Connective Tissue Thumbs

Some thumbnail sketches for the book (which hits the shelves on or about May 13th!

Updates Imminent!

With Connective Tissue hitting the shelves in a couple of weeks, I'll be uploading some of the prep work for it and some more images I cut from the final product. Please buy this book! It's really sweet.

Connective Tissue Video

Fantagraphics has been making these great little videos of paging through their books (all are on Flickr). I think they're a nifty way to get an idea of the book, especially if you're going to order online and not be able to see it in person at a store. Check it out (then order it!).



Video store clerk Darla Vogel is fed up — fed up with her job, fed up with her wake-and-bake roommate, fed up with everything. But when one of the customers at Kwok's Video offers her some of his meat-flavored candies, Darla takes a plunge down the rabbit hole into a surreal world of throbbing, veinous buildings, compulsory public nudity, weird creatures, and more. If William Burroughs, Lewis Carroll, H.P. Lovecraft, and Harvey Kurtzman ever collaborated, the result might resemble Bob Fingerman's bold confection of words and pictures — the copiously illustrated prose novel Connective Tissue.

"This is a genuinely monstrous book that made me laugh until something burst and now I think I might be dying. You really need to buy one of these." – Warren Ellis, author of Crooked Little Vein and Transmetropolitan

"Fingerman does it again! He disturbs, entertains, amuses and charms with his unholy Fingermanian mixture of perversion, humor, and pathos." – Jonathan Ames, author of The Alcoholic and Wake Up, Sir!

134-page duotone 7.25" x 8.25" hardcover
ISBN: 978-1-60699-143-5

In stock: April 2009
In stores: May 2009

Mysterioso

Color for a page of a project I just wrapped up. I think I'll leave it at that.

Not Everything Makes the Cut...

Self-rejected drawing of Byron (from From the Ashes).

BOOKPLATE FEVER

Yes, folks, there's not one, but two exclusive signed bookplates I've done for the upcoming (it's at the printer!) Connective Tissue. One is for the publisher, Fantagraphics Books, the other for retailer Panel To Panel. If you want one of these bookplates to come with the book, order the one you prefer from Fantagraphics or Panel To Panel directly.

FROM THE ASHES!

Though I still don't have an exact street date (May 2009 is as close as I can get for the time being), here is the cover for the first issue of my forthcoming series for IDW.


Also, check out the new dedicated From the Ashes blog!

Graphic NYC Takes on Yours Truly

Ace photographer Seth Kushner and journalist Chris Irving are posting sections of their work in progress, Graphic NYC, a book about the New York-based comics community. They just posted my profile. Take a gander. Here's Seth's portrait of me. I think it's pretty sweet.

Bugs & Daffy à la Bergman

A while back I did a two-page segment for the Looney Tunes comic that my friend Joey Cavalieri scripted. The sequence was a parody of Ingmar "Chuckles" Bergman's The Seventh Seal, starring Bugs as Death and Daffy as Antonius Block (AKA Max Von Whythelongface). I went to town and with filters made it look like aged film. It was fun. Here are a couple of panels which (as they all were) ran cropped and covered with dialogue balloons.

¡Salario Mínimo está aquí!

Got my copies of Salario Mínimo today from Dolmen Editorial and am very pleased to report it came out great. If you're in Spain be sure to pick up a copy.

Daily Crosshatch Interview

Brian Heater recently interviewed me on his very fine comics blog The Daily Crosshatch. I was a little less guarded than perhaps I should have been (it was more a conversation than the typical Q&A), so I think I come off a bit sourer than I feel these days, but read it and judge for yourselves. All three parts are now up.

Guy Smiley

Okay, not the Muppet. Just a picture of Yours Truly (for From the Ashes).

CONNECTIVE TISSUE FINAL COVER

So here's the final version of the cover of Connective Tissue, as put together by ace designer Jacob Covey.


Now available to order from Amazon with a sweet 32% discount! Let's make this one a hit.

Culled...

This week I've been going over the final guts of Connective Tissue with the designer (Jacob Covey) at Fantagraphics. He's doing a great job and the book's going to look terrific. Seeing all the art put into a layout with the text highlighted that a couple of the drawings were superfluous, so I cut them and did new ones for the book. I liked the drawings I cut, but they didn't make the grade. Anyway, waste not want not, here they are.

Byrons!

Here are some pages of me working out the character Byron, from the forthcoming From the Ashes.

Cerberus

Not much to say. Three-headed dog. Angry. 'Nuff said.

BIG ANNOUNCEMENT!

It's official: IDW Publishing will be releasing my satirical post-apocalyptic saga From the Ashes next spring. It will be a six-issue series and stars Michele (my wife) and I in the radioactive wastelands of New York City. I'm dubbing it a "speculative memoir" (can I trademark that?). Consider it the antidote to the seriousness of Cormac McCarthy's The Road (which I haven't read, but it's on my list; suffice it to say, though, I'm sure there's nary a chuckle to be found between its covers).

Some of the prep art can be found here, in older posts. But now, I'm so deliriously delighted to say, this dream project has found a home, thanks to my editor/friend Scott Dunbier and publisher Ted Adams. The first issue will hit the racks in May, so between Connective Tissue in April, and this, 2009 is shaping up to be the big comeback!

Here's a sample page from the first issue.

CONNECTIVE TISSUE cover art

Here's the cover art for Connective Tissue (out Spring '09).

My Goon Pages...

For those of you who didn't want to click over to Dark Horse's DHP MySpace to see my take on Eric Powell's The Goon, here are my two concluding pages of the serial that ran there. They make no sense without the preceding pages, so don't feel bad if you read them and go WTF? They wanted a riff on The Maltese Falcon for the punchline. This thing was done "Exquisite Corpse" style, so I was brought in to deliver the punch line. Several lines of dialogue are directly from The Maltese Falcon. Whee.

Dog

I’m in the final stages of completing Connective Tissue. I don’t want to ruin any of the story, so I won’t explain what the dog is eating here, but I wanted this cartoon pooch to be grotesque and somewhat monstrous (yet still somewhat “cute”). I started off drawing a more realistic dog to work out the anatomy, and then moved on to deforming him.

Normal pooch.

Monster pooch (version in book).

Rejected version. I like the face, but the body is bad, especially the forepaws. It looks like Clifford the Big Red Dog after huffing a snootful of speed.

Final version. (Thanks to my friend Mikey P. for sending me pix of his pit bull, Hiro.)