Here’s the next part of Chapter 16 of Spoilers

I apologize to anyone who hates reading. The joke is coming in the next part.

Also, I wanted to apologize to J. M. Davey for any and all inaccuracies in the depiction of sound  recording and broadcasting equipment in this comic. You won’t be surprised to hear I did no research and just made stuff up (actually, I did look up what a boom mic actually looks like, but not whether one would be used in this particular situation). Thanks for understanding.

“Dead objects live on”

On Valentine’s Day (thanks internet), Blaise Larmee asked his Twitter followers “does anyone believe in conceptual art anymore?”

This strikes me as a bit of a trick question – when art is a concept, it kind of requires belief in order to exist, or at least to be recognized as art. Otherwise, it’s just stuff, like everything else. This is the central issue that Larmee addresses with Young Lions, his debut novella for which the young artist was awarded the Xeric Grant. Cody (with rosy-cheeks), Alice (a flower in her hair) and Wilson (looking like a bespectacled Yokoyama character) make up a conceptual art group that performs rites and rituals at parties around the trio’s New York stomping grounds. Of the three, the point of view mostly follows Cody on his search for art in life.

(take note, I reveal some plot points in this, so if you’d like to be surprised, read the book first. You can order copies from http://blaiselarmee.blogspot.com. Consider yourself spoiler warned.)

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Hey y’all, I promised I’d be back.

Moving Up

It’s time to break the news officially. For the past two years I’ve been a Technical Assistant for the Cleveland Institute of Art (where I got my BFA) in the Foundation Digital Art and Design area. What this meant was I helped out the teachers and students of the freshman digital classes. This was a great job, by several standards, especially in the current economic climate.

A couple of weeks ago, however, I was offered a job to be a full time web designer for another company, Media II, with a salary that I’ll be able to support a family with (if you look them up, don’t worry, one of my first tasks will be to fix the website). Since then I’ve been working on wrapping things up at CIA and getting all my ducks in a row (is that a good or bad thing?) and will start my new job in a week.

This is a pretty exciting moment, and I’m sure my life will be changing drastically once again. One of the things I’m most excited about this new opportunity, besides the job itself, is that my schedule will be opening up a bit more, in order to allow time for more comics making! The reasons behind this are many and twisted together in a complicated pretzel – coinciding with major work slowing down on making our house livable, the new job will have me bringing in enough that I won’t be required to fill what other free time I had with either freelance work or job hunting.

Freelance was great because it let me work with a lot of great people, but work was never really off the clock. It got a little unmanageable when I was trying to shove my web design work in during my TA hours and they began to compete for my main focus (I have a hard time not being totally focused on one thing at a time, so the switch back and forth could be jarring at times). With a regular, salaried 9 to 5 kind of job, I can come home and leave work at the door.

Also, I imagine I’ll feel like I’m contributing enough that I’ll be able to let myself do things I want to do, like focus on comics making when I’m not at work. Of course we’ll have to wait and see what happens when the job actually starts, but as a show of good faith, I’ve done something else I wanted to show you…

New Spoilers

Yeah, that’s right, I got a new chapter of Spoilers done. It’s a long one, so I’ll spread it out over a couple of weeks.

Here’s the first part to Chapter 16, where Moses Donahue, that notable chap we saw back in Chapter 4 talks with the conscientious Rita Goodman on the broadcast news show, Talking About Now.

This chapter is dedicated to anyone who gets the jokes, especially Derek Hawkman, who has been a fine upstanding human being for as long as I’ve known him. I based Donahue’s house on what I could recollect of Derek’s parents’ home in Virginia.

Be warned, this is a talky one, so settle in by the fire and and get comfortable.

I’ll put up the next part to this chapter sometime next week. Be sure to see it as it was meant to be seen too.

Five Day Forecast

It’ll be a sunny one I think! I’ve got a lot of plans for the old Encylopedia. I’d like to do a spotlight on some reasons why I’m learning to love Cleveland as well as that Reader Partici-ation thing I mentioned a while ago in the comments.

More definitive are my plans to put up a review of Blaise Larmee’s new work Young Lions, which comes out on the 1st of April.

Until then, take care of each other, all of youse!

Hi guys, big things have been happening!

So so much, I will have a couple of real posts for you all in the next week or so with actual content!

In the mean time, check out the beautiful photography of my man, Richard Cline. (Richard is the other half of Sean Malloy Pictures, first-rate filmmakers from sunny northern Virginia. Their new short film, The Gains and Losses of Porter Harmon is set to be released very soon.)

See you in a few, sportsfans!

from Tanna Tucker's sketchbook

So much is going on around me! Let’s take a moment to pay attention to the state of this community of movers and shakers, shall we?
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