True Swamp by Jon Lewis

Uncivilized is reorganizing (in a good way-- augmenting its personnel-- I don't see any announcements online so I guess I shouldn't say more) but my book is delayed a bit as a result

Forks I was just thinking of you today, I wanna ask you about some stuff

drop me a line. sorry the book is delayed.

Seattle area ilxors -- I will be in attendance for the opening of this 5-way show at my friend's gallery on cap hill which I more or less coordinated:

http://blog.seattlepi.com/seattlearts/2016/03/01/in-the-story-room-5-seattle-cartoonists-opening-march-10-at-dendroica-gallery/

Thanks forks. I may just take you up on that.

― Thelema & Louise (Jon Lewis), Monday, July 22, 2013

I will! I'm trying to cut out this dumb hermit bullshit this year!

So back in 2007, when Dark Horse was publishing an anthology series of comics derived from the imaginary Escapist comics embedded in Michael Chabon’s Kavalier & Clay, I sold a 21 page script for it to Diana Schutz which was then drawn colored & lettered by Marc Hempel; by the time the story was finished though, DH had cancelled the antho series and the 21-pager went into inventory. I saw it as digital files on marc’s laptop at a show that year - it looked gorgeous. Di said she hoped she could place it somewhere or other at some point (we got paid our page rates obv despite the piece getting inventoried).

Was at a couple friends’ signing event at desert island last night and poking around and noticed a new squarebound collection of that Escapist stuff. Thought hm what if, and was a bit floored to see me and marc’s story is included.

This came out in June - “Michael Chabon’s The Escapist: Pulse-pounding Thrills”.

It was really the tail end of me trying to making a living in the industry after my two year stint scripting at DC and then four or five years of floating lots of pitches all over the place to varying degrees of almost-but-not success. The good thing was by 2007 my scripting was in a pretty good place and the piece was personal enough and pro enough and probably the best commercial script I ever sold, much more in control than my DC stuff. I rammed classical music in there - the story revolves around a performance of one of Szymanowski’s violin concertos.

So it’s weird but nice that that’s finally in print. Does not look like the TPB has garnered any attention to speak of but it exists!

The main thing that happened with new work this year was the Sunday funnies page at Popula.com - I was one of 5 cartoonists doing a page a week there (full color). (Me, Karen sneider, Tom hart, Megan kelso, Steven weissmann). I was really into this project and they were paying a legit page rate! Sadly no one was clicking the Sunday funnies page so after 8 weeks when popula started having their blockchain funding reversals and had to halve their comics budget, they killed Sunday funnies and just retained the self contained specially commissioned comics that run during the weekdays. I’m trying to divert the resulting thwarted creative momentum into getting some steam building up on new true swamp material which is probably what everyone (~20 ppl) would rather I be doing anyway, but JFC it is so goddamn nice to get paid for ones work (obviously an outmoded publishing model but it was great to have a nostalgic glimpse for a sec there!)

That’s the news. Gonna try’n draw this weekend.

ha, congrats on the escapist thing!