Halloween Launch

Reminder that I'll be doing a signing of my comics along with Elliot Serrano and Art Baltazar at Dreamland Comics in Schamburg this Saturday November 8th from 1-3 pm!




Happy Halloween! Belated I'm afraid, but the holiday kicked my ass this year. Been really busy in the last couple of weeks with all sorts of projects. Top of the list had to be Van's Halloween costume! Emily and I have challenged ourselves to make Van's costumes from scratch each year. This year we weren't really sure what to pick for the costume seeing as he was old enough now to understand it better. So I thought about some of his favorite things, and since he's been absolutely obsessed with airplanes lately, and since one of his favorite DVD's is Duck Tales, (I'm so very proud of this fact) it was a natural to make him a costume of every ones favorite crash prone duck billed pilot, Launch Pad McQuack!

So it's basically just a WW1 fighter pilot outfit, with some webbed feet, a shock of orange hair and a rubber duck bill that van didn't want to wear.

As you can see, Emily did a fantastic job with the sewing! The whole thing is handmade aside from the pants.

But what pilot costume would be complete without a plane? This was my end of the costume, and this was also made from scratch. Half way during the construction I realized that the damn thing was too big and too fragile for a two and a half year old. Oh well. I'm sure he'll destroy it in good time, as it's only made from foam core and duck tape, with assorted cardboard and spray paint. I did actually use reference from the cartoon to get the details of the plane right, although I obviously played with the proportions.

in other Halloween news I carved my pumpkin with the knife of my white sox love. Below is the result; a mix of the old 80's sox batsmen logo and a jack o lantern.

Also went to the windy city comic-con a week or so back. What a great show. And by all accounts, from what I heard in talking to people at the show, it was busy and successful. I saw a bunch of friends there, and meet some new people as well. It was nice to go to a show that was small and creator focused, the kind of show I've wanted here in Chicago for years, as Wizard World leaves a lot to be desired.

Got to swap books with Jeff Brown, Jeff Lemire, and Neil Brideau. Jeff Browns latest, Sulk, filled with all Big head stories is a blast and quality as always from Jeff. Jeff Lemire was also super generous and swapped me a couple of his trades in the Essex County Trilogy. A beautiful, sad, tale and Jeff is quite nice to boot. Also meet Neil Brideau who I knew from the Indie Spinner Rack Forums. Neil and I swapped as well and his books are fun and creepy in the rich tradition of Gorey, Addams, and Tim Burton.

I also stopped by the table for Short Pants Press, a local distro/publisher. I picked up their new anthology The Short Pants Observer, and meet Sarah and Kristin. The Observer is a quality package, nicely put together with some great comics that were all quite different from each other, (always nice in an anthology). You can check it, and all the other quality wares out here.

Also bumped into Elliot Serrano again, and did yet another interview with him! This time for the Red Eye. You can check that, and Elliot's other coverage of the con here. And don't forget about the signing!
One more thing! Phew, lots of crap to cover right now. The new bindledog cartoon is up! Adam, Jay and I have been working on this one for a while. It's a cartoon featuring the lovable logo character bindledog. I hope you find it sad and cute.

The Fall Semester Begins

I love the autumn. Above are some pictures I took outside of work with my camera phone today.

Since I was a kid I've loved the fall, and I guess it's in large part to Halloween. But it is also because of the weather. The crisp cool days sit just right with my body somehow, as if it's the natural state it desires to be in. I always loved the smell of the air when the season was starting to turn. It seemed to be so clean and clear, and it seems like I smell it less as I get older. Is this not noticing it as much? My allergies? Or is the scent tied to an emotion I've moved past psychologically? At any rate, good things seemed to happen to me during the fall, and the colorful trees and the sensation of crunching leaves underfoot on grass leaves me feeling happy in a way that's melancholy at the same time. I guess cause it's not the bright sunny kind of weather one associates with good moods. Also, the fall doesn't seem to last nearly as long as it did when I was young. When I'd rake up big piles of leaves to jump into. Now it seems it's over in a blink, just a colorful glimpse between summer and winter.

In other news. I just received a great review over at sequart.com for the whole Burning Building series. Thanks to Rob! He really seemed to GET the whole series, and especially the last issue, which I was concerned about, as it's a little tricky, formally speaking. So please go and read the review and check out the other great articles!

Also I wanted to announce a new first for me! A signing!

Yes, I somehow was lucky enough to be invited to sign along with Elliott Serrano and Art Baltazar at Dreamland comics in Schaumburg Illinois on November 8th between 1-3.

At least that's what I've been told as of now.

This will be my first signing at a store, and it should be a good time. I'll update here as the information becomes more solid (although I have no reason to think this isn't solid).

I've just recently picked up this book by Ivan Brunetti.

It came along with a copy of Comic Art magazine. It's been out for a while and I didn't have the dough at the time to pick it up so I'm glad I came across it again. This book is basically a breakdown of the classes that Ivan Brunetti teaches here in town. I've always wanted to take a class with him, as he's such an influence on my style, and a tremendous cartoonist, but he didn't begin teaching art classes till years after I left college.

Well Ivan breaks down his teachings into courses, and I plan to follow each one as if I were in one of his classes, along with all the appropriate drawing. I think here, I'll also do special blog postings dedicated to each course and show my results. I'm really excited about this and really look forward to trying a different method of developing comics. Stay tuned!

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.