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July 30, 2008 01:42Footpad Footnote

It seems all my readers have been sitting on the edges of their seats. Every time I meet one, they demand to know what's going on with the family of raccoons. Well, I've poked a flashlight under my front step a couple of times recently, and it seems they've left the building for good. The emergency backup nest has served its purpose, and now they're movin' on up.

Movin' on up, but not far.

On the night of my recent birthday celebrations, I was seeing the last of my guests out. There were a few on foot, and a few others leaving by car. No sooner had the car engine started up than a raccoon -- Mama by the looks of her -- came out of one of our neighbour's front yards (Cindy Sherwin, Pulse News in fact) and trotted casually across the street, right in front of everybody.

Marr, who was in the car, rolled down the window and shouted to me, knowingly, "Fucking raccoon!"

"Fucking raccoon," I concurred. I'll miss them all.

July 08, 2008 19:51Drawing Words, Writing Pictures

Some of the recent surge of new interest in Longshot Comics has been academic. I've been contacted about having my dots discussed in a few books on the subject of graphic novels and experimental sequential art (read "weird comics"). One of them is the remarkable nuts-to-bolts look at what goes into creating a comic book, Drawing Words & Writing Pictures by Jessica Abel and Matt Madden. An excerpt from The Failed Promise of Bradley Gethers makes an appearance on page nine, right between clips of Matt Feazell and John Porcellino. My comp copy showed up in the mail a couple of days ago, but your very own copy is waiting for you in bookstores on and offline. Amazon is selling it on its various sites for about twenty bucks, which is a nice price for a big album-sized book full of pretty pictures and indispensable information.

July 01, 2008 22:41Inspiration Where You Can Find It

There have been a few more comic jams since the last one I wrote about, and I'm happy to say I've been at all of them. Well, relatively happy. I could have done without certain aspects of the one that accidentally took place during the NHL playoffs. Unless you're a hockey fanatic, you really don't want to be in a Montreal bar when the Habs are in the middle of a hotly contested series. Any bar. Because even the sparsely patronized dives (like the one we do our jams at these days) fill to the rafters with crazed, drunken hockey zealots who spend the entire evening screaming at the top of their lungs whenever their home team so much as touches the puck.

The Montreal Canadiens were eventually eliminated from the playoffs, ending the dire imperative for fans to torch police cruisers by the dozen. The city coffers were thankful, the automotive economy less so.

When the jam was reconvened last Thursday, I had my current raccoon woes in mind. Yes, the family is still living underfoot, but largely without incident. Despite the peace treaty that exists between us, I decided to lay out a disparaging raccoon page and pencil panels one, five and nine. The rest of the page was quickly filled by other contributors as the evening progressed. As usual, Rick Gagnon took all our work home and was already busy inking the results when I asked him to send me a scan of the page as it stands.

Simply because it amused the hell out of me, I present "Fucking Raccoon" as a work in progress. You'll be able to see the final product in a future issue of What the F***?

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