Levon In San Francisco

Pictured above: Run DMC

This weekend I'm heading to San Francisco!

Saturday and Sunday I'll be at the Alternative Press Expo (APE). I will be helping out at Tom Neely's table on the main floor right next to Sparkplug Comic Books and Pigeon Press. I'll be selling mini comic editions of Danger Country. Tom will be debuting a brand new mini-comic called Doppelgänger. We will have some Henry & Glenn "Special Package" collector's items for sale. We will also have Bound & Gagged and many other books and prints available for sale. Maybe even some original art.

Also debuting at the show is the new anthology Studygroup 12 #4. I have 2 pages of art in this amazing book published by Zack Soto and Floating World Comics.

Please come out and say "HI" an see all the wonderful comics from all the participating artists and publishers.

Fork Frenzy Podcast Launches!

I'm happy to announce the debut of my very own podcast, Fork Frenzy. In it I interview a bunch of artists and cartoonists that I know and like. This is co0nnected to the online store that I launched last week. the store will shortly contain books, prints, and art featured on the blog and podcast.

My first interview is with the cartoonist David King, and he talks about how he got started making comics in his signature introspective way and relationships between his life and his work. He reads us a Ralph Waldo Emerson poem and talks about Crime World and his latest book, Lemon Styles.

It's been a strange and new undertaking. I've never done a podcast before and I had a lot to learn. But this was something that I had wanted to do for a long time, just because I know so many amazing artists, and wanted to get to know some more but had no excuse to meet them.

I hope you enjoy it!

Go See: Forkfrenzy.com

Tom Devlin/Highwater Books

The fantastic and objective Peggy Burns posted an eloquent tribute to Tom Devlin in light of the Highwater tribute art show that just opened in Boston. I think this bears mentioning on this blog, because Highwater Books was a powerful force in my development as not only a cartoonist but also as an artist. In my senior year of college, I interned at the west coast branch of Highwater (also known as Jordan Crane's living room). Up until then, my education pushed a strong message of capitalism in every facet of art-making. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but having failed in that aspect, I might have long ago abandoned the notion of making my living from my art. Highwater showed me that money is the means, not the ends, of being creative, and lack of money should never hamper those efforts. My main contribution to the company was primarily production work. I scanned Marc Bell's seminal work, Shrimpy and Paul and Friends, Brian Ralph's Climbing Out, and James Kochalka's Fantastic Butterflies. Jordan Crane paid me in burritos from El Pollo Loco and showed me his mystical secrets of silkscreening. Tom Always made me feel like I was single handedly making all of those books possible, and he is still gracious and kind to me to this day, even though my beard is bigger than his. That internship still holds the record as the best job I've ever had.

Check out the art show if you're in Boston, and read the story on the Drawn and Quarterly blog.

Announcing the Fork Frenzy Shop

For those of you who are interested in buying some of my art work, I've put a bunch of it up on my new online store, ForkFrenzy.com. Fork Frenzy will host other content as well, soon, and hopefully grow into a colossal force in pushing culture and literacy to the masses. That's the goal, any way.

But getting back to selling stuff, all of the artwork is priced extremely low, and these deals will not last very long. Keep checking back though, because I'll be adding more depressingly cheap drawings and paintings over the next couple of weeks. I've also got a couple of books and prints there, too.