Tonight David Lasky and I are doing a comics reading to celebrate the release of Best American Comics 2011 at Gainsbourg in Seattle. Here's a link to the Slog post.

I'll be reading from both Flesh and Bone and Too Dark to See. I edited all the images for my presentation on the train, listening to Sade. There will also be absinthe cocktails and French music. Yes, this is completely real, we live inside a dream.

Rest? What is rest? Sorrow has returned.
Alas for the Danes! Aeschere is dead.
He was Yrmenlaf's elder brother
and a soul-mate to me, a true mentor,
my right-hand man when the ranks clashed
and our boar-crests had to take a battering
in the line of action. Aeschere was everything
the world admires in a wise man and a friend.

Dylan Williams, the mastermind behind Sparkplug Comic Books (which published my book Flesh and Bone) is seriously ill and facing some gruesome medical bills. If you were thinking of ordering some haunting and artsy indie comics, now is a good time to support Sparkplug.

Here I am grimly tabling at Stumptown last month, as photographed by Glenn Peters.

A tragic thing happened to my computer (I spilled some hot tea on it while reading Twilight fanfic, alright) resulting in some unfortunate silence in my corners of the internet over the course of a very exciting fortnight. I will now catch you up with an extraordinarily excitement-dense blog entry.

The first ten pages of Flesh and Bone are going to appear in Best American Comics 2011, guest edited by Alison Bechdel and to be released on October 4 (Saint Francis's feast day, which I like to spend watching Brother Sun, Sister Moon and opening bibles at random for advice) of this year. What! Excitement.

Wallid H. Felding of Underground Brilliance posted a nice little review of Ariadne auf Naxos. He even explained how to pronounce my name.

J. Caleb Mozzocco reviewed Too Dark to See for the Newsarama blog, and Justin Giampaoli reviewed it on 13 Minutes. Both of these reviews are beautiful and thrilling and you should check them out.

I was also interviewed by J. T. Dockery for the Victorian Squares blog. We talked about some of the cultural touchstones that influenced Flesh and Bone, and I cleared up some stuff about the story that was confusing him.

Finally, Too Dark to See has been distributed to my distributors, and you can buy it from them as well as from me. Visit Global Hobo, Miss Valerie Park, and Sparkplug Comic Books for online retail comix thrills.

Too Dark to See is officially released and if you bought it from me online you should get it within a few days. If you didn't, um, the Etsy listing is here, or you can get it at Floating World or Pony Club.

The library reading last week was a success, and was recorded and made available as a podcast. We read from Too Dark to See and Ariadne auf Naxos. Jesse performed such a perfect Graham Faulkner impression that I nearly died on the spot, and I later learned that his excellent Wolverine voice was actually in imitation of the inimitable T. Edward Bak. According to eyewitnesses I was also very funny and said many witty things.

Also the Stumptown Comics Fest happened. Now that it's over I barely know what to do with myself.

"Here in Sleaze City" is my guest Slow Wave comic, which I wrote and drew and Jesse colored. A few minutes after sending this home I got an email which inquired, for coloring purposes, what was the topping on the turnip fries, and this was a question to which I did not know the answer, friends. "I don't know, something disgusting," I promptly responded. "Turnip sauce. Sleazy grease." And then I chuckled to myself about the phrase "sleazy grease" for about ten minutes. That cowboy type talking to Leesa at the club is Father Vivian O'Blivion, obviously. Sleaze cracks me up.

My week so far has been occupied with the satchelful of minutia which needs to be completed in order for me to be totally fucking prepared for the Stumptown Comics Fest this weekend. For example, I drew some nice lettering for the cover of Too Dark to See (a mockup of the cover is visible on yonder preorder listing), I made fifty more copies of that book at the IPRC (twenty of which I valiantly collated by hand after forgetting to select the "collate" button), I drew a badly-needed label for my bookplate packaging (customers must be told how many plates are within and how to adhere them), I filled out some contracts, and as always there is still a lot more to do.

Finding The Conversation on Netflix Instant Watch totally made my day.

I finished Too Dark to See on Thursday and made copies of its guts at Fed Ex. You can preorder it from my Etsy store. I'm still working on the cover image, which, when completed, eagles from Forest Park will pluck from my inky fingers and deliver to Dueltone headquarters, whereupon it will be swiftly screen printed, and then my books will be done. Already the cold fingers of lethargy and self-doubt are creeping up my spine. They sense my work ethic slackening. They want to kill me.

Another thing I did this weekend is a guest strip for by buddy Jesse Reklaw of Slow Wave, and you can see it in six days.

Jesse will be reading my comics with me at the Multnomah County Library on April 14, for this event. He kindly offered to accompany our reading on the ukulele, but after reading a few pages of Too Dark to See he pronounced its ideal soundtrack "moody silence." I will also be speaking as part of a panel at this event, so you can anticipate my extemporaneous attempts at humor and completely off-base observations on history and culture to be received with more moody silence.

I'll be sharing a table at this year's Stumptown Comics Fest with François Vigneault. Come see us at table D-14 for copies of my new book, plus teeth and book plates and prints, and more moody silence. Just kidding. Conventions are where I'm a viking.

It's impossible to sustain enthusiasm for a creative project long enough to get the project done. If you want to finish anything you have to go through periods of not liking the project, or not giving a shit about the project, and your commitment to the work you do has to carry you through. A couple of days ago I came out on the other side of one of those periods of antipathy and now I'm completing several pages a day of Too Dark to See and, which is unlike me, I'm so thrilled about this fucking book I'm practically effervescing. Imagine me effervescing.

Today I spent a couple of hours behind the bar at Coffeehouse Northwest where my barista friends let me sketch their espresso machine and counter setup. This resulted in the following three pages of comix, which I like so much I decided to post them online so you can see what's been cramping my hand these days. One, two, three. Then I danced around to a bunch of my favorite songs. Then I drew some more.

Then I got on the god damned internet and read about sixty eight five hundred thousand things that made me feel like nothing I do is ever going to be good enough and I wanted to disappear. Sometimes the internet is completely useless for anything other than harshing mellows and killing boners. I don't even understand what makes my fingers so sticky on the keys.

Today I waded through pouring rain with two of my favorite dudes to drop off three Theodicy prints at the Pony Club Gallery. So if you're scared to shop on the internet (and who isn't?) you can now buy them in Standard Reality.

Last week I got this really sad email from my publisher, Tim, of Teenage Dinosaur. He said he wouldn't be able to publish Ariadne auf Naxos vol. 4 in time for this year's Stumptown Comics Fest. And, I mean, I didn't cry about it, but I was pretty bummed out for about half an hour.

And then I decided to take this opportunity to dedicate myself fully to a longer, more serious comic that I've been shoving to the back burner for about ten months. It's thirty pages long. It's about a man getting raped by a succubus. I bought cover stock for it and started inking it today. God help me, I'm going to finish this son of a bitch in the next month or bust.

Another thing that I did today is spend a few hours printing self-promotional postcards and new notecards for my Etsy store on Ogami Itto. The postcards are green with that broken Catherine Wheel drawing printed in dark brown. They came out awesome.

A lady named Lynette got this tattoo of my Saint Catherine drawing from Roger Valdes at Tattoos by Lou in North Miami, FL yesterday. Beautiful, right? When you guys get tattoos of my work I cannot describe how it makes me feel. Humbled. Amazed.

I'm suffering from my eighty five hundredth cold this winter, which is comeuppance for putting my kid in daycare, and that fever haze my brain is in is good, I think, for my work ethic. I stayed up late drawing a cover for Ariadne auf Naxos vol. 4 the other night and I've been cranking out the pages for that thing, some of which you can see on Facebook.

The other day an acquaintance of mine suggested that I should see the movie MacGruber because "it's so funny."

"I don't really like funny movies," I confessed.

"But this is really funny," she explained.

"Then I'll probably like it even less."

Undeterred, she began to describe her favorite scenes from the movie, one of which, I was appalled to learn, depicts a man having sex with the ghost of his dead wife, on her grave. My first reaction was: here I am, busting my ass to conjure up some edgy art for you all to enjoy, and damned if this fucking bullshit movie doesn't saunter up and jizz all over my totally earnest and touching graveyard ghost sex scene. I ask you. MacGruber. Wikipedia says this movie came out a month after Flesh and Bone was released. Maybe graveyard ghost sex was just in the air at that time.

In less bullshit areas of my life, there's a women-themed show next month at Guapo Comics and Coffee, entitled "Woman," featuring me and a bunch of other radical lady artists. I wanted to share with you the beautiful bio Sean Christensen wrote about me for his press release:

Julia Gfrorer is a comic book artist, printer & fine artist. She is the author and artist most famous for her short comic Flesh & Bone of sparkplug comics. Julia makes possibly the most intense, dark, erotic, romantic and brutal, modern comics in print, yet they have a visual quality that lends them to a time that could lay anywhere between the 1700's to the future.

Reading things like this makes me feel like I am winning at life, and that is a rare and precious feeling.

My beautiful friend Danielle just got this tattoo of a doodle she found in my sketchbook. She and I love to drink champagne together and wear these special flower crowns we made, and if people ask us why we're wearing them we say it's because it's Saint Margaret Day. So it is relevant to a post headed with a photo of her lovely ankle to mention that my Saint Margaret drawing is now a t-shirt.

This morning I found half a twenty dollar bill on the sidewalk.

An artist called Kyle Cross has been exhibiting my incubus drawing from "Beastmasters of the Universe" as his own. It was displayed at "Best of the Breasts" at Sacred Gallery in New York, where the curators somehow realized it was mine, removed the piece from the wall and from their site, and alerted me. (You can still see the thumbnail on my facebook page, though--apparently he Photoshopped it blue.) A friend of mine asked me if I was mad about this. I'm not--I think I'm kind of flattered, really--but if you buy any art from this sleaze or put his sleazy work in your shows you should probably double check its pedigree.

Emma Bolden's poems about witches are thrilling me to death today. Read "Hour Seventy Two: In Which the Witch Describeth Her God" here, "The Witch's Vision" and "The Witch's Apprenticeship" here, and "The Witch's Burning" here.

Other than this handful of morose comic strips, in the last month or so I haven't drawn a whole lot. Most of my energy has gone into reading (Beowulf, Twlight, Franny and Zooey, Metafilter) and making things. I ordered some plates from Boxcar Press and printed my bookplates on my favorite press, Ogami Itto, the antique floor model C&P at Bamboo Grove Salon. My friend Matt also silk screened some awesome posters from my Theodicy drawing last week. So my etsy store has about twice as many things in it now.

Here's a review of Flesh and Bone you may not have read. They compared me to Lenny Bruce, and suggested that the Baphomet blow job scene on the third page of the book might be a goatse.cx reference. Uh, it's not, there are no references to internet memes in Flesh and Bone, astonishingly.

Josh Blair of Candy or Medicine reviewed Stupid Tales of Wolverine. Thanks Josh! We did try to warn you.

Speaking of reviews, today in the comments of a Rage Against the Manchine post, I read this 1974 review by Angela Carter of Linda Lovelace's fictional autobiography, and it has provoked a great many thoughts in me.

In the service of the god, she has taken the repertoire of sexual display from the commerce and intimacy of the brothel and allowed her performance to be frozen upon celluloid, condemned to a sequence of endless repetitions. In doing so, she has removed any element of tactile immediacy from her exposition of the potentialities of the body and therefore completely defused the sexual menace implicit in her own person and her polymorphously perverse talents. And that menace is enormous. If she can engulf a foot, what else could she not engulf? The owner of the foot in his entirety? The world itself?

Because remember this essay I posted a couple of months ago about how horror stories sometimes feature monstrous symbolic vaginae that threaten to absorb the protagonists into an undifferentiated state of pre-birth or of death, the loss of physical boundaries, and also how fascinating the idea that videotaping sex removes from it the highly desirable quality of awe. I didn't say they were well-formed thoughts. Now I'm going to take a shower.

Two new reviews of Flesh and Bone, each with unique insight that was fun for me to read about. Justin Giampaoli at the Poopsheet Foundation talked a little bit about the use of language in the book, and Derik Badman for Mad Ink Beard wrote a pretty in-depth analysis of some of the formal elements of the artwork and how they shape the narrative. These are things I really don't expect people to consider when they read my stuff.

I was slightly surprised to discover my work at this show at Powell's City of Books this month. Here I am next to my dead deer drawing. See the slight surprise scrawled plainly across my sweet face. Immediately after this I drank a PBR at Floating World.



I did this drawing on Christmas day and I'd like to turn it into a t-shirt, or a print, but I'm taking my time choosing the colors. Pulling the trigger on these things is hard for me. Maybe you should just tell me what color your couch is.