Hindsight

Last week I was on the road, in good old PA, for both business and leisure.

First there was the Annual Convention of the National Council of Teacher of English, my favorite show, which was in Philly. This is the first year that Candlewick has sent me officially, which was pretty sweet in that everything was paid for and I got some fancy dinners. However, I kind of missed being on the show floor all weekend as I have in the past. Even though that’s exhausting, it’s just fabulous to meet so many teachers, almost all of whom are excited about my books! I still got a lot of that excitement, but I didn’t have a chance to meet quite as many teachers this year.

During our day off from the show, we went to see Eastern State Penitentiary, which is awesome, and then to the Philly Zoo, which is aging but quite cool. We didn’t have much time at the zoo before they closed, so we mostly just saw primates. And lions. Drawings below.

After the show, we stayed in the area and had Thanksgiving with Alison’s parents. Now I’m back, and trying to finally finalize the Odyssey cover.

LOTS more drawings below the cut:

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I recently gave a talk at the Aldrich library in Barre, VT (where, incidentally, I used to play D&D as a young nerdy child). This is more or less my standard presentation — although I made a few last-minute changes, so I was improvising a little. Here’s a 15-minute excerpt from the 1-hour presentation:

Well, today was the Comicazi show I mentioned in my last post, and it was okay. The crowd was actually pretty good, though for the most part they were spending minimally. Don’t know if that was demographic or a sign of the economy, but I wasn’t the only one who had that impression. I sat next to an old convention pal, Karl, who does beautiful, meticulously crosshatched pen & ink books. I chatted with my pals from the Boston Comics Roundtable, who do a nice anthology called Inbound. And in the plentiful downtime, I did a lot of sketching (both digital and traditional – more below the cut).

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On December 14th (a week from Sunday) I will be making an appearance at a local comic convention in Davis Square, at the Dilboy VFW, 371 Summer St., from 9am-3pm. Come chat with me and other local comic folks, and buy some books and art. I’ll be showing some samples of the Odyssey art, too!
Speaking of which, I’m past the 20% mark on the finished pages for The Odyssey. Yay!

We did our presentation at the Center for Cartoon Studies a few days ago, and it was great! It’s a lot of fun to talk to folks who want to know about all the nuts and bolts. We discovered that 2 hours was not nearly enough time for both of us to share all the info we wanted to. They are already talking about bringing us back next year, and giving us two hours each.

Here’s the CCS front window:

Here’s Alison doing her talk. If some of the students look zoned, that’s because I already talked to them for an hour and a quarter. Plus they’re all cartoonists, so they can’t not doodle.

Here’s me in front of the CCS museum/library with Alec Longstreth, who organized the visit. The reason he has a huge beard is that he decided not to shave until he finishes his 200-page graphic novel. And apparently this is only 3 months of growth!

Next week I’ll be presenting at the NH Creative Club, open to the public (with a $15 cover charge, I believe, to cover the cost of the venue). For more details see my Facebook page.

School is back in session, and I’ve been doing a few author visits. I was at the Newton Library last month, South Shore VoTech last week, did a skype interview / vodcast with Park Tudor High School, and I have upcoming appearances at the Plymouth Library and the Center for Cartoon Studies. I’m particularly excited about that last one because CCS has a lot of big-name faculty and seems to be doing everything right (even though I’m not sure anyone should be spending their money on an education specifically in making comics).

That visit will also be my first joint presentation with Alison, which I think will be very cool. We’ll be talking to all those aspiring comic creators about the realities of publishing and selling graphic novels. And getting to know the faculty too, of course.

So yeah, as mentioned in the last post, I did an author visit at Penn State Harrisburg for their summer writing program. Actually two writing programs, one for kids and one for adults. I was a pretty big hit, or so it seems from the feedback.

This blog tool is too clunky for uploading a large number of photos, so I’m going to start a new Flickr account for this sort of thing with the username garethhinds. (You know what I hate about Flickr, though? Photos appear in reverse order unless you go to the set.)

Of course I also did some sketching, and here are a few samples. Arguably one of the best features of Harrisburg is the lovely path along the river:

Some more from the river, and some plants at Ashcombe’s nursery:

The nursery also has bunnies (with too-cute names)!

These are from the Railroad Museum of PA in Lancaster:

And you know what else is in Lancaster — lots of Amish! Seriously, I mostly didn’t draw the Amish themselves, as they have this thing about graven images (guess I won’t be joining that religion, bucolic as it may be!). But drawing their horses, barns, and buggies I have no problem with.

I didn’t get a table or have a signing or anything, but I did get down to New York last weekend for the MoCCA comics show.

I didn’t bring my camera, but luckily we ran into our friend Cecil, who took a photo and blogged about the show.

I picked up a few good books… Supermarket by Brian Wood and La Primavera by Alexis Frederick-Frost, one of the minicomic collections by Tom Gauld, plus a cool cheese t-shirt by Lucy Knisley.

Just back from a nice relaxing week on the Cape. Mostly just for recreation, but I did do a talk for the Mass Library Association’s Youth Services meeting (blogged by MLA members here and here).

I also did a few drawings, though not as many as I might’ve expected.

The fish above are from the aquarium at Woods Hole, which is very small but has some nice specimens and a few interesting touches — such as being able to go behind the tanks.

Or, My Author Visit to Roswell…

I’m writing most of this on the plane flight back from Roswell, NM, where I spent 3 full days doing author visits at the New Mexico Military Institute, the Sierra Middle School, and the Sidney Gutierrez Middle School. It was a good trip, although it was *definitely* hard work rather than fun.

The flight to Roswell took most of the day. My first flight left Boston at 2:20pm and I didn’t arrive until 10pm Mountain Time (midnight Eastern). I did manage to get a bit of work done on the way (books 7-8 of the Odyssey script, plus a couple of pages of layout).

My guest suite at NMMI was very spacious and comfortable. I’m not sure I would recommend the accommodations, though, because there’s a wake-up bugle at 6am and another (calling the cadets to drill?) a short while later. Also the water was the hardest I’ve ever encountered. It was almost impossible to get my soap to lather.

NMMI has students ranging from 7th grade to Junior College, and I worked with a lot of them. I did my standard comic workshop at least 6 times, my show&tell presentation in standard, short and long variations, and tried out several new demos and exercises. Every group had a different mix of artistic, rowdy, disciplined, sleepy, cooperative, and bored kids. Some of groups mixed 7th graders with seniors or Freshmen with JC’ers. The shot below is of my presentation open to all cadets and the public after school on Wednesday evening. The turnout was modest, and the cadets can be a bit of a tough audience, but it went reasonably well. Introducing me is the teacher who arranged the whole thing, Liz Boese.

Here’s me presenting at the Gutierrez Middle School:

My basic workshop involves creative reinterpretation of a certain childhood nursery rhyme, and I do it along with the students:

Each day involved about 5 hours of work, and the rest of the time I was mostly resting, checking email, eating Mexican food, and sightseeing in Roswell. I went first to the alien museum, which is 100% amateur. There’s actually some pretty interesting information about the various major UFO incidents, but it’s all presented as plain ol’ text on a wall plus a few black and white photos of the persons involved. They have various photos people have taken of UFOs, a few explanations of hoaxes, and some small dioramas of saucer crashes. Probably the coolest thing there was the alien autopsy diorama donated by a filmmaker who did a movie about Area 51 — for the movie they built a very realistic life-size rubber alien and an autopsy set. This now occupies a large glass case near the end of the museum. I couldn’t even find much in the way of good postcards in the gift shop, though I did buy a spiffy Roswell alien t-shirt.

I also went to the Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art, which is a very cool little place. They do year-long artist residencies there, so it’s filled with the work the residents have done over the years. Mostly representational, mostly quite good. I noted a bunch of names to look up later.

On the last day Liz took me for a drive out to the mountains, where it’s prettier than in town. Some of the parts of the river valley (what they call a river is more of a stream) actually reminded me of VT. The terrain around the highway looked like a lot of the reference I stared at endlessly for the Cars game. The mountains are cool though — literally as well as figuratively.

When I landed in Roswell it was nighttime (and cloudy), so i didn’t get to see much. On takeoff I was treated to an excellent view of miles and miles of barren desert, and then an interesting agricultural area. The fields are all circular, because apparently they irrigate them with a rotating pipe-arm sort of thing. After that, we came to a cool raised shelf in the land, similar to what I imagine the continental shelf looks like under the ocean. Oh, now we’re going over more circular fields. It looks like a polka-dot blanket (in reddish-brown, green, and burgundy). Well, time to crank out some more layouts. Signing off from the skies over New Mexico….