blog: appearances

Just added: June 17 book signing in Beverly Hills!

faaancy

Mark your calendar! I’ll be bringing books, sketch paper and high-fives to the official Clever Tricks to Stave Off Death release party at the awesome Crescent Hotel in Beverly Hills. What better way to launch a book that no less an authority than Publishers Weekly called “mordant but must-have“?

The Crescent has an amazing indoor/outdoor lounge bar with double-sided fireplaces, massive leather couches, and a full-service bar and restaurant. We’ll be there from 7-10 PM, and I’ll be doing free sketches in all my books! It’ll be my only Los Angeles appearance this summer, and perhaps all year.

This is the first time I’ve held an event like this and I can’t wait to meet everybody who lives in my very own li’l town. Finally, an event in Los Angeles for the locals! Come out, introduce yourself, and represent.

I’ll post another reminder closer to the date, but mark your calendar now for Wednesday, June 17!

This weekend: TCAF! in Toronto!

tea calf

In just a few short hours I will be boarding an aeroplane for CANADA. This is a country many of you have probably heard of, and in fact some of you probably even live there! If you happen to be in Toronto, the City of Charity, I hope you will come to the biennial Toronto Comic Arts Festival, featuring many fine artists and raconteurs from nations both near and far. It will be my first time in Toronto and, depending on how lenient the local law-enforcement proves to be, perhaps my last! DO NOT MISS IT.

Should you be prohibitively far from Toronto, or restricted from entering Canada due to outstanding warrants, never fear! You can still get the “personal experience” by ordering an Artist Edition book during these LAST SEVEN DAYS that they are available.

Stumptown Comics Fest & BEARD LINK ROUNDUP

This weekend I’ll be in Portland, Oregon for the Stumptown Comics Fest! Portland is the Beard Capital of the USA, so it’s only fair that I use this post for a BEARD LINK ROUNDUP:

BEARD HEAD. So many people have sent me this link! It is a very windy day in Los Angeles today so I could certainly use one of my own. Beardhead.com

Amazing video from the World Beard & Moustache Championships (2003)! My favorite quote: “Well, I don’t normally wear it like this, it’s a bit impractical actually.” This year’s championships are coming up next month in Anchorage, Alaska.

Beard Song. Quite a lovely song really.

The astonishing charity fundraiser, Things My Beard Can Lift.

The Australian band “The Beards“. They proclaim themselves to be “a bearded band”, which is great — but wait! “We only play songs about beards and having beards.” Phenomenal.

This lovely poster is by Michael Buchino of beardrevue.com, which should have a home in the “Beards” tab of your bookmarks folder or RSS list.

Finally, here is a drawing that I made in 2006, the very first year that I went to the Stumptown show:

See you in Portland!

Emerald City ComiCon: April 4-5

whoooosh

This coming weekend I’ll be in Seattle for the Emerald City ComiCon! I’ll have books, posters, a few T-shirts and a pad of paper for sketches. This is one of my favorite shows of the year, so I really hope you’ll come out to say hello.

Later this week or early next week: I’ll be launching a pre-order for my new hardcover strip collection, Clever Tricks to Stave off Death, as well as Return to Wondermark Manor: Dispatches from Wondermark Manor Volume III.
Both books will begin shipping in about a month, but you can secure your copies ahead of time with the pre-order — that’ll ensure you get the very first copies that I receive!

This week I will also be closing the window for Unique Sketch Cards and ludicrous phone calls — if you’d like to take advantage of those offers, you have through Friday! There will probably be a slim Venn-diagram of time when both the new books and the Sketch Cards will be available simultaneously, but don’t make it hard on yourself. Just order them separately. I really don’t mind.

See you in Seattle!

Guest comic! Interview! Photos! Oh my.

it's the cool neww thing!

If you missed the New England Webcomics Weekend, mark your calendar now for March 2010, when it’ll be back bigger, better and (hopefully) just as awesome. If you were there, I hope you had just as much fun as I did! However, I believe this to be impossible, as I had the maximum amount of fun. I am in the one hundredth percentile of fun had. Gary does a pretty good job of doing it justice.

NEWW made for a wonderful kickoff to the convention season, and heaps of thanks and praise are due to Meredith, Rich, the TopatoCo and Dumbrella crews, the diligent volunteers and the building management at Eastworks. Here are some photos that some of the approximately 8 zillion attendees took at the show!

After the show wrapped on Sunday, new best-pal KC Green and I made a guest comic for Meredith! We thought it would save her some time, but I don’t think it did because she stayed up while we did it. We made her promise to post it blind, but really it didn’t matter because it’s not, like, dirty or anything. We didn’t go anywhere weird with it like some people might have.

Also over the weekend, a very nice profile of me appeared in the North Adams (MA) Transcript, which I think is an actual, ink-on-newsprint newspaper? I am almost certain that it is. Representative quote: “‘If I was just drawing a cartoon strip, I would one millionth-best cartoonist in the world,’ Malki said.” Thanks to John Mitchell for his dogged drive to make me known to everyone in North Adams!

Finally, I should probably mention the other places I’ll be lugging my charm to over the next few months: in just two weeks I’ll be in Seattle for the Emerald City ComiCon, one of my favorites; after that it’s Stumptown in Portland (April 18-19); the Toronto Comic Arts Festival (May 9-10); then MoCCA in Manhattan (June 6-7) before hitting San Diego in July. There’ll also be a Clever Tricks to Stave Off Death release party in Los Angeles somewhere in the middle there, and of course every state has their own Arbor Day. The list of “Upcoming Appearances” on the site’s sidebar (just there on the right, if you’re on the site now) can be your friend once this post has vanished into the Ozymandian dustbin of history!

Extra-finally, it should be reiterated that if you encounter me in person at one of these events or any other, the whispered word “huckleberry” will get you an immediate high-five in front of anybody, I don’t even care.