this one's for Colin's Mummy. I always liked this story about her.... however, the facts are dubious. This is how I hear it from Colin.

Well here it is...I have been working pretty steady on the poster since the last posting.

I just got word that The Green Mountain Music Festival will be happening again this year! I was assuming that James wouldn't be able to organize the show this year since he has only been back on his feet for about a month now. I talked to James on the phone this morning, and he said that the team made such incredible strides last year, all the logistical details seem to just be falling into place by themselves. It's James'es nature to want to do everything himself, but obviously he can't since he's still recovering from his brain injury. I learned a LOT last year about taking initiatives and being responsible, and just plain learning how to use photoshop. I am much much better at photoshop now, and I think my logistics are going to fall into place as well.
as far as artistically, I think I might use a bear for this years theme....that or something like a baby bird, or some other kind of bird, to use a heavy handed metaphor for Mike Gurr. James says that this years show will be the final show for The Hotel Lobbyists, then they will retire the name and reform as a new band. I'd like to use some kind of metaphors for that in this years poster, without using something obvious like a stupid Phoenix.
Green Mountain Music Festival!
August 8th, 2009
Nanaimo, BC

Tonight is the night I spend my hundred-dollar ticket to see Leonard Cohen! apparently he is still a great performer, even in his seventies. The other big-ticket item I mention in this comic, the David Byrne concert, was excellent, so hopefully this show will also be good. I can understand why these guys are so famous, because they are spectacularly carismatic performers. About 5 years ago, I got to see David Bowie at GM place, and I swear it was like he was singing directly to me, way up in the nosebleeds. That show was also worth the price of admission.

This comic is from back in January, I was backlogged a bit because of my 10 pages of useless hourly comics...which I will NOT be doing (to such an extent) again. As far as this comic goes, this winter was especially harsh. We had several huge dumps of snow that reeked havok on the town. My strategy for dealing with my 40 km commute was to drive to my parents house the night before work so I would only have to drive through one city as opposed to three. This particular night, I started driving in the middle of a huge snow storm, I probably would have been better off driving that morning.

in other news, April 5th I went down to Seattle to the Emerald city comicon. I was only a spectator but it was a spectacle. I got to meet my favorite comic artist, Jaime (Xaime) Hernandez of Love and Rockets fame. I showed him my comics. He was very nice. nothing spectacular happened at this spectacle, but it was just really nice. like home.

This is an old comic I put on hold in order to do my hourly comics. It's really old.

I think that only one image at a time can be blown up, here. Thats annoying.

I am re-posting the images from the hourly comics that wouldn't blow up, so my poor blind aunties can read them.

Well, Feb 1st is Hourly Comics Day, where cartoonists go nutty drawing what happens to them every hour for every waking hour of Feb 1st.

So, I decided to participate in this, which took me until yesterday to finish. I hope you can enlarge the image, I know my last comics had some glitch, I will try to reload them.

Poor little Hedwig the Guinea Pig died suddenly at the end of November. That night I had a crazy Dream? vision? sleepy hallucination? I really SAW this strange thingy on the bedroom wall, be it a ghost or something in my head.

I thought you might want to see the photo we traced to make the cover drawing. This is honestly what the top of my desk looks like most of the time, with various incarnations. Right before I got the idea for the cover, I had ironically cleaned off the top of my desk to help with the thinking process. I therefore had to cosmetically "mess up" my desk to it's regular state. The task was fairly simple: pull some sewing out of the pile, toss some overdue bills, sprinkle with bits of paper and pins and thread, and then decorate with empty beer cans and moldy tea mugs with festering tea bags dried to the bottoms. It's no wonder one of my idols is Francis Bacon. If I was computer smart I would make that into a link so you could click on it and see a picture of his uber messy art studio. I had a similar crush on this guy in art school who had the messiest studio space in the painting department. he literally kept a shovel that he would use to shovel the crap away from his painting area. I don't particularly LIKE having a really messy desk, but I like having all my stuff there where I can see it. Colin likes that as well, he wants all his stuff hanging on the wall out in the open, no cupboards on the doors or anything. Sometimes I get a little freaked out with all our stuff towering over us, threatening to topple and crush us.

Here it is ! the cover of my very first mini-comic collection of these strips, from dec 2006 to july 2007. I had been dragging my feet on layouts for a few months now, but I decided to give them away as christmas stocking-stuffers. I did not actually draw this cover, Colin did- but he didn't actually DRAW it, he traced a photograph of my desk. In the process he smashed a freshly healed cut and gushed blood all over the drawing, which I edited out with photoshop after the drawing was done.
Today I took some of them down to the local comic shop but I was too shy to offer them up. Maybe tommorow then.

This is a really old comic, part one of one of the many adventures Colin and I had with Christine and Travis when we went up to the Queen Charlotte Islands this past August.

Why would I get stuck up a tree with a bunch of giant turtles?

Well to everyones' delight, James Wood, singer/geetaurist of The Hotel Lobbyists, has been back home in Vancouver for almost a week, but still has a ways to go to being the dynamic fellow we know and love. I have been thinking a lot lately about back when we were in UBC education together. My little brother is now doing his first short practicum with UBC education, and the tension and stress and smelly BO problems are all fresh in my mind. The whole situation seemed so over my head back then (and still is) but James always seemed to have a pep talk or some empathy, without seeming holier than thou. He always seemed to be way more stressed out than me, but still inspirational and more in control? I always felt better after talking to him.

I thought it might be nice to re-publish this strip from right after UBC Edu, before I got hired with the Surrey school district. I was very, very nervous and stressed out about having to be a substitute teacher, and not having a job yet. I then had this crazy dream which was comically metaphorical, about having no choice but to kill TEENAGE zombies. I was totally out of my element, being the pacifist I am, and there was James, encouraging me along to kill some zombies. Next thing I knew, I was hired as a sub, and feeling a wee bit more confidant.

For some reason there isn't much sub work right now and I have had a lot of spare time to work on comics in my new studio space. I've begun a process of editing my juvenile quality control with magical Photoshop, so this is the new, improved cleaned up version.

part two of the great Mojave Desert moth attack.

Thursday, september 25 at 3am, the Hotel Lobbyists were driving on the trans canada highway outside of Brandon, Manitoba. The driver of their van fell asleep at the wheel, veered off the road, tried to right the course and the van rolled. James, the singer/guitarist, and my good friend from UBC teacher ed, was critically injured. The drummer, Mike Gurr, was killed. I don't know what happened to Jordie and Jordan, but I hope they are okay athough they must be hurting pretty badly even if they're physically okay.

I've done a lot of drawings for the band in the last couple years, and consiquently gotten to know them all fairly well but not nearly as well as I could or would like to. I do know that Mike was an extremely hard working, driven guy with an electric personality. he always greeted everyone with a smile, and had fantastic energy and big plans. I can't stop thinking about him. All the same can be said for James, who spent all summer killing himself.....wrong word......working himself to the bone organizing the Green Mountain Music festival to raise funds for CF. After the concert he had his own wedding to organize and attend, and then what seems like two weeks later, was off on this tour with his band. all their dreams. I went to the kick off around the last week of august and I asked mike if he had all his changes of underwear packed. He said that was all he had left to do, that night as they were leaving the following day.

tommorow night there is going to be a funraiser to help the families with costs of getting the boys home and everything.

I have already posted this image but lets see it again....it's the drawing I did for the Hotel Lobbyists t-shirt. from left to right, James, Jordie, Jordan and Mike. I hope he gets to finally know all the secrets of the universe.

part one!

This dream was awesome. I honestly have always fantasized about living in a "shack"...especially one with a secret passageway.

This comic has been sitting around for months now. I finished it weeks ago but I went on vacation to the Queen Charlotte Islands and forgot to post it beforehand.

I've been noticing that my comics look really....amature sometimes, because of the lettering and the way that you can see every booger smear on them when they get blown up. Since I've been using photoshop to work on rock posters I am aware that I should be polishing them up with that before posting, but I can hardly pull out a pen lately.

anyway, I got a new sketch book the other day and that always promises goodness.

I also got a real art studio too, at the beginning of the summer, and the office across the hall is that of one of my idols, Pia Guirerra....google her. woot!