What are they saying? Don't ask me

More established cartoonists may take foreign editions in stride, but it is still a novelty for me to see my characters speaking in some language I don’t understand, as they did when both Perspective! and David Chelsea In Love came out in French editions. In my slow, deliberate campaign to cover the globe with my books the latest country to succumb is Japan, where an edition of Perspective! has recently been published. With the French books I was able to do a little second-guessing of the translations (does “parallelepipede” really have the same plain connotations in French as “box” does in English?) but given my utter ignorance of even the Japanese alphabet I will have to take it on faith that my translators know what they are doing. Evidently they are doing something right- according to my latest royalty statement, the Japanese edition is outselling the American version six to one.
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One question I get asked every so often is “When are you going to get back to drawing autobiographical comics like David Chelsea In Love?” For these fans, the long wait is over- I just posted a four panel autobiographical strip on the comics page of this site. I have grown a bit more reticent about revealing the intimate facts of my life than I was in the early 90’s, so I have altered a few minor details- like my age, my appearance, what I do for a living and the fact that I don’t habitually speak in rhyme. Otherwise, the guy is totally me.
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Caricature for Inx

See this week’s Inx drawings here

It is a matter of some regret to me that I never got to do an LP cover; even though I began my illustration career in the late 70s, I was not established enough, or didn’t have the right connections, to get a record gig before the LP format died in the mid-80s, so I never had a chance to strut my stuff on that 12-inch canvas.  Fortunately, I have at least gotten a chance to fill the 12-centimeter cover of the CD a couple of times, thanks to my sister Anny Celsi, who is an independent musician based in L.A. Her latest CD, Tangle-Free World, came out last fall.

(By the way, that business about our spelling our names differently is a long story that I don’t have time to get into right now.)

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Hello, illustration fans. Happy Valentine’s Day, Presidents Day and Chinese New Year. l know it has been many months since my last blog post, but I have an excellent excuse- I was deep in work on my new book Extreme Perspective! Curvilinear And Beyond, trying to make a January deadline (which I only missed by a month) and far too distracted to write anything longer than than a Facebook status update. Well, the long slog is over- not that the book is FINISHED exactly; I still have chapter introductions to write, but the intensive part is past, and am finally able to take my first day off since Thanksgiving. Time to get around to things I’ve neglected, like folding laundry. Maybe I’ll even get a haircut this week, so I won’t look so much like Severus Snape. I promise to return to a more frequent schedule of posts soon- in the meantime here’s another preview panel from the new book:

Among my works, Welcome To The Zone is the redheaded stepchild, a book even people who say they are big fans haven’t read. Cursed in its timing, the book was acquired by Kitchen Sink right around the time it was taking over the list of a far larger comics publisher that was going out of business, and it got somewhat lost in the shuffle editorially as a result. By the time it appeared in 1995, Kitchen Sink itself was on its last legs, I was too preoccupied by my move from New York to Portland to do much in the way of promotion, and the book was quickly remaindered.
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This two page comic drawn for the 2002 charity anthology 9-11: Artists Respond tells the story of French daredevil Philippe Petit’s 1974 wire walk between the towers of the World Trade Center, which was also the subject of the recent award-winning documentary Man On Wire. I could classify this one as a comic for hire, but to me it doesn’t qualify because I wasn’t paid for it. The book was in aid of some worthy charity I can’t recall- possibly a fund for firemen’s wives whose husbands had left them for 9/11 widows- and all contributors waived their fees.
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Sports

Just because it’s Faye Penn’s birthday Saturday, here are three more illustrations from the New York Post’s Millennium Countdown column, which predicted life in the new century from the vantage point of 1999.
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Caricature from lnx.

Education

Straight out of 1999, here are more illustrations from the Millennium Countdown, a series of columns in the New York Post which imagined life after Y2K.
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