For the past few years, I’ve been drawing our family’s Christmas cards. It’s been a fun way to contribute to the holiday. Last year’s card was a riff on A Charlie Brown Christmas and we did A Christmas Story in 2011. This year, we went for a somewhat more traditional approach.
I hired Madeleine Witt to color this year’s comic and man, she outdid herself. You should all definitely go over and check out her blog; it’s as awesome as this GIF she made of the drawing!
Every year, as is my tradition, I draw a Halloween themed picture of my family to use as my catch-all picture on social networking sites. This year, I had a go at The Addams Family. I’ve become quite a fan of Charles Addams’ macabre one-panel contributions to The New Yorker but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that my first exposure to the Addams’ clan was the big-budget early 1990’s film staring Raul Julia and Angelica Huston.
I have a second version of this drawing I colored based on the Hanna Barbara cartoon which had a more vibrant palate than the black and white strips. I’ve got that one behind the cut but I much prefer my black and white pass at this sketch.
Last year, we had a lot of fun making up our own Christmas cards for the family based on the movie A Christmas Story. We decided to do the same thing this year, but with different yuletide inspiration. I had “After Schulz” written at the bottom of the drawing but it was scissored off during the edit process. I hope the inspiration is plain to see.
I drew this a couple of years ago, when Elliot was a toddler.
For the past few years, I’ve taken some time out of my comic schedule to celebrate Halloween by drawing a picture of Ellen and I with the kids in some kind of Halloween motif. I also color the thing, something that’s not entirely my forte, but I give it a shot.
Two years ago, I drew us as Ghostbusters. Last year, I went the Universal movie monster route. This year, I decided to stick with the monsters but go a little modern.
Ellen is Freddy Krueger, I’m Jason Voorhees, Elliot is Chuckie from Child’s Play, and Henry is Jigsaw from the Saw series of films.
There are things I really like about this drawing, I guess. Ellen’s in a fun, dynamic pose. I always feel like she gets the short end of the stick in these holiday drawings, so that’s a nice thing. Beyond that however… I don’t know. I’m not as happy with this years’ drawing as I have been for past Halloweens. I guess the “monsters” the kids are just don’t pop the same way they have in the last two drawings.
Of course, I’m over thinking this a whole lot. I’m aware.
(I colored this using a whole bunch of Prismacolor markers I’m trying out. It looks much better in my sketchbook than it does scanned!)
As we ramp up to the end of the year, I start thinking about what I’m going to do with myself and this blog over the summer. The answer in years’ past has been to turn an eye toward my home life and do a couple of strips featuring Ellen and the boys. In particular, I’d like to do a whole bunch of comics featuring Henry, who has definitely received the short end of the stick on being written and drawn about. Henry’s birth coincided with the second year of my teaching comics and I’ve done very little to detail his personality and character; he’s certainly gotten less attention than his brother… as evidenced in the comic above.
Here’s the wildly ambitious plan right now- I’d like to do a solid month of comics about my homelife. That is, 31 days including weekends. I have no idea if I’m going to be capable or invested enough to get to that point but it seems like a solid experiment to me. It’s a schedule I used to keep pretty regularly, in the days before spousal and parental responsibility.
Got a cool delivery in the mail yesterday afternoon:
A whole bunch of awesome art supplies for a comic project I’m gearing up for with my current and former students! I wanted to test the pens and markers, so I doodled this:
I don’t normally work with markers and I don’t really planning on doing so again, but I like they way they came out! I’m sure my students’ll dig them.
…………………….
So hey, it’s my birthday today. I’m 31.
If you want to do something nice for my birthday, do what Garry Trudeau says: Kick a couple of bucks my classroom’s way. In fact… this comic book project is less than $300 dollars away from being funded. Don’t forget to use the checkout code “Zonker” and… jeez, I’d only need $150 dollars pledged! I have at least two millionaires who are regular readers, right?
Also, check out this interesting result of the above comic strip.
A bunch of stuff piled on one page.
Have you ever seen the original Fleischer Brothers Superman cartoons? I picked up a set of them on DVD for Christmas and the boys have been obsessed. They’re quite beautifully produced and I can see why they remain so popular (although their existing in the public domain doesn’t hurt anything). I love that squinty-eyed, he-man version of the character.
A doodle of the Eleventh Doctor… I colored a sketch of the Tenth Doctor sometime last year, so I thought I’d follow suit here.
Here’s this year’s Pearce family holiday drawing; you may like to click here and see the drawings from years’ past. This year, I’m paying homage to the 1984 classic A Christmas Story. The fun thing about this sketch is that Ellen and I turned it into our Christmas card this year!
We quibbled over the text inside the card. I wanted to use the original tag line from the movie and have it read, “Hope you have an Original, Traditional, One-Hundred-Percent, Red-Blooded, Two-Fisted, All-American Christmas!”
Ellen balked at that… and she was probably right to. Not many Christmas cards use the words “blood” and “fist” in any form, and the tagline for the movie isn’t universally known. It was probably too “inside baseball” for our purposes. Instead we went with a more friendly “Hope your Christmas Story this year is terrific!”
If you’re on the list, you’ll be getting one of these in the next few weeks!
Ellen and I took Elliot to the gastroenterologist a few weeks ago. He’s been having some tummy troubles and we wanted to make sure everything was OK. We’re in early days, but they ran a few routine tests including drawing some blood. Elliot was not pleased.
I don’t know why I colored this doodle, but I did so here it is.
Teachable Moments 
