David Malki !

Signing! Book sale! COMIC-CON

ITEM ONE

Meredith Gran’s massive nationwide book tour is touching a tentacle to the slimy form of Los Angeles this week, and I’m pleased to join her this Thursday, the 15th, at the crazy-cool Secret Headquarters in Silverlake! I’ll have books and high-fives and basically anything you might want out of life, ever. Come say hello from 7-9 PM and here is a Facebook thing with maps and everything.

ITEM TWO

You know what I did last night? I looked at my many, overflowing bookshelves and said “It’s time to reintroduce some of these items into the ecosystem so other people can enjoy them too.” I own too many books — and while they’re all great, I always seem to be getting more of them and it’s creating space problems in my life. So this weekend, I am opening up my studio and having a book rummage sale with art books, novels, tons of comics and magazines, and again, free high-fives and loads of joy all around! Come check out my studio — I’ll be here Saturday and Sunday from 9AM-4PM and I promise you will find some pretty great books here. And you will spend like a dollar for them. I am doing this friends-of-the-library-style where a massive novel will cost you about as much as a cucumber. The address is: 1506 Abbot Kinney Blvd, Venice CA 90291. COME ON DOWN

ITEM THREE

NEXT WEEK is the SAN DIEGO COMIC-CON. I am going to be at booth 1231! That is super-easy to remember because it’s just 1-2-3 and then 1 again. You cannot forget a booth number so simple, which is great because everything at the Con conspires to capture your attention. This booth number, however, will be rooted so deep in your brain that even your lizard ancestors could find it, even while being distracted by a Jabba the Hutt made of LEGOs. I’ll be with TopatoCo and the sign will likely be very red. Again, a good color for attracting even lizards. SEE YOU THERE???

BONUS ITEM FOUR!!

As a present for reading this whole thing even if you are nowhere near California, I will give you a little taste of what it is like to be in California. I found the following thumbtacked to a tree.

(UPDATE: This image was accidentally deleted, and I no longer have the original to re-scan. It was an index card with a to-do list written on it. The list included “laundry”, “buy sports bras”, “cuddles”, and “buy Pliskin’s light.”)

At first I thought it might have been viral marketing for a beer called “Pliskin’s Light”, but I can’t find any evidence that such a thing exists. I only hope that whoever thumbtacked this to a tree didn’t come back, find the note missing, and go on to totally forget to empty the trash. I would feel bad.

WHAT’S GOING ON HERE? Why in the world was this thumbtacked to a tree? Suggestions in the comments!

Original art auction: CASUAL GAXIAN

When my friend and yours Carly Monardo said “Hey folks who wants to donate some original art to be auctioned off for charity to benefit the Colbert Nation Gulf of America Fund,” I said “Well shucks I’d love to, except that my work doesn’t involve the creation of any original art!” To her credit, Carly was going to take that as an acceptable answer (and I was gonna make an exclusive print or something instead), but then I said “Dang-blast it, I wanna draw something.” So I did! And the result (that you see above) is up for auction right now as part of Carly’s Webcomics Auction For the Gulf series, which also includes many other pieces by many of my favorite people!

ANYWAY ENOUGH ABOUT THOSE PEOPLE HERE IS MY DRAWING which could very easily become your drawing (wink wink)! Edit: it’s sold! Thanks!

I Read This: Cul De Sac, by Richard Thompson

What Is It: Cul De Sac: This Exit and Cul De Sac: Children at Play by Richard Thompson
I Got Mine: From the author at Heroes Con in Charlotte, NC
Get Yours: From Amazon or Indiebound

I first became aware of Richard Thompson’s daily comic strip “Cul De Sac” when the news broke that Bill Watterson had written an introduction to the first collected volume. Bill Watterson? The reclusive “Calvin & Hobbes” creator had taken a break from whittling logs into clarinets or whatever to speak well of this very new comic strip? This must be something special.

And indeed! Despite running in newspapers, this is a great comic strip. The characters are eccentric in ways that continually delight and surprise. I read individual strips in bits and pieces (here’s the strip’s official online home), but it wasn’t until I sat down with the full books in-hand that Alice, Petey, and their parents and friends took on strange and hilarious personalities. The language is clever and specific; the drawings are weird and delightful.

I had the pleasure of seeing some of Richard’s original art at Heroes Con this year, and it’s phenomenal. Despite the scratchy-looking style, it’s very precise, very controlled. The watercolored strips in the first collection are particularly lovely. There’s something about seeing the work of a master well-versed in his craft — despite “Cul De Sac” only being a few years old, Richard has been a professional cartoonist for decades — that’s tremendously inspiring. BASICALLY WHAT I AM SAYING IS that I really like this strip and these books!

These Books Are For: Fans of “Calvin & Hobbes”, “FoxTrot” or goodness

Here is Richard Thompson’s blog
Here is a great interview with Richard
Here is Cul De Sac on Amazon or IndieBound

Abe Lincoln is sad

Because his shirt is closing out. The current print run of this one will be its last! The last shirt I closed out — Ninja on a Unicycle — sold out of its common sizes very quickly, so if you’ve had your eye on ol’ Honest Laser-Vision Abe, now’s your chance. Also don’t forget to read his backstory: Part 1 / Part 2

OTHER NEWS! Here’s a video interview with me conducted by rgbfilter, shot at the Toronto Comic Art Festival this year:

I talk about beards. I talk about matter transportation. I talk about my hoard of old books. Beyond that it’s a little hazy.

MOVING ON. Here’s an interview with me in Quail Bell Magazine, which is “a magazine dedicated to fantasy, fairytales, and magical realism, as well as related fields in Medieval and Victorian studies.” They asked me about fairy tales! I never knew I had a position on fairy tales, until I was asked:

I’m trying to think of some way that I can retroactively recontextualize the entirety of Wondermark as one enormously elaborate interweaving fairy tale. I could probably do it if it wasn’t for that 40-strip run in which I methodically and exhaustively disclaimed the existence of pixies in the Wondermark universe. I guess we all have to learn to live with our mistakes.

Speaking of ink (were we?) — here’s some tattoos some people have gotten of Wondermark characters. Daniel’s reads “How Much More Art Can U Take?”

…Based, of course, on the protagonist of Comic #013 and the Russian Elephant shirt. And Denis, a photographer, offers this version, “The Revolution Will Not Be Digitized”:

…Based, of course, on Hobart from my The Revolution Will Not Be Telegraphed shirt. You know, in my travels this year, I have had probably a dozen people come up and tell me that the Revolution shirt is the most comfortable garment they own. It’s 50/50 cotton/polyester and it’s super-duper soft. You will want to snuggle it.

REVIEW! Cory at Boing Boing really loved my latest book, Dapper Caps & Pedal-Copters:

…Apart from being a doubtless royal pain in the ass to typeset, Dapper Caps is just plain wonderful. Malki adds a bunch of original prose to accompany the strips, some of it screamingly funny (I literally snarfed water out my nose at the stuff on p.17). It’s just the perfect thing to settle down with on a summer Sunday and point out to your slightly puzzled loved ones.

Such a kind review! Thanks very much, Cory. Slightly-puzzled loved ones the world over thank you as well.

Thanks as well for your thoughtful votes and responses to this week’s query. I think I know what I will be doing, but I have to mull it over a bit yet. Here’s the kind of thing you might see in a hypothetical collection of Malki miscellany — a detail view of Comic #634:

Because I like looking at things big.

Works-in-progress survey

At any given time, I’m working on a half-dozen different projects: making comics, of course; designing books; hashing out ideas for prints or posters or shirts or what-have-you; and often, creating logos and layouts for stuff that may not see the light of day for months, if ever. Sometimes I get a little antsy and post previews or sneak-peeks on my Twitter, but that’s very limited in its scope, and I’d like to share more, and in different ways.

However, I am also very sensitive to the fact that you come here to read comics (with the occasional other nonsense), and you may not want half-complete junk-in-progress, or long chunks of prose, or stuff wholly unrelated to Wondermark in your feed reader or email inbox. Personally, I’m in favor of littering this site with everything I do, but this site doesn’t just belong to me anymore; it belongs to you too. So I’d like to ask your opinion — where should I put miscellaneous stuff? We’re talking half-finished comics. We’re talking chapters from novels, potentially. We’re talking sketches and designs and journal-type entries and probably stuff related to Tweet Me Harder and other projects. I figure there are three options:

Keep it at Wondermark. I’m a big believer in not fragmenting one’s online presence more than necessary, and Wondermark is potentially a broad enough umbrella to encompass everything I do. Besides, you could just ignore the stuff you don’t want to read.

Move it offsite. I’d probably start a Tumblr and start posting over there. That has an advantage in that I wouldn’t feel self-conscious about posting non-comics-related stuff there, but I’d hate for that to be so separate from Wondermark that nobody bothered to visit.

Move it offsite, but post a weekly digest on Wondermark. I’d put all the nonsense on the other site, but on Wondermark there’d be one post a week (if that) listing the highlights. So you’d still stay abreast of any cool stuff over there, but if you were only subscribed to Wondermark it wouldn’t be tons of posts in your feed reader or email.

Here’s a poll!

Or, if you have other ideas, leave me a comment. Thanks for your feedback!