Fake It 'Till You Bake It

One of my and my wife's favorite yearly traditions is the Christmas-to-New-Year's break. For the past few years, we have both been fortunate enough to have the week between Christmas and New Year's off, and it is during this time that we are at our most adventurous. We watch a dangerous amount of movies , sleep precariously past noon, and read comics and other books to perilous excess. Swept up in this heady whirlwind, I often believe myself capable of extraordinary, impossible feats, like baking.

This unfortunate story is all too true. I've vowed that in the New Year, I will learn how to make this bread pudding recipe without poisoning anyone. It's a delicious recipe when it comes out right (i.e. when my wife makes it), and contrary to what my bungling suggests it is really not all that difficult. My wife and I got it out of a Nigella Lawson cookbook, and I've included here a video showing how Nigella herself puts it together. I guarantee that if you use fresh cream, you will not only avoid much unpleasantness, but will also eat the whole thing in one sitting. Enjoy!

"Fighties and Bities"

Many of you reading this blog may not be aware of the new phrase "fighties and bities" that has recently entered the cultural lexicon. This may be because 1) you do not live in my apartment or 2) you have never visited my apartment for an extended period of time. "Fighties and bities" refers to a higher state of consciousness only experienced by cats. It is characterized primarily by what is known in the vernacular as "biting" and in the high German as "fighting." I think it is best summed up by the following (very) short story:

Yes, sadly the unshaven, poorly dressed lout with glasses is meant to be me. Pathetic, I know. Especially in panel 6, where somehow my arms and torso do an impossible bend-y dance.

The middle section, with rolling eyes and ticking clocks, is not far from what happens when I scold my cats in real life. There is definitely comprehension. They respond to their names, and have a somewhat skeptical relationship with the word "no," but everything else seems to goes over their heads. For example, "Robin, NO! Do not eat my tuna fish!" probably sounds to them like "Robin, NO! blah blee blah blee blee bluh blah!" Robin hears his name, he hears "no," and he knows I'm telling him he did something he was not supposed to. But he is visibly clueless as to what that something could possibly be. Usually, I think the result is that my cats assume they're in fact innocent and that I'm just delusional, and so continue their bad behavior with clean, fuzzy little consciences.

If only they understood more English! I've tried to each them to spell, but, well you know how that goes.

Discipline: it's Tough

As promised, blog friends, here is an update with one of the short comics I recently dashed off. Literally dashed - where I would normally obsess over details and agonize over every line, I forced myself to put this down on paper as quickly as possible. From the initial joke to the final page, it took less than 10 minutes (a record for me). Hopefully it will all be legible when you click on the image!

I love comics, all kinds - superhero comics, indie comics, manga, webcomics, graphic novels. I even find myself drawn to those instructional comics they have on airplanes - whenever I'm in the air for more than three hours, they become suddenly compelling...those stoic faces, so calm in the face of their impending watery and/or fiery doom...What is that woman thinking as she slips on her own oxygen mask before helping her child? Do I see a frown, a furrowed brow, a small glimmer of guilt? Those instructional things are PACKED with drama if you are in the right mood (and by right place I mean hyperventilating from boredom).

I've made a few comics of my own, but I'm still an utter novice. I want to make more, but I cower under my bed whenever the time comes to actually sit down and map out a story, or even a short joke. To push myself, I've decided to draw up at least one short comic every week. I'm hoping that over time, the process will come to seem less daunting. You will, of course, see the results here, good or bad as they may be. Get ready, readers. It's on.

Choi De Vivre

A Sunday night. The laundry is spinning, the cats are napping, and I am blogging it up after a full day downtown. It was a good day, a day of comic-books and groceries, two of life's greatest pleasures. And it is with comics on the brain that I present you with two sketches, recently completed for a comic of my own (he admitted with trepidation). Hopefully it will not be long before the whole comic is finished, and I can post the fruits of my labor here:

The basic story is this: I want cereal and Robin, my cat, wants milk. Two opposing desires whose tension can only be released in a climax of milk-spattered violence.

These comics take me a long time to draw. This is mostly because my free time to draw anything is often limited to subway and bus rides, and it is a bit cumbersome to lug bristol board and my inking supplies (pens, brushes, ink bottles, etc) to these venues. I also get very tentative when drawing my own comics for some reason, and have actually begun forcing myself to dash off short one-pagers - no penciling, just inking, all in my sketchbook - so that these things don't feel so "momentous" to me when I put them on bristol. In fact, I'll be posting some of those this week! So stayed tuned, my friendly and patient readers. Your thirst for narrative art will be quenched soon enough.

Cats and Their Comics

Occasionally I will undertake projects of making comic strips about my two cats. I have about 7 complete so far, and I've been thinking that if I ever get to 15 or so I will post them on the internet, on a full-fledged website. For now, however, I'd like to just share some tidbits, in the way of studies I've made for one I complete not long ago:

This is a not-very-good characiture of my wife working on our taxes. The little guy to her left is our cat, Solomon. He is hungry. Normally, when Solomon is hungry, the following ensues:

There is really no bit of trouble he won't get himself up to when dinnertime draws near.

There's actually a tiny bit more work to be done on the finished version of this comic, but when it's complete, I will post it here for you all to see!

In other news, I'll be also posting a "serious" drawing I completed recently later this week. I decided that I needed to start working on landscapes, and so I attacked one in ink, with some success. This decision, in part, grew out of my cat comics. I realized that, while my subway doodles have given me a lot of experience drawing faces and figures, I am sorely lacking in the background department - furniture, trees, buildings, and general inanimate objects. As a result, there will be some more of those showing up over my next few posts, but not to worry, there will be drawings of people as well! Only they will include backgrounds more often, and not simply be floating heads...like this one: