Year's End

Above is some of my most recent advertising work that I've done for Golden Lasso, up in Seattle, which I'm happy with. Once again, it looks like I'm solidifying my rep as "that robot guy". Also, I'm pretty sure I worked with one of those robots at a temp job once.

As the year draws to close, I like to think about projects I did, weird events that occurred, and people I met that left an impression. In that vein, the run down:

This year I:

- Hooked up with Richard Salzman as my agent, which has been nothing but a great
experience.

- Got invited to Seoul to present at SICAF about mobile comics.

- Launched RobotsAndMonsters.org

- Ran my first marathon.

- Got a totally awesome new apartment.

- Got mugged at gunpoint.

- Saw 2 friends get married, and wished well 2 more from afar.

- Spent an awkward Christmas with both my parents at once, the first time in 12
years.

- Actually got most of my income by drawing for money, a first.

Which makes 2007 kind of a gorgeous year, in retrospect, besides the mugging part, and even that, once could argue, is informative in a Bukowski-would-have-dug-this-life-experience-kind-of-way. So I'm nothing but pleased.

Every single year, I write down things that I'm going to do in the next year on a piece of paper, and I keep it in my wallet. It's a constant barking reminder of all the stuff that I still want to get done, and there is no better sense of satisfaction than to cross one of those bad boys off the list. The problem is, I really have no one but me to keep me honest. So this year, I thought I'd post my list. That way, there's more incentive to not write a check my drawing hand can't cash. So, consider yourself witness, dear reader. You are now a part of this.


Next year I'm gonna:

- Get hitched to the greatest girl on the planet.

- Get a publisher for Robots And Monsters: The Book.

- Assemble the pieces for a solo art show.

- Get some comics in a few newspapers.

- Finally do something constructive with The Basic Virus.

- Fix my motorcycle.


Also, I'll be in a show next Friday at The Space Gallery in San Francisco, in which I did a custom skateboard , but I'll give more updates on that later. Stay tuned.

Happy New Year, y'all. Be good to one another out there.

Lurvely Spam

Back when The Internets was a mite fresher than it is these days, without the foetid stank of 2G1C mingling with the smoke of a billowing BMW Pain Olympics, my friends and I used to have a good time emailing back and forth some of the more poetic passages of text in the spam we received. Often culled from online sources, patched together in a completely random way, these little pieces of web wisdom would fall onto our collective plates and occasionally produce a real gem. We often bandied back and forth that someday someone (read: one of us) should do something with these things. Someone did.

Linzi Hunter illustrates spam subject lines in that beautiful, Ward Kimball mid-century style so popular these days, and they are, in a word, wonderful. Damn! One of us should have done this. Oh, well. Throw it on the pile with Apocalypse Insurance, Guerrilla Dogs, and Google.

(via the Hermenautic Circle)

The Sum of Our Years

Living My Life Faster - 8 years of JK's Daily Photo Project from c71123 on Vimeo.

From the Times today, an unbelievably fascinating project from Detriot Artist Jonathan Keller.

Besides the obviously cool, if slightly pedestrian project theme ( "Like...life, totally move faster than you think, man!"), I'm more impressed by the technical aspect of the project. You'll notice that his nose tip is in the exact same place every time, which makes me wonder what his method is: perhaps using the previous day as a 50% overlay? A laser guide? Tape marks and shot through a one way mirror? It's impressively consistent.

The other part I really like about this project is his plan is also to keep this project going for the rest of his life. Considering the projected age span for folks of his ( and my) generation, there's a possibility of what would end up being about a half an hour film of a man aging to 90 years old. What an incredible send off once he actually dies: way better than your average wake.Talk about life's work.

Rest On Your Laurels

I was informed the other day that my dad, Brian Alterio has had some of his photographic work from the 1970s entered into the Government Art Collection of the United Kingdom. I understand that this is akin to having your work added to the Smithsonian National Art Archive collection here, so it's huge honor. Most notable among entrants is the image above, the irony of which is that my dad doesn't have a print of this image anymore, or even the negative. I had to email the GAC and beg them for a scanned file, which at 150K, is the biggest file size I could get out of their greasy little hands. So it truly belongs to The State now, I guess.

As a part of the neo-verite school that was bubbling around Britain at the time, alternatively called the Young British Photographers and the Romantic Realists, my dad was but a small cog in the upswell of recognition that photography was an art form best taken on the fly with little fuss, moving away from the staid tired images of previous generations and into more visceral iconic images. From my dad's blurb:

"I was first introduced to photography while trolling the stacks at the library as an under grad at the Mass College of Art in 1966. I happened across a book by Alfred Stieglitz the seminal figure in American photography in the early 20th century. Struck by the power of his images, I urgently set about buying a cheap, rudimentary, yet effective, range finder camera.

From that point onward the trajectory was steep and powerful until I found myself in England in 1972. Coincidentally, the precise point in time when British creative photography was about to make it's second mark in history other than the obvious and great historical figures that populate the books in our libraries and bookshelves today.

At that time I always carried my trusty Lieca everywhere I went day and night every day 365 days a year. Inspired by my predecessors and stimulated by the now famous cadre of young British photographers that would hang out at the offices of Creative Camera in London, I would shoot dozens of rolls of B/W per day and return home to process them.

That period was one of great influence and inspiration in both directions. I had the pleasure to meet and befriend one of the great yet here-to-fore unsung giants of that time Paddy Summerfield in Oxford. Paddy's approach was so unique and powerful as to be the undiscovered avante garde of that period. We shared many hours of hotly debated topics that ranged from Herri Cartier Bresson's "decisive moment" to and including the purity on the frame edge at the precise time of exposure."

I'm gratified at this turn of events of multiple fronts, not the least of which is that I'm really happy for my dad. Once I was born, and then later my sister, my dad stopped shooting and actually got a real job and career. When we were growing up, he would occasionally take us out shooting, but it wasn't as often as probably he would like: he had a lot of his plate at the time, from sustaining a family to managing a crumbling marriage. I can't help but feel partially responsible by my mere existence for my dad not being more renowned than he is. But that's enough Psychology-by-Blogger; I'm just glad he actually is getting some recognition for his vision.

My dad's mention of Paddy Summerfield lends me to add one more link, Paddy's photographic site. He's still shooting, and some of his work is truly amazing, especially the 'handheld' series under 'portrait. It's visionary work, check it out.

Congrats, pop. I love ya.

Jazz's St. James Infirmary Blues

...And then this is just weird.

St James Infirmary Blues

People always ask me why I'm such a grumpy old man and hate on most modern cartoons. This is why. If you're an old hand, enjoy again. And if you've never seen this, gird yourself.

Fever Dreams

Los Angeles' cool thin tendrils slip their sticky coils around me for a few nights this weekend, and all I can think of is the electricity in them that used to be thrilling, but now is static discharge to my frontal cortex. We all assume mantles at a certain point, if only because it's easier: sometimes, your three sentence rundown of how you are in your brain keeps you from going over the edge with self-doubt or, even worse, a booze-fueled existential slip up. Part of my Cliff's Notes involved being the Consummate Los Angeles Defender. My stock lines are familiar to anyone who has gone abroad and felt the need to defend their home country as a place of decent human beings. "It's misunderstood, there's wonderful parts about it, it's so damn trendy to hate it". But for some reason on this particular visit, Madam Angeles kiss feels cold and clammy.

Out in Sherman Oaks, and something strikes me that I could never put my finger on before, maybe because I was too close, too complicit. There's no people here. The abstract of complaining about cars is something that naturally leads people to think of traffic, smog, and delays. But my epiphany is of a more natural sort: looking around, the human form is nary in sight. Tucked safely away in their flying vehicles, funneled onto the city streets where everyone is behind tinted glass, sunglasses, air conditioners. The sight of a human being is rare from the window of a car here. And that, combined with the bright newness of the malls and and streets signs make it look like a place where something just happened for which you were a little late, and now everyone's gone.

But I'm here with Kevin, which is gratifying. We talk projects of all sorts, and as usual when I'm with him, I get excited all over again for my various ridiculous hair brained creative schemes. We flit from location to location like purposeless bees, carried by Santa Anna winds from a production studio to the Tee Yee Lounge for Knob Creek rocks to Canters for Lox and capers. We talk about robots and monsters and comics and films and merchandising and how can rest on our laurels and still make rent. It is a infinitely futuristic web 2.0 existence we lead, joining the other sort-of employed college educated professionals who haunt coffeeshops and exist on their Macbooks and are allowed to be nowhere at 2 PM. Our perfect lucky states are enviable.

Los Angeles breaths. We breath with it and hope it all lasts for a little while longer. The tendrils keep their buzz.

Sketchblog 11/14/07

My new and very belated present to to my friend Rebholz, for his and his wife Catherine's wedding in 2006. Click here for a larger view.

It feels good to get back to comics. Illustration feeds my face. Comics feeds something else inside. Like that weird multi-headed worm that showed up on those medical scans.

Dreams of A Rarebit Fiend: The Movie

Above is actually my first introduction to Rarebit, when I was still in film school, comics weren't in my mind yet, and my animation teacher was blowing my mind every day with more and more obscure early animations. Once again, McCay was decades ahead of any of his contemporaries. I couldn't bully stupid YouTube into including it in the last post, so...enjoy.

Dreams of A Rarebit Fiend: The Book

Over at the Boston Globe Brainiac blog today, Josh Glenn has a really cool and enlightening slideshow about Winsor McCay's early comic (predating Little Nemo in Slumberland), Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend. True to McCay form, the comic's loose pretense, the wild imaginings of restless sleep after ingesting some rarebit, is a close ancestor to Slumberland. The McCay mandate insisted on any excuse to draw the strange and surrealist imaginings going on in his head, and both Slumberland and Fiend offer as much freedom for odd imaginings as possible while still keeping a modicum of plot continuity. He was the world's first pop surrealist, to be sure.

In his slide show, Glenn examines a (unfortunately rather pricey) new self-published book by German scholar Ulrich Merkl, which gives Rarebit a close examination and makes the argument that McCay, and Rarebit in particular, influenced a great deal of popular images in our culture. You won't hear any dispute from me that McCay remains one of the most important artists of the the 20th century, though some examples, like the Buñuel film Age D'Or, carry the argument much more robustly than others, like Mary Poppins. Regardless, it seems like a great book, and the slide show by Glenn is a joy to watch.

Sketchblog 11/7/07

(Click image to enlarge)

Above is the wrap-around album cover art I did for the new Edisyn album. I think it turned out well, if I may be so immodest. I had another idea originally which was rejected that I think I may still ink and color anyway. I worked a little bigger this time on both of 'em - this is 15 inches long - so I think it'll make a good piece for my upcoming show, when I actually get around to planning it.

All Dressed Up

Oops. I forgot to post these on the Day of Days, but better late than never, I guess. As evidenced below, and from previous precendents, these are all homemade. I love my friends.


Dangermouse, Wingman, That Katmari Damacy king-guy, a rubber duckie, and JonBenet Ramsey


Bumblebee (tragically, sans mask) and a giant Tootsie Roll.


Hall and/or Oats. I can never tell which is which.

Also, more R and M. As usual.

Back In The Saddle

I actually have a studio now! Swish!


It seems like a subconscious cycle I must perform every three months, much like how dogs unwittingly circle before they lie down: blog a lot for a spurt, stop blogging because something time-consuming happens, come back and apologize and resume. Well, I'm done apologizing. I moved, goddammit. And that takes a lot out of you. As you can see from the image above, we still have a lot to do before the house is fully functional, but we're getting there. I will apologize to everyone that's been trying to reach me, whether personal or professional: I have a huge backlog of unreplied-to emails and uncompleted projects, so bear with me over the next few weeks. Suffice to say, our new place is lovely, spacious, and waaay too expensive. C'est le vie.



Luckily, I haven't had any lack of huge projects to distract me, one of which of course is the constant sword over my head Robots and Monsters: there's new members up, with more coming (project of the day today), as well as the first of our Special Contributors submissions, which are all fantastic. Thanks to Lawrence Yang, D. Emory Allen, and Adam "Ape Lad" Koford for showing up so big and donating your immense talents. You all rule.




I also had the good fortune of being hired by Ignited LA to illustrate their set of holiday cards that goes out to all their clients and friends. The job took a long time, but I think the results are worth it: the images above is just one of many images I made for them, and I'm happy because it pushed me stylistically, and but still ended up looking great. I'll definitely be posted photos of the actual cards when I receive my set.

With album cover as well as snowboards on the to-do list, I'm gonna be plenty busy, but again, if you've contacted me and are waiting for a reply, be patient: I'll get to you all, I promise.

Just...as soon...as I can find...my mouse....

A New Member of the Fleet

Firstly, apologies for my blog absence, dear readers: a long life is a busy life, and all that that entails. The blogosphere exhausts me, but also emboldens me. I only hope that, on the balance, I give as much as I take.

I'm proud to announce the long awaited web portfolio site of my great friend Matt Rebholz, at www.mattrebholz.com. Any one of you that are on the web and a Rebholz fan will know that this was a long time coming, and is sure to enrich the web art community in untold ways.

I have a complicated relationship with Matt: I met him during play auditions in 8th grade. I was up for the role of a young Christopher Columbus (the older iteration of which went to this chump), and he was drawing manga before manga was cool on the auditorium floor. I rudely told him I thought the arms on his character were too long, he rightly rebuffed me haughtily, and we're still strong friends today.

Let me riff for a sec on Rebholzian art, and say that it is, unto itself, a very organic beast. Rebholz' obsessions with teeth, penises, liquids, scales, fur, and hair, parlay an animalistic and raw notion that is constantly attempting to break through a constructed fabrice: even buildings, structures, and mechanics all have an organic tilt in the world of Rebholz. It is a monstrous menagerie of imagination, deviancy, and nightmare-ish illusions that (at least my take on the) art has little seen since Maurice Sendak. Besides being one of my best friends for more that 15 years, I also inhabited the great City of Angeles with him for a period, and that too comes through: the raw, heretical, beastial notions of existence that Los Angeles proffers up to it's profane gods. Rebholz' artistic vision, still in it's early stages but already frighteningly good, captures with outrageous poignancy the obsessions of our obsessed culture, ranging from drugs to conspiracy to the commodification of art itself.

Clickwheel relaunch

As some of you may remember, I'm part of an online webcomic and mobile comic group, Clickwheel, that hosts some of my comics (about 2/3s of 365, the first few episodes of The Basic Virus, as well as a few comic-casts). A while ago I stopped uploading for a few reasons, namely, that I got a lot of web traffic but little restitution, it had poor marketing, and that process of and design of reading comics was unintuitive, and frankly, kinda lame. I'm happy to report, however, that in subsequent 6 months of furlough, it was bought by 2000 AD and that it is trying to reinvent itself as a destination again, an effort which I heartily applaud.

Part of their effort is (gasp! shock!) actually commissioning exclusive content for Clickwheel. The above panel is part of the second chapter of Colin White's fantastic series "Comics on Small Screens", an experiment of his in which he tries to tell stories by pushing the envelope of how many panels a screen can handle before it stops making sense. Loyal readers of this blog may remember that Colin and I were both invited to South Korea to talk about mobile comics, but Colin couldn't make it: nevertheless, I consider him my (somewhat more talented) brother-in-arms when it comes to trying drum up support and discussion about possibilities of mobile comics. I'm also totally flattered to report I make an unexpected cameo in his new series. Thanks, Colin. Go get it!

My main issue with CW, and one unfortunately that still hasn't been addressed, is
the actual physical process of getting the comics on your phone or iPod. It's tough to be in the tech biz these days: things move so damn fast, what used to be a project about comics on iPods (hence the name, "Clickwheel", already outmoded) has now necessarily turned into a project about comics on iPhones and iTouches. The duct-tape and bubblegum patch that was first initially proposed - just providing customers with JPGs they can download and put onto their mobile device - is unfortunately still around, and feels as caveman as ever. However, I have been assured that a CW reader app is in the works, and with iPhones now having not only wifi capability but WAP push, one has to assume that a smoother process - like just subscribing to your favorite comic and having it show up on your phone every day, a la RSS - is right around the corner. One has to assume. Fingers crossed.

Nevertheless, check out what CW has to offer anyway: its definitely light years ahead of what most other big slow stupid media companies are doing with content, it's cool, it's now more community oriented, and it's run by really nice guys. I'll go back to uploading new work too, and maybe develop something for them: the potential for instant comics to you wherever you are is just too great.

Faster Than A Speeding Bullet

I just bought the new DVD of the Fleischer studios Superman series from the 1940s, and to my delight found that they've just been made Public Domain, which means that, in light of all the other locks put onto to seeing work on the web, here's a few precious gems that you don't have worry about be caught about. I could go on and on about how amazing the framing is, that all the backgrounds look like they're shaded with chalk and airbrush, or that even the animation, for a weekly serial, is fantastic. But I don't need to. Just watch them all, and enjoy. Lookee them robots! Wowsa!

Silhouette Maker

I've discovered my new favorite comix artist: Tom Gould, of London. Check out his whole site, it's all very phenomenal work, as is his client list. He's like a unholy hybrid of Edward Gorey, Steven Beistey, and R. Crumb. Agh...I'm swooning because I love all of it so much. I'm gonna try and get him for Robots And Monsters. Fingers crossed!

"A slime draws near. Command?"

Future Systems on London has just won the contract for building the new national library for the Czech Republic, on the strength of their kinda outside-the-box design, picture above. Now, I ain't no prude, but frankly, I'd love to see a return to a little classicism one of these days when it comes to destination building design. What's the matter with dentals and dorics? Having recently lived in a city with a very weird and newsmaking library, I know I'm bucking the trend, but screw it: stuff like this just seems dated immediately out of the gate. Czechs 20 years from now are going to walk past this thing and roll their eyes and say "Ugh, that's SO early 2000s."

Let me just say this: the buildings pictured below also were viewed as "groundbreaking" by some circles at some point in time, too:










Nuff said.

Don't Get Too Comfortable

Via Digg:

The site for Alan Weisman's new book The World Without Us is a trip, and knows exactly what it needs to do to get hits, science be damned: give us pretty computer generated images and little Quicktime clips of what that subprime hunk of real estate that we're sweating over so much will look like in a billion years or so. Like all the best forms of pop-sci, if the site is any indication, Weisman's book uses the guise of 'science' to give us the vicarious thrill of reading about our probable end game. Futurism seems to come in waves, and the combined forces of the millenium change, 9/11, and the Global Warming® Brand Social Concern place us firmly in the Apocalyptic cycle, not that I'm complaining, mind you. The last time we saw this merging of science and culture to scare the bejeezus out of us was the 1970s, was of the best decades, in my humble opinion, for art, film, and music. With great fear comes great imagination, I guess. Check it out.

Oh My Freakin' God

This one is for Rebholz: after the unbelievable let down of Reign of Fire and the false promises made on it's movie poster, finally, finally, there is a movie that gives us exactly what we need: army guys vs. dragons. Only slightly less fantastic than this trailer is the comments on the YouTube page debating whether these are dragons or wyverns.

I heart The Internets.

(via Techsploitation)