Mike Dawson Comics

It’s a podcast-crossover event this week, as notorious cartoon-shock-jock Robin McConnell joins us in The Lair to run down the Best Of The Year in all media. Hear what insightful things we have to say about movies, television shows, comics, sporting events, and more! Comments welcome!

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The Return of The Slush Pile, featuring The Desert Panther, Tony Consiglio. If we’re talking about something you’re not interested in, just wait five minutes and we’ll be talking about something new. Topics include: Alex and babies in Las Vegas; brand-new celebrity sighting; Tony’s has a big announcement; Mike has a big announcement; and so on, and so on. Comments welcome!

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I had time on my hands today, so I started clearing/cleaning out my home studio. I came across this acrylic painting that I did in college. It’s a panel from Debbie Drechsler’s series, Nowhere. Does this count as something I can somehow submit to that Repaneled blog?

I’ve just posted the Troop 142 epilogue to the website, which of course means that we’ve reached the end of the story! Check it out, won’t you?

I saw that they were accepting submissions to the Eisner awards yesterday, so I thought it couldn’t hurt to send along the Troop 142 link in the digital comics category. While I was putting that together, I took a look back at my site to see exactly when I started posting pages from this book. The first time I link to the micro-site from here was in the beginning of December 2009, so that makes it a little over one solid-year of weekly updates to post this entire book online.

Of course, I think I’ve mentioned many times that this story really took me much longer than one year to write. I’d been working on it off and on for a long, long time, and had completed pages and pages of material that would eventually get scrapped. I remember in 2002, I was taking a silk-screen class at SVA, and working on making a cover for what was then called “Boy Scout Story”, and I’m positive I’ve got attempts going back even farther than that. Maybe I will dig those out at some point.

And also, in reality, I’m not really even done. My plan is to take some time away from the story (a month? I’m not sure), and then come back to it with fresh eyes, and start working on revising, editing, and expanding the story, to get it ready for it’s forthcoming print release. There is a concrete plan for getting this book published, and I am really, really excited about it. I ought to have news to announce about that in the coming weeks.

The Ink Panthers happily present the complete audio recording of panel they were featured in, entitled “Indie Comics: Do They Matter?” (or something along those lines) at this past New York Comic Con. Alex and Mike were thrilled to sit-in on a lineup which included the wonderful Julia Wertz and Jason Little. It starts off a little rocky, but it gets going after everyone warms up. Comments welcome!

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Introduced my 2-and-a-half year old to The Incredibles this weekend. I sort of stayed on the fence about her watching it the whole time, as I guess it’s kind of violent and scary, even though it’s so great. I decided we should watch it the whole way through, as it’s only fair that she get to see how it all works out OK in the end, and also she kept insisting she was enjoying it. She liked that Dash could run so fast, and also that his Mommy kept coming to save them.

A few thoughts:

Mr. Incredible has a moment when the whole family is all trussed up where he apologizes for being an absentee Dad, more preoccupied with the past, and oblivious to the present. I guess the point of the speech is that he was wrong to do what he did (lie to his family, put them in danger), but it all works out so that doing what he did was the best thing for him, because at the end of the movie they all get to be superheroes again, and he’s much happier. So, I’m not sure what the message there is.

I love the central theme of “when everybody’s special, nobody’s special”. I imagine every audience member sitting and solemnly nodding in agreement, certain of the fact they they were the special ones, and everyone sitting around them were the mediocrities.

Along these same lines, I’m taking Dash’s race at the end, where he can easily win but is encouraged to “make it look close” for the others, as some sort of metaphor for Pixar. Actually, I guess the whole movie is. But, it’s pretty obvious that Pixar is doing stuff with full-length animated cartoons that’s so far and away ahead of what anyone else is doing. Especially when I think about their amazing post-Incredibles films, such as Wall-E, UP, and Toy Story 3, which are all so daring and challenging, and way beyond junk like Shrek 4 and whatever else is out there.

It’s a bummer that most of the upcoming Pixar movies are going to be sequels (Cars 2, Monsters Inc 2), but presumably they can still be great movies, so I’ll keep an open mind about them.

Oh, how The Panthers are afflicted this week. Common colds, the croup, and a vicious bout of Writer’s Block. Mike and Alex really get into it on the latter, talking about possible creative remedies for what ails. Should Alex take a stab at historical fiction or poetry comics? Or is it time for a complete change of career? If so, what would those “fall-back” careers be? Something practical, I’m sure. Comments welcome!

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New pages have been posted to the TROOP 142 website, wrapping up the the Saturday morning awards. Wait, what’s that you say? Saturday concluded already? Is that the end of the book? No, don’t worry, there’s still an epilogue, which will begin next week.

This are the items I accumulated this weekend, thanks to the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival, which I went to yesterday. Personally, I most enjoy buying prints or pieces of artwork at shows like this. I was very happy with the things I picked up along these lines: there’s a letterpress print by Ben Catmull, a silk-screen comic by Joe Lambert, and then a really large silk-screen done by Jennifer Tong. Then, the thing I’m most excited about for the weekend, which was a page from Josh Cotter’s Skyscrapers of the Midwest.

I’m heading over to check out this festival today. Copies of all 5 issues of my Troop 142 minicomics ought to be available at the Secret Acres table (well, they will be once I get there, and give them the copies…). This looks like a really great show, with a lot of fantastic artists, and some very interesting panels, many of which I plan on taking in.