I’ve been continuing to post two pages a week from my revamped version of WELCOME TO THE ZONE on Patreon. I’m now up to part 15, including this particularly grisly death scene:
David Chelsea is reading: Winter: Five Windows on the Season (CBC Massey Lecture)
by Adam Gopnik
Continue reading Secret Stash: The Real Zoners
Not necessarily the best, but certainly the biggest. This sketchbook was given to me by Gloria Moyer, the art director at Longman Publishing. I had been illustrating one of their English As A Second Language textbooks, and Gloria had noticed that I carried a sketchbook with me everywhere. She presented me with one of Longman’s dummy dictionaries, a bound book with blank pages made to give them an idea what the real dictionary would eventually look like. I have never counted the pages, but they must number in the thousands. To give you some idea of its dimensions, I would ordinarily go through three or four sketchbooks a year in those days. This book I carried around for about five years, 1984- 1988. Having so many pages kind of unleashed the floodgates for me,and the book contains a wide variety of drawings.Eventually I constructed this jacket from cardboard and masking tape to protect the covers:
David Chelsea is listening to:
Little French Songs
by Carla Bruni
Continue reading Best Sketchbook Ever
For all of you who don’t happen to be regular readers of Back Issue magazine, there is an interview with me in the current issue by Los Angeles comics writer Michael Aushenker. Thanks to the glacial pace of print the piece is a bit of a time capsule, a transcript of a wide-ranging and somewhat incoherent phone conversation we had two years ago, months before my new book, Extreme Perspective! was even proposed (and at one point I tell Michael that I don’t think I’ll be doing any large comics projects anytime soon. Ha!).
Continue reading New? Interview.
Among my works, Welcome To The Zone is the redheaded stepchild, a book even people who say they are big fans haven’t read. Cursed in its timing, the book was acquired by Kitchen Sink right around the time it was taking over the list of a far larger comics publisher that was going out of business, and it got somewhat lost in the shuffle editorially as a result. By the time it appeared in 1995, Kitchen Sink itself was on its last legs, I was too preoccupied by my move from New York to Portland to do much in the way of promotion, and the book was quickly remaindered.
Continue reading The Zone