Sundays Anthology

Next week starts the Sunday’s Sam n’ Dan Sunday Spectacular! Full color, full page strips! Every Sunday! All April! Yikes!

Morgan Pielli’s another one. From his and Colleen’s continued Herculean efforts, I’d guess they’d slept 2 hours between the two of them. Wednesday nights are deadline nights. An often heard question on Wednesday late afternoon and night is, “How’s Morgan doing?”

The reply is always different. “He still has to ink 16 pages.” “He’s almost done. He has to finish pencilling, and do all the inking, but he’s almost done.”

For his final project for James’s class he made a box set of his comics, with a printed hardcover box which would not have looked out of place in the Criterion Collection. He glued 30 of them together, in one night. While finishing his comic, while getting them all printed.

I’ll never forget walking into Imprint - the cheapest place for copies in the Upper Valley - with Penina to make copies of both our books, and seeing Morgan and his roommate, Chris giving instructions to the Imprint folks. They’d been sequestered into a side office, because in the main room Imprint were getting three new machines in, rearranging their office, and training two new people. They were also trying to find Morgan’s application, which he’d given them months ago.

Morgan’s website is:

Dancing Paper Clip

His comics are available on I Know Joe Kimpel.Com

The only set schedule most of us keep is, work on your comics when you’re not at work. Helping hyperactive kids make pottery all day must infuse Colleen Frakes with the energy of all the kids in the Upper Valley.

Colleen has more finished comics after two years here than — I don’t even care to guess — the rest of us combined probably, if you did the math. She had three issues of Tragic Relief (#2 seller at iknowjoekimpel.com) out in the same number of months. Thick comic filled books. She tells a damn good story in them, with drawings a lot more calculated and complicated than they look. Her effort for Sunday’s is in her preferred vein — mythological, folkloric stories about loss, life’s unfair bent, and larger than life characters.

Cowboy Orange 

Colleen’s comics on IKJK 

It’s happened three times. I’ve come into CCS’s lab, late at night, and seen originals that someone left laying around. I don’t always look at them, but these three times, something about their exacting smoothness was apparent from far away. Soon, I was just standing over, staring. The first time, Sean or Chuck came down, saw me staring, and said, “Oh, wow, who’s are those?”

“They must be Rich’s.”

Those were pages he was scanning for the Satchel Paige book. The second was some doodle of Santa Claus or something, for a school benefit, on a scrap of paper. Both — one finished art for Hyperion, one dashed off probably for some kid — had the same quality, the same perfect line — like Chris Ware reduced to get the bumps and shakes out. The third time was a print out of his Sunday’s page for us.

It’s about Norse Mythology. Striking, because it’s about the creation of the world, but told on one page, with drawings so tiny and delicate that the force they contain is off putting. The drawings remind of a story by Steven Millhauser about a miniaturist, in the court of the emperor, some dynasties ago, who keeps constructing smaller and smaller miniatures until even he, through the most powerful lenses, can’t see what he’s working on. Only, he perceives the lines he’s carving, and the pieces he’s gluing together, and he knows that it’s his best work yet.

Rich has published many of his books through Fantagraphics, and has done work for all the other top alternative comics publishers. His books include, Clover Honey, The Horror of Collier County, Perverso, 8 1/2 Ghosts, and the upcoming Miriam, through Alternative Comics. Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow, the book he just completed with James Sturm, will be out through Hyperion in December. You can find most of his books over at I Know Joe Kimpel and, of course, Amazon.com.