Also, someone stumbled across a letter from a Jason Turner in issue #3 of Optic Nerve. Yep, that was me!

I was in Ontario for a quick spin last week. Managed to avoid the seriously bad weather, but did have a good blast of winter proper. Even went tobogganing with my brother and his kids. It was great to see the family but not nearly long enough. And now I am back in the mild grey drizzly world of Vancouver.

While I was away, and especially when I was on the five hour flights to and from Toronto, I did some drawings. I was inspired to return to my series of drawings of the little astronaut guy in the house of debris. You can see them all here.

Well we are closing in on the end of the YEAR 40 Project, just a few more pages of October to do, and then the 22 day countdown in November. You can read the October comics over here for now.

I have also gotten a bunch of new Page One Hundred Project submissions this week, one from Italy and a bunch more from our Page One Hundred friends in Croatia! Some cool looking stuff there.

And it is Halloweekend, which means I am busting out the Mega-j!

After wrestling with it the past week, I have a store, so you can buy things like this recent issue of Vinegar I put together. Please let me know if it doesn’t work or something.

Also, put up a bunch more of those old D&D drawings. And there have been some camping comics going up over here.

I am having a lazy weekend here in North Vancouver, nowhere near SPX in Maryland. To entertain myself I have been scanning some old drawings of D&D adventures from around 1990. You can see them here. I have also posted the first portion of my YEAR 40 August comics here, for now.

Oh also, I got to see a preview of Scott Pilgrim and it was so much fun. Funny and exuberant! I loved the comic (just read the final book the week before the movie), and they did such a great job with the cast and capturing the kooky vibe of the books. As a bonus for me it was set in the Toronto I lived in during and post-university, and so it is like a movie of that period of my life too.

I was watching the movie Bronson this evening and enjoying its theatricality. Lots of grotty cells and prisons that looked great but their reality was irrelevant, all that was important was that they were texturally appropriate for the scene in question. And that made me think that maybe these days movies are more likely to go for the loose realism of the Puffy Chair than the deliberate composed theatricality of Derek Jarman or Peter Greenaway.

Today’s sad news is that comics legend Harvey Pekar died, which hits me much more than general celebrity deaths. All the news articles I read today are short and garbling the details. This one is okay. I think it is most worthwhile for the second David Letterman clip posted. Not the Last Time on Letterman one, the other one. A crazy and heroic dismissal of Letterman.

The Pekar comic of his that comes up first when I think of his work was a page or two called Making Lemonade, which just showed him doing just that. Then enjoying a glass. I think it had a transformative effect on my mind, like “What?! Can… can you do a comic like that? But… nothing happened!” Seeing the beauty and magic in the everyday.

The Pixies album Come on Pilgrim keeps popping into my head after my Scott Pilgrim reread last week (so good!), and thus mutating into Come On (scott) Pilgrim.

Have you been following along with the 30 Days of Plant Comics? Those updates will continue on for the rest of July. I still need to figure out what I am going to do for the July installment of my Year 40 Project.

And there are a couple more Page 100s:
The Road by FHNavarro (scroll down a bit for the English version)
Game of Thrones by Brian Evinou
Hey those are both excellent books that I have actually read!