Sketchbook 18, December 1995-March 1996

This was a pretty bleak time. I quit the retail job because it was awful, and worked off and on for a temp agency. One memorable job was shoveling out a parking lot so people at an electric company could get to big tubes buried under thick ice. My foreman couldn't stop swearing or stuttering, usually at the same time. I was mailing out promo postcards to art directors every week, hoping to get art jobs instead.
weird heavy paintings:


It seems like the headlines are always bad, tons of random violence, terrorist attacks, innocent people getting murdered, all over the world but especially in the Middle East. I try to put myself in others' shoes pretty often, and this one came about from trying to imagine if the one I loved was suddenly killed by a terrorist....the shock, grief, horror, and anger of these people caught in the middle must be unbelievable

this "bad-day" sketchbook painting ended up being appropriate for a Boston Book Review spot illustration:

a masked monster nurse slipping a masked monster doctor a scalpel? what was I thinking?

more hospital badness:


Black and white version of a rejected cover for Lollipop magazine:

"The River-Bottom Man" was inspired by a gross story one of my fireman cousins told about pulling a huge bloated corpse out of the river. Fish had eaten the man's eyes, fingers, toes, etc. except for one finger....which came off in a cop's hand. So the cop let all the liquified stuff inside the finger-skin fall out, then slipped the finger over his own finger and was waving it around in the faces of the other cops and firemen on the scene to gross them out:

some less-depressing stuff:















"Don't cheat off my paper":

holiday card sketch:

and the actual card:

I hung out in coffeehouses with Tom at night and we drew in our sketchbooks and played "Bummy-Rummy", which was like regular gin rummy except you used 4 decks of cards, got 14 cards instead of 7, and discarded into a whole tabletop of cards placed face-down in no order. Games basically never ended.

My family's old dog Dudley's health was starting to fail. We'd had him since I was in 4th grade. He'd been rescued from the pound twice, about to be put to sleep both times, before a different cousin gave him to us. Here he's sleeping on the kitchen linoleum:

Girlfriend, drawn from memory



we had some tough times and I tried to put all my bad days into my sketchbook rather than talk to people about it



2 more sketchbook paintings I turned into promo postcards:


I finally got an assignment from the Boston Phoenix! After 9 months of constant postcard mailings, they hired me to make a spot illustration for a story about sexual harassment via email at the workplace. Here's the sketch that got approved. At the last minute I was told that the company in question would sue the Phoenix if they were represented as the monster in my illustration. I didn't want the assignment to slip away, so I painted another version without the monster insanely fast. It got printed.

I was lucky and soon got another Phoenix assignment, this time for a story about little kids bringing guns to school. They picked the last sketch for the final, and it ran as is:

Sketchbook 17, August 1995-November 1995

This book starts and ends with comics. I'd do a thumbnail page layout in pencil, figuring out how big the panels should be, then draw/ paint the individual panels in my sketchbook twice the size, then Xerox them back down to 1/2 the size, cut them out, and tape them onto black painted layouts to be Xeroxed again.. I was heavily influenced by printmaking...woodcuts, blockprints, and the comic art of Ted McKeever. By using lots of scumbling and blotting and Xeroxing the finished sketchbook paintings, I found I could achieve a block-printy look in a fraction of the time it'd take to do a real woodcut.
This one was called "Boundaries", written by my friend Tom of Standard Design, published in the MassArt comicbook Forty-3, and reprinted in the Boston Phoenix. For these 5 pages I rubber-cemented torn pieces of paper for the hand-written text boxes. They've deteriorated a lot since then:





Some of the pre-Xerox panels:
The Tooth Fairy (later redrawn and used as a band poster for my friends The Kabooms):

The Boogeyman busting out of the narrator's closet:

Greegor the Little Kid Eater:

I was sending out tons of homemade postcards to art directors, Xeroxed right from these sketchbook paintings:





In the meantime I got a super-non-fulfilling part-time job in retail. Nothing is more inspiring to succeed as an artist than having to work shitty dayjobs. I doodled on the hour-long train rides going back and forth from work a lot with a Uniball pen:







After work I'd do more messy eyedropper and gouache sketchbook paintings back at my parents' place:






"not sharing":

"black bird":

Thumbnail sketches for a Halloween postcard:


girlfriend at the time, from memory:





Anybody who's ever looked through my sketchbooks knows they're loaded with weird lists. This book has a funny list of "head" insults to call people that my friends Peter Gueth and Jamie Gilb and I came up with on a long bus ride to NYC to visit our friend Matt Smith. Some good ones to use if you want to simultaneously insult and confuse your enemies:
"Stick-head, 2 x 4-head, fire extinguisher-head, deodorant-head, tunnel-head, halibut-head, machete-head, hill-head, acorn-head, light saber-head, bowling-ball-head, nunchucks-head, fist-head, pear-head, hibatchi-head, cigar-head, thumb-head, bean-head, toilet-head, ground beef-head,...."
"Afterschool Special". This was created for Jef Taylor's Boston comic anthology, "Don't Shoot, It's Only Comics!"'s wordless issue. Looking back, I really overdid the scumbling, sacrificing clarity for texture. If you can't make out what's going on, 3 bullies steal a smaller kid's hat and start beating him up. A huge monster disguised as a kid shows up, crushes 2 bullies' heads, bites the head off the 3rd bully, returns the little kid's hat, and then they play in the sandbox together.









I think as a kid, it took me a long time to understand that life isn't fair, especially if you try to obey the rules and be good. I had to go to a Catholic school for 8 years and was really naive, and so I got picked on/ beat up a lot. It confused the hell out of me, like, you're supposed to "turn the other cheek" and let kids whale on you...and if you chose to not fight back and tell a teacher instead that you're getting bullied, they'd bring out the the whole "No One Likes a Tattle-Tale" shit...and if you DO fight back, YOU'RE the one who ends up getting caught and punished. I wasn't street smart or anything, and I'd get really really sad that the other kids were just so mean, like, I was constantly surprised by it. Then in 6th grade I just snapped and started getting in crazy fights pretty often. It was very cathartic. And I started listening to Metallica and Slayer right in junior high too, so that helped a lot-----the music was so angry and aggressive and I totally identified with it. I turned into the total stereotypical sullen teenager for a while, and I remember my dad getting mad at me, asking "What happened to you? You used to be a happy kid!", and me yelling "Real life happened to me!" Ah, the past.
So basically, this comic is like my childhood revenge dreams come true: A huge monster shows up and rights the wrongs of the schoolyard. I think I should redo this in full-color and send it to Fantagraphics for one of their anthologies or something.