The Girl, who is now a young woman working on her mother’s hydroponic farm, asked me to draw this gag, which I did, 98%, and then just…forgot? It’s the brain fog.
I love this joke because it is accessible to an absolute tiny percentage of people. But it is very relevant if you like internet memes and you work on a hydroponic farm.
The author Dawn Burns asked me to create an illustration for her short story, “Letter from the Fort Wayne Children’s Zoo,” which will appear in her forthcoming collection, A Green Glow on the Horizon: Tales from the National Association of Tourist Attractions Survivors (Cornerstone Press, 2026).
The book and the story are forthcoming. It’s not entirely clear whether this illustration will also be forthcoming in the actual book. But I had a little inspiration after reading it and created something I really love.
The otters are based on a photograph I took at the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum in 2022. He was doing these elaborate backflips every time he passed the underwater viewing window, and I saw the golden ratio in this one. My entire conception of the illustration was centered around that memory.
The purple plastic gorilla cup gave me the most trouble. I vaguely recalled their existence but not well enough to accurately reproduce one, and I couldn’t find a single photo anywhere on the internet. Believe me, I tried. I spent as much time looking for an example of a purple plastic gorilla cup from the 20th century as I did drawing the rest of the picture. My google-fu is powerful and I usually find what I’m looking for, but these cups were instant trash the moment you finished consuming their sugary contents. I doubt anyone saved one let alone posted a photograph of it 40 years after the fact. So I kind of had to make them up. These are not the plastic purple gorilla cups that you would get at the zoo in the ’80s and ’90s, they are just a tribute to those cups.
It was August of 2022 when Bonnie Jo Campbell commissioned the View from Whiteheart, Michigan map and sent me the manuscript for The Waters for reference, and November of that year when I sent her the final version, which means I’ve been working on this comic book for approximately 2⅓ years.
All the others took like 2–4 months.
I’ve still got some tweaks here and there plus the 4 color pages for the covers, but today I finally finished the last page of the body of the work. And good timing, too. In 12 days I have to lay out The Pencil Eaters Volume 2 so it can get to the printers in time for the release party May 13.
But until then, I’ll focus on getting this book to the printer and uploading the pages as they’re finalized.
it’s very different from any of the other books. It’s shaped like a comic book but it reads like a hand written and illuminated fairy tale manuscript, for reasons that I think will be obvious to anyone who’s read it. It’s a very inspirational book, and it inspired me in refreshing and magical ways. I expect the people who liked the other ones will like this one, plus it can be enjoyed on its own without any reference to the source material.
This is an unfinished detail from the inside front cover/table of contents: “The Spirit of the Waters.”
At long last, we have come to the final meerkat. Construction meerkat has a lot of heavy lifting to do, but I am setting my stylus down for a minute.
Have no fear! I will not abandon this blog for months on end. Not any time soon, anyway. Later today or early tomorrow I will share the project I did this week (marker on foam core) and by the end of next week I hope to share pages from my new comic book, Bonnie Jo Campbell Comics Volume 5.
Surprise, surprise! It’s another meerkat!
These other animals were fun to design too.
Here you can observe another meerkat in its natural habitat, which is great for you, I’m sure.
Well, here is a meerkat doing data entry at Burning Man. That’s what it is.
Happy International Trans Day of Visibility! As always, I’m nonbinary. So, I have reason to believe, is this meerkat.
My poor, neglected blog!
I’ve been diverting 100% of my creative energy into the new comic book since October but it is still tantalizing in the Zeno’s paradox of incompletion. Very close. SURELY by next month. Unless I break both my hands or fall into a coma or die, it HAS to be done by next month. I just have to finish one interior page and the front cover, inside and outside and also start and finish the back cover, inside and out.
So close.
I took a little break over the last week or so for this small commission of a series of 6 stickers featuring a meerkat in a lab coat at Burning Man.
So that’s what this is: 1 of 6. I’ll try to post them every day until you have experienced the complete adventures of Census Meerkat. And pretty soon after that you can watch this space for Bonnie Jo Campbell Comics Volume 5.
The person who commission me to create this wild interior van wrap asked me to create some window clings, “so my van looks like not my parents’ van.” And thus the rainbow slothicorn rides again. I had a lot of fun with it. Obviously. It took me way longer than I like to admit; I could have fidgeted with the details for another month but given that it’s intended to appreciated while zipping past at 75 mph I guess it gets the job done.
I also designed some banners so they could cover up the vehicle’s logo with a fun rainbow sign sharing the vehicle’s name.
The vehicle is named “The Prideful Sloth.”
For this job, I gave up on using the Lenovo touchscreen to draw directly and went back to the Wacom tablet. It just works better for my purposes. It’s more comfortable to use. I drew a bunch of things without it in the last year and the convenience of not having a second device never outweighed the functionality of the Wacom for my purposes.
Here’s a delightful little commission I did for the writer Heidi Bell, for the cover of her collection, Signs of the Imminent Apocalypse and Other Stories, forthcoming from Cornerstone Press, October 2024.
The way it was explained to me, one of the stories features a critter that Bell refers to as a gopher, and thus the designer chose a gopher as one of the images for the cover. But as it turns out, it’s not a gopher. Bell sent me a picture of the animal to which she was referring and I ran it through Google image search, and learned about 13-lined ground squirrels, which, in some parts of the US, are colloquially/regionally/demotically called gophers.
Perhaps coincidentally, the gopher picture chosen by the designer was drawn in a style very similar to work I’ve done in the past. After looking at the original gopher drawing and 50 photos of 13-lined ground squirrels, the work began.
On my first attempt I made his tail WAY TOO FLUFFY, so I had to erase it and start again, but otherwise it went smoothly. I am still getting used to my new computer, which has some odd glitches that I am working around for now because I have no idea how to address them (if I set the stylus down in the upper left quadrant of the screen, it makes random dots in other parts of the screen, but I can’t draw, although if a line starts in another part of the screen and continues into the upper left quadrant it works fine). I was so used to the old Wacom that drawing directly on the screen still feels weird, but I’m getting acclimated.
Also, the stylus that came with this computer apparently runs on batteries? Which died an hour after I started using it? And rather than live at the mercy of technology that could betray me at any vulnerable moment in that manner, I decided to work with a capacitive stylus. And rather than actually go out and buy a capacitive stylus, I have just been using some random pen with a little rubber nub at the end that doubles as a capacitive stylus. I got it for free at some festival over a decade ago. It has an advertisement for a private k–12 school on the side. It’s an extremely inelegant solution, but it works. It works much better than when I had to draw 3 mosquitoes with my finger on a touchpad last year.
I think it’s the exact sort of complication that helps you bloom in adversity.
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