More pics and sketches!

Hello and hola to everyone! More pics and sketches from yesterday!!
The top photo has always been a weird photo to look at. It's me and my lil' brother, Joe in 1967. It's a cute photo and all, but why in the hell am I wearing a DODGER'S shirt?? I've been a Giants fan my entire life and somehow I got photographed wearing the logo of my most hated enemy!!

The middle photo is my dad, along with my brother Jim (to the left), sister Sue (middle) and Joe (front). I look like the tiny host of Match Game '68. I mean, look at that JACKET!! One of my favorite photos.

Below are my mom and dad in a photo booth. As it says there, my father loved photo booths. He loved a lot of goofy things and I really feel I absorbed his taste in bizarre humor.


Here are a bunch of sketches, some of the first ones of TSSTG. I was reliving the night right there on that page. So many fun moments and personal joy. This stuff just drew itself. Lily has an absolutely zero waist... much to Lily's delight.

Notice the typo in Lily's name there above her head. That very typo stuck in my head the entire time I did the first issue, which she pointed out as she read the pages upon her visit to Napa later. She wouldn't let me change the mistake. When issue three came out, I thought it was fun for the reader to see us talking about that mistake and I could imagine readers taking the first issue out to see if we were kidding. That mistake is kind of endearing and shows how we men pay very little attention to details.


Me in my hotel room. I didn't sleep much that night. It's really amazing how a person can have such an impact on you and that's what Lily did. I had some problems early on in this series with the profiles of the characters. The noses are wayyy off. But there's really an indie look to that art that I love to revisit now and then.

The page on the right never made it to the book. I had problems with all those caption bubbles. There are many times when you dummy a book up, where you're off a page or two. It's really the toughest part of the gig. You have to look over your designs or pages and decide which ones get thrown overboard for the sake of the story. You have to be absolutely critical.

You can't just say "I'll take the ugliest page out" because some of those ugly pages have some of the greatest text in the book. So, the decision is critical. I'll mull over it for days before I decide.


So, this is probably the first moment I pull in the Puerto Rican culture into my series. Lily and I go to the concert and she recognizes one of the musicians, conga master Giovanni Hidalgo. She runs up to him and hugs her. It was one of the first moments I could see what a fierce pride Puerto Ricans have for their culture.

The page on the right contains one of my favorite lines in the book. "well, THIS sucks." It never fails to happen to me at concerts where some huge person will sit directly in front of me. When it happened here, I laughed.

Below: Giovanni Hidalgo.