Other Welcome News

I'm very happy to learn that a friend's newly released book is earning some nice recognition. Sarah Leavitt is a Vancouver cartoonist whose book Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer's, My Mother and Me, was just named a finalist for the prestigious Writers' Trust of Canada Non-Fiction Prize--the first graphic novel finalist in the award's history. Sarah gets $2500 for making the short list and, if she wins (to be announced Nov. 2), would receive $25,000.

Sarah and I began corresponding because I guess she thought the Mom's Cancer guy might have some idea what to do with a comic about losing her mother to Alzheimer's disease. I liked her work a lot, offered some advice when asked, and, after she found a publisher, was glad to provide a blurb for her book's back cover (my first!). Now she's doing readings and signings, conducting interviews, and living the literary life. If this Writers' Trust recognition is any indication, Sarah may be yet another writer I've advised at the start who goes on to rocket past me. I love it when that happens.

Congratulations, Sarah!.

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Wellcome News

The Wellcome Trust is an enormous UK-based philanthropic organization with a focus on biomedical research and improving the public understanding of science. It was also a major sponsor of the first-of-its-kind Graphic Medicine conference I keynoted (is that a verb?) in London last June, and they've got a blog and a magazine for which Mun-Keat Looi, whom I met at the event, has written a nice little feature about it.

From my self-centered perspective, the coolest thing about the article is the honor of being caricatured by the conference's organizer and my host, Dr. Ian Williams (aka cartoonist Thom Ferrier). I don't think a cartoonist has ever drawn me before; it's a bit like listening to a recording of your own voice. It's clearly me, yet I didn't know I looked like that.

Without speaking out of turn or prematurely, I can say that plans for a follow-up conference on Comics and Medicine are in the works. I thought the first was very interesting, productive and worthwhile, and look forward to bigger and better ones to come.

Thanks, Ian!
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Five Years On

Five years ago today, Mom died. Five years. So much time, so little.

I've sometimes written, and often thought, that I wish Mom were here to see how the story she let me tell in Mom's Cancer has circled around the world and still comes round to revisit in surprising ways. How it's being read in German, Italian and French. Today, what surprises me most is its staying power. Most books fade away after a year or two, and Mom's Cancer certainly has to some extent. But in the past year it's also been written up in the British Medical Journal and gotten me invited to speak to an international conference in London. Last Mother's Day, the Huffington Post listed it as one of their seven favorite mother-themed books, and in January the Onion's A.V. Club named it one of "25 Great Songs, Books, Films, Albums, and TV Shows in Which Cancer Plays a Major Role." Just last week, a German newspaper highlighted it in a big article. Independent of Mom, independent of me, the book lives.

That sounds like bragging, and it is, but it's bragging on Mom. Mom's Cancer is her story and legacy; I was just the messenger. Each of those accomplishments was one I wished she were here to share, along with the other life achievements of her children and grandchildren. She'd love to see what everyone is up to, and I know she'd be pleased.

My sister Brenda ("Nurse Sis") posted the following on Facebook this morning that I thought was good enough to steal: "The minute my Mom was told she MIGHT be ill she quit smoking that day... cold turkey. Done. I'm giving you permission to quit smoking BEFORE you get Stage IV Lung Cancer with Mets to the Brain. My gift to you on the 5th Anniversary of my Mom's death. Mom would want you to have THAT gift!"

I'll just add that Mom was always a stubborn smoker who reflexively fought any pleas to stop, arguing that she wasn't hurting anyone but herself. The one truth she realized too late that I'd like to pass on is that dying of lung cancer doesn't just hurt you; it hurts everyone around you that you love. Apply her hard-won wisdom.
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Memo to My Wife

Dear Karen,

Remember when I blogged about that USS Enterprise pizza cutter and jokingly hinted how much I'd enjoy finding one under the Christmas tree?

Remember a few days ago, when I tried to convince you that our next car really should be a refurbished DeLorean, and promised that if you agreed to get one I'd let you be the first to take it up to 88 mph?

Never mind.

I realize now I was being childish and silly. I owe you so much more than that. You deserve a husband who aspires to be more than an arrested adolescent desperately clinging to the nostalgic fantasy icons of his youth as he lurches uneasily into middle age. I'm sorry. I'll try to be a better man.
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A better man who just found out that DC Comics has licensed a company called Fiberglass Freaks to build modern, street-legal reproductions of the Adam West Batmobile! Complete with real flames blasting from the rocket exhaust! And they only cost $150,000! Woo-hooooo!

Atomic batteries to power! Turbines to speed! Come on, baby, let's go for a spin! I'll let you pull the lever that releases the Bat-parachutes!

Love, Brian
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LitGraphics at the Michener

Google Alerts tells me that LitGraphics, a traveling museum exhibition of comic art including mine, opened today at the James A. Michener Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. If you, like I, wonder what a museum named after Michener is doing in Pennsylvania, or indeed why it exists at all, the museum's website explains that it opened in 1988 and "was named for Doylestown's most famous son, the Pulitzer-Prize winning writer and supporter of the arts who had first dreamed of a regional art museum in the early 1960s." There you go.

This is the exhibition whose opening at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Massachusetts I attended in November 2007, and then followed to Ohio's Toledo Museum of Art in October 2009. It's worth seeing if you're nearby, notwithstanding my contribution. There's work by Will Eisner, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Peter Kuper, Harvey Kurtzman, Frank Miller, Steve Ditko, Jessica Abel, Terry Moore, and more. I loaned them eight pages of original art from Mom's Cancer that I figured would be more productive touring the country than sitting in a file under my desk.

My stuff at the Rockwell in Stockbridge . . .

. . . and at the TMA in Toledo. Both museums did a beautiful job of displaying everybody's work.

Both the Rockwell and Toledo museums set up their galleries to show videos of some of the artists (there's one playing in that picture immediately above) shot by videographer Jeremy Clowe and Rockwell curator Martin Mahoney, which I may as well take the excuse to show again. Martin and Jeremy actually flew across the country to interview me in my home. I'm ashamed to say that my rolltop desk, where I do my 'tooning, looks pretty much the same. I mean, some objects have literally not moved since 2007. I really should dust. Here's the video (apologies if you've already seen it once or thrice):



And here are Jeremy and Martin backed into a closet to shoot that video. It's not a large room.

It's a good show. If you're in the Doylestown neighborhood, or if you see LitGraphics coming to your neighborhood in months to come, check it out.

Tik Tok Spock

I like how life surprises you. I started the week thinking its theme was going to be foreign publishing, and now it's going out with "Star Trek." My daughter Robin sent me this and made me smile. That's good enough for me.



Have a nice weekend, y'all. I've been working hard and could use one.
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Slice: The Final Frontier, or Deep Dish Nine

I don't know what took somebody 45 years to think of this, but I want one:

A beautiful, gleaming, silvery chrome-plated USS Enterprise pizza cutter. Now that's a work of art.

sniff. Pardon me, I've got something in my eye. Must be a bit of . . . sniff . . . pepperoni. Or anti-matter.

Not sure it's worth $24.99, but Christmas is coming. You can find it here. Karen.

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It's a World of Laughter, a World of Tears . . .

. . . Now try to get that song out of your head the rest of the day.

Looks like I inadvertently stumbled into "International Week" on the ol' blog, following yesterday's post from France with today's from Germany: an article in the Sueddeutsche newspaper about cancer-themed comics, including mine--ein Comic über Krebs.

This is more fallout from that paper in the British Medical Journal as well as the Graphic Medicine conference I mentioned yesterday. I was interviewed for this article a while ago, but had forgotten all about it until Ian Williams (also quoted in the article) sent me a link. Thanks, Ian!

When I saw that the article included a graphic of my comic in English, I was afraid the writer might not have realized that Mom's Cancer is also available in German. But reading down with my ossified high-school German, I see that Mutter hat Krebs is also mentioned, so all is well.

Once again, I can only imagine what Mom would have made of all this, but I imagine she'd be pretty proud.

In the Wild, Old World Style

My friend MK Czerwiec, a Chicago nurse who makes comics under the name Comic Nurse (go figure), was in a Paris bookstore recently when she saw some familiar artwork and took a photo:


That's the French edition of Mom's Cancer, and it was very cool of MK to take the shot and send it to me. Once in a while, I'm still brought up short when I realize people in different parts of the world read my words and pictures in languages I don't even understand.

I got to know MK via e-mail before we finally met in person in London, where we both attended the Graphic Medicine conference at which I was honored to give a keynote speech. (Look, it's another sentence I never could have imagined writing a few years ago!) MK had been thinking about organizing a similar conference in the United States even before the one in London, and I suspect she may yet get her chance. I hope so.

I came home from London feeling like I'd been part of the start of something with the potential to be important. I don't know quite what or how, but there's untapped potential in this intersection of comics and medicine that seems useful and worth exploring, and a lot of other people agree. It'd be great to see that potential realized.

With MK in London.

Higher Than a Kite and Some Aircraft

I don't usually pass on stuff like this, but I found this video fascinating. Think your job is tough? This guy's not hooked up right, and I'm not just referring to the safety line he seldom uses.

A climb up the tallest tower @ Yahoo! Video

Enjoy your weekend--I'm sure that tower-climbing guy enjoys his.
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Saturday at the Museum, Now with Music!

Good pal Mike Lynch alerted me to this short video of last Saturday's Sketch-a-Thon at the Charles Schulz Museum celebrating the 60th anniversary of "Peanuts." I'm in it, about 31 seconds in. And solely to embarrass my wife (never a good idea but I'm a thrill-seeker), I'll note that there's a quick shot of Karen standing behind me at 54 sec.



I was surprised to see this video, even though I obviously knew I was being taped. There were a couple of videographers running around and I forgot about this guy (cartoonist Mike Capozzola). Here's how big a sap I am: watching myself draw Linus's pumpkin patch accompanied by Guaraldi's "Linus and Lucy" theme puts a little shiver down my spine. What a dope.

The video definitely captures the spirit of the day. Thanks to Mike Capozzola and thanks (again) to the museum for letting me in the door.
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A Sketchy Report

I had a great time at the Schulz Museum's Cartoonist Sketch-a-Thon this afternoon. The event drew a nice turnout, with a steady, comfortable flow of nice people interested in watching a bunch of cartoonists draw and talk (sometimes simultaneously!).

An overview of the museum's Great Hall, with cartoonists lined up against the wall. I'm down by the man in the pink shirt. This is early; the crowd got heavier. All photos by Karen Fies (thanks, Sweetie!)

A closer look. Sharing my table in the blue Hawaiian shirt was cartoonist, teacher and actor Brian Narelle, whom I'd met before and was pleased to see again. Sitting to my left (the photo's right) are animator Mike Gray and cartoonist Jonathan Lemon. The guy in the green shirt to whom I'm talking is Andrew Farago, curator of the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco. I was especially happy to reconnect with Andrew and his wife, cartoonist and writer Shaenon K. Garrity, who was one of the tooning participants (in the top photo, she's at the far left next to the guy in the green shirt--hey, there he is again!). I cannot believe how gray my hair is. It's positively luminescent.

Being interviewed for a local television program. That's my "cogent and insightful" face. Seriously, when did I get so gray?

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Dan the Man Piraro, award-winning syndicated cartoonist and international bon vivant. I've never seen a cartoonist who looks more like one of his own drawings, and not just because Dan frequently draws himself into his strip "Bizarro." As I mentioned a few days ago, Dan and I have met before and had a few minutes to get reacquainted today. His table was packed all afternoon, and his follow-up lecture/comedy act filled the museum's theater.

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All the participants were asked to contribute a drawing celebrating the 60th anniversary of "Peanuts," and I cleverly got a head start by penciling mine at home before I showed up. I assumed I could ink one simple drawing in a few hours. I assumed wrong. People kept me busy enough that the hours passed in a flash and I had to take it home to finish.

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Some of the crap--er, materials and tools--I brought to draw with. A couple of artists wandered by and marveled that I still use brush and ink. I guess for them it was kind of like visiting a Renaissance Faire to watch an artisan make chain mail.

Getting started on my 60th Anniversary Sketch for the museum.
And . . .

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Finished at home later. (Click to see it bigger.) I planned to do some shading with a light gray wash, and actually had it diluted out to just the tone I wanted, but decided to leave well enough alone. I liked this fine. Also, the museum plans to collect the drawings into a little souvenir book of the event, and I wasn't sure they'd be able to reproduce the graytones. So I stopped.

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Karen and I had a really good afternoon. We sold a few books and talked to some nice people, including cartoonists, museum volunteers, Jeannie Schulz, and even some kids I remembered from my cartoonist-in-residence gig last January. Afterward we crossed the street to the ice arena's cafe and sat in the sun slurping root beer floats. My only regret is that I was so busy I didn't have a chance to meet a couple of people I really wanted to, including comic book artist Brent Anderson and cartoonist/colorist Lark Pien. I sat 20 paces away and never had a moment to say "hello." Maybe someday.

Thanks to the museum and especially Jessica Ruskin for inviting me and pulling the Sketch-a-Thon together. I promise I'll turn in my drawing in tomorrow.

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Sketch-A-Thon Saturday

Just a reminder: I'll be at the Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, Calif., tomorrow between 1 and 3 p.m. taking part in a
16-cartoonist "Sketch-a-Thon" to help celebrate the 60th anniverary of "Peanuts." The event's headliner is syndicated cartoonist Dan Piraro, who'll be speaking in the museum's theater at 3:30.

We've all been asked to draw something for the museum's collection to honor "Peanuts" while we're there. When I showed my wife Karen a sketch of my idea, she found it way too depressing. I tried to defend myself: one quality that made "Peanuts" great was its melancholy. She didn't buy it. "It's supposed to be a celebration!" So I happied it up a bit, to the point that I expect the number of people who will feel suicidal after seeing my drawing to be quite small. So much for artistic vision.

Come on by, meet some cartoonists, watch us draw, buy some books, tour the museum, listen to Piraro. Sounds like a nice afternoon.
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