covers- THE EYEBALL KID no.1

Above are two versions of the cover of the first issue of the Dark Horse mini-series from 1992. The first is the color xerox from my files. This is another cover that gave my editor Diana Schutz a hard time. There's no way this will reproduce, she said. Just photograph it and see how it comes out, I insisted. The problem was all this collage I'd stuck on the surface. As I said a few days ago, I was on a collage kick for a couple of years back then. The Kid's suit was made of a shiny material which looks purple on the original and in my copy, but which photographed green, and I thought that was really cool. The rest of the picture is made up of cut out stuff; the eyes are actual photograph-eyes from magazines, except the one which is an apple. There are little diagrams of jockey shirt colors from the racing section of the daily paper. And finally there are all those color stickers from the stamp books of the Billings method of birth control*, which the wife of my bosom was giving a trial back then. Whether the multitude of our progeny is due to some failing in the system or because I and hayley campbell used the calendar-mapping color stickers to make collages, is a question I will leave to my biographer.

* I see that John Billings himself died last month, aged 89. (sciencedaily.com)
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I'm proud to say I was involved with this project as a thesis advisor for one of the students, a young lady named Elizabeth Chasalow, of whom we will be hearing great things in the future:
Center for Cartoon Studies graduates 18--Times-Argus--May 20, 2007
WHITE RIVER JUNCTION – In early 2005, James Sturm looked out the window of his studio in downtown White River Junction and saw opportunity where others saw an ancient, vacant department store.
Two years later, Sturm is graduating a class of 18 from that storefront, which has been since renovated into the Center for Cartoon Studies, a two-year college dedicated to the art of cartooning and graphic novels.
Sturm, the cartoonist behind the graphic novel, "The Golem's Mighty Swing," about a Jewish baseball team in the 1920s, was looking for teaching opportunities, but instead decided to embark on his dream to found a comics college.
Tom Spurgeon shows us the certificate of Completion (soon hopefully to be called a 'diploma'), designed by Ivan Brunetti.
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More about the garbage bags, for those who have been following this important story:
Trial would have upset Ben Wicks -Toronto Star- May 18,
Fight over abandoned drawings takes toll on Wicks' family but, on a lighter note, gives glimpse into life of a sketch artist
Rarely, if ever, has a civil case dwelled so much on the legal ramifications of "garbage" or green garbage bags, the method by which Wicks stored many of his works.
In a more interesting sense, however, the trial revealed stunning insights into the work of a sketch artist, who was incredibly disorganized for all his genius and was even worse at financial management.
Wha? who'd'a thought..?
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Camera phone photography emerges as art--Orange County Register--Monday, May 21,
"When people see my images, they don't believe that I took them with a cell phone," she said. "The depth and clarity of the images are so phenomenal."
The quality was good enough to persuade John Matkowsky, owner of Drkrm, a small gallery showing Elmi's work through May 26, to break from his norm of featuring only traditional silver prints to do his first-ever show of digital prints.
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And in other news:
Woman still likes gorilla
AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - A 57-year-old Dutch woman who was attacked by a gorilla at a Rotterdam zoo said the ape was still her favorite even though she felt she was going to die when he bit her.