umberhulk

sketchbooky

magritte's bird

nixon

Fun Facts about Richard Nixon:

--He was the only President to resign the office as well as the only person to be elected twice to both the Presidency and the Vice Presidency.

--His courtship of his wife Pat is maybe the most unromantic/creepy/depressing account of a courtship I've ever read:

"In January 1938, Nixon was cast in the Whittier Community Players production of The Dark Tower. There he played opposite a high school teacher named Thelma "Pat" Ryan. Nixon pursued her, but initially Ryan was not interested in a relationship. He began making unannounced visits to her home and would take her on Sunday drives to the Quaker Sunday School where he was a teacher. After several proposals, Ryan eventually agreed to marry Nixon and they wed at a small ceremony on June 21, 1940."

--Met Elvis at the White House in 1970, gave him a pearl-handled revolver that was supposedly able to kill ghosts.

--Unanimously voted by historians "The Most Cussingest President". Also, "The President Most Likely to Come Back as a Zombie and Kill Us All".

1995

nikola tesla

Tesla, aged eighty-five:

my kind of sci-fi

In the past two weeks I've seen two great sci-fi movies, in what I guess you could label the "non-Hollywood blockbuster" sub-genre of sci-fi films. All things considered this is probably my favorite film genre.

A few examples:

fight!

murmur

A drawing I did of Lorenzo Mattotti's title character from his Murmur comic. It was the first Mattotti comic I had read (Fires had been highly recommended to me, but at the time I just couldn't find it anywhere--these were the days before Amazon.com, you see), and the combination of it and David Mazzucchelli's Rubber Blanket magazines really first opened my eyes to the idea of a kind of surrealist comics storytelling.

This drawing is from my first college sketchbook, done in mid-1994 or so--

winter

angry crayon man

when superman was superboy

When I was about four or five I was given a 4-book collection called The Story of Superman (the books were "The Origin of Superman", "The Adventures of Superbaby", "When Superman was Superboy", and "Superman in Metropolis"). Written by Elliot S! Maggin (yes, the S! stands for Superman) and drawn by Metamorpho and Aquaman artist Ramona Fredon, the books run through the whole Silver-Age origin of Superman.

I always liked the ridiculous amount of thought that must've gone into reasoning how Superman could use his heat vision through his glasses lenses when he was Clark Kent:

matissey

Sketches based on some Matisse drawings...

kirby homage