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.

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.

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.