collaboration

Beastles: Let It Beast

Illustration

The Beastles: Let It BeastBoston DJ and mashup-artiste Bob Cronin (a.k.a. “djBC”) has compiled his second CD of Beatles/Beastie Boys tunes, appropriately titled Let It Beast. (His first album, The Beastles, was written up in Rolling Stone, The Weekly Dig, The Metro Times and other places.) Anyway, I did the art for the cover. It’s sort of a “Brady Bunch”/Let It Be homage. Being a huge Beatles fan, I was thrilled to be commissioned to draw the Fab Four. Still, I never claimed to be much at likenesses, so don’t judge the results too harshly.

Check out the album here. I think you’ll agree that the songs are simultaneously keen and dope, groovy and slammin’. And then there’s the added edge of it all being slightly illegal and underground. Yeah!

So baby gimme dat "Toot toot"

Illustration

Image hosting by PhotobucketSo on Friday night Sari and I attended the premiere of The Civilians’ Nobody’s Lunch, and I finally got to see the promo postcard I did. Turns out they also used my art for the posters advertising the show (one of them was five feet high!), and for the program. And perhaps the biggest compliment of the evening was finding out afterward that one of the show’s key props — the “suspicious package” — was based on my drawing!

The production itself was amazing. Nobody’s Lunch is a plotless cabaret-style fragmented mirror image of our current society. We all know we’re being lied to — by the government, by the media, by our own families — and yet we don’t care. Plus alien remote viewers and lizard-men! It’s scary, depressing, funny, and entertaining. The songs were great, and the cast of six wowed us with their performances. Sari & laughed our butts off, and then had a lot to talk about afterwards. (There’s a pretty insightful review in today’s Times that pretty well echoes my thoughts on it.)

I’m tickled to be associated with The Civilians — especially now that I’ve seen one of their productions — and I encourage you to see the show yourself before their limited New York run ends.

No Words

Work

No WordsHere’s another of my collaborations with the independent theater group The Civilians. Early last year, they approached me about a book they’re putting together based on their show, Gone Missing. As they said when they contacted me: “The show is about loss and about how the loss of small things can seem enormously resonant despite the relatively trivial material value of something. Six actors portray more than 30 characters who have lost everything from rings and phones to dogs and favorite toys and family heirlooms.” Again, right up my alley!

They continued: “Anyway, we are working to produce a book based on Gone Missing. It’s not exactly a published version of the play. Rather, we’re taking the monologues and pairing each vignette or story with an artist or illustrator. The book will be primarily an art book, something to look at rather than something to read, and I’m very excited about it because its a way for The Civilians to expand the range of artists they work with and the methods behind their philosophy of engaging with the ‘real world.'”

They provided me with a monologue from the show, a harrowing personal reminiscence alternately called “Drunken Englishman” or “No Words.” I’ve never seen the show, but it was my initial feeling that the monologue would be very difficult to adapt. But I love a good challenge — in many ways, that’s what makes a collaboration come alive — so I went at it. I approached the piece from a formalist viewpoint, imposing a series of restraints on myself. In the end, I wanted it to be not exactly comics, not exactly a straight recitation of the monologue, but something in between. Most of all, I wanted to use the panel format to capture the rhythm — the beat, if you will — of the spoken piece. The result is for you to judge.

So, without further ado, I present “No Words.”

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Nobody's Lunch

Illustration, Work

The Civilians — an interesting New York-based independent theater company — contacted me about collaborating with them earlier this year. Their mission is to “develop original projects based in the creative investigation of actual experience.” Right up my alley. I’m working on a two-pager comix adaptation of a monologue from a previous show, Gone Missing, which I gather was well-attended and critically acclaimed. I hope to post that collaboration soon.

In the meantime, Civilians artistic director Steve Cossen asked me to draw the announcement card for their next show, (I am) Nobody’s Lunch (A Cabaret About How We Know What We Know When Nobody Knows if Everyone Else is Lying and When Someone or Something Wants to Have You for Lunch). Whew! (The show will run Jan. 19 – Feb. 6 at 59E59 in NYC before moving on to Philly and Cambridge, MA.)

As Steve put it, “The show is about the floating fear and paranoia in post 9/11-America, and that while the show’s subject is dark, our approach is eccentric and well, funny… So as our main marketing piece, the card should encourage someone to come have a good time watching a show about bad things. Basically — creepy in a fun way.” And then he mentioned that he wanted the card to feature a suspicious package, and a bartender who turns into lizard. (That’s a theme of the play, which I read and is AMAZING.) No problem! Oh, and the card is almost a foot long (and, yes, it’s supposed to be cut off like that.)

So here’s what I came up with:

Nobody's Lunch

The Artists of American Splendor

Comics, Geek, Work

As Harvey Pekar’s unofficial, unauthorized archivist, and in honor of the publication of The Quitter, I’ve updated my list of Pekar’s artists! From R. Crumb to Joe Sacco, “Dino” man_size Haspiel to Gary Dumm, Joe Zabel to Frank Stack, Chester Brown to Jim Woodring — even Joyce Brabner to Alan Moore — this is where you can find which artist drew what story.

The list is organized by artist’s last name and features the title of the piece, where it appeared, and the date it was published. It’s fairly comphrehensive: I own pretty much everything Harvey’s ever published, with the exception of American Splendor #1 (but a lot of the material from that issue ended up in the first AS collection), but if you spot an error or have an addition, please let me know.

Enjoy the arcana: joshcomix.com/and/pekar_artists.

“Lionel’s Lament” Joins Serializer

Work

“Lionel’s Lament,” the ongoing experimental strip by myself and Dean Haspiel, is moving to Serializer.net. The groundbreaking subscriber web-comics site presents two simultaneous “Lionel” storylines — “Lionel AM” and “Lionel PM”. It’s available only on Serializer — tune in each Tuesday for the new episodes. What does the future hold for Lionel? Only time, myself, and Dean will tell…

“Lionel’s Lament” hits the web

Work

Dean Haspiel & I have been working on a collaborative strip featuring our character Lionel, from the pages of Keyhole. Since last June, we’ve both drawn two panels each week of an ongoing story, featuring two storylines. Both stories take place in the same day in the life of Lionel, one in the morning as he wakes for a new day, and one in the evening as he comes home from work. After the events of September, we took some time off, but we’ve gone back to work in the last month or so, and the results of this ongoing experiment can be seen at the “Lionel’s Lament” website, hosted by Alternative Comics. The work is definitely not for kids, but we hope it has some merit. Time will tell; check it out and let us know what you think.

Collaboration with poet Nick Flynn

Work

I recently adapted a poem called “Cartoon Physics, Part 1,” by my friend Nick Flynn, into a 2-page comic. Our collaboration is due to be published in the fall issue of CrossRoads, the magazine of the Poetry Society of America. Nick Flynn is a poet who lives in Brooklyn, New York, and Provincetown, Massachusetts. He has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and from the MacDowell and Millay Colonies. His poems have appeared in the Paris Review, Ploughshares, and The Nation, among other journals and magazines, Some Ether, a book of his poems published by Graywolf Press, won a “Discovery”/The Nation Award, as well as the PEN/American Center’s Joyce Osterweil Award. I want to thank him for choosing me for this collaboration.