the Dan Best who co-wrote Leotard is not to be confused with the Dan Best who writes the 20th century Danny Boy blog, linked from here more than once. The two recently met in Brisbane and were photographed (our guy is on the left, and that's Dan Best on the right) in our regular drinking spot, as explained by Dan Best.

the story in the newspaper cutting at left would have been perfect for a scene in The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard. I found it while perusing Dan McFan's blog.
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Meanwhile,
Dr Jon directs me to Boing Boing, (a directory of wonderful things), where there is a link to COMICS WITH PROBLEMS, which has posted an entire Will Eisner M-16 U.S. Army rifle maintenance booklet (1968). Blog comments at the end give us this observation, interesting in view of the fact that Eisner invented the PS army mag at the time of the Korean conflict eithteen years earlier and it hadn't changed its style much in the interim:

"A friend of mine brought one of these home from the Army way back when. He said it didn't actually help with the training because it was so lunatic. We all thought of it as being on the pathetic side of funny. The military was a sexist institution then and so remains. I suppose it's better than a computer game."

Review of Leotard at Aint it cool.com: "First Second has made a name for itself by producing quality material, but this book outdoes all of its previous endeavors."

Also, Stephen Grant reviewed it last week at Comic Book Resources: "it's a first class tour-de-Campbell whimsy"

a preview

i'm getting impatient waiting for The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard to come back from the printer in Hong Kong. I may see a copy later this month, but it will still be a while before the boxes arrive by sea mail. So here is a small excerpt to whet your appetite and keep you interested. I've cut the pages so they can be readable here on the main page (Blogger resizes things according its own logic unless you take pains to outwit the system):



I see via my pal Dirk Deppey that I'm being discussed here. Both blogs reproduce an image I drew as part of a set of question-answers for the Powell's site two years ago as promo for Fate of the Artist (It's been linked in my sidebar for some time). They invite an author to select between six and ten questions from a bunch of twenty. The Bookseller was having a special 'graphic novel' month and somebody had the interesting idea of asking me to do my Q&A as a set of cartoons. I thought that was nuts as it would take me longer to draw it than a regular author to just type his answers. So I grudgingly did it. I wish I'd spent more time and enthusiasm on it as it turned out to be very popular for its novelty value. You can still read it here. If you click on the first image you can see it all as a slidshow.


I think a few other cartoonists drew their Q&A after that, if you want to browse around the site.
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"Men love women, women love children and children love hamsters. It's all hopeless." -Alice Thomas Ellis

The Amazing Remarkable Leotard

Here is the final cover, showing front with spine, as designed by Charlie Orr, who also put together the covers for my other First Second books, The Fate of the Artist and The Black Diamond Detective Agency. The book is at the printer and is on schedule for arrival in the publisher's warehouse at the beginning of July.


My pal Dan Best worked with me on the story. You may recall him from the Escapist piece we did for Dark Horse a couple of years back. Leotard is a huge sprawling epic that gobbles up a large swathe of history from the Franco-Prussian war to the sinking of the Titanic
My book tour will not be quite so epic, but will impress nevertheless, starting in July with San Diego, where I am a guest of the convention, and finishing with an appearance at Page 45 in the UK on the first Sunday of August, with a couple of other stops in between, still to be worked out and announced here in due course.

Ladies, have you met:

I'm working on the final presentation of The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard. I'm way past the stage where by innumerable successive revisions the work ceases to have all meaning and becomes a kind mandelbrot set, in which I zoom closer and closer in the hope of finding surprising and unexpected configurations. Today I've blown up some of the little faces in the audience at the moment the monstrous ti-lion suddenly gets loose and runs amuck:


P.s. the original painted pages of my book from earlier this year, The Black Diamond Detective Agency are for sale at The Beguiling.
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In the town where I was born:
A Scottish woman has avoided a prison sentence after she admitted putting dog excrement in her husband's curry. Jill Martin, 47, took drastic action after her marriage broke down and burst out laughing when her husband Donald started eating the dish at their home in Newton Mearns, Glasgow, Paisley Sheriff Court in central Scotland heard.

Finally
get all 128 pages of The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard wrapped up and off to be scanned well before the Sept 1st deadline. The day starts with buckets of rain and continues with them, and with our state still in a drought panic too. Everybody weeps into their breakfast cereal because they don't know what to do and then orders a taxi. Normally I'd cycle there and carry the art in a big back-pack, but that's too risky with watercolours in this weather. So I wait two and a half hours for the one I called at 7.30 a.m., having risen early and showered and shaved with the nervous energy of one who does not normally have to leave the house in the morning. Around ten I wonder if it's safe to nip into the bathroom for two minutes. Sure enough, while I'm wiping my bum I hear the hooting of the horn and run down the front stairs in disarray, doing up my trousers and tucking in my undershirt, past Monty who is leaping up and down trying to get a look at the driver.
Here's a glimpse of the work while it was in progress:

How my business trip turned into a vacation, almost.

It's the cardinal rule.
You don't get the important thing out to show off to show off to the assembled luminaries, when you're in a bar, jetlagged, and into your third beer.
The important thing in this case is the mock-up of my The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard. It took me and Anne four hours to photocopy in colour and wee Cal spent most of a day sticking on the word balloons.
And the problem with three beers is that they are apt to undermine your grasp of the cardinal rule.

It was around three o'clock the next day when I realized it was missing.
First place I went to of course was the bar. One day I intend to write a book about things left in bars. During the short spell I worked in one in Blackpool, while I was polishing glasses on a Sunday morning, an attractive girl came in and mumbled something with her hand half over her mouth. I cocked my ear. She mumbled again. She had lost her false teeth the previous night and was retracing her steps.

The mock-up wasn't in the hotel bar. But I hadn't been off the premises, to the best of my recollection. I went back to the room and consulted my external hard-drive. He was snoozing and objected to being woken up. I got through to him the intense importance of the situation. I was to hand the mock-up to my editor, the illustrious Mr. Mark Siegel that night so that we could discuss it over dinner the following night and map out all that had to be done on it before the absolute deadline three weeks away.
"While I was looking at the turtles in the decorative pond, you went to the bathroom."
The restroom in the hotel lobby. Of course. It wasn't there now. I asked a porter. he pointed to the front desk.
yup. They had it. I described page 15 in intimate detail to prove ownwership (since it hadn't occurred to me to write my name on it) and all was well.
Right, i'm off to breakfast.

Short post; cat out of bag.

In the nearly two months I've been doing this daily blog, only one post attracted zero comments. Regular commenter Nathalie has just gone back and unblemished it.
"Looking back on this post, I think you might also enjoy this little creature and the site it came from."
My original post was about sculptor Christopher Trotter and his scrap metal constructions which appealed to me for his sense of humour, much like the links above. There are a couple more of his works here (the kangaroos, about a dozen items from top; they're in the middle of a busy city sidewalk) and here.
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Since I'm running late today and only have time for a short post, here's a piece of news. The book which I am currently working on is now 41 pages to the good, in full painted colour. If the schedule is met, it will be out in mid 2008 from First Second Books. It's title :
The Amazing Remarkable Mr. Leotard.
I'd tell you more about it but I've already gone so far astray from the original pitch that I don't want to worry my editor.