We Happy Few

Jim reminds me that today is St. Crispin's Day, or the feast of the twin saints Crispin and Crispinian. (And as a dad of twins, I assure you that Crispin and Crispinian's parents soon realized what a horrible mistake they'd made with those names. "Crisp!" "Yes, father?" "Not you, the other one!")

In the saints' honor, here's my favorite bit of Shakespeare and one of my top five bits of anything in the English language. If you're not familiar with it, you may be surprised how much of it was recycled by other writers later, not least of which the phrase "band of brothers." It's true, Shakespeare invented everything. Just try to enjoy your feast today while holding your manhood cheap.

I've Been One Poor Correspondent

First thing every morning I check to see how many visitors my blog's received, and on days I don't plan to post it makes me sad. So many nice people who don't know I've already decided to let them down.

But inspiration doesn't always strike and bills must be paid. My October has been consumed by three or four big day-job projects all coming due at the same time, one of which the client dithered on for a year before deciding it needed to be done now. So, to quote Dr. Gillian Taylor in the movie Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home: "That, as they say, is that."

Sometime soon, I hope to compose a post on what my sisters "Kid Sis" and "Nurse Sis," about whom I never write, have been up to lately. Short version: It's good. In keeping with my blog's original mission of focusing on the process of writing, drawing and publishing a graphic novel, I'd like to blog about the status of "Mystery Project X," which I hope will be my next book, and the never-before-hinted-at "Mystery Project Y," which I hope might be the book after that. Short version: Don't hold your breath. I've also got half a mind to pull out some old sketches and talk about character design in terms of how I approach it and what I might have done differently if I'd been a bit smarter. Short version: Cap Crater is a pain in the neck.

We'll see if any of that happens. You'll have to come back to find out.

See what I did there?

Before I proceed to post some videos I've enjoyed lately, remember that drawing I did at the Charles Schulz Museum's "Cartoonists Sketch-a-Thon" commemorating the 60th anniversary of Peanuts? All the participants were asked to do one for the museum's collection, which I assumed meant that it would be archived in a spooky warehouse next to the Lost Ark. Well, it turns out that mine and a couple of others will actually be put on display next month.

My stuff sharing wall space with Mr. Schulz's stuff. Yeah, that'll take a while to sink in.

Video #1: A radio essay on language, grammar and pedantry by Stephen Fry, courtesy of my friend Jim O'Kane. I heartily, happily agree with 92% of Fry's delightfully expressed opinion. I part with him when he argues that careful, proper use of language doesn't "illustrate clarity of thought and intelligence of mind." I think it does. In my own writing, I find that choosing just the right words, and organizing them precisely to convey exactly the meaning I intend, often does clarify (even for me) what I'm trying to say. Sometimes I change my own mind--if a sentence's grammar won't hang together, sometimes it's because the thought it's trying to express is flawed. Conversely, I often find that people who don't speak or write clearly aren't thinking very clearly, either. On the scale of grammatical philosophy, Fry's a half-inch nearer "descriptivist" and further from "prescriptivist" than I am. Still: if what I just wrote sounds halfway interesting, this is worth your time.



Video #2: This is almost surely not worth your time, but I enjoyed it anyway: How the first Superman movie (with Chris Reeve and Gene Hackman) should have ended. Hard to argue. Found on Mark Evanier's blog.



Video #3: What happens when you mix hot postassium chlorate and a Gummi Bear? I worked in chemistry labs for more than a decade and never did anything this cool. Makes me feel kind of bad for the bear, though; it's almost as though you can hear his screams. From Bad Astronomer Phil Plait.

Later, I promise.

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Dad of the Year Steals My Idea

Well, I guess it's time to turn in my "Father of the Year" plaque and "#1 Dad" t-shirt. This guy totally schools me.*



Just a couple of quibbles: 100,000 feet isn't really "space," which starts about three times as high as these boys' balloon got. Also, the Earth's curvature isn't so apparent at that altitude, the roundness is just a distortion from their camera's fish-eye lens. But still . . . totally cool!

Seriously, I used to think about doing projects exactly like this all the time. I mean, when I was around 8 years old I actually drew up plans! Of course back then there weren't any tiny video cameras, mobile phones or GPS devices. My scheme involved a Kodak Instamatic and a really long string to simultaneously click the shutter, release the balloons and deploy the parachute. Still: same principle.

This dad's boys will remember this experience the rest of their lives. Engineering in action, potential scientists in the making. Sorry I let you down, girls. Anybody want to lend me an iPhone? It's not too late.
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* "Totally schools me" is how the hep cats would say that, right? I don't want to get dissed in my own blog. Chillax, dawgs.
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Ich Bin Ein Chilean

Tapas du Jour

Little bite-sized bits to tide us over for the weekend . . .

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"Why I Feel Old" #355: I was alive when they made this.



Yeah, I watched all those shows. How odd to see a Corvette tearing down the main drag of old Virginia City. I find Endora's flirtation with Hoss unsettling, but my opinion of Elizabeth Montgomery's extraordinary beauty is stronger than ever. Sadly, 1965 was a year too soon for Captain Kirk to spin doughnuts around the Enterprise's bridge in a Corvair.

(Hat tip to Jim O'Kane.)

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Deep-thinking cartoonist Darryl Cunningham posted on Facebook: "What if the Chilean miners came out to find the world empty of people? I think we should all hide to freak them out." I like the way Darryl thinks. Read the comics on his blog and look for his book Psychiatric Tales, already out in the U.K. and coming to the U.S. soon.

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More bragging on friends' books: my once-a-year pal Raina Telgemeier's just received a Boston Globe Horn Book Honor Award for her graphic novel Smile. The Horn Book Award is one of the more respectable honors that a book for children or young adults can win, and goes to the year's best in nonfiction, picture books, and fiction/poetry. I want to be careful to describe this right: Smile was named one of two nonfiction Honor Books, which isn't the big award but a still-prestigious honorable mention. It's well-deserved recognition for a fine book, and I'm very happy for Raina. It's nice when good things happen to good people.

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Finally, also from Jim O'Kane, whose tastes in entertainment and spacecraft seem to mirror my own, this may be worth four minutes of your time:



To be clear, the puppeteer says in his video's comments that this is performance art. He's not really homeless, just trying to call attention to their plight . . . their pressure, if you will. Still, I found it fun, especially as it picks up about two minutes in. If I saw this in person I'd give him a buck, which is the highest praise I can offer a busker.

Have a good weekend, y'all.

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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.