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His Holiness’ Coffee

I’ve been reading up some more on Caravaggio and his contemporaries.  Apparently, Pope Clement VII was a big fan of coffee, which the church saw as Satanic since it was drunk by the Muslims.  (Further medieval logic: Muslims don’t drink wine and therefore cannot partake of the Eucharist and thus are from Satan.)

Anyhoo, Clement the VII found it tasty and baptized coffee so it would be safe for Catholics to drink.  I have yet to find a worthy source for this little tidbit of fact about Pope Clement, so take it with a grain of salt.  It could turn out to be an internet hoax perpetuated by bloggers like me.

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My Life in Records Cover Page Outtake

From Outtakes

I’ve decided to post some of my thumbnail and rough drawings that I made while making My Life in Records #1. Since I’ve already established the non-canonical stories as “B-Sides”, I thought I’d play up the music lingo puns some more and call these drawings “Demos” and “Outtakes“.  

“Demos”, of course, are rougher versions of the final pages and “Outtakes” are sequences that didn’t make it into the final book.

So here we go!

The picture above was meant to be the title page.  I was in the habit of making little booklets out of scratch paper to make my thumbnails and roughs.  This was a habit that went by the wayside when i realized that I sometimes wanted to shuffle sections around or redo a page completely.  Of course this story had been drawn once already, so I had an idea of how many pages it would take and the sequence I had in mind.  You can see I scribbles notes about color hex codes, appointments and phone numbers (redacted, of course).

I originally wanted the reader to have that sense of expectancy I used to get when I first put the needle down on the record and you heard the initial vinyl crackle before the first track started.  For the final version I have opted for a more economic way of starting the book and this section is now, as they say, “on the cutting floor”.

You can see the “Album Version” of this page here and the book can be purchased here in the store.

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Year In Review

Over all, 2011 was a good year for me.  I got some graduate credit to hunker down and polish up some curriculum and make some corresponding podcasts.  In May, my wife and I celebrated six years of marital bliss and a few short months later we celebrated the first birthday of our twin daughters.

Probably the biggest news for me in 2011, was finishing my Masters in Art Education and having my thesis accepted for publication in a scholarly journal.  I was planning on writing my thesis on comic books in art education, and my adviser suggested that I make the thesis a comic book about comic books.  There were a few articles of this type that had been published in this manner, but no one had created an entire Masters Thesis as a comic book.

It was a good year for as far as putting out mini comics, too.  In April I put out Dodo Comics #1 which collected a lot of odds and ends I’d made for the last six years.  Next I worked all summer on a remastered and reworked version of My Life in Records #1 and also on the second issue of Dodo Comics.  On a whim a put together a little accordion book about an undersea adventure.  Justin over at the Poopsheet Foundation said, “Thomas indicated that this “accordion” folded gem is free with any order from him, and I’ll tell you it’s worth ordering something else just to get your hands on this.”

So four minis in a year.  Not bad for a guy with two kids wrapping up a degree!