Fantagraphics Blog Jacob Covey

Dan Zettwoch organized a show of art based on movie villians, which sounds great. But more importantly he made this badass poster. OPENS TONIGHT in SAINT LOUIS. And NEXT WEEK in CHICAGO Jesse LeDoux has a show of paintings at the Rotofugi gallery. I've seen a little of what he's been up to and I would not miss this if I were near that gallery.

Back in June Fantagraphics Publisher Gary Groth and I were trouble-shooting ideas for packaging "Gahan Wilson: Fifty Years of Playboy Cartoons." Most of the ideas were unfeasible or enough of a gimmick that it felt distracting from the work. (Sure an iron maiden clamshell box is funny but do we really want the case to be that cumbersome?) As we axed ideas, so to speak, I kept returning to this classic gag of a man pressed under glass and was interested in how it echoed the idea that we're capturing the legacy of Gahan Wilson within this boxed set. A…

Flickr user Moonage Daydreamer has a few photos from the Art of Stan Sakai exhibit (from early 2009) that I hadn't seen before. The anecdote posted with this photo is typical Sakai, one of the truly gracious men of comics.

And, yes, that gag is on page 666 of our stupifying collection of the master cartoonist's Playboy work.

A dream of mine was dashed last week, when the TMNT property transfered hands (for $60 million) from a flesh-and-blood man, Peter Laird, to a corporate entity, Nickelodeon. What had seemed a plausible book idea that would storm the world whenever I, you know, got around to proposing it (A TMNT book in the vein of "Batman Collected" meets "Bizarro World" by way of Kramer's Mome meets the "Marvel Encyclopedia" and, of course, "BEASTS!"*) is almost surely a lost cause now. My Argentian "Kalkers", my ceramic French mini-figures, that baby-turtles animation cell up above, and my whole lot of compulsively…

I always love when we get Jason art in the mail and I really love these sheets of translated text he sends for upcoming books. (Bad iPhone photo blurred so as not to create any spoilers.) A long time ago Jason allowed me to give away a small piece of lettering to the first Flog reader to respond to my posting of it. We should really try to do things like that more often, huh? No, not today. But sometime.

There are a dozen things each week that I'm not Flogging due to No Time. I hope to soon do some postings on recent and upcoming books that I've been involved with. Until then, I've made a habit of annually encouraging Flog readers to support artists with their holiday shopping and this year I'm digging into it a little deeper. Some of these notes are aimed at artists who are looking to connect with audiences and some are aimed at audiences looking to support artists. • Chuck Close as recorded here has some thoughts about Art and its cultural importance….

…And speaking of Tony Millionaire, did you see Jeopardy last week? Where Tony's brother-in-law totally destroyed Wolf Blitzer? It was crazy.

  The Conrad Groth sketchbook is a mammoth thing: at least 12" square with thick glossy art stock and maybe a couple hundred pages to be filled. Fantagraphics Founder, Gary Groth, gets the best cartoonists in the world to do sketches for his young son and it is AMAZING. I can't imagine the pressure of sketching in it. There's no B-Team in this thing. And nobody who sees it can stop turning the pages to see what's next. As Gary is preparing to leave for SPX, he brought in the book, bound for the hands of Gahan Wilson so I…