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Monday, May 5th, 2008
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1:32 pm - MoCCA news
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The programming for this year’s MoCCA festival has been announced, including the panel that I’ll be appearing on with Alex Robinson.
Sunday June 8, 12:10 – 1:10 PM
Alex Robinson and Mike Dawson in conversation
Alex Robinson is the author of Tricked, Alex Robinson’s Lower Regions, Too Cool to be Forgotten, and Box Office Poison. The French translation of Box Office Poison received the Prix Du Premier Album prize at Angoulême International Comics Festival in 2005. Mike Dawson is the author of Freddie and Me: A Coming-of-Age (Bohemian) Rhapsody (Bloomsbury). He received the Ignatz Award in 2002. Alex Robinson and Mike Dawson are members of the notorious Ink Panthers comics collective.
One correction that I feel I must make: I didn’t win the Ignatz in 2002 (for “Promising New Talent”), I was just nominated. Greg Cook won that year. The other nominees were myself, Rick Smith, Sammy Harkham, Jeffrey Brown, and Anders Nilsen. Quite a talented group of cartoonists to be lumped in with, I must say.
Anyway, come and hear me and Alex converse!
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| Tuesday, April 29th, 2008
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1:29 pm - Estelle
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We went to see Estelle last night at the Highline Ballroom. It was a really fun show, though I didn't recognize any of the guest stars except for John Legend.
We're (almost) getting to the age where we're aware of being the older people in a room, so it was nice to see that there were plenty of folks in their 30's and up there. I am pretty sure that Aliza was the only one there who was six/seven months pregnant, so she still had something to feel self-conscious about. The baby starting kicking a lot towards the end, which I am taking to mean she was really happy to be there, and was very excited to hear the hit-single "American Boy" close the show.
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| Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008
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12:25 pm - Homecoming
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Some fantastic news: it looks like I will be heading over to the UK in June to participate in at least one event related to the release of Freddie & Me. I’ll post proper details when I have them.
I can’t wait to get over there and see how it feels to spend 20 dollars on a candy bar. Stupid worthless American money...
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| Tuesday, April 15th, 2008
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12:09 am - NYCC etc
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I'm looking forward to New York ComiCon this Friday. My book still isn't quite out, so I'll have no table of my own, but I'll have at least one copy with me to show off. The guys from Indie Spinner Rack have invited me to sit with them for a few hours so that's really exciting. They have a slew of awesome cartoonists scheduled to spend time at their table over the duration of the weekend. I will be at their table from 3:00 - 6:00 on Friday.
Saturday is Passover, and I'm not sure about whether or not I'll be back at the show on Sunday. We still have a few more months before the baby arrives, but it feels like there's still so much to do to get ready. I'm halfway through moving my study into the crappy little room (so that the baby can have the much bigger and nicer room for her nursery. Thanks a lot, baby!), but I keep getting slowed down with furniture painting projects.
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| Friday, April 11th, 2008
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10:34 am - Freddie & Me hardcover
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| Thursday, April 10th, 2008
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11:50 pm - Help! Circle of Rats
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At dinner tonight we saw a rat run past - a few feet away from our table. It's OK, we were eating outside - so this isn't a story about a restaurant failing their health inspection.
Afterwards, we were talking about rats, and I brought up something that I remembered reading in Bryan Talbot's "The Tale of One Bad Rat", about rats doing this weird thing where a bunch of them form a circle with their backs to each other and tie their tails together. I vaguely recall in the comic that people didn't know why rats did this, and sometimes they'd die this way, and their skeletons would be discovered in this strange formation.
Everyone assumed I was making this up*, which annoyed me because I remember it from the comic. I've been looking online though, and am having trouble finding any reference to this.
Does anyone know if this is a real thing? Or was it made up for the comic? Or, is it not even in the comic, and I imagined it? I can't seem to find my copy of the book, so now I'm getting worried that maybe I just hallucinated the whole thing.
* For some reason I have an undeserved reputation amongst certain friends for being someone who makes things up, and all of my amusing stories and claims have to be met with skepticism and distrust. I don't think this is right or fair.
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2:04 pm - UK comics, on their way!
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Very excited to hear that the Jonathan Cape editions of Freddie & Me have been printed, and a box of them is on it's way from England. In time-honored LiveJournal tradition, expect to see a photo of me holding a brand-spanking-new copy of the book in this space sometime next week.
current mood:  recumbent
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| Tuesday, April 8th, 2008
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1:38 pm - Pin-Up Tuesday
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This is a pin-up I drew for cartoonist Mike Lariccia, who has a new comic called The Death of Black mane and the Feared Self debuting at MoCCA in June.
In other news, my website got all messed up - so I changed it so it just re-directs to my MySpace profile. In some ways the MySpace is better anyway, there's more to look at, and it's easier to update. I'm getting someone to help me rebuild mikedawsoncomics.com though, and am hoping it'll be ready to re-launch within the next month.
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| Thursday, April 3rd, 2008
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11:49 pm - You know it - Sha-mon
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I've had Michael Jackson's "Man in the Mirror" stuck in my head for two days now. I can't get rid of it! It's driving me crazy.
On the positive side though, it has given me some good ideas about how I might make the world a better place.
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| Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008
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3:20 pm - bye-bye bike
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I finally discovered selling stuff on Craigslist, so yesterday posted my mountain bike for sale. I was very sad to let it go, but in our ongoing effort to clear out the apartment to make room for all the eventual baby crap, it was time.
I bought this bike in 1999, to use when I was living on the outskirts of Princeton, NJ. The train was a few miles from my house, so I used to ride into town, rather than driving and futilely attempting to park at the station. Biking to the train (then actually having to switch trains – it used to take over two hours for me to get to work in those days) got pretty tedious after a while, but I was probably the fittest that I’ve ever been in my life.
Since moving to New York in 2000, I probably used the bike maybe three times, maybe – so I’ll admit that it wasn’t doing much except for taking up various rooms in our succession of different apartments. Oh, and also it was good for making marks on the wall with the tires, whenever you tried to move it out of the way to get at something behind it.
I was glad that the person who showed up to look at the bike turned out to be an awkward looking teenager and his buddy. The friend seemed to genuinely think that the bike was awesome, and that it would be so cool for riding around Crown Heights on. They both seemed really psyched to get it, and I got $75.
I really liked that bike – so I am glad that the new owner seemed so happy about buying it.
The next thing for me to try to unload is my set of cumbersome flat files. They are a really great thing to have, but are the most awkward pieces of furniture ever. They take up a lot of floor space, but only come as high as your knees. You could put things on top of them, but that looks like garbage. Really, the only solution is to buy more flat files, so you could stack them to an acceptable height, but I don’t think I’m going to do that.
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11:12 am - Music as Memoir
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This was nice: the cover story to this week’s Publisher’s Weekly was an article called Music as Memoir. Freddie & Me got a nice little shout-out, as an example of comics getting into the game.
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| Tuesday, April 1st, 2008
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11:10 am - Wham! Rap!
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I was trying to decide whether or not to spend a lot of money getting tickets to the George Michael at MSG concerts in July. I went ahead and bought the cheap ones.
Speaking of George Michael - I DVRed a recent episode of the show "Eli Stone" that had him as a guest star, playing himself. In the episode, George hired Eli Stone as his lawyer to defend a girl who had played "I Want Your Sex" at her school's abstinence training class, and had been suspended.
I'd not watched Eli Stone before, and I'm thinking now that I won't ever watch it again. It wasn't good at all. The worst part was when the girl's principal finally caved on the issue of her suspension. She pointed out that her lawsuit wasn't about her suspension, but about getting her school a real sex ed program.
PRINCIPAL: You know we'd like to have a real sex ed program, but it's just not something the school can afford!
GIRL: But it's important that we teach kids about responsible sex ed!
PRINCIPAL: What are we going to do??!!!
GEORGE MICHAEL: I know a way we can raise a lot of money in one night...
(cut to: hastily put together George Michael concert at the local High School...)
AWFUL!!
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| Monday, March 31st, 2008
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10:20 pm - Faith
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I'm quite interested in going to see George Michael with my sister when he goes on tour this summer. He's supposed to be playing two dates at Madison Square Garden, so it will probably work out. I am a little concerned that the tickets are going to be stupidly expensive though, and I'm not sure how much I want to spend on them. I have a feeling that he'll be using the fact that he's not done a US tour in something like 20 years as an excuse to charge a ridiculous amount of money for seats.
Now, even though I am well aware that it's not cool and barely acceptable it reveals once again that I have questionable taste in music, I am a big fan. I definitely would have been willing to go the extra mile $$$-wise to see this show, if not for the fact that I already did that when I went and saw him touring in Europe. Aliza and I went to Ireland in December of 2006 for a long weekend with my sister and her friend, and we saw the show in Dublin. It was probably one of the most fun concerts I've ever been to, but it might have exhausted my capacity to go "above and beyond" when it comes to making sure that I have a ticket to go and see him when he plays again. I dunno, we'll see...
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| Thursday, March 27th, 2008
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12:15 pm - A box of treasures
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Some items that I didn't drop off at the Salvation Army recently were two large boxes of old Marvel and DC comics that I didn't want anymore. The reason that they didn't go over was because there wasn't room left in the car once I'd loaded in all the boxes of books and bags of clothes.
The two boxes of comics sat in the hallway for a few days, causing a hazard to anyone walking to the bathroom in the dark at night.
Yesterday morning I took one of them and put it out on the street. There's a school next to my apartment, and my hope was that it would be discovered by some kids, who would be excited to find such a box of treasures (the Longshot limited series! Keith Giffen Justive Leagues! Captain America comics featuring Diamondback!).
When I came home from work, the box was indeed gone. I have no idea who took it, but I am going to assume it was a kid, because that makes me feel good. It could have been anyone though. Unwanted things left on the street in Brooklyn will always be taken by somebody. They never sit there for long.
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| Wednesday, March 26th, 2008
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7:49 pm - Certified Cool
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I remembered this morning that FREDDIE & ME was supposed to be solicited in the April PREVIEWS, so after lunch I nipped over to Cosmic Comics and checked it out.
And yes, it's in there, on page 232, with a nice little "Spotlight On:" box around it, and CERTIFIED COOL. Awesome!
I also bought the new LOVE & ROCKETS collection, and GANGES #2 by Kevin Huizenga. I haven't read the L&R book yet, but I read most of Ganges on the subway ride home, and finished it once I got here. It was really good.
In the comic Glenn Ganges is working at a dot com start-up in the years 1999-2000. It brought a lot of memories rushing back, and kind of a bad feeling. I dunno, it seemed fun when I was there, but now when I think back on that feeling of getting money for nothing that I had at the time, it kind of makes me feel a sense of dread. I'm not 100% sure why.
My best guesses are that it was a combination of my personal feelings of being unqualified for my job, and the general reckless attitude of the time that permeated at least two of the dot com offices I worked in before 9/11: the company tossing money around to buy toys for the employees and throwing parties all the time; everyone getting expensive thousand-dollar Herman Miller chairs; spending way more than necessary to get prime office space with a view of Central Park. I thought it was so awesome when it was happening, but now not so much.
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11:19 am - Taxes
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Tax day was yesterday. Ugh. That didn’t go well. To make up for it, we went out for tasty, tasty fish tacos and beer at Lobo, my favorite Tex-Mex restaurant 20 feet from the apartment. Also, I used it as an excuse to skip doing any drawing last night, guilt free.
Instead, I watched American Idol and grumbled about how I don’t think we (meaning me and my wife) should have to pay taxes; since all the money ever gets used for is war and things I don’t like much anyway. If the government were to spend all the money fixing collapsing ice-shelves in Antarctica, then I’d be happier to pay my share.
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| Monday, March 24th, 2008
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4:50 pm - Spring Cleaning
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More clearing out this weekend. We donated four garbage bags worth of clothes and coats to the Salvation Army. Also, collected up about ten shopping bags filled with books and took those over too. According to the lady at the Salvation Army, ten bags is about seven bags too many from their point-of-view. She didn’t seem happy with me (I think because now it becomes her job to sort through all this crap), but I didn’t care because I’d already dumped everything in their back room, and was heading out the door.
On Sunday we were at my folks for Easter. In keeping with my sudden enthusiasm to discard unwanted things, I offered to throw out some of the junk of mine that has been crowding my parent’s basement. My mother liked the idea, but had to step away from me while I was doing it, because she got upset every time I threw away an old drawing that I did in High School or something.
From that clear-out, I now regret tossing away an embarrassing old paper that I’d written in college about an art exhibit that I’d gone to see at the MOMA. I don’t remember what the exhibit was, but it must have been conceptual, because my whole paper was about how I thought the whole thing was a bunch of b/s, and that the artist was scamming us all into thinking that it was really “deep” and full of meaning, and only chumps and pretentious fools would ever act like is was really “art”. I think I must have thought I was really In-Your-Face by writing a paper like this.
Anyway, the professor grading the paper took a lot of time to write me a detailed response (that was almost as long as my original essay) explaining what she had gotten out of the exhibit, and why I was wrong to dismiss what I’d seen. Looking back at this now, I think it’s something that would have been worth holding on to, because it now reminds me that we all go through a phase where we think we’re really ballsy and original and cutting-edge to sneer at so called “artsy” art. I clearly thought I was revealing to the world that the Emperor had no Clothes, but in reality I just didn’t really know what I was talking about.
Also: I found a grody old tooth of mine in one of the boxes, and had a good laugh bringing it up out of the basement and putting it in my wife’s hand without telling her what it was.
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| Friday, March 21st, 2008
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5:15 pm - Lentils
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I bought some lentil soup today, which I realized tasted and smelled funny when I started eating it. I couldn't quite put my finger on it. It sort of had a melted-plastic thing going on, but not quite. I asked Aliza what she thought, and she correctly identified the smell as weed. But not the pleasant skunky smell of normal marijuana, but the nasty toxic smell after everything's been smoked and there's just the thick tar-like stuff left in the bottom of the pipe.
I don't know why the lentil soup smelled like this. I bought it at a reputable place: the expensive Union Market, which is like Whole Foods, but there are less of them. If I had bought it at the crunchy-hippie Food Co-Op just up the street, then I would have been less surprised. You know what those hippies are like, right?? Am I right? HAWR!
The moral of the story is that I had mixed feelings about telling this dumb story. On the one hand, I figured it was an amusing enough little thing to help fill up the LiveJournal, but on the other hand, I suspect my mother lurks and reads this from time to time, and now she'll know that I know what marijuana smells like.
Pictured above: someone working at the Park Slope Food Co-Op. I think he's stocking shelves.
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| Thursday, March 20th, 2008
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6:12 pm - Oversized
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I think the cover to the new MOME is awesome. I only have the one book by this cartoonist (I think his name is Killoffer), but I think his drawings are great.
The book that I have (Six Hundred and Seventy Six Apparitions of Killoffer) is one of those oversized ones that don't fit on any normal shelves. We're doing a lot of clearing out of our apartment at the moment, trying to get rid of things, and I think the shelves that I'm actually able to fit this book into are going to go.
Don't worry, I'm not getting rid of the book, but I'm wondering to myself where it will go now. Same thing for my too-tall Acme Novelty Libraries, and the giant NINJA book from Picturebox.
On a slightly related note: every time I bring up that NINJA book, or the excellent MOURNING STAR book from Bodega Press, I want to add the phrase "The buzz-book of SPX". This is because when I was at SPX in 2006, I heard numerous people refer to these books in that way, and now the association is permanently stuck in my head. It could be worse, I could have "The shittiest book at SPX" stuck in my head for them instead, and that's probably definitely not what those creators want to hear!
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| Wednesday, March 19th, 2008
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11:30 am - Booklist review
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I’m not sure if Booklist reviews are posted online without one having to subscribe, so I’ll reprint the review here:
Freddie & Me: A Coming-of-Age (Bohemian) Rhapsody.
Dawson, Mike (Author)
Jun 2008. 304 p. Bloomsbury, paperback, $19.95. (9781596914766). 741.5.
Graphic novels rarely come more deeply personal than Dawson’s autobiographical chronicle. Departing from the dot-com slacker humor of his comic book Gabagool!, he explores his lifelong obsession with the UK rock band Queen. His Proustlike moment of remembrance arrived after seeing a performance by a Queen tribute band and realizing that “When I think of Queen, I can remember my whole life.” As a child living in Bedfordshire, England, he caught the Queen bug early, cadging music tapes, converting friends, and even performing “Bohemian Rhapsody” at a summer talent show. During the 1980s, when Queen’s popularity waned as that of grunge rose, a teenaged Dawson moved to New Jersey and endured the painful ribbing of classmates after Queen’s lead singer, Freddy Mercury, died of AIDS. Dawson’s skillfully drawn panels follow him through girlfriends, adolescent angst, and career highlights, with Queen providing background music at every milestone. Anyone who has ever obsessed over a music icon, be it rock group or charismatic crooner, should identify with Dawson in this poignant, charming memoir.
— Carl Hays
In related news, I understand the book will be listed in the April issue of PREVIEWS, coming out next week.
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