I may be biased, but my favorite comic strip these days has got to be Skin Horse, written by Shaenon K. Garrity and Jeffrey Wells, with art by Shaenon. A brand-new storyline starts today, so if you haven't checked it out yet, please click on the link and bookmark it. You'll be glad you did.

For those of you who don't want to read through the entire archive (and haven't ordered your copy of Skin Horse, Volume One yet), here's a brief recap from the helpful cast page:



If you are already reading and enjoying Skin Horse, please tell one or 500 of your closest friends. Preferably friends who like webcomics, buying print collections of webcomics, original art from webcomics, crossdressing, zombies, werewolves, and swearing Jewish helicopters.

Here's the first batch of photos from our recent trip to Japan. Cheers to Facebook for changing their programming so that those of you who haven't joined the Facebook cult yet can still look at photos that are posted there.

Short explanation of our trip: In 2007, Shaenon and I curated an exhibition for the Cartoon Art Museum called The Art and Flair of Mary Blair. It was very well-received, prompting Studio Ghibli to plan their own much, much, much larger version.

Shaenon and I were hired on as consultants, assisting Mary's nieces with the process of gathering all of the art together and making arrangements for the art to travel to Tokyo back in April.

Earlier this month, we made a return trip to pack up the artwork and bring it back to the U.S. Fortunately for us, they held over the exhibition long enough for us to get a look at it. Even cooler, we got a private look at the exhibition on its final night with staff from Studio Ghibli, the Tokyo Contemporary Art Museum, Japanese broadcaster NHK, Disney, and the core crew behind Pixar's UP, which is already one of our all-time favorite movies. It was incredibly cool to be able to trade Mary Blair stories with Pete Docter, Bob Peterson, Jonas Rivera and Ronnie Del Carmen as we walked through the galleries.

Anyway, please check out the photos. More should be on the way soon.

Patti Martinson of Sequential Tart has been interviewing all of the Couscous Collective members (minus the elusive Konstantin Pogorelov, who lives in a small cabin in the woods with Bill Watterson, Steve Ditko and J.D. Salinger), and she's kicking off October with me and Shaenon.

Enjoy these, then meet us in person at the Alternative Press Expo in San Francisco on October 17 & 18. Shaenon's moderating a panel, I'm moderating a panel, and I'm actually *on* two panels, which is a rarity. If all goes well, I'll have a new print-only William Bazillion mini-comic, entitled "Fatty Camp" on sale at the con.

We'll be loaded with stories from our (currently ongoing) trip to Japan (wrapping up a project for Studio Ghibli and Disney) and copious amounts of rum. Miss it at your peril!

Gary Tyrrell of webcomics news site Fleen has read the entire archive of The Chronicles of William Bazillion, and apparently he liked it enough to write about it at length on his site. He does a pretty good job of summarizing the plot, too, so if you've been on the fence about checking it out, you can tell at a glance if you're likely to enjoy it or if it's something you really need to avoid at all costs.

I'm in the planning stages for a new comic, though, so it's hard to say when I'll get back to William Bazillion and his crew. I'm a bit tempted to go back and re-do the first story arc in a more easily-digestible (more printable/publishable) version, but I'll see how I'm feeling after I've gotten this new idea off the ground.

Just an advertisement for The Cartoon Art Museum's newest exhibition,Monsters of Webcomics as this week's William Bazillion update.

I'm stuck at home with a very nasty cold, an even nastier bottle of codeine-infused prescription cough syrup, and a stack of DVDs and comic books. I could have headed this off by taking a sick day last week, but I worked myself too hard getting "Monsters of Webcomics" up and running. I'm not sure if that's ironic or not...it probably isn't, and I'm just high on codeine, but what are you gonna do?

The Race for Santa's Nazi Gold takes a few more giant steps toward its stunning conclusion. Really.

Sorry not to post more Japan photos this week, but Shaenon and I just got back from a roadtrip to Portland, and we're trying to settle back into some semblance of a routine right now. Once it's sunk in that we're actually going to be in our apartment again for more than a few days in a row, we'll try to dive into the Japan blog reports.

And if you want to find us on Thursday night, please swing by The Cartoon Art Museum where we'll be hanging with Carlos Alazraqui of Reno-911! and Rocko's Modern Life fame at the fifth annual Comics 4 Comix stand-up comedy/art auction fundraiser.

Excelsior!

It's been a crazy few weeks here, mostly due to things at work. First up, for those of you who are interested, here's a long interview with me at the Comic Book Resources website. NBC 11, our San Francisco affiliate, covered the Cartoon Art Museum's current Watchmen exhibition, and so did Electric Playground.

I don't know if there's video footage available on the NBC website, but I'm somewhere in the last segment on the Electric Playground thing.

I'm sure that I look completely exhausted in the video clips (and the other recent ones I've posted), since I've been dealing with a really heavy workload since last summer. The Cartoon Art Museum's Executive Director, Rod Gilchrist, went on medical leave last June because of cancer, and he passed away on February 26. Kevin Fagan wrote a piece on Rod that ran in Saturday's San Francisco Chronicle.

I don't have much to add beyond that right now, but if you knew Rod, there will be a public memorial for him at the Cartoon Art Museum on Friday, March 20.

My life's officially, undeniably weird. What was the turning point? I dunno...I think it was more of a cumulative thing.

Tuesday and Friday were spent in the company of Dave Gibbons, in promotion of The Cartoon Art Museum's new Watchmen exhibition. Saturday was spent returning artwork from The Totoro Forest Project. On Sunday, we carpooled with a Mexican wrestler and his partner to an Academy Awards party that included Batman fighting Robin as bikini girls on stilts paraded around us.

But all that's par for the course. What struck me as really weird, was that while I was packing up puppets while gearing up for an exhibition about a samurai rabbit, I got a phone call from Timmy Lupus, who offered to bring some of his voice actor friends to the Cartoon Art Museum's fundraiser party this weekend.

Meeting Adam West, conducting a pair of panel discussions, and interviewing a standup comedian seem pretty normal by comparison.

Oh, yeah, I'm going to Japan next month.

And go read William Bazillion for a dose of normalcy.

I was interviewed recently by Jazma Online. Read the full interview here. The photo for the article was taken at the 2008 National Cartoonists Society Saturday morning business meeting, and I look amazingly attentive despite operating on only about four hours' sleep while recovering from a day of construction work in the Ninth Ward.

WATCHMEN
Cartoon Art Museum exhibition: February 21 – July 19, 2009
Sneak Preview weekend: February 14-15, 2009
Opening Reception: Friday, February 27, 2009, 8:00-11:00pm

The Cartoon Art Museum presents an in-depth look at one of the most anticipated films of 2009 and the graphic novel that inspired it in its latest exhibition, WATCHMEN. The exhibition features dozens of concept illustrations, preparatory sketches and original comic book pages illustrated by Dave Gibbons, the co-creator and illustrator of the critically-acclaimed Watchmen graphic novel. Viewers will be able to follow the creation of the Watchmen universe from Gibbons’s conceptual sketches through his completed artwork to the actual props used in the creation of the Watchmen motion picture, courtesy of the Warner Bros. Corporate Archives.

Details about the Cartoon Art Museum’s February 27 opening reception will be announced shortly.

About the film:

A complex, multi-layered mystery adventure, Watchmen is set in an alternate 1985 America in which costumed superheroes are part of the fabric of everyday society, and the “Doomsday Clock” – which charts the USA’s tension with the Soviet Union – moves closer to midnight. When one of his former colleagues is murdered, the outlawed but no less determined masked vigilante Rorschach sets out to uncover a plot to kill and discredit all past and present superheroes. As he reconnects with his former crime-fighting legion – a disbanded group of retired superheroes, only one of whom has true powers – Rorschach glimpses a wide-ranging and disturbing conspiracy with links to their shared past and catastrophic consequences for the future. Their mission is to watch over humanity…but who is watching the Watchmen?

Watchmen is directed by Zack Snyder (300) and produced by Lawrence Gordon, Lloyd Levin and Deborah Snyder. The screenplay is by David Hayter and Alex Tse, based upon the graphic novel co-created by Dave Gibbons and published by DC Comics. Herbert W. Gains and Thomas Tull are the executive producers, with Wes Coller serving as co-producer.

Playing the film’s core group of “Masks,” the masked adventurers at the center of the story, are Malin Akerman (27 Dresses) as Laurie Juspeczyk, aka Silk Spectre II; Billy Crudup (The Good Shepherd) as Jon Osterman, aka Dr. Manhattan; Matthew Goode (Match Point) as Adrian Veidt, aka Ozymandias; Carla Gugino (Night at the Museum) as Sally Jupiter, aka Silk Spectre; Oscar® nominee Jackie Earle Haley (Little Children) as Walter Kovacs, aka Rorschach; Stephen McHattie (Shoot ‘em Up) as Hollis Mason, aka Nite Owl; Jeffrey Dean Morgan (TV’s Grey’s Anatomy) as Edward Blake, aka the Comedian; and Patrick Wilson (Little Children) as Dan Dreiberg, aka Nite Owl II.

Joining Snyder behind the scenes are director of photography Larry Fong (300), production designer Alex McDowell (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), editor William Hoy (300), costume designer Michael Wilkinson (300), and visual effects supervisor John ‘D.J.’ Des Jardin (The Kingdom). The music is by Tyler Bates (300).

Watchmen was originally published by DC Comics as a 12-comic book series between 1986 and 1987, before subsequently being collected into a trade paperback. It is the only graphic novel to win the prestigious Hugo Award or to be named among Time magazine’s “100 Best English Language Novels from 1923 to the Present.”

Warner Bros. Pictures and Paramount Pictures present, in Association with Legendary Pictures, a Lawrence Gordon/Lloyd Levin Production, a Zack Snyder Film, Watchmen based on the award-winning graphic novel.

Watchmen will be released nationwide on March 6, 2009. It will be distributed domestically by Warner Bros. Pictures and internationally by Paramount Pictures. The film has been rated R by the MPAA for “strong graphic violence, sexuality, nudity and language.”

Details on the Cartoon Art Museum's next exhibition coming soon:

Over at his blog, Neil Gaiman mentioned the Cartoon Art Museum's Coraline exhibition. If you're in the Bay Area and want to see some really cool stuff, please drop by the museum sometime in the next three weeks and check out real-live puppets from the upcoming stop-motion feature, plus loads of 2-D concept art.

If you really enjoy it, and want to support what we're doing (including the our Gene Colan retrospective, our upcoming Stan Sakai retrospective, and our sure to be mind-blowingly cool Watchmen exhibition), please consider becoming a Cartoon Art Museum member, donating additional money, or otherwise lending your support to the museum. You can also join the museum's Facebook group and donate money there, if you're so inclined. If you're already a supporter, please let your friends know about us.

Funding for the museum is particularly precarious right now due to decreased attendance, fewer and less frequent individual donations, fiercer competition for grants and other effects of the current economic downturn. If you're expecting money back from the IRS this year, if you've got a guilty conscience that you want to assuage through giving to charitable organizations, if you've got a little extra cash in your pocket, or if you just plain love the art form, please consider donating to the Cartoon Art Museum--and soon.

Thanks for your consideration.

Nope, he's not in this week's comic, but there's still no shortage of other Nixons. Check out this week's William Bazillion for the answers to all of life's little questions.

As long as those questions are about Nixon clones.

I've got a new Fresh From the Festivals column up at Animation World Network, and if you missed it, I had a review of Don Hahn's new book, The Alchemy of Animation, up earlier this month.

Coming soon will be some interviews I did as part of the 20th (!) anniversary of Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

And as long as I'm plugging things, there are a lot of events coming up at the Cartoon Art Museum over the next couple of weeks. Please check out our LiveJournal for details.

Nearly a year ago, Dice Tsutsumi, Ronnie Del Carmen and Enrico Casarosa approached me at an event at the Cartoon Art Museum to discuss a project that they were working on, which they thought would make a fun exhibition.

Earlier in 2008, the first rumblings of the Totoro Forest Project hit the Internet, and word of the charity auction, the plight of the Sayama Forest, and Hayao Miyazaki's efforts to preserve Japan's endangered woodlands started to spread.

And now, after all that, we're now two days away from the official opening of the Totoro Forest Project original art exhibition (Part One) at the Cartoon Art Museum. I tried something a little bit different with the galleries this time, and you can get a sneak preview right here (featuring *my* artistic contribution to the Totoro Forest Fund):



And if you want a sneak preview at the exhibition, I'd suggest dropping by the Cartoon Art Museum tomorrow night for our special Keith Knight Opening Reception and Book Release Party, celebrating the release of The Complete K Chronicles, published by Dark Horse. If you want to see the whole magilla, drop by on Sunday afternoon, on your way to attend Keith's three-hour intensive workshop, which is pricey, yes, but well worth it for the cartoonist who's looking to take his or her career to the next level.

Next up--Gene Colan (but more on that later. I've still got 30 soot sprites to hide in the galleries...)

I got quoted again, this time in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Shaenon and I got to spend this past Saturday at Pixar for the Totoro Forest Project Art Auction, and we had a great time--even though we didn't manage to get the winning bid on our favorite piece. a non-profit museum curator earns slightly less annual income than the other folks who were attending the fundraiser, and I couldn't justify cutting lunch, the phone bill and running water from my budget for the next two months to justify dropping $700 on a single piece of art, much as I'd have liked to.

For those of you who missed the event, though, you can look at online versions of the Totoro artwork at the aforementioned Totoro Forest Project website, and if you want to see everything in person, you can visit the Cartoon Art Museum between September 20, 2008 and February 8, 2009 and see just about all of it.

My take on this year's election:



Vs.

More William Bazillion here: http://www.williambazillion.com

And if you ever wanted to learn all there is to know about promoting your own cartoons and comics, *and* if you're going to be in San Francisco next month to check out the Cartoon Art Museum's new Totoro's Forest, you'll want to take Keith Knight's workshop, Cartoons Are Serious Business. Keith's a great cartoonist and a brilliant self-promoter, and I'm sure that 99% of the cartoonists I know would benefit from this class.

If I've been slow getting back to anyone over the past couple of months, it's partly because of this.

And this.

And this.

And this.

More information on these as they develop--make sure to click on the first link, though. And join the official Totoro Forest Project Facebook Group while you're at it.

Me, I'm gonna take a nap.

Earlier this month, I interviewed El Tigre Co-Creator and Executive Producer Jorge Gutierrez for Animation World Network. You can read the complete interview here. Please check it out, and, as always, if you enjoy what I'm writing, please drop the folks at AWN.com a line and tell them to keep me around.

Thanks!