My world got smaller when artist and art teacher Gary Faigin died this past September. Gary was not just a colleague that I knew for over 40 years, but he was also a personal friend. He and his wife Pamela knew me and Eve in New York, and we kept in touch after Gary and Pam moved to Seattle and Eve and I moved to Portland.
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Attentive Patreon supporters have been seeing occasional previews from my upcoming Vortex graphic novel, which I’m more than half done with.
The story in a nutshell: It’s summer 1970 and Governor Tom McCall has a problem. The American Legion is planning to hold its convention in Portland, with the theme Victory in Vietnam, and their planned speaker is President Nixon. Antiwar activists plan a protest in the streets, and more than 50,000 are expected to descend on the city, threatening a repeat of the violence at Chicago or Kent State. A group of hippie entrepreneurs offer McCall a way out: sponsor a rock festival at a park outside Portland during the convention to siphon off longhairs who might otherwise come to protest. McCall agrees, and Vortex I: A Biodegradable Festival Of Life is the result. With no budget to book name acts, the festival books a motley collection of local bands to entertain the happily stoned crowd. Good vibes prevail because McCall has instructed law enforcement to turn a blind eye to open drug use and public nudity, and rumor has it that local sheriffs are giving away the contents of their drug lockers to keep the crowd away from the convention. The feared confrontation fizzles out, McCall is re-elected in a landslide that November, and that’s the reason you don’t read about the Portland Riots of 1970 in the history books.
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Mark your calendar! I’m having an exhibit of early posters and comics pages, mostly vintage prints but some originals, drawn in the 1970s and 1980s in Portland, when I was still signing my work David Celsi. Many of these have been posted on Patreon over the years, but this will be a golden opportunity to see them In Real Life, and possibly take one home!
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I have been dropping hints on social media for over a year on this, but now it’s official: my next comics project is going to be a graphic novel about Vortex I, the 1970 rock festival sponsored by the State of Oregon. I had been doing preliminary work on the project- scripting, character designs, sample pages- but what has tipped this over from hobby to vocation is an early birthday gift from Uncle Sam, in the form of a $4000 grant from the Regional Arts & Culture Council. Now I HAVE to draw the thing or I’ll be cheating the taxpayers!
My very talented nephew Ivan Pyzow recently recorded and released a lovely new song which includes cover art by me. I’ll let Ivan tell it:
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Copied from Steve Doughton’s Instagram:
“ILY2 is pleased to present a screening of Earthlings, a film by Portland-based writer and director, Steven Doughton on November 6 at 7:15pm at Cinema 21. The screening will be followed by a live conversation between Doughton, writer Jonathan Raymond, Earthlings actor and Executive Producer Luis Chávez, Brooklyn-based film writer Nolan Kelly and artist Patricia Vázquez Gómez.
Based on the short story “The Suckling Pig” by Portland writer Jonathan Raymond, Earthlings follows a small group of strangers from vastly different cultural backgrounds who share a singular meal and evening together. Actor Luis Chávez and director Todd Haynes serve as Executive Producers for the film.
On Earthlings, Doughton writes “I’ve always been drawn to dialogue-rich movies, in which dramatic shifts in plot or character can hinge on a single thread of conversation. So when I read Jon Raymond’s story ‘The Suckling Pig,’ its cinematic possibilities struck me immediately. In it, a group of people with almost nothing in common spend an intimate evening together which they will never forget. I want to place the audience directly within the disquieting situation of a dinner party among strangers, thereby allowing them to experience the struggles of the characters as they try to relate to one another across a well-appointed table and a vast sea of cultural and political differences. The audience should discover (as the characters themselves do) that these five people have secrets and depths they rarely share with anyone.”
Tickets for Earthlings are NOW ON SALE at Cinema21.com. Tickets are $15 and all proceeds from ticket sales go to the Oregon Worker Relief Fund
Poster by David Chelsea”
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The digital version has been out for a while, but it never seems real for me until I get my three contributor’s copies of the American Bystander’s latest issue in the mail. This one has a 70s theme, and contains a comic based on my bicentennial dream diary.
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I completed the final panel of the final page of my most recent 24 Hour Comic at ten in the morning of Sunday, October 2nd, only four hours behind schedule (according to rules laid down by 24 Hour Comic inventor Scott McCloud, this is an acceptable variant- some projects just take longer, and this one involved a prodigious amount of shading). My final count was 23 pages and a cover image- which I consider a page on its own, but your mileage may vary. As promised, the story is titled Nudity I Have Witnessed, and it is a memoir of my years drawing the figure at Hipbone Studio and elsewhere.
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My first call for 24 Hour Comic sponsors a week ago attracted no response, so I have crafted this shorter one tailored for Hipbone Studio regulars:
This blog has been mostly silent for the past little while, but I decided to post a solicitation for my upcoming 24 hour comic, which I intend to draw on the first Saturday in October. You can read all about it below:
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