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.

Return of the Return of the Not-Even-Remotely Daily Dog

So about a month ago, after a layoff for the holidays, I was raring to get back to regularly semi-regular postings. I was keen eyed, quick witted and sweet smelling. I was enthusiastic, energetic and copacetic. In short, I was the very model of a modern graphic novelist.

So what, you ask, happened? A waning of enthusiasm, a bolt of remorse, a dearth of dogs?

None of the above. Basically, I got sick. Not deathly ill, just sick enough that for about a week I couldn’t do much except the bare minimum of work and the absolute maximum of sleep. Yet somehow during that week, I acquired two new clients and a half dozen new projects. Since then, I’ve been working my larger-than-average tuchus (a word that Microsoft Word, in its Gentile heart, does not recognize) off trying to make enough time to get back to this soul–satisfying-but-as-of-yet-not-mortgage-paying project. But now I am back with the whole dog posting thing.

So why just a dog and no story in this email? Well, this week’s segment contains a mildly objectionable word that may offend SPAM filters for the faint of heart, so to read it, you’ll have to click on the link down below. (I don’t really want a big buildup here; the word in question is Occidental for “tuchus.”) But it is quite a dog, isn’t it? This week’s dog is the steadfast Sam the Man, sent in by Jerry and Lenore Katz.

More soon, promise. (Really!) In the meantime, keep sending in dog photos, 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.