Profiles In Storage

Last Sunday we went to our storage unit in Brooklyn to visit all of our stuff. While Lauren and I suffer exile in NJ, we have most of our things in Brooklyn. We just acquired some more stuff from Lauren's parents and went to add that to what's already there - books, furnishings, kitch & kitchen items all stacked and boxed and waiting to be set free. Frankly I'm a little worried about our possessions. It's been five months plus two or three more before we move back to the city. Not exactly "hard time" but prison changes things. Our chairs and sofas will be just a little harder. Our books and clothes a bit rougher around the edges. We heard rumors that half of our fine bone china has fallen in with Aryan skin heads and the other half with the Triads. This info came from a set of measuring cups. Despite being built for precision they do tend to exaggerate.

Haiku Corner

Way, way back, in the days when "Old School" was just "School" I was fiction editor of the Prattler, Pratt Institutes school newspaper. I had a segment called Haiku corner. Each issue I'd sort through hundreds of haikus that were submitted - all of them from the same two guys who'd get stoned and write poetry - and pick the best. Because most of the haikus I recieved started with the line, "Man, I am soooooo high!" I would occasionally write my own haikus to spice things up a bit. That's actually a good tip for all you aspiring writers and poets out there. If you want to be published, it's good to be the editor. That's how I got this little gem in the paper:

All the ladies love
Ernie the dolphin because
he doesn't wear pants

Now that I'm oh so much older, my material is more mature. I wrote this haiku this morning:

Now with all this hair
in my nose I wonder why
my nose still gets cold

"B" States

I'm working on this weeks Super Delegates for FOTM. This week I'm covering the SD's from Arkansas. Very exciting. I'm going in alphabetical order by state. Arkansas is the last of the "A" states. Next week I start on the "B" states.

Purim Carnival

Last night I did some caricatures at Temple Shaaray Tefila's Purim Carnival. Purim, for those of you who choose not to follow the link I so kindly provided, is kind of like a Jewish Halloween. Why, you might ask, do Jews need Halloween when so many of them dress funny all year round? This would prompt me to comment that I didn't realize you were such an anti-semite and then we'd start punching and slapping each other until one of us gets a bloody nose. Probably me.

sketches

Face Practice

Lauren likes the "nice" caricatures that I do. Nice meaning I don't over exaggerate and distort facial features. But that wild exaggeration is what caricature is all about. That and getting paid to draw insulting pictures of drunken wedding guests. So, I've decided to start practicing and figure out how best to exaggerate facial features. Don't tell Lauren.

Future Spam!

I wasn't going to tell anyone about this but it's just too incredible. I've been receiving email from the future! Right now it's just spam but I suspect I'll start getting emails from friends and family with news of things that haven't happened yet! I'll get re:plies from emails I haven't sent yet! It will be the end of lotteries and sports betting. We'll be able to prevent future crimes and disasters. Well, I won't be able to prevent them, but someone will. It's an astounding, Earth shattering event and it all started with spam.

Meet the Super Delegates: Part One

Instead of my normal, odd political cartoon over at

Fact of The Matter I'll be presenting the Super Delegates! Yes, those Democrats with all The Power. There are 796 of them. I can't promise I'll draw them all but that's the goal. I'll be posting them all at

Fact of The Matter. Here's just a sample - Meet Bud Cramer:

Domenico's Birthday Magic

Sketches from Saturday's activities, Andrew's first B'day party at Domenico's in Levittown and the drive home

evANIMALphabet

Here are some evANIMALphabets; the three most recent I've done. Currently the most popular item I'm being commissioned for. Mostly done for toddlers and newborns but who wouldn't want their name drawn in colorful animalesque letters?

Neck-N-Neck

Fact of the Matter #9: OBAMA!

FOTM: skipped but not forgotten

If you're wondering we're the latest
Fact of The Matter is, I haven't done it yet. It's the middle of January. There's not much happening in politics these days. We're exactly one year away from the date G.W. is due to step down. There's the occasional primary here and there, but really, what's going on?
Because politics have been so slow I took the week off and went to California with Lauren. We've been visiting my sister & her family, spent the weekend at a Yearbook Conference in Huntington Beach. We'll be back to NYC (ok, New Jersey) on Wednesday or Thursday and by Saturday, 1/26 I hope to have a new
FOTM online. After that, I plan to keep posting new
FOTM 's weekly.

André François

So the New Yorker still isn't buying a whole lot of cartoons from me but I go almost every week. Most of the others there are curmudgeons who've been cartooning longer than I've been alive. I've learned a lot of priceless tidbits from them, like how to build a crystal radio set and that Mary Pickford is the Bee's Knees. Today they were raving about some old illustrators I wasn't too familiar with - Bob Marz and André François. Both google and wiki let me down in finding Mr. Marz but once I saw Mr. François, I knew I knew him. Great stuff. Here's a the cover of one of his books




Click the above pic to check out the wiki. It's worth it.

sketches

two sketchbook pages

Curious George

I made this pic for the "Illustration Friday" theme "Little Things"

Goodbye Conselyea

We went into contract on a brand new condo at 63 Conselyea, in Brooklyn, waaay back in March. It should be ready by the end of April they said. In June they said it should be done by the end of the summer. The last week in July we got an email: "Pack your bags, you'll be getting your 30 day notice to move in." A few days later we were told that was a mistake. It will be done by October at the latest. Also, they claim to have their Certificate of Occupancy, but our inspector said it's impossible. There were dozens of code violations, the outlets didn't work yet, no sinks in the bathrooms and missing appliances. All sorts of things required for a Certificate of Occupancy. So, things will work out, we thought. It seems like such a great place and we'd have a back yard and lots of space and live happily ever after, as soon as this place is completed. At the end of October, we went by the place and saw them putting in new toilets ( that's what they said they were doing ) but almost none of the other violations were fixed yet. During this whole process, we're waiting for their lawyer to contact our lawyer. She called and faxed their lawyer repeatedly to no avail. About thirteen hours ago, Lauren and I went to see the place. Below are the pictures.



The garbage that's strewn all over the place - not really that bad. They can clean that up quickly. But the holes and scratches in walls and ceilings, the uninstalled toilet - all of that plus the dozens of violations they haven't tended to yet - it's insane. We called our lawyer and backed out of the deal.
This sucks a lot. We really wanted to live there. If only the builder made it possible for us to do that.

2 Books, The Beatles & a Turkey

What hasn't happened since my last post?
2 book release parties, a Thanksgiving week with laws and in-laws, dinner parties AND my wife and I accidentally moved to NJ.

New Yorker cartoonist and Harvard Oompa-Lampooner Zach Kanin has written The Short Book, a damn funny book about being short. The perfect little stocking stuffer.

I got to see Strawberry Fields, the Beatles tribute band at B.B. Kings on Thanksgiving. It was good show. If you closed your eyes and listened closely you'd swear you'd been transported back in time to a Beatles cover band concert. And it makes you wonder, if John Lennon were alive today, just how big would his waistline be?

(this pic stolen from seanp284.typepad.com - thanks seanp284)

Matt Diffee , New Yorker cartoonist and Dictator of his own island nation, has edited
The Rejection Collection 2: The Cream of The Crap, available at crappy bookstores everywhere. Great stuff. Lots of cartoons and cartoonist profiles.
It's no small coincidence that the afore mentioned Zach Kanin is also in this book.

Aside from working on my own perpetually rejected cartoons, I'm trying to create a couple of comic strips. One for newspapers and/or other print media based on the hilarious hijinks of Evan & Lauren Forsch. Based on. NOT lame autobio comics. Really, this will be lame, "based on" autobio comics.
The other comic is political. I was going to call it The Race of Our Lives, as in Days of Our Lives and the tag would be, "Like oil in an hour glass, this is the race of our lives." Fortunately I thought of a better title. But I'm not going to share that with you yet. I'll be posting the political toon soon enough. Probably.

Last Laugh

Last night at the NY Historical Society I learned absolutly nothing about history. But I did get a copy of Last Laughs, a dynamite cartoon collection edited by Mort Gerberg. The pic above is a drawing of Mort and Marisa (MAH-REESA) Acocella Marchetto who put on a little show with Jack Ziegler (who I didn't sketch because his back was to me the whole time - but I won't take it personally Jack) and then signed the book with other cartoonists like Sid Harris & Sam Gross who are probably also in the book, though sometimes they just like to sign stuff.

some old sketchbook pages