Kinda depressed this weekend, no reason i should be.
I took a bunch of pics of my studio to post, then realized it was stupid to post dorky pics of weird toys/crap i made/bought-at-thrifts made/stole/melted/drilled/beat-with-a-hammer mutilated or otherwise... defaced.
These are three imaginary friends of Nola, which is a book that's not out yet. Artists Vassilis Gogtzilas is drawing it! More on these three later...
Figure you'd much rather see a piece or ART, rather than plastic or clay goofball stuff?
(Lower left is Leigh Dragoon's drawing of Nola, from an upcoming Oni book we're doing!)
Then, I decided to draw little Trout and Bimbo FINGER PUPPETS, so people could print them out, and tape them to their fingers...
...before i realized how finger puppets are actually an inspiration about how inventively i was pissing away one's Sunday.
Then i thought, hell, maybe Sundays ARE sometimes supposed to an incredibly astounding waste of time.
I can feel the holidays are really over now, which is good and bad. Nothing like fresh steamy personal compost of CHANGE to wake yourself up, eh?
The Maxx DVD is FINALLY out. MTV stepped up for a commentary with me and the folks from Rough Draft. Also a frighteningly rotund looking short behind the scenes film of ME talking about the Maxx, drawing a budget-looking Maxx with Kleenex and markers. I was up all night so i was pretty fried by the time i flew in to Burbank, did the commentary, drew a Maxx and stumbled back onto a plane.
Got to see my old Maxx alumni friend Seth Kearsley, which was cool.
I wish my other Maxx co-hort James Dean could've got on the DVD too. Darn it!
So, since i owe a lot to the moldy old purple guy, i dug out a cover from the Maxx trade i did; it looks much different in B&W... before it was colored. So it's KINDA new ... if you don't squint.
I will always have tremendously mixed feelings about this Maxx: so much fun up front, so many lawsuits-clusterfucks-nightmarish-bottom-falling-out crap in the end, like so many books from the post-crash Image days.
But i wanna try to remember what i hope WILL last—which is hopefully, the books themselves. The cartoon was cool, but the books finished what the animated show couldn't afford too. Drawing the Maxx, once upon a time... WAS fun. silly. invigorating. juvenile. experimental.
It also inspired a generation of NEW artists like Vassilis Gogtzilas, Leigh Dragoon, Tim Kelly, Josh Halger and many more. All these artists thought "Crap. they let a goober like THAT on TV??? Heck, maybe there's room for someone like me, then!" Yeah, they'd have made it in anyhoo... but it's cool to think every weird artist who sneaks under the radar helps the Alex Pardees create their own artistic home.
Despite whatever personal baggage i carry, or create, i just wanna say, in my more lucid/honest moments, i can never, EVER be ashamed of the Maxx... if i am only remembered for that one work alone, fucking-a. Cool. I'll take it.
I'll see what else no one's seen that i can dig out that might be cool. Here's one of the last panels of the Maxx book, one of my favorites.
Almost everyone's in there, too. Kinda 'glad to be unhappy' isn't it? In the meantime, back to Trout-crap and Bat-crap. Life goes on... thankfully.
