Halloween comes and goes. I didn’t get up to too much more than getting together my costume to wear at the dayjob. It turns out wearing a fur suit makes one quite warm. My costume was inspired by those Wilder Mann photos I was drawing early in October. My costume confused people all day long!

My department decided on a theme of “Scary Forest” (downgraded from the more evocative Haunted Forest). The decor included trees made from cut up brown paper bags, and a whole pile of branches from my back yard. It looked better in person, of course.

That’s what I’ve been working on. But when I got too tired last night I listened to some more of those Nick Cave album talking things. I had sort of forgotten this song. It is nice.

And then I started watching Twin Peaks, but got so excited that I had paused it twice to draw in the first five minutes.

What am I enjoying this week?
- Duncan Trussel talking to his old buddy Ari Shaffir
- The Nerdists talking to Tom Hanks
- These cute comics about haiku by Jessica Tremblay, who I know from local comic shows.
- This Jonathan Carroll book Outside the Dog Museum. It seems like I can’t read two pages without something completely delightfully surprising happening. I am loving this guy’s books!
- I’ve been getting the Tezuka Buddha books from the library and holy crap. So good. I veer between being completely inspired and completely intimidated by how good they are.

I was awake and totally hyped up at 4am Saturday for no reason. I read some of the Jonathan Carroll book. Did this drawing.

And I was excited yesterday to see there was a new Die Antwoord video! NSFW and not safe for delicate constitutions.

Maybe it was from thinking about my Halloween costume, but I was reminded of these drawings from 2002 that I did hanging out with my pal Jesse.

At that point in our day, jumping into colour was quick a crazy and daunting proposition, but I plunged in.

And then I went even more wild… this is a two page sketchbook spread.

Whew!
Similarly, a couple of years later visiting Jesse in Montreal, we were let’s say, in a similar state of mind, wandering around Mount Royal.

We wandered through a graveyard and went past the crematorium and cracked ourselves up referring to cremated people as “melties” and when we got back to Jesse’s place I did this epic two page drawing to commemorate the term.

The rain is back. Just now, while I slept. That is okay, it has rained twice in the past three months here.

No new True Loves this week, but Manien and I did do some writing last weekend. It was a great session. As we approach the end of the book, the writing seems easier. While writing phrases were uttered such as “I’m on fire!” and “Now you’re on fire!” And we blasted through one crucial sequence that left us breathless and reeling by the end of it. Here is where we writing.

Manien has been working a lot of nights this month, and I have gotten in a good rhythm of inking for a few hours (or longer if the podcasts I’m listening to are too interesting, like this Inkstuds chat with Dave Sim). And then I putter on the internet and end up staying up too late watching these videos with people talking about Nick Cave’s albums, and drawing some of the great faces in them. Last night I was thinking that part of my enjoyment of them is that the people talking tend to be my age or older recalling their wild youth in the 80s.

Kid Congo has an AMAZING and animated face. As I drew him I recalled that I saw him play at the Railway Club once, and he was hanging out afterwards, and talked to him a bit and drew him.

Tender Prey was my first Nick Cave album. I clearly recall being at an Industrial Video Show at the Rivoli and the Mercy Seat came on, converting Jesse and I instantly.

On the weekend I saw a dog driving an RV.

No new comics this week. I am getting pretty stoked about Halloween though, and some of the drawings below are related to that.

I have been inking a good bit the past couple of nights and listened to some really good podcast chats.
You Made it Weird talking to Nerdist’s Chris Hardwick which included some interesting background, Chris’ views on stuff and goofy voices.
And then the Nerdist in turn talking to Joseph Gordon Levitt (who I have had a giant soft spot since Brick and Mysterious Skin). The deal was sealed for me when JGL dropped a casual “magic missile” into something he was saying. He used to play D&D! And not in a “this was a dorky thing I used to do” way, it was in a “this is a great thing people don’t understand. It is like acting, developing a character, figuring out where they came from, who their parents were…” way. And he just seemed like kind of an awesome guy.
And then the WTF chat with COOP. Marc Maron had me before the interview even started, shouting ART IS IMPORTANT. And Coop was a fascinating guy with great ideas. Deep into his culture. And echoed ideas I have had about the mystery of creating things.

I was listening to some more of those videos about Nick Cave albums last night (The Firstborn is Dead in this case) and drew a few more people.

And then I got looking at these fascinating Charles Freger photos of traditional ceremonial Wilder Mann costumes, which are going to be a strong influence on my Halloween costume.

New True Loves 3 is up! The virtues of man-servants are discussed.

I was watching these videos on the youtube of people discussing all of Nick Cave’s albums. Interesting to hear thoughts and memories, some from people in the Bad Seeds. And some great faces. I just had to draw some of them.

And I quite liked this video. The song kind of reminds me of that Edward Sharp and the Magnetic Zeroes “Home” but that works for me.

And this is a cute song and video too.

On the other hand this David Lynch song and video is fairly disturbing.

I wanted to finish off this sketchbook this weekend, so I have done a bunch of drawings. This is not even all of them. And a couple of these are actually not from this weekend, but I felt like scanning them.

From that day when I felt like it would be nice to be all cozy in a big furry suit.

Looking at Brian Fukushima’s photos of SPX made me a little sad I wasn’t there. This one was funny so I drew it.

This morning as I was cooking breakfast, I was thinking about how my explorer drawings were a post-apocalyptic version of my grandma’s house, and I’m currently working on a post-apocalyptic Guelph story, but I haven’t done post-apocalyptic Vancouver. Which reminded me of the funny idea I had to do True Loves 3 as a post-apocalyptic Road Warrior type thing. And this scene popped into my head such that I had to abandon my cooking to scribble the dialogue down.

And my traditional self-portrait which I always do as the last drawing in a sketchbook.

I don’t seem to have any new drawings or anything this week, so I will tell you a little story in photos.

Manien and I went camping at Birkenhead Lake, up past Pemberton. It is quite an insanely lovely spot, nestled in amongst the mountains. After finding Alice Lake way too busy in August last year, we decided to experiment with camping after Labour Day. Indeed, this was the last week Birkenhead was open before closing for the winter, and there were only a handful of other people there on the Wednesday night.

We had a great site right by this little river. Perfect for sitting beside while reading Catching Fire, sipping wine. Our camping is not that oriented to roughing it. More just getting away and reading books surrounded by trees.

There were a lot of signs warning about bears in the area, including this rather evocative one right at the entrance.

After the first night we were told that there had been a new assessment of the fish in the river by our campsite, and that there were now so many fish in the river that it was a bear hazard, and we had to move to a site further away from it. So we did a superfast camp strike/re-strike, relocating to a site right by the beach. We didn’t see anything scarier than a chipmunk though. Maybe an osprey.

The second day, we walked a ways up a path. I would hesitate to call it hiking, as it was just a leisurely walk looking for a place to picnic. We found a big cushy pad of moss and flopped out on it. Read. I drew. We ate. We watched little fishes eating bugs off the surface of the lake.

I started to draw some trees, but got lost in the roots.

We had perhaps the most reluctant fires I have ever experienced. Everything was extremely damp, but even so, normally a fire just goes at some point, right? This was about the best fire we could coax out of the logs.

One night this week I had a dream in a post-apocalyptic setting, and one of my companions was a sentient piece of wood that helped us monitor the status of our fire. Apparently my mind hasn’t quite gotten over the campfire trauma.

This week a guy came to fix our front door handle, which had been a bit cantankerous ever since we moved in seven years ago. It turned out Manien’s dad had been quite creative and used parts from four different handle/lock assemblies to build ours. When the guy took it out, there was all kinds of bits falling out, and then he discovered our door was completely non-standard and no normal handle would fit it. So we needed a new door.

And so for the past week we have had this lovely mechanism to lock our front door.

But the new door is getting put in as I type. Hey look, there is also some work in progress down at the other end of my desk, tentatively titled Farm School.

New True Loves 3 is up!

The garden has peaked, and things are starting to wind down into fall. It is pretty green out there right now though.

Manien is trying to dry some sage by our front door. That sage bush gets right out of hand.

On Sunday we got up and out the door and went for a lovely ramble around North Van. Saw posters warning that a black bear had been seen in one neighbourhood. Two neighbourhoods, actually. And a coyote.

And I did this drawing of Ninja and Yolandi from that crazy Harmony Korine short with the wheelchairs.