Thoughts after travels

Two months and still figuring out my schedule!

Super important ! If you are a registered Democrat in NYC, please vote for Zohran! Don’t even think about ranking Cuomo. With all the hell going on nationally let’s bring in some freshness to our city and be rid of the spoiled rotten dirty old fruit!

Cuomo is backed by some of the same billionaires as Trump. That should tell you all you need to know.

Cover for Toxic Avenger #3. After Ahoy posted this a wonderful fellow contacted me to buy it! Gouache on paper. No Photo Shop. This is the raw scan. The first time I painted all the Toxic Avengers together.

We got a new pope. I made a new painting, I just made two new espressos. It's a new day. Every day is a new day. Stepping back by a solar system, what is a day? What is “new”. I'm pretty happy with the new painting. A cover for a future issue of Toxic Avenger. I'm indifferent to a new Pope. The appearance of a new Pope probably affects just a few more people's lives than my cover will. I still like my cover better than the Pope.

A beautiful 25 minute walk from our place in Athens and we’re at the Parthenon! This is actually next to the Parthenon. We haven’t had the patience to wait in line and actually go to it yet. This area is a small parcel of quiet right next to tourist hell. Tons of gift shops with clever T-shirts that say “I ❤️ Athens” and other inspirational quotes.

I've been processing my return from Greece. I came home to a ton of work. Every time I go to Greece there are things to fix, unfinished business. The never ending battle with the pigeons which I think we're finally winning. Upon returning to Brooklyn we rearranged furniture, and moved equipment, including 3 air conditioners from storage for the summer. I'm very grateful for Molly's assistant! I usually have to navigate these things by myself and having an extra set of hands really helped.

Cover for Toxic Avenger #2 “Hardboiled”. Matt Bors the writer wrote 5 one-off issues to start the ongoing series to give me some time to work on the following 5 issues after. They all sound fantastic and I wish I had the time to do all of them! I am doing all the covers and the first 2 pages of each issue to set up the 5 issue story arc I’ll be illustrating. I painted this while in Athens!

I'm just getting back to the gym after not really working out for almost three weeks. It reminds me of how fragile we all are. In three weeks I can feel all the joints reminding me that they are creaky, and my energy levels need real food not just espresso. Three days after a light chest workout and my muscles are still under protest every time they are asked to do their job. My upper management has been more sleepy and wanting to read news and doom scroll more than figure out what is on the schedule for the day. Not very productive. My first week back, I prepped for a small convention and sold some art. Then there was seeing all my friends and catching up on people's drama. Molly has had her usual fires. She deals with so much more crap than I do. But she has greater rewards for when she gets things right and fortunately she's pretty good at that.

Cover for Toxic Avenger #1 “Horror”. Gouache on paper. I started the interiors of this issue in Athens and finished it in Brooklyn.

One of the things I wasn't doing regularly was writing these little whatevers. Missives, notes, musings... I think “whatevers” works. Over the years I always had plans. I'd make lists, commit to this or that. Nothing ever goes according to plan on my end. I have even drawn out schematics to make shelving or desks, etc. and I still end up improvising. If it's more complicated than measure, mark it with a pencil, drill, screw, it goes sideways pretty fast. Nobody else knows my plans and they are probably trying to carry out their own which are probably going off track, so I'm often improvising and doing something other than what I planned most times. There was a sequence on the TV show “Malcolm in the Middle” I thought was a great observation about how the world works.

Basically starts with Hal, (Bryan Cranston) notices a lightbulb is burnt out in the kitchen and one thing leads to the next and it ends with him underneath his car in the garage to fix the engine. I don't want to spoil the short scene, but I immediately related to it. It's like that joke about, How do you make God laugh? Tell him your plans. Even when I don't plan anything for some reason I still feel completely blown around by chance.

I took so long in-between paragraphs that America is at war with Iran now. That kind of sounds like quite the procrastination doesn't it? “He Joe! How long have you been trying to clean out your basement? Oh I don't know, maybe since Vietnam?” Maybe that's a stretch but I'm leaving it in. I'm approaching the stress and anxiety I was experiencing during the first Trump administration. I had the worst insomnia the first go around. But since then, marijuana has been legalized and now I'm self medicating with it every night. I usually sleep the whole night through now! In Greece I don't know how to acquire pot or any other drug so I only had beer and whiskey occasionally, bars are everywhere. My insomnia returned within a week.

I will be appearing at Troma-Thon July 20^th. Mahoning Drive-in theater in Pennsylvania just west of Allentown. I don't know what to expect but I would love my friends to show up! They're giving me a table and I'll be selling Toxic Avenger books and signing stuff and probably drinking too much. My buddy Paul will be with me and we're staying at a hotel nearby. You can talk to Paul as well. He's human and funny and will probably be making friends with only the craziest people, he has a knack for finding them.