A cup of my java

Sketches, people

Dédicace

I will have a signing at Planète BD in Montréal August 11, 2PM. Their site is here: http://www.planetebd.ca

Montreal sketches

My rifle pony and me

Cover design

Coverdesign for Lost Cat, for the Fantagraphics catalog. If I get a better idea, I'll change it.

I can't stand the quiet!

Down by Law

What's this button for?

Happy birthday, Ernest Hemingway!

They were seated in the boat. Nick in the stern, his father rowing. The sun was coming up over the hills. A bass jumped, making a circle in the water. Nick trailed his hand in the water. It felt warm in the sharp chill of the morning.

    In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing; he felt quite sure that he would never die.


Indian Camp, 1924

Which film?

There's a film I remember seeing on tv as a kid. I don't remember the name or any of the actors. I only remember one scene. The main character is in a college cafeteria, having an argument with his girlfriend. Possibly she's breaking up with him. At the same time he's getting a glass of milk, I think, but the machine is malfunctioning and the milk keeps flowing. He has to keep finding cups and glasses to keep it from overflowing. Anybody knows which film this is?

It's probably not a Kubrick film.

Pancakes

Breakfast can be tricky in a new country. Back in Norway I used to have sandwiches with slices of banana, blueberry jam and a dash of potato salad. When I moved to France I stopped eating that since I never found the right type of potato salad. I rather switched to cereal. In Montreal I found one that was pretty close to the one I'm used to, it's called Morning Crisp or Croque Matin. But really, if I'm in another country, shouldn't I use that opportunity to try something else?

So I bought bagels. But there's no toaster in the apartment, I will have to buy one. In the meantime I'm eating buttermilk pancakes with syrup. It only takes a minute to heat them in the microwave. Very good, and quite different from the flat French pancakes - crêpes. Oh, love that Hellboy strip, by the way.

Read Norman Mailer

or get a new tailor.

Café

I guess I should visit some museums while I'm here, but I don't care too much about that stuff. What I usually do when I'm in a new city is walking around blindly, discovering things by accident and getting lost. I find a café and sit by the window looking at people. The local coffee shop is a good one for that. There are some interesting faces to see walking by. And I've been here enough times that I've started recognizing some of them, like bearded Brad Pitt guy.

The book: To be honest, I've struggled a bit with the ending, the final scene. Usually I have the ending one third into the book. I had an idea for this book as well, but it didn't feel right. I came up with some other solutions that worked, but were still not quite there. It was a bit too serious, but finally I changed it a notch to the left, that made it both a bit touching, I hope, and ridiculous. Which is always a good mix, I feel. And the book is ending up with exactly 150 pages. Still some work left, though.

If you steal

... be Robin Hood.

"Ralph, meanwhile

, turned his drink around and around on the table, as if the other side of it was going to show him something different."

Denis Johnson, Resuscitation of A Hanged Man

Almost finished with this novel. It's strange, but very good. I have no idea where it's going. You can really drown in the writer's language. I also brought along with me his The Name of The World / Le Nom du Monde, which I thought I'd try to read in French, being in Canada and all.

Lloyd Cole

          I haven't seen Lloyd Cole live. Seeing him play in a small place like this would have been great. It would almost be as if he played in your living room.

Top five concerts

1. Chris Isaak. Sardine's, Oslo 87. The first concert I ever saw.
2. The Pogues. The If I Should Fall From Grace With God tour. Shane McGowan wasn't too drunk, he was standing upright during the whole show.
3. R.E.M. Green tour.
4. Iron & Wine. Copenhagen, around 7 or 8 years ago? I had no idea who they were at the time. They had a concert with Calexico. It was during a comic book festival, my Danish publisher brought me there. They did a great version of All Tomorrow's Parties.
5. Martin Stephenson & The Daintees. Also in Oslo, during my art school days, for their debut album Boat to Bolivia. Warmup artist was a then unknown Melissa Etheridge.

Wish I had seen:
1. David Sylvian. Preferrably around Secrets of The Beehive
2. Tom Waits. The Asylum years or after Swordfishtrombones, but really - anytime!
3. The Waterboys. Raggle Taggle Gypsy period.
4. Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. Early sixties. This would require a time machine.
5. Leonard Cohen. He had a concert in Nîmes in France a couple of years ago, and I didn't go - the idiot that I am.

Metro

The place I rent is in a calm working class area. I have to go a couple of blocks, about 5 minutes, to get up to the street where all the shops and restaurants are, including the local hip café, where I get my latté and bagel. I bought a hipster hat in the hope of blending in. I should probably get a tattoo as well.

On the subway an old woman was singing loudly in French. People applauded her as she got off. This never would have happened in Norway. Any person singing on a subway or a bus in Norway would be considered crazy. Or drunk. Or both. The other passengers would probably stare straight ahead and pretend she wasn't there, hoping someone would ask her to be quiet or to leave.

Okay, the book: I'm drawing the long conversation scene. Another sequence where I haven't done much work yet is from the end of the book where the detective goes to an island off Bretagne looking for someone. I've never been there myself, so I have to do my research by google. I've been to St Malo in Bretagne. I wanted the buildings in this sequence, where the detective finds the answers, to look different than the ones in the early part of the story.

Originals for sale

There's now a lot of new originals for sale at the Beguiling site - like this image, an unused panel from Werewolves of Montpellier. http://www.beguiling.com/artproductlist.asp?ID=39

Joan Baez - 1965

Dépanneur

That's what a cornershop is called around here. So that's already one thing that is different from France. I'm woken up around dawn by the chirping of birds. I've asked them to turn it down a notch, but noo. Outside my window there's a tree, sometimes with a squirrel in it. There was a cat watching the squirrel yesterday. It's a zen thing, looking at squirrels - I can do it for hours. Maybe not for the cat.

In crime films you often have people stuffing other people's heads into toilets, to get money or some sort of information - like a variation on breaking a leg or a finger, I suppose. In France that's not possible - the toilet bowl is too small. I've noticed here that it's big enough to do that. Not that I intend to. But it's good to know.

Jetlag

Change can be good, I think. I was sitting on the plane, bored. The film they showed was a Jack Black comedy. I started writing some ideas on a piece of paper. At the hotel I woke up at three in the morning. Since I couldn't fall asleep again I used the notes and wrote a 20 page dialogue scene between the detective in Lost Cat and a woman he meets. It's an important scene that I only had had a general idea about before. Now the words flowed.

The first thing I had seen stepping out of the metro station to find my hotel earlier that day was a Lost Cat / Chat Perdu note. Was it a sign? Maybe, except that the French title of the book probably will be Le Détective Triste, The Sad Detective.