First off, I’m assuming you all went out and bought your copy of “Dork” #11? Another frantic and funny comic by one of my favourite cartoonists, Evan Dorkin, with dozens of gag strips and full of satisfyingly twisted humour… it‘s not easy being funny, ya know. If you can’t find it at your local comic store bitch at the store owner!

Also new is “American Splendour #3” written by Harvey Pekar and illustrated by a group of talented cartoonists including English “Bonzo cartoonist” Hunt Emerson and another of my favourites Rick Geary! There’s a wonderful story on the medicinal use of cats.

I’ve been getting a real kick out of the comic book series “Action Philosophers”(#7, the Ancient Greek philosophers), which takes a light hearted, humorous approach to teaching complex ideas and esoteric details which it does rather well… although even in comic form French philosophy makes no sense…

It’s been over week we’ve been under a boil water order and one of the three reservoirs that serves the lower mainland has been shut down entirely. There was an E-coli scare but everyone thinks it’s a false positive. We’re adjusting to it now, I don’t think I drank this much water before the tap water became tainted. Still raining of course, although next week it’s supposed to clear up, become sunny and really cold! That means the possibility of snow! That is freakish for Vancouver, we’re not like the rest of Canada! We can go a whole winter without snow. If it does snow it snows in January, not November! I asked my mom for new boots this Christmas, the ones I have are coming apart.

Today we were supposed to interviewing Gilbert Hernandez, Beto, on the radio show but we totally forgot its American Thanksgiving! Oops… Robin went to the station to play a “cartoonists in music” show while I begged off… I wasn’t feeling up to it really, it was cold and wet. It was one of those days you just want to sleep all day. However, I was pumped on doing the Beto interview, I just finished reading (and re-reading) a whole pile of his books and it struck me that the Hernandez’s have been around so long (indeed, I consider Love and Rockets to be the first alternative comic series) and so consistently good that we forget how good they are. Next week all going well we interview Ivan Brunetti!

Work wise I’ve been “clearing the decks’, stuff that needed doing so I could move on to other things. I finished the Zeppelin/armoured car, painted those Samurai for Dave (he picked them up last night, now he’ll send them to England to hopefully be photographed and included in a rulebook and I finished painting a regiment of 15mm Napoleonic Hungarian infantry I owed Brian. I’ve been working on the pencils for a secret project and getting back to the graphic novel, adding pages… some of the anecdotes I was trying to tell in one page were just too constrictive, needed a little more room to breathe. Tonight I spent most of the evening cleaning up, tidying around the studio, trying to get ri of the clutter. You know, “clearing the decks”.

Friday night is my war game club’s monthly meeting, Saturday openings at the JEM Gallery (The Jupiter Project) and The Parking Lot (Owen Plummer) plus all weekend long is the East Side Culture Crawl when dozens of artist work spaces are opened to the public. I just hope I don’t have to tramp through the snow and sleet!