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stand-up shorts

December 12th, 2011

I’m working hard on finishing up the drawing for my new book. All day long I sketch and take pictures of myself in various poses, then sketch some more. I use different props and clothes for all these reference shots.

I have this ancient pair of Patagonia “Stand-Up” shorts from when I was twenty-five, so I wear them in some of these little tableaux to help me conjure up my younger self. They’re too small now–I can barely button them. So I take them off as soon as possible after the shutter releases. As I was rushing about today, I caught this glimpse of them living up to their name.

They also reminded me of that Dr. Seuss story about the empty pants in his book The Sneetches and Other Stories.

I saw a pair of pale green pants
with nobody inside them…

gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights

December 6th, 2011

Holy shit!
I’m listening to Hillary Clinton’s staggering, mind-blowing speech in honor of International Human Rights Day. You can too, right here.

Here’s the transcript. It’s totally worth reading every word.

(Thanks to Rex Wockner for these links!)

inking away

December 1st, 2011

library confusion

November 23rd, 2011

I made a post here in the summer of 2010 about a book called Unpacking My Library that I was being included in. Now the book is out. I haven’t seen it yet, but I just noticed a post about it on the New Yorker’s website.

It’s kind of a photography book—it’s pictures of different writers’ libraries. But the funny thing is, in this New Yorker post, the photo they run with a quote from me is of Holly’s books, not mine. It’s a shelf full of field guides and shells and Rachel Carson and John McPhee, all very interesting, but not my books. The skull is that of a sloth that Holly found in Panama once. She cleaned the maggots off of it and brought it home. She can’t remember if it was a two-or three-toed sloth.

barbara grier

November 11th, 2011

Barbara Grier, the founder of Naiad Press, died yesterday at age 78. Victoria Brownworth has a very nice piece about her on the Lambda Literary Review site. I think I first learned about Naiad when I began reading their reprints of Ann Bannon’s Beebo Brinker books in the early 1980s. Later, when I started drawing Dykes to Watch Out For, I would occasionally poke fun at Naiad books by giving them these barcode covers. Some years later, I actually met Barbara. I was nervous she’d think I was an ungrateful young punk, but she said she always loved seeing the Naiad jokes in my comic strip. I was completely charmed. You should read Victoria’s whole column, but this part sums up our collective debt to Barbara Grier very nicely.

Grier wanted no memorial service and McBride has requested that people not call her at this time. But somewhere, someplace, a woman is reading a lesbian book–perhaps in a room hidden away where no one can see, or perhaps right out on the subway on her way to work. All those women reading all those lesbian books–be they intellectual treatises or pulp fiction in the Ann Bannon tradition–owe a deep and abiding debt of gratitude to the force of nature that was Barbara Grier.

UPDATE 11/16/11: The New York Times ran a great obituary of Barbara!

new post

November 9th, 2011

I am way deep down in the mine of my new memoir Are You My Mother, so haven’t had time to blog. But in case anyone’s still reading, here are a few odds and ends.

Here is a picture of me on a recent visit to Quimby’s Bookstore in Chicago signing these two very adorable young peoples’ skateboards. I never signed a skateboard before.

Here is my friend Hillary Chute, who I will be teaching with at the University of Chicago next spring, in front of a beautiful life-size Anders Nilssen comic panel at an exhibit called Cartoon Ink: Emerging Comics in Context, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The show is down now but it was really good.

Here are two very worthy Kickstarter projects:
• The Harvey Pekar memorial statue!
•Jessica Abel’s new project sounds amazing–a graphic novel about roller derby on Mars. If you pitch in, she’ll give you an article from her wardrobe. (I’m hoping for the vintage 40s men’s swim trunks.) Check out her great little film about what she’s up to.

My buddy Phranc has turned her cardboard crafting skills to artifacts of the old west. She has an installation of cardboard cowboy boots, geetars, and suchlike, at the Autry Store.

Fun Home The Musical is under way. The brilliant Lisa Kron (Well, The Five Lesbian Brothers) has written the book and lyrics. The very awesome Jeanine Tesori (Caroline or Change, Shrek The Musical) is the composer. It’s kind of unbelievable. But I’m starting to believe it. I’ve seen some of their early work and it blew me away. Lisa and Jeanine are working on the play right now at the Sundance Theater Lab.

And if you’re in Chicago, come see the premiere of “Alison and Riva,” a documentary about the artist Riva Lehrer, and our collaboration together as she draws a portrait of me. Riva’s work is fascinating. You can see some of it, and also details about the screening, here.

Okay. I’m now I’m grabbing my pickaxe and donning my miner’s helmet and going back down. OMG. I once had a miner’s helmet! I sent away for it with boxtops from Quake cereal. It was yellow hardhat with an actual flashlight in it!

Paula Ettelbrick

October 9th, 2011

Another sad loss of someone who died much too young, at 56. I didn’t know Paula personally, but always admired the radical legal vision of her work at the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, NGLTF, and the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission.

There’s a very good obituary in the Times that cites an article she wrote back in 1989.

“When analyzed from the standpoint of civil rights, certainly lesbians and gay men should have the right to marry,” she wrote in the fall 1989 issue of Out/Look magazine as part of a debate with Thomas B. Stoddard, a colleague at Lambda who strongly favored same-sex marriage. “But obtaining a right does not always result in justice.”

Ms. Ettelbrick continued, “Justice for gay men and lesbians will be achieved only when we are accepted and supported in this society despite our differences from the dominant culture and the choices we make regarding our relationships.”

I remember that debate in Out/Look very well—it helped to shape my own thinking about what is gained and lost as a liberation movement begins to achieve success. I don’t want to be accepted because I’m like everyone else. I want to be accepted despite the fact that I’m not.

It’s very sad that her work was cut so short.

RIP Steve Jobs

October 5th, 2011

I’m watching footage of the Wall Street protest. Everyone’s using their iPhones to photograph and videotape the police whacking people with batons.

This is my first computer, in 1992–a Mac Classic. I continued using the Apple Stylewriter black and white printer that I bought at the same time through the next 3 or 4 computers. I finally had to retire it not because it stopped working but because its connection cable had become obsolete.

that new book smell

October 3rd, 2011

Here’s Best American Comics 2011, hot off the press. I was the guest editor this year. There’s some amazing stuff in this volume. Work by Gabrielle Bell, Joe Sacco, Dash Shaw, Chris Ware, Jaime Hernandez, Kevin Mutch, Eric Orner, Kate Beaton, Gabby Schulz (Ken Dahl) and many many more. Jillian Tamaki did the cover and Robert Sergel did the endpapers.

It just got a very nice review in the Austin Chronicle.

I’ll be traveling to do a few bookstore events soon. This Saturday, October 8, I’ll be at Quimby’s Bookstore in Chicago. Next Saturday, October 15, I’ll be on a panel at the Boston Book Festival with Dan Clowes and Seth. And on Tuesday October 18, Gabrielle Belle, Kevin Mutch and me will be at the Union Square Barnes and Noble in NYC.

Also, it’s LGBT History Month. And I’m an icon! One icon a day for 31 days. It’s a very peculiar feeling to be considered “history.” A great honor, of course, but also disorienting. Watching the 10-second little slideshow-with-dramatic-voiceover about myself, I was overwhelmed with nostalgia for the present.

Progress report

September 10th, 2011

I’m drawing and drawing, on deadline for the memoir I’ve been working on for the past five years. It kinda freaks me out that the book is already up on Amazon.com, considering that it’s far from finished. But I guess it’s also motivating. The book will have seven chapters, for a total of around 280 pages. So far I’ve got 116 pages done…that’s the first time I’ve allowed myself to tally them up.

Thanks to the people who wished me a happy birthday on the last post. Today I’m 51. And I get to draw all day!