To begin the year we present the cover to the Cul de Sac Golden Treasury, A Keepsake Garland of Classics, due out this June. It'll feature extensive Author Commentary (and I'll get it finished early next week, Caty! Swear!), which will no doubt deepen and enrich the reader's Cul de Sac-reading experience and provide unique insights into the creative process, and pad the book out to a coupla thousand pages if I can gas on about the creative process long enough, and god knows I can.
This may be a little out of date (the "local hoopster" was Michael Jordan) but the sentiment still holds. Here's to a widespread increase in uneventfulness for 2010. Not that it's too likely...
This here's from just about four years ago. I redid it a couple years ago as a series of dailies, maybe two or three, but this shows the antic confusion more succinctly. And antic confusion is my middle name.
I've got all these Christmas cartoons lying around that I didn't get around to posting, so I'll take advantage of the Twelve Days of Christmas. This is an Almanac from around 2000, and it was printed in the Almanac collection (you can see the "Poor Almanac" crudely whited out by me for reproduction in the book). I like getting these Christmas newsletters, though I've never sent one out. Or even sent out a Christmas card in recent memory. So, here's this instead.
Here are two old bits appropriate for the season, which I hadn't gotten around to posting earlier because of all the #@!% Christmas stuff going on. The above is a cover for USN&WR, now no longer an actual magazine, though at one time one of my favorite clients (in short, they kept me busy every week and paid well). It's in alkyd and casein paint, with some layers of Krylon to force it to dry in time (Krylon has been the savior of many a deadline-crazed illustrator and probably the bane of the ozone layer for years; even Norman Rockwell used something like it). I haven't used that technique in years, abandoning it after I figured out watercolor well enough to fake some competency. In this case, I was trying for an Ashcan School type of painting, to make it look like a turn of the 20th century sweatshop.
I'm posting this just because I like it. My favorite part is the tangle of typography to show that Nara and Alice are not too well in sync, but I like the scrape of the snow shovel too. We just had 20.5 inches dumped on us in under 24 hours, so I've heard that scrape a lot without actually participating in it (my thanks to Amy and Lars and to Andy Hemmindinger, who showed up with a snow blower!). And, in case you missed it in the comments section, here's Paul's completion of the Winter Jewels ditty-
The finalists have been chosen and their photos posted! Now it's up to you, the Great Unwashed American Public, to choose a winner! Please go over to the Christmas Sweater Contest at GoComics and make your selection from the finalists, each of whom will win a Cul de Sac book signed by me (with a drawing too). But only the winner will receive the Complete Calvin & Hobbes (ooh!), which, besides being a collection of masterworks, is also the heaviest book ever to make the New York Times bestseller list.
Wouldn't this make a great all-purpose charming yet slightly offensive Christmas card? It's from a column by either Joel Achenbach, E J Dionne or Gene Weingarten, all of whom have had a column at some point in the Wash Post Magazine that I got to illustrate. This one's probably from a Joel Achenbach piece.
We are winter’s jewels,
Dancing through the air.
Crystal shards of starlight,
Sticking in your hair.
Accumulating on the ground,
A foot or two (or more).
We hope the plow comes down your street,
If you need to reach the store…
Traffic’s at a standstill!
Cabin fever’s rife!
Three months out of every year
We paralyze your life!
Heart attacks from shoveling!
Power lines that break!
So much havoc wrought from
Each tiny little flake!
But if by chance the sun comes out,
And melts us all away,
Remember Frosty’s vengeful vow:
”I’LL BE BACK… on Christmas Day!”
This is the last day to enter the Christmas Sweater Contest over at GoComics. Do you have a Christmas sweater so ridiculous that it's a sartorial slap in the face? Well, check your closet if you're not sure. You could win these great prizes- a Cul de Sac book signed by me (with a drawing too), the Complete Calvin & Hobbes (ooh!), and the admiration of your peers, if any.
This is a backhanded salute to my little brother, Tim. He appeared in a Winter Pageant in either kindergarten or first grade, portraying an icicle, and the first few lines of Alice's poem were his. He took his role very seriously. It involved a little sideways dance that the several icicles were to execute in unison while reciting the poem. He was told to project his lines. I attended the performance (I was in 6th or 7th grade), sitting with my folks near the back of the school auditorium. When the icicles took the stage they exhibited something more like Brownian motion than ensemble work, except for Tim, who slid back and forth in the correct way (I guess; it looked right to me). The other icicles mostly flubbed their lines or mumbled. But Tim projected with enough force that he practically blew the civilians out of the back of the theater (that's theater talk, I think). 
