The Ghost of Rudy’s Future Past

This comic page from early 1995 is not exactly for hire, since I was working from my own concept rather than a client’s, but I put it in that category anyway because I was paid money for it. I had been a regular illustrator for The New York Press for about a year when they started a feature called Comic Of The Week; this little piece of satiric fantasy (the kind of thing Steve Brodner does in his sleep) was the first and only concept I was able to sell them before I left New York, and the paper, later that year (I was told the editors only wanted to work with New York-based artists, but within a few years they dropped that policy and l was able to work for them again).
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…and Ed McMahon and Farrah Fawcett, but I only had Michael’s picture handy.

This painfully hip piece goes so far back that l have forgotten who the client was- my assumption is some young adult magazine published by Scholastic or one of the other educational publishers. l can’t recall the year either, but internal evidence points to 1994 or 1995. The flannel shirt worn by one of the band members dates it to the era of grunge (which I had never heard of before Kurt Cobain’s suicide in 1994 made headlines), and I’m certain I did this job while I was still living in New York, so that had to have been before June 1995.

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Julie Benz

In a follow-up to the Rasheed Wallace comic featured in a previous blog post, l have mounted all the episodes to date starting with this one, of an advertising series for SmartStart Practice, a service which provides veterinarians with the education and training to run their own businesses. The hapless heroine, Dr. Pauline, is an overworked vet perenially swamped by the details of maintaining her practice and in dire need of outside expertise.

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Rasheed Wallace

Most of the work I do on commission is illustration, but occasionally a client who knows about my comics will hire me to draw a strip for publication. This strip for The Portland Monthly was the client’s concept all the way, and if the result looks unusually stiff, it’s because I was dealing with a sport I know nothing about- basketball- and an athlete I’d never heard of- Rasheed Wallace ( I believe he used to play for a team called the Trailblazers). With the thorny matter of race added to the mix, I wasn’t about to attempt anything too caricatural. Basically this piece is a straight photocollage with a light layer of drawing- using photographs I found of Wallace online, I put together a layout with added captions and balloons in Indesign, then used Photoshop to convert it to a dithered dot pattern which I printed onto coquille board and then pencilled over.
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My twelve year old son Ben began an ambitious painting project three years ago in a school art class; when the teacher gave him a choice of several pictures to copy, Ben picked a portrait of George Washington, which he copied in black and white. This is the result- pretty accomplished for a nine year old, even if it’s not quite an accurate likeness.

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For those of you who missed Monday’s broadcast of Jim Woodring’s story Dinosaur Cage on KBOO-FM, the audio file is posted here. Woodring himself wasn’t available, so I do the narration.

One of my very occasional moonlighting activities has been acting on the radio. Usually I’m reading Damon Runyon stories in my best Brooklyn accent under the alias “Naples Yellow” for KBOO-FM’s program Gremlin Time, but tonight it’s something a little more contemporary, a radio adaptation of “Frank” cartoonist Jim Woodring’s story Dinosaur Cage. I’m the narrator, and there is another cartoonist in the cast- The Oregonian’s Michael Russell, who years ago drew this strip about my first 24 Hour Comics Session. Another cartoonist, S.W. Conser, adapted and directed the piece. It is scheduled to air tonight (Monday) at 11pm PDT as one of the features on KBOO’s “Ubu Hour” (alert, in case you’re forwarding the info to friends: several of the other theater pieces airing tonight feature parental-advisory language).

The show can be tuned in live on the web at http://kboo.fm/listen but if you prefer to wait until Tuesday, the audio will be up on the KBOO website, available for download.