Full Color Black Out!

So I'm pretty bummed I couldn't make it to SPX this year, which took place over the weekend, especially since I've heard it was a good year, with lots of good product and sales to be had. Maybe I'll be able to swing the full convention circuit next year.
Anyway, the fine folks at Top Shelf have put up the third Issue of Burning Building #3 in FULL COLOR! Please go here to check it out. Also a while back The Chicago Tribune did a video piece of the Diane Tanios Gallery show and I've just found it posted recently. Plus since the completion of the series, I thought it appropriate to take some "book porn" shots of the completed building in all of it's glory. Hey, you can build your own!

On a sadder note, my Chicago White Sox finally blew it the other night. They had a long, extremely frustrating season, with a second half that pissed me off more than rush hour traffic in the rain. But alas they managed to put together some very exciting well pitched games at the end, to make the season feel successful. I was at the critical "Black Out" game, however, and that was as thrilling a baseball experience I've had, and since I'm broke, its the closest I'll come to the playoff environment.

Here's another passage from Moby Dick that I liked quite a bit.

"Death seems the only desirable sequel for a career like this, but Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored; therefore, to the death-longing eyes of such men, who still have left in them some interior compunctions against suicide, does the all-contributed and all receptive ocean alluringly spread forth his whole plain of unimaginable, taking terrors, and wonderful, new-life adventures; and from the hearts of infinite Pacifics, the thousand mermaids sing to them -"Come hither, brokenhearted; here is another life without guilt of intermediate death; here are wonders supernatural, without dying for them. Come hither! bury thyself in a life oblivious than death. Come hither! put thy gravestone, too, within the churchyard, and come hither, till we marry thee!""

An Interview with Jeef

So Burning Building Comix #5 is finally printed and done! Anybody anxious to order it before I get a chance to put it on the website can drop me a line. I tell ya it feels pretty damn good to finally have it done. Finally all the stories can be completed to build a full building. But now what? Well, as you can imagine I've been thinking about that a lot. In fact I've been thinking about it for a long time, cause I like to have my ducks in a row. I think I'm going to plan a series of special blog posts to explore this idea. The inspiration for this idea goes back to the Gallery show I took part in for the Diane Tanios Gallery. On my Bio area in the Gallery, my wife pointed out to me that my name was actually spelled wrong! Funny enough, it wasn't Zwirek that was misspelled, but Jeff. Yeah, so it was transcribed as Jeef Zwirek. During the opening reception for the show, my friends and I were talking about it, and we decided that when I become a hugely famous comic artist and move to Europe I should publish under the simple moniker of Jeef.

SO, for years now I've always been absorbing stories about how people became successful in their lives. Whether I was looking for inspiration or just good ideas, any time I heard an interview where it got into how a person got started, and when they got their big break, my ears would perk up. Now comics people have these stories as well, but I've never been to satisfied with the details that they divulge.

In that spirit, I'm going to start a series of blog posts called "Becoming Jeef" or "The Road to Jeef" I haven't decided yet. The idea here is to document the process of taking my comic and hopefully getting it published, and then out into stores and all that that entails. Along the way I'm sure, I'll have words of advice for other people trying to do the same thing. (I know I'm not accomplished enough to give advice, but I like too, and really it's gonna be mind set type stuff anyway) Basically it will be the important points in making my career, till one day when I'm rich, pretentious, and living in France.

So look for those to start soon.

In other news, I recorded another interview with good guy, Elliott Serrano today. Elliot invited me to record with him on his video podcast over in Schamburg at Dreamland Comics. We recorded two segments and they're gonna be posted in two different places. The first will be on Comics Waiting Room, that should be up for Monday. The other went long and is gonna have to be broken up into segments for Elliott's other video podcast Comic Culture Warrior. I had a great time talking with Elliott, and we seemed to hit on all sorts of topics. I apologize for going on too long. I'm kind of a quiet guy until you get me started.

In addition to dying a little bit every day with each White Sox loss, I've been in the process of coloring Issue #4 of Burning Building for Top Shelf's Website.

I'm also almost done reading Moby Dick. Recently saw this beautifully done piece of Moby Dick done by Tom Neely, of "The Blot" fame. Had I the ducets, t'would be mine. Plus I thought, I'd share another segment from the book that I thought was quite well written. It's at the end of Chapter 58 and I won't bother for context.

"Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all of the horrors of the half-known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou can'st never return!"

"One Insular Tahiti" is a wonderful turn of phrase I might have to steal for a title some day.

Oh! I've finally sunk to joining a social network, so anybody else out there on facebook should go make me their friend, cause it seems that the point to that thing is to accumulate as many ancillary friendships as possible!

A Stroll in Whales

I've recently been busy putting together some work for a gallery show. I'm still working on the details, and I'll be posting the particulars here when the time comes, but basically it will be a gallery show for comics in downtown Chicago. The plan is to display some Burning Building work, and so far it's coming together nicely.

So, this has put the delay on getting the new comics posted on the website, but I've got that all taken care of now, and I just have to wait for my brother Adam to do the magical website stuff.

Hey now, there's a nice shot of man with his dog. Unfortunately It's not my dog. I'm allergic. However, I wish I could have a dog just so there would be more pictures like this. What a lovely picture.

So, I took the boy out for a walk to the park today and I must confess that I love being a dad. There are these moments when I'm with Van, and something happens that takes me back to that age. Today, I was pushing him home in his stroller after a nice time in the park. We were going down the sidewalk and it was a quiet summer afternoon. There was a nice warm breeze and as I pushed the stroller I became aware of a steady rhythm as the wheels bumped over the segments of cement. I looked down and saw Van lulling off to sleep, and the memory of falling asleep myself after an afternoon trip to the park was a real as yesterday. And so was that feeling of calm and simple happiness. As I finished pushing the stroller home with that regular rhythmic cadence off the sidewalk I couldn't help but think that this kind of serenity, with the warm tranquil stillness, must be what it feels like when Buddhists meditate.

Somewhat related to that, I'm reading Moby Dick right now. I've read a little of Melville before, and liked it, and I try to read classic literature to help me feel smarter than I am. Anyway, it's slow and very descriptive and I have to admit there have been moments where it's lulled me off to sleep. There was this passage I just finished though that I thought was so nicely written and original a thought, I wanted to share it somehow. So here it is:

"Whales are scarce as hen's teeth whenever thou art up here." Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absentminded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly discovered, uprising fin of some indiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Cranmer's sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over.

I think that passage is talking about young sailors being lousy at spotting whales. Come on, huh? That was three sentences! There's seven semi-colons! Seven! Now, that's writing!