife and do stuff with her. The weather is finally getting warmer though, and that always helps so much that you would probably be a bit shocked if you knew the extent of it. I've still got some art gigs lined up for the spring, a secret comics project with my good friend Johnny Ampersand plus a few pages for a good friend from PANEL and the slowly gelling story for issue #5 of "Spudd 64." Mostly though, I have just been a lot more interested in music for the past few months than I have in comics. There are a lot of reasons why, some of which finally came to a head last week. The movie "300" depressed me deeply (more on that in a later update) and this whole ridiculous media blitz regarding the death of Captain America has just really left me feeling very burned out on comics in general. And then I spent some time talking to my friend Fre (yes, that is Fre, sometimes known as Frank Zap, both of which are pseudonyms of course) and he is just doing such really incredibly creative thinking about art, visual space, painting, and even photography that it simultaneously intimidates me, inspires me, and pulls me in a million directions. I hope this will all be sorted out soon because I want and need to do something - ANYTHING - creative. I am just at loose ends right now. Fre says maybe I am on the verge of a breakthrough. I do hope so. Actually, I kind of know so. But I am also relentlessly optimistic. Which has served me well for the last few years, I think.

So there. You're all caught up, more or less. I could tell you stupid things, like that I changed shaving creams, but you don't really want to know that kind of bizarrely personal minutia, right? RIGHT? Geez!

Matt K.