i was in town today to visit the dentist, due to the mishap mentioned here on Saturday. I popped into Folio Books, where my pal mr j works. he showed me all sorts of wonderful things. I bought a book which I'll write about later, but right now I'll give a quick mention to the one I didn't buy as it is a recent release and relevant to yesterday's celebration of James Kochalka. James is one of the fifty "artists, illustrators, designers," featured in


An Illustrated Life: Drawing Inspiration from the Private Sketchbooks of Artists, Illustrators and Designers (Paperback) There are six pages devoted to Kochalka's sketchbook diaries, including some close up photos of the objects, which invite us to see them in quite a different way from his online digitally-colored scans.

It was released in December 2008 and Amazon included it in their best books of that month.

And since I haven't mentioned my pal mr j here in quite some time, you can see what he's been up to on his blog, ON THE MAT, which is all about his wrestling cartoons, of which this is a sample:



Meanwhile, there is abeautiful big white whale that we love to watch for along our coast here.

Migaloo, a 14-meter, 35-ton pure white humpback whale, has been spotted off the New South Wales mid-north coast and could soon be in Queensland waters, where hefty new fines apply to anyone who gets too close.
"Migaloo has been declared a special-interest whale, granting him more space to swim up the Queensland coast," Ms Jones said.
The first reported sighting of Migaloo was in 1991 off Byron Bay, when he was three to five years old.
His unusual colouring makes him easy to track.
In winter humpbacks migrate north to warm tropical waters, where females give birth. 2005 PHOTO AT THE LINK

____ochalka, yet again

k






I've been reading the most recent of the American Elf books published by Topshelf and it occurred to me that the sketchbook diaries, as he's been calling his daily strip, recently marked its tenth year. This was the very first cartoon:
And here's the most recent as I write this:


The whole archive is available at his site, linked above, but you should do like I did and go out and buy it.

Actually, It was more complicated than that. I was on my way to get one last week after my pal White reminded me of it, but then he phoned me to say, 'Oi, you haven't gone and bought that yet, have you, no? because I accidentally bought two." He was going to write it off as stupidity tax, but i was there to take it off his hands, so all's well that ends. While we were having lunch, Whitey reminded me that he was one of the first, if not THE first, to publish a selection from the Kochalka dailies, way back in DeeVee around ten years ago. Who would have thought then that we were looking at the first step in such a significant piece of work? At the same time he was serializing my How to be an Artist. Who would have thought there was all that happening in a quiet little book like Deevee? It goes to show you never can tell. You need to pay attention

speaking of Michael Jackson:

Michael Jackson's death sparks bus brawl
MIAMI (Reuters) – A fight broke out on a Florida bus when news of Michael Jackson's death sparked debate over whether he should be remembered as a great musical talent. The bus was moving through the city of North Lauderdale on Thursday when passenger James Kiernan received a text message about Jackson's death on his cell phone, and he read it aloud on the bus. The unidentified bus driver opined that "Michael Jackson should have been in jail long ago," prompting Kiernan, 60, to retort that "the world just lost a great musical talent." The last remark enraged another passenger, Henry Wideman, who started a swearing match with Kiernan, then pulled out a knife... .

my previous Kochalka post

Kochalka

J ames Kochalka's American Elf: Sketchbook Diaries Book 1 was one of the half dozen stand-out books of 2004. His Book 2 has the same status this year. The good thing about the new one is that it's in colour. I love the way each day's strip is in its own key of colour harmony. I've picked two from the same page which demonstrate this clearly:


Beginning in 1998 Kochalka took the form of daily strip and imbued it with a life that has been missing from it for a long time. Since then he has made sure his daily round is not finished until a strip is done. Another thing I like about it is the way he carefully avoids any taint of 'continuity'. There is no story here, just the eternal incidentalness of life as it is lived. Another little occasional touch I like is that if he finds himself away from home and in the company of a fellow artist he may invite him to join him as a guest (Or 'ghost artist') in that day's strip. It doesn't happen often, but i love it when I spot one. You may have noticed Campbell drawing himself in a strip in the first volume. Indeed, you may even have been the one who complimented James for getting the campbell style just right. Trondheim appeared in a similar capacity. In this volume I see Craig Thompson drawing himself and James on July 19.
I count it as one of the important ongoing bodies of work in the comics field today. he draws himself as an 'elf', his friends as assorted dogs or whatever, and none of this could ever convince you that the thing is not a real and accurate account of the daily life of now. If you can be persuaded that the best way to experience it is to recieve it 'now', that is, as it comes out, he puts it up daily here. And for the bookshelf version, go to Top Shelf.