FlameJob

August 11^th was fun. Steve Bissette, Denis St. John, Bob Oxman, Dan Barlow, a few other cartoonists and I were invited to Comic Boom in Keene NH to sell, sign, and sketch. The turn out out was great, the attendees were great folks, and it was down right profitable ta-boot.

Comic Boom was partnering with Keene’s Colonial Theatre and their Spooktacular series. The theme of the day and evening was clowns. I’m not going to get into how much I hate and fear/hate clowns that much, surface to say that if it hadn’t come so highly recommended from Steve Bisstette and if I didn’t think it would be half as fun as it turned out to be I never would have considered going. Proof of this is that I joined at the last minute when Steve sent out an email himself to confirm a few of us were all carpooling. The only reason I noticed it was it was from Steve, looking back I apparently subconsciously and automatically deleted or ignored all invites and news on Facebook, the CCS board, twitter and email. My brain saw the C word and just decided to save me some stress and block it out.

Why were we celebrating those grease-painted circus terrorists? The movie of the night at the Colonial was Killer Klowns from Outer Space (a movie partially responsible for my coulrophobia). It wasn’t nearly as disturbing as I remember it…except when it was.

Part of the evenings festivities was a raffle held during intermission. In exchange for free admittance we cartoonists all donated prizes. The way the raffle works it that every ticket attendee gets a strand of numbered tickets with their admission and they drop as many as hey want into whichever prizes they desire, keeping the stubs for reimbursement if they win. As a contributor I love this because you know for a fact that the person receiving your art specifically wanted it. One of the big items up on the block was a personalized Killer Klown Survival guide made by several cartoonists, most thanks go out to Denis St. John for his hard work in putting it together.

For my donation I drew a female clown in Victorian elliptical cage crinolin with spider legs underneath (see above). This was done brush and ink on velum that I stained with coffee and chicory and baked in order to make the spot white pop a little. The trick I used to stop it from wrinkling was to press it under glass while it was still warm and malleable and then run it through my laser printer a few times. Beyond that the color is a brush using a variety of interesting things I had around the house.

The winner of “Vikki Delapore-Bobo”, as I named her, was a very nice local couple who said they loved it and were going to immediately frame it. They were interested in my process and I was very happy to sign, personalize and date the back. I love it when people want you to personalize the back of art because I believe it means that they regard the work less as novelty and more as art. They were great folks and I was glad to meet them.

It was an all around great time. They are doing it again in on October 27th with 1972′s Tales from the Crypt! More information on that can be found on their Facebook page. I’ll see you there.