This was pretty much our experience with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police as well (during our drive through B.C. on the way down from Alaska in 2007). A fine, polite fellow was our Mountie.

Off to New York for the seminar and reference photos for the GN.

Hm. Must blog something…

Ooh—Kate Beaton collection! There. That was easy.

Dylan Meconis began her webcomic about vampires in the French Revolution back in high school, but you’d never know it from the smart, funny writing and accomplished artwork.

Now we can finally own it as a book so all is right in print as it is in pixels.

Also out this month (with a considerably bigger spine) is Tatsumi’s monumental A Drifting Life which I’ve been reading with great interest. Early in the book, the young cartoonist meets his hero, Osamu Tezuka, still in med school, but already a Manga sensation. I’d pulled over in my car to a shady spot to read a bit, and it made me think about how I’d been influenced by Tezuka, and had the pleasure of meeting some of my own heroes like Eisner when I was just starting out.

Starting to drive again, I realized that I was about to pass the cemetery where Jack Kirby was buried. I pulled in, parked, and picked up a small stone.

Dylan Meconis was in late elementary school when Jack Kirby died, and barely out of kindergarten when we lost Tezuka, but their genetic traces run through almost anyone making comics in America today, whether they realize it or not. It’s a long, long lineage, and it’ll be longer still with any luck.

It’s all here. Help out one comics’ greats any way you can.

Also going the distance is David Chelsea who’ll be dedicating his next 24-hour comic event to raising money for Wilson.

Larry Marder is collecting his amazing Beanworlds into gorgeous new volumes from Dark Horse. They feel heavy, blocky and wonderful. Soon there will be NEW Beanworlds and all the world will rejoice, but for now add this collection to your must-have list. It even includes my original introduction from almost exactly 20 years ago.

From Mind TV (via Tom), comes this great bit of shop talk from one of America’s most thoughtful cartoonists. Would love to see a central repository of these kinds of videos someday. Cartoonists could learn a lot from each other.

No one has had more influence over my art than my old friend, the legendary Brian Dewan. He’s a songwriter, composer, builder, music historian, and fine artist, but in my world he’s always been, first and foremost, a cartoonist, because he understands better than anybody how ideas and images can be distilled to their essence, a magic trick I’m still trying to learn.

I talk a lot about how Kurt Busiek got me into comics in junior high school, but despite a statistically-improbable cluster of geniuses my age growing up within a block of my house in Lexington, MA (including Brian’s amazing brother Ted whose photo of Brian I stole above), no one did more to unlock the mysteries of art for me than Brian.

One of Brian’s coolest inventions, his funny, touching, brilliant, insane, and unforgettable filmstrips, have been issued as a DVD collection from Bright Red Rocket. I can’t recommend them highly enough. Here’s an audio portrait of the talented Mr. Dewan, courtesy of NPR, which includes the filmstrip Innovations (from which the above screenshots were taken) if you’d like a sample.

Lucy + Erika = Awesome. Hey, and there’s still time to order Erika’s new book and reward one of the many printers out there that aren’t prudes.

Cartoonists are visual artists. We should all have better headshots. Everybody’s been enjoying the great photos of NYC comics artists that Seth Kushner has been taking, but I think my favorite is this one from a recent interview with James Kochalka. If anyone out there has a better headshot than that, I’d love to see it.

Do comics artists have musical twins? I think some do. For example, I’d say that Craig Thompson is the Sufjan Stevens of comics. Midwestern roots, struggles with faith, gorgeous compositions, a bit weepy… They even look similar (in fact, I was googling to make sure I was spelling both of their names correctly and came across this).

Others I’ve been toying with (or that have been suggested by others):

Will Eisner = Duke Ellington
R. Stevens = Daft Punk
James Kochalka = Flaming Lips
Paul Pope = T-Rex
Gary Panter = John Zorn
Jim Starlin = Yes
John Byrne = Phil Collins
Mary Fleener = B-52s
Eleanor Davis = Joanna Newsom
Jeph Jacques = Death Cab for Cutie

Some need two or more to match. I think that Bryan Lee O’Malley is a combination of Pizzicato Five and Go! Team, or maybe the Ting Tings, and Chris Ware might be our Radiohead, but you’d have to throw in some difficult turn-of-the-century composer like Charles Ives to really make it work.

My favorite suggestion so far was when Sky said that Ryan North oughtta be the Ramones because “the only thing that ever changes is the words.” I love my kids.

This whole thing started because of a now-defunct thread on the Comics Journal Message board on this same topic years ago. Someone had suggested that I could be the Raymond Scott of comics which I liked, but another poster logged in to say that I wasn’t good enough to be R.S. and was, in fact, the Thomas Dolby of comics. I objected, said that despite liking Dolby, I wanted to be the Raymond Scott of comics, to which my tormenter replied “make better comics then.” In the end, it was agreed that I could be upgraded to the Herbie Hancock of comics until further notice, which I thought was fair enough.

Working on a much bigger list. Any suggestions?