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!

Swedish Cyborg

So I had a great time at the panel in Columbia Missouri this past weekend. I only wish I had more time to hang out and talk to people, as everyone was so nice.

Hey did anyone watch Terminator the Sarah Conner Chronicles, or as I call it, that show with Shirley Manson! Well Shirley was in the first episode, and she was pretty wooden. She looked good enough, but the acting seemed a little stiff, unless it was on purpose! Spoiler. Shirley is a robot, so I'm not sure if she was acting that way on purpose. But I do love the idea of another Terminator robot with an inappropriately thick foreign accent.

In other exciting news, Burning Building #5 is done! I have to merely print it up, but it's all assembled hacked together. I'll post here when the new issue is available to order.

So, I finally got some pictures of the prints from the gallery show over on my flickr page. Van here is posing with the facade to give you an idea of scale. Email me if your interested in purchasing a page, I'll let you know which ones are left and give you a price.

Beijing Blitz

Okay so a reminder that I'll be In Missouri next weekend for the Alley Oop panel event, looking forward to that. Also I have a new comic finished that I teased last week. It's another in the Cast Of... mini's that I've done, the Cast of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. I don't have this up on my website quite yet, but anybody interested can email me and order it. It's 16 pages long and has a full color hand cut cover for $2.00. This is kind of a new style of drawing for me, It's the same profile type drawing that I've used for a while in BlackStar and Burning Building, but to get the likeness' down better I'm also doing more of a caricature. In this comic, you get 16 of them, along with stats and a list of the events they won medals with, a must have for any Olympics fan!

I also wanted to mention that a few weeks back Burning Building Comix #3 was reviewed by Whitey over at Optical Sloth. You can check it, and all of Kevin's Mini-Comic reviews here. Thanks Kevin!

Oooo! I almost forgot to mention that every Shirley Manson fans should watch the season premier of Terminator the Sarah Conner chronicles! Keep posted here for reports on her charismatic sexuality.

Ooplyimpics!

First off I want to direct everybody back to the web section of the Top Shelf Comics Website, as Issue #2 of Burning Building is up and in full color! TopShelfComix



So Sept 14th is the date of the panel I'll be a part of for the Exhibit above. I'll be on the panel with other comic artists, Matt Kindt of Super Spy fame, Ted May of Injury comics, and Mardou the artist of Stiro. I'm really looking forward to this and it should be a good time, so anybody in Missouri mid September should check it out. All the specific details are here.

Also, I just got back my work from the Gallery exhibit at the Diane Tanios Gallery. The show was great, and I'm so thankful to Diane for all the great exposure that the show afforded me. We even did a photo shoot for Lake Magazine last week that made me feel like some sort of important person! It was very strange. Not sure when that article is supposed to appear.

There are still some prints left, and I think I'm going to make some available on the website at some point in the future. Anybody interested feel free to write.

I've also been working hard on finishing up another "Cast Of" mini, dedicated to one of my favorite things, The Olympics! I love the Olympics, both summer, and winter, and there are so many great faces involved in the game that I couldn't resist putting together a cast of the Olympics 2008 Beijing mini. I'm nearly done, and gonna try to get it up and available quick before everyone loses all interest completely. Here's a sneak peek at Mr. Gold himself.

Publicity Stache

Burning Building Comix #5 is done! Yes, the last issue of the series is pencilled and inked, and just needs to be put together. It's very exciting for me to finally be done. Friends have already asked if I'm sad that it's done, and the answer is NO! Not that I don't like working on the series, but I'm excited to get it done and get it out there in the world, and to move on to a new project. I'm not sure what that will be as of yet, but I have a bunch of ideas in the hopper, so I probably won't wait too long before starting up something new.

Also, I wanted to point out that you can see a short comic of mine in a new 'zine. It's about mustaches, and is edited by the talented Sarah Morean. It's called Man-up and you can buy it from Sarah here. Sarah did a great job, and you can find mustache related stories from a large group of people, including Jeff Brown and Tim Sievert.

So keeping with the theme of my last entry, I thought I'd put up some of the articles that have been written on myself and the gallery in the last couple of weeks. It's been a great experience having the gallery show, and I've been very lucky to have very nice people write some very nice articles about me and the show.

Elliot Serrano wrote a great article for the Red eye that you can read below, and also posted the entire audio from our interview on his blog in the link below that. And if you want to hear something strange, Elliot hosts a web series on comics with a former co-worker of mine from my time working at the Comix Revolution. Small world huh? You can see Jose and Elliot for yourself here, and you might be able to see me join them, as I've been offered an open invitation.

http://redeye.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/red-0080508-serranocolumn,0,2135443.column

http://weblogs.redeyechicago.com/geektome/2008/08/my-talk-with-je.html#more

Then I was interviewed for the Pioneer Press by Myrna Petlicki. This was a nice full page article in all the papers last Thursday. I was very happy with it, and Myrna did her homework and even read this blog!

http://www.pioneerlocal.com/parkridge/entertainment/1103549,dc-comics-081408-s1.article

So thanks to everyone for helping me out in getting the word about my comics out there.

OH! I almost forgot another event to mention.

Next month I'll be travelling out to Missouri to participate in a panel about young comic artists. It's hosted by the library at the University of Missouri and is celebrating the 75th anniversary of the comic strip Alley Oop. You can find all the information about the events here. Apparently Alley Oop creator V.T. Hamlin held a bunch of different jobs before the success of Alley Oop, and the panel will focus on the trails of becoming a cartoonist, and the jobs you have to take in the meantime. More info on that as it approaches.

Bragadocious Uber

Finally got some pictures from the gallery show! You can see them on their flickr set here. The show opened on August 1st, and was great. Tons of people showed up! For a couple of hours, it was jam-packed and kinda hard to see the art on the walls. I had a great time and met a lot of cool people. Special thanks to everyone who turned out to the show. I'm really truly humbled when people take the time to stop and lend me their support. It really makes all the time sitting behind a table worth while.

To anyone whom I didn't get a chance to speak to or meet, I'm new to the gallery environment and didn't know exactly how to behave, so excuse me if I didn't introduce myself.

I did get to talk to a couple of different reporters, who interviewed me for various publications. I spoke with super nice guy Elliot Serrano, who writes for The Chicago Tribune's sister publication Red Eye. He wrote up a nice article on the show and you can read it for yourself here.

I also talked to the Pioneer Press and expect to see an article in print August 14th. Plus there's some rumbling about a Chicago Tribune video web thing.

Jeez, does this all sound like bragging? I guess. I'm just very excited and with only a couple pages left to ink on the 5th and final issue of Burning Building, all the hard work feels like it's starting to pay off. And hey, it's presumptuous to even do a blog about yourself, so this is the only forum to go ahead and whore your work out right? I guess.

Thanks to Mike Sims and Jenny Seay who pimped out yours truly on their Podcast cast over at Earth-2.net. You can check out Mike's one stop comic culture news, message board, and podcasting hub here. One of my very earliest comics work was with Mike, doing a Twilight-Zone-esque comic about killer bunnies.

So the gallery show with the other uber talented artists, Alex Wald, Tony Akins, Gene Ha, and Elisabeth Belliveau, will be on display at the Diane Tanios Gallery all of August. Seriously, having now seen all the other artists work up close, man are these guys good, and technical geniuses! Plus, everyone has been super nice and cool to a wet behind the ears, social retard like me.