Out of Order

I’ve been pretty good with this book so far, you know. I started on page one, went on to page two, proceeded to page 3, etcetera etcetera.

I never do this. If you were to somehow flip through my sketchbooks, you’d find that I always start drawing somewhere around, oh page seven, then I skip around some, then I draw a lot, I mean a LOT, of pictures of Batman. Which is why I don’t like it when people flip through my sketchbooks.

But like I said, with this book I’ve been very disciplined -- until this week, when I skipped ahead a couple of

pages. It’s not a great big discontinuity, but I’ve always carefully followed my script, which has made a point of interspersing story with pure gag, like the page above.

There’s not a great big reason for the jump. What happened is that I penciled a couple of pages in order to speed up my work, and then I decided to ink this one first, because I had a brand new bottle of ink and it looked like so much fun to do.

And I had this great dog to draw with it! For everybody who has sent it dog pictures so far, I want to explain that the way I pick which one to use is totally arbitrary. I look for a dog who looks like his or her image would complement the story. And this week I had this wonderful image of a moodily lit daschund! If you think about it, the number of people who have daschunds intersected with the number of people that think that taking moodily lit pictures of them would be a good idea intersected with the number of people who have sent me photos is a really, really small number, and also a very strange Venn diagram. So I offer especial thanks to Laura Marmo and her lovely dog Tippy.

Next week, I’ll backtrack a little to go back to the story, give some news about the gallery show, and avoid talking about Batman. In the meantime, keep sending in dog photos (thanks to all of those I got this week!!), write me emails, make some comments on the blog, read the story so far or check out seltzerstudio.com. By the way, to see the Studio's portfolio in the same great format as Part-Time Dog, just click here.