wait... does this spoil the ending?

Sorry about breaking your feed, here.

Announced today. Maybe you'd be interested to know that I've been awarded a grant from the Xeric Foundation to help me publish my comic strip, !
Pretty exciting news, for me. I join some good company in the current batch of recipients, as well as the former recipients (who include some of my favorite cartoonists)
I don't have many details just yet. I've got my printer lined up, and yes, it will be printed as one long strip (somewhere around 35 feet long) and look something like this:

(one of the mock ups I made as part of my Xeric application)

I'll have more details, of course, as I get closer to solicitation.

Anyway, I've taken down the archive I kept up as I was posting the rough draft here. It'll be back soon enough, but all re-drawn and stuff. Up top of this post is my original sketch of the story, which took about 45 minutes to draw and defined probably the next following two years of my comics making life.

Congrats to the other Xeric recipients. I'm looking forward to your books.
Special thanks to Alexander Danner who nudged me to apply for the grant in the first place.

And thank you guys for reading.

projections

Boy am I bad at this blogging thing lately.

I'm about halfway through redrawing my ! story. I'd hoped to be further along by now.
I've set a deadline to finish the whole thing by June 10th. I can do it but I've still got a lot of work ahead of me. Keeps me busy.
And I'm waaaay behind where I'd hoped to be on Uncertainty, too...
I'll get back to posting comics here someday.

But, hey! I built a wall this weekend!
The second-floor stairwell used to just open right into Sophie's bedroom. We had gates and everything, but her or Jamon falling down the stairs was always a concern. Chris helped me to build the barrier and to move around some of the electrical stuff. Now it looks like a real room up there. When you ignore all the still bare wall board.

Oh, yeah... plus I also fixed our flickering livingroom lamp!

Who needs comics when you can hear all that exciting stuff?

*sigh*

Here's another in an intermittent series of non-comic sketches. Not Quite Geometric.

! - page thirty-one

Talking with our pediatrician this week for the kids' checkups.
She says that children have trouble drawing one line across another until about age three and a-half. They just can't bring themselves to do it. The doctor asked Sophie (three years old) to draw a + and sure enough, she had trouble doing it. She kept drawing vertical lines, one after another until the doctor showed her again what she wanted her to try. Even then her horizontal line was labored and misplaced, and Sophie seemed a bit confused as to the whole thing.

Tony Millionaire has said that he doesn't like to draw one line through another either.

The Briefest of Interludes: a not-so-brief interlude

Hey! Remember me?
Been a while since I posted an update for ! here and I have more coming, but I'm going away for the holiday and I thought I'd let you know what else I've been up to lately before I disappear again.

Some of you may remember me mentioning that I was working on a rewrite of my Lost and Found story-sketch (or sketch-story) for Cat Garza's Secrets and Lies anthology. Well I finished it now, and it's ended up quite a bit different than the original.

I cut the length by more than half to seven pages. The layout treatment is altered a bit, as are the character design and dialogue. It's also a completely different story called The Untold Mysteries of (Popular) Science.
Here's a brief exerpt from page two that pretty much sums up the premise:




I've also been playing the "part-time illustrator." My friend Chris is on the board of directors for the local Humane Society. He asked me to work up a design for their "Animal Transport Vehicle." Here's the colored pencil rough:



So all that - and, like, real life - has been keeping me pretty busy. Thanks to everybody for your patience. I'll be back with a page or two of ! next week, after the holiday.

waiting...

Hope everyone had a good weekend. Three days, here in the U.S. for Labor day.

This Sunday I forsook my usual small town hermetic existence for a jaunt up to beautiful Cleveland for a Cloud Cult show. Always an entertaining band (well, the two time that I've seen them at least...) As a bonus I got to meet up with Steve (Fabricari) Harrison and his wife Meili, who also attended the show. It was nice to get to talk shop face to face with another cartoonist for once (I don't get to talk about comics much 'cause most people I know don't really care). I'm sure the explosion of comicspeak bored poor Meili half to death, and I apologize for that.
Social gaffes aside (I also neglected to introduce Steve and Meili to another from the Wooster contingent there, Mr. Adam Budd...) I had quite an enjoyable evening. And meeting Steve made this whole webcomics thing seem a little more real.

Thanks for coming out guys. Hope you enjoyed it as well.

shooting star

I though this was okay when I first drew it but now I see that the anatomy is all off and one leg is longer than the other.
And, MAN! Would you just look at that wedgie!

We tried camping out near Mohican State Park a little while back, to watch the Perseid meteor showers. We didn't make it the whole night, worrying too much about the kids (well, Jamon mostly. He was only a month or so old, after all) and headed home around 11.
Chris and Shannon stayed all night and Chris said he only counted seven meteors.

Nothing to do with the picture except tangentally.

Here's how it happened...

I know you're all dying to know how the whole baby thing went down but you're all thinking "Gee. Tim put Mostly Banal on hiatus. And besides, he's too busy with baby stuff to draw any comics right now anyway. Aw shucks and gee wiz."
Well, never fear. In steps a ghost cartoonist with MB's first ever guest strip to tell you all the really real story of what happened.
Rejoice!



Shattering the illusion (By Billy?) to give credit where it's due: my good friend Chris came up with this little ditty all by his lonesome. Thanks, Chris. You have a stellar carreer in comics ahead of you, and it all starts here.

NEW BABY!

It's a boy! (we didn't know boy or girl until he was born)
Actually, new about three days ago. Things have been crazy around here. This is the first chance I've had to post this stuff.

Jamon Anthony Godek

born 7-6-07 @ 11:22 am
8 lb 10 oz
21 inches long

Everyone is doing well. Adjusting to being a family of four now.




Sophie is a little jealous of her brother getting our attentions, but all in all is taking it quite well.




We're all healthy and back from the hospital now. Being a dad the second time around is weird. It's like your experience the first tim around has shown you all the things to avoid freaking out about so you freak out about all new things. Our biggest issue has been helping Sophie's transition from only child to big sister. It's gonna take a lot of getting used to (for everyone).
Jamon himself has been a remarkably mellow baby. He has a voracious appetite and let's us know when he's hungry, but other than that is pretty laid back.
In case you're wondering, the name Jamon (Jay-mon) comes from Rachelle's family. Anthony (and Godek, I guess) from mine.




Babies...

crazy stuff, huh?

I'm not ignoring you, I just haven't been giving you any attention...

Things have been kind of dead here for a while, huh? The fickle beast that is the internet has probably forgotten about me by now. I mean, somebody like Drew Weing can get away with it, but with us mere mortals...

We're getting ready for the arrival of our second child sometime at the end of the month (or the beginning of the next) - getting into that "nesting" mode. We have to shift a lot of stuff around the house to make room for one more. And the cleaning... with this many pets there's always something to clean.

Anyway, here's a couple things I did manage to draw recently:




You remember Cloud Cult? I've mentioned them a few times here. Well, they caught wind of the post I did on their latest album "The Meaning of 8" and asked me to draw up couple concert posters up for them.





Since I'm poor - and since they never said that I couldn't - I'm offering the originals up for sale. They're both 8 1/2" x 11" ink on bristol board. I'm thinking $35 a piece or both for $60.
If you're interested, or know anybody that might be, then let me know at tymgodek(at)yahoo(dot)com.

If somebody buys these, I promise to post more often... :)

How often do you see that?

yeah, so?

Not that it's keeping me up nights...

five more minutes...

Sometimes I Have a Lousy Sense of Humor...

I went back and forth as to whether to post this strip.

My reaction to the events at Virginia Tech here touches on a bit of insensitivity that I'm not entirely comfortable with revealing. Obviously I can't even begin to imagine the heartbreak that family and friends of the victims are feeling right now. I feel a great sympathy to these survivors of what can only be called a completely senseless massacre. I have no wish to insult their pain with anything that could be construed as any type levity regarding their loss. My reaction is that of a selfish nature; thinking first of my family, and a sense of the helplessness toward protecting my own children that an event such as this can evoke. Perhaps the whole thing reveals the same selfish nature that compels me to pen an autobiographical strip in the first place.

If I erred in posting this strip, I did so in the sake of honesty.

Weak-end

You'll have to bear with me on this ballpoint pen thing...

Last one for these. I promise.

Before I scribbled all over this one, I scanned in just the panels and dialogue. I was a little surprised at how well it worked like that (at least to me)



(sorry about that stray hair there)

And now, real quick - just for fun.
(Everybody's read Matt Madden's 99 Ways to Tell A Story, right?)





_________
An aside: as I was readying this post for publishing Sophie got onto the book shelf and picked out a Love And Rockets collection to read. All by herself. She's engrossed...

Not even two years old yet and reading Jaime Hernandez...

...and it's suddenly Thursday

...and it's suddenly Wednesday

I've been playing around with doing these strips in ballpoint pen.

Time Flies, or some other cliche

It's all true - and it all happened in one day.