Auction for Dylan Williams

"We've organized a series of art auctions to raise money for Dylan's medical care. The theme is for artists to recreate Philip K Dick book covers. Although you'll see that in some cases publishers have donated some very rare books and other artists have donated other illustrations and sketches to the cause. 

100% of the proceeds from these art sales go to Dylan Williams, founder of Sparkplug Comics Books, who was battling a serious case of cancer. Tragically Dylan passed away on 9/10/11 but the fundraisers will continue to help his family with the financial burdens from his medial care."

These are 2 pages I drew for the forthcoming Nobrow #6. The assignment was to do a story on the theme of doppelgangers or doubles. The printed pages will be in "two color" which means they will be in black and white plus one other color.  Ganges-style. It may help you to see the way the final pages look after the photoshopping and text edits, and so you can see small versions of those here:
page 1
page 2


Here are photos of the originals. Click on the images to enlarge them. Direct links to the auctions are below the images.

click here for the auction of page 1

click here for the auction of page 2

(You also should check out all the beautiful stuff for sale at the Nobrow site.)


Batteries not included!

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New Books up at the Catastrophe Shop

This minicomic is 32 pages and contains 4 stories. Two of them are already up at What Things Do (here and here). The strips have been reformatted, and of course they're not in color here but they look pretty good in black and white. And then there's two new stories you haven't seen yet. One of those is another Postcard from Fielder and the other is called First Try and is "weird" and abstract and "interesting." Hand-colored covers!

Collections Four and Five of Amazing Facts and Beyond...with Leon Beyond.  As you can see, one has a screen-printed cover, and the other is hand-colored.

I spent a lot of time on this one. It's got gags and some pretty fancy cartooning, and an infinite grid of panels, only some of which you can see and read, but occasionally you catch a glimpse of it fading off into infinity, and also the grid contains itself nested within itself at different levels. 

(also see here)

Dylan Williams, DIY RIP

Dylan was very gracious to me and supported me in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s when I was starting out. He wrote me long letters (and later, emails) even analyzing individual panels, which level of interest and attention amazed, inspired, and sustained me—tips and crits about hands and angles (all the while emphasizing that all this is just his subjective opinion), along with a lot of encouragement and kind words. I’m eternally grateful to you for those letters, Dylan. I wish I had said that in the last few weeks but I didn't realize how serious it was this time. Dylan reached out and was a friend to me when I was lonely and full of self-doubt, and over the years I think he did the same for a lot of young cartoonists. We argued a lot about comics and related things over many emails in the early ‘00s, ending in a bewildered but friendly stalemate, and then we just moved on to other things. I’m sorry I let our friendship fade with time and distance. What a terrible thing to be saying. I wish I had told him all these things I'm thinking about now. I wish I had somehow expressed my gratitude for his kindness and help to me when I was starting out in comics, and also my serious respect for the way he lived out his beliefs and gave of himself. He believed in punk and kung fu and comics. He laid aside his own work and built up Sparkplug and published great comics. Before the web he would self-publish thick zines named Eighty-Six (I have around 15) that he would send out for free, anonymously, filled with rare comics he thought people needed to see. He had great taste AND a big heart AND he worked hard to make shit happen. He helped out a lot of people and laughed and smiled easily. What a great way to have lived. There are many wonderful testimonies to his kindness and friendship around the Internet that you should read. I just got home from SPX tonight and I’ve only read a handful. There’s many more, the kind of reading that makes you want to repent your selfish ways. We were lucky to have known you, and we were lucky to get all that mail from you.

If you haven’t already please consider buying some Sparkplug books.

New Leon Books

Collection number 4!

Collection Number Five!

Available at SPX this weekend, and at the Catastrophe Shop in a couple weeks.

New Book

Here's a new minicomic collecting some published and unpublished stories. Should have them at SPX and available at the Catastrophe Shop in a couple weeks.