The Virginia Quarterly Review has been publishing some installments of Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel in progress Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@?*! They are pretty great… I’m definitely looking forward to the book. You can read two of them online here and here.

Here’s an interactive feature on the New York Times that features audio clips from Chris Ware, Seth, Chester Brown, Art Spiegelman and Joe Sacco.

The ongoing Funny Pages feature in the New York Times this week features a strip by Seth.

Check out the cool cartoon Big Time Attic just made for FairVote Minnesota.

Here is the page on You Tube.

Here’s an interesting list of “The Top Ten Most Influential Flash Shorts,” which includes interviews with the creators of those shorts.

Here’s an excellent bunch of illustrated tips for drawing comic strips and pages from Disney artist Carson Van Osten:

http://sevencamels.blogspot.com/2006/09/comic-strip-artists-kit-redux.html

I mentioned on my blog that a few of us SF Cartoonists got together last Sunday for a farewell brunch to our friend Tanya who is going back to Edinburgh.

In her honor we did a series of pirate themed exquisite corpses.

For most of you who may be familiar with this exercise, our group is doing a fun twist on it. We fold the paper in thirds, but each artist only does a pencil sketch then passes it on. After the page is finished a fourth person then inks the whole piece to give it a coherent look and working magic on the sometimes weird results of the unfolded pages. I’ll also mention that we never have any rules about the top section being a head, the middle being a torso and so on. It just happens that that is what happened with this piece, which made it such a surprise when we openened it and saw how well it all worked. Here are some photos from Sunday:

The Amazing Screw-On Head pilot episode is now online, and it is fantastic:

http://www.scifi.com/amazingscrewonhead/

Don’t miss it!

The 700 Hoboes project previously mentioned on this blog a number of times has a lovely new home…

www.e-hobo.com

Over 400 hobo drawings have been submitted to the project at this point. You can still participate if you’re interested. The project has been mentioned a number of times on the popular blog boingboing.net, and is a good way to get your stuff seen by tons of people (I’m sure it will be mentioned again at the project’s completion).

I’ve just set it up so you can subscribe to feeds for two of the items you see on the right side of the blog (in addition to the main blog posts, like this one), the Upcoming Events list and the Calls For Submissions.

SDCC is only a week away. Time to print out your comics and update your portfolio. Because on July 19,2006 thousands of talented artist and writers, fan boys and girls, actors and directors, and all sorts of other sorts will converge in San Diego. Are you going? Why not let us know and we can add you to the

– Space Sheriff & Happy Space Boy (aka Justin Cermak) – no location given yet – Spacesheriff.com – MN Cell
– Beyond the Great Chimney (Atomic Bear Press/Brian Kolm) – CAM table – Atomicbearpress.com – SF Cell – E11
Big Time Attic (c/o of Zander Cannon) – Minneapolis Cell
– you??
– your friend??

If you are Cartoonist Conspiracy member going to SDCC06 and want to let others know, all over the world, why not post here. Just add a new comment with: your name(s), imprint, book title(s), location at the con, and which cell your part of. We will gradually move the info above and delete the comment.

This is a great opportunity to bring together members from all over the US into one (very very hot) location.