Robin McConnell interviewed me this past week for his excellent comics-related radio show, Inkstuds. We talk about my books Ace-Face and Freddie & Me, as well as my ongoing webcomic, Jack & Max Escape From the End of Time, among other things.

Unfortunately the last minute and a half of our chat got scrambled, so had to be cut from the online audio. This results in the conversation ending kind of abruptly, just as I started on some weird rant about my disgust at my former college-age self for being such Politically Correct drip instead of going out and partying for four years. Maybe it's for the best that the majority of this screed has been lost to the ages...

Originally published at Mike Dawson Comics.

Freddie & Me reviewed as Book of the Month at iFanboy.com.

It's a great review, and I'm psyched they spotlighted it. I can't help but assume the worst though, at the beginning where he mentions seeing the book on the shelves, noting in his "to check out one day" mental filing cabinet, and then a year later picking it up. Was it the same copy that he saw both times?

Originally published at Mike Dawson Comics.

Two recent pictures of interest:


A not very high-resolution image of the cover of the Spanish version of Freddie & Me, which I believe will be out in a few weeks from Ediciones La Cpula. When I get a less grainy version of the image I will probably replace this one.


Me and Orli in the swimming pool. She was a little freaked out when she first went in, but pretty soon she really loved being in the water. I am not sure when it's OK to let them put their heads under, though. Do they learn pretty quickly to not breathe the water in, or do you need to wait until they're old enough to understand you when you tell them to hold their breath?

Originally published at Mike Dawson Comics.

I was alerted to a recent episode of the podcast Frank and Erik Internet Famous. In this episode (which I enjoyed), one of the hosts tells a story about being on the subway with a copy of Freddie & Me, and getting into a conversation with an attractive girl reading A Thousand Splendid Suns.

According to the storyteller, he was doing very well striking up a conversation with the girl, talking about her book, which he had also read, until, he claims, he showed her Freddie & Me. Apparently, she saw he was reading a comic-book, and became repulsed and he ended up striking out. He frantically attempts to salvage the conversation, but the damage is done, and she gets off at the next stop.

Normally I would have a problem with this, because seriously, is this 1988, or 1995, or even 2004 or something, and comics still aren't considered cool/acceptable by the mainstream? Didn't she get the update? Hasn't she ever heard of MAUS or PERSEPOLIS or even the Dark Knight or Iron Man movies? Does she think only creepy man-children are going to see these things still? Shouldn't reading a "graphic novel" make you seem more interesting/sophisticated/with it/etc? Come on now.

But, I am OK with this, because whether or not she was wrong to dismiss the guy because he was reading a comic, according to the story he was very attracted to her, so it's all fair-enough. I just feel bad that F&M was such a lousy wingman for the fella. Maybe if he was reading John Grisham's The Firm or something, things might have gone his way.

Originally published at Mike Dawson Comics.

I joined the guys at Comic Geek Speak for an in-depth discussion about my book FREDDIE & ME. It was really a lot of fun, as the hosts had shared a lot of the same experiences as me when it came to some of our High School reminisces about Queen and Freddie Mercury.



Note for Alex, who I know only likes to listen in the hopes that his name will come up: if you just want to hear the part where you get mentioned, it's towards the end when we're talking about which cons we'll be making it to for the rest of the year.

Whilst suffering through New York Comicon, I sat down with Peter Jaffe of Comixology and recorded a substantial interview, here. We talk about Ace-Face, Jack & Max, and Freddie & Me.

My so-called friend Alex gleefully passed this link along to me this afternoon, knowing it would ruin my day. Another book coming out called "Freddie & Me"?? They even used my ampersand! This book is a memoir of the author growing up being friends with a notable golf caddie.

The only upside I can see to this is that it's possible that some people might mean to buy this book, but buy mine by accident. I could see a well-meaning Aunt asking her sister what her nephew (a golf-enthusiast) wants for Christmas and mixing things up, leaving the golf-fan stuck with a delightful graphic novel about a thick-faced English child, growing up idolizing the lead singer of a 70's classic rock band. The downside is that it could happen in reverse, and some Queen-fanatic will end up with this golf book under the Christmas tree by mistake as well.

A lengthy conversation between me and Tim O’Shea has been posted at Comic Book Resources. We mostly talk about Ace-Face and Freddie & Me, but also talk a little bit about the new Jack and Max webcomic I’m going to be launching next month at ACT-I-VATE.

The Ace-Face section was good, because I was able to explain a little more about what the contents of the book are going to be comprised of. I plan on posting some more details about that in this blog in the coming weeks.

One of the questions Tim asked me about Freddie & Me was to respond to the more negative criticism that the book have received. This answer took me a while to settle on, because as I say in the interview, it’s hard to defend your own work without just sounding defensive, but I did my best.

An interview up on The Pulse with Seth Kushner about the photo book he’s been putting together, Graphic NYC. This is a book of photos and essays about New York based cartoonists. I’m included, and the image of me is up in The Pulse interview.



I don’t think I’ve posted this before, so apologies if I have. Seth came over to the apartment to shoot this pic over the Summer, right around the time The Baby was getting ready to arrive, so my memory is foggy. Initially I was hesitant to ham it up for the camera as much as I am in the photo, because, well, that’s my personality. But, like a true photographer of models, Seth was able to coax some energy out of me, and get me to "work it" for the camera.

I think all of the pics that Seth has for this book look amazing, and I am really hopeful that he’ll find a great publisher for it soon.

Part two of the interview with me at The Daily Cross-hatch is up.

Here are two random pages from the Boy Scout comic that I discuss at the top of the interview:



( next one below the cut because of bad language… )

Hey, an interview with me is up on The Daily Cross-Hatch today. Pretty cool.

I mention that I'm hoping to have a collection of comics published. I will have more to "announce" in regards to this in the coming weeks...

Here’s another set of pages that I wrote and drew for Freddie & Me, but ultimately decided not to use. This is actually a fairly lengthy set – possibly the longest sequence to get cut, aside from those imagined conversations between Freddie Mercury and Brian May, which I’ve posted a couple of times before.

This material was supposed to be the beginning of the third main section of the book, “Hard Rock”, which was set in 2002, and centered on me meeting my future wife, Aliza, and a trip that we took together to Rome that summer. These pages are actually sort of a rough draft of sorts – a lot of the scenes and ideas that I toss around here, were re-drawn into the sequence that I used in the final book.

I am pretty sure I’ve said before that the 2002 and later material was actually the toughest for me to write, mainly because, just like with actual History, it’s sometimes hard to have any perspective on things that happened in the more recent past. Unlike the parts of the book that took place in my childhood or teenage years, it wasn’t immediately clear to me how to present myself or the people around me. Writing about my relationship with Aliza was especially tough – and I think these pages kind of reveal that. Instead of being a sustained narrative, like other parts of the book, this sequence is more like a cliffs-notes kind of bullet-point thing, where I’m basically just depicting random memories about our first few months of dating as they come to me.

Another concept which I attempted to introduce here, but didn't really go anywhere, was about autobiography in music. I established that Aliza was into hip-hop/R&B, and I wanted to talk a little about how a lot of that music is much more lyrically autobiographical than most Classic Rock. There aren't many Queen songs where Freddie talks about his actual specific life, but there are a ton of Kanye West ones where he does.



( There’s more… )

Well, it’s only been almost two months since I posted the first discarded scene from Freddie & Me… but, here’s another one that didn’t make it into the final book. This one is a conversation taking place between a VH1/MTV-style "VJ" and former WHAM! band-member, Andrew Ridgeley.



( There’s more… )

In this photo: AdHouse head-honcho Chris Pitzer and PETEY AND PUSSY creator, John Kershbaum at SPX.

John's book is one of the few that I've had time to sit down and enjoy since coming back from the convention last weekend. It's not due out from Fantagraphics for another few months, but there were advance copies at the show, so I was sure to pick one up. I saw that the reviewer Rob Clough got himself a copy at the show too, and he wrote a tremendous review of it here. I definitely recommend looking for this when it's released.



PS: Rob Clough also recently posted a great review of Freddie & Me, here!

I'll be attending the Small Press Expo in Bethesda, Maryland, this weekend. It's a Saturday/Sunday show, and I'll be there with Freddie & Me, some other comics, and a bunch of original art.

On Sunday, at 1:30, I'll be on a panel called "Cartooning in Collaboration/Collaboration in Cartooning", moderated by Isaac Cates and Mike Wenthe, along with Dash Shaw, Frank Santoro, Jim Ottaviani, and Becky Cloonan.

Also, Saturday is also actually my 33rd birthday - so if anyone feels like buying an extra copy of F&M as a present to me, then I think that would be really nice of you!

Weird: this is what showed up when I googled "Happy Birthday to me"

Two interviews with me appeared this week. One is only partially online, on the website for NUVO, an alternative magazine in Indianapolis. An excerpt of it can be seen here. Hopefully at some point I'll be able to get myself a copy of the actual issue.

The second is an audio interview that was recorded at MoCCA over the summer, and has been posted at the Secret Identity Podcast

My Dad asked me the other day if I'd send him some jpegs of two pages from an earlier draft of Freddie & Me that featured a friend of my folks chatting with my Mom. He wanted to forward them along to her, as a point of interest. The pages were cut from the final version of the book, mainly because they didn't really add a whole lot, and I was working on streamlining things as much as I could. It occurred to me that I've actually got a reasonable amount of material that didn't make it into the final draft, so I'm thinking I might start posting some of that stuff here.




Work on new material is progressing OK. The baby sure is making me more tired than I used to be, but I've somewhat managed to keep going at the drawing table a respectable amount. My paternity leave is over tomorrow though, so we'll see how things go once I'm back at work...

Slightly embarrassing interview with me and Alex Robinson posted up at Indie Spinner Rack. I'm sheepish about it because the main topic of our conversation is a sales competition between me, Alex, and Josh Cotter, who all debuted new books over the Summer. All I can say in my defense is that it was just a joke between us, which we foolishly told Charlito about when we were at dinner at the big Heroes-Con. No sooner had we dished, and Charlito was fanning the flames of competition, taking it all public on the ISR. I should have learned my lesson when I did the solo conversation with them a few months back. Before we started taping I made a joke about being in competition with an old High School friend who's also in comics, and before I knew it, Charlie was asking me about it on the air.

Lessons learned: Despite their claim that they want to produce a controversy-free show, Charlie and Mr. Phil love the salacious gossip. I will know better next time, before I start talking off-the-record with the two of them over drinks. Thank God I never told them about the blood-feud I'm engaged in with Tony Consiglio - otherwise I'd be defending myself about that in some future episode as well!



I'm lookin' at you, Tony!

This was cool - a German music magazine arrived in the mail this morning with a short bit about Freddie & Me. Here's the cover and the piece. I'm going to need to go to BabelFish and type in the text so I can find out what it all says.

This was very cool to receive this morning: the cover to the Italian edition of Freddie & Me, coming out in September from edizioni BD.



I know it's basically the same cover as the US version, so it's not like some foreign editions of books that have completely different artwork. I think all the versions of the book will be using this same image. But, it was still cool to see the new title, and I didn't realize this version would be coming out so soon.