Leigh's Paintings

As long as I'm recharging a bit for future blogging and managing my preparation for the new semester here at school, I felt I should at least devote one blog post to shill for the new website my father established for his paintings. He's put up numerous works of his along with essays about them, including this one below which hangs in my home.



Most of my family is highly creative in various domains. So, if you're interested in checking out some nice impressionist-ish paintings, go check it out!

A Time Sex Thing!

In response to this Language Log post, my best friend John sends along this wacky revamped movie poster:



As he put it "A google image search for 'pulp sci-fi novel' turns up some great material for this title."

Indeed.

Character Design for Graphic Novels

An excerpt from my drawn Comixpedia article along with some quotes from your's truly appear in the new book Character Design for Graphic Novels, written by Steven Withrow and Alexander Danner.



After they'd asked me to be in it, Alexander and I happened to become friends when I moved to Boston. So, I've been hearing about the book's coming for awhile. I got to see the proofs in black and white, and I must say the final copies look gorgeous in full color. In addition to its great instruction, the book is chalk full of works by creators far more talented and interesting than I, so go check it out!

Speaking fun

As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm going to be speaking next week at the Popular Cultural Association National Conference here in Boston next week. If you're interested in attending, I recommend checking out their site. I'll be presenting once again about my work on visual language grammar.

Then, I'm almost more excited to say, that I'll be teaching my stuff to the Syntactic Theory class that I'm a Teacher's Assistant for here at Tufts since my professor is going to be out of town that day. My advisor is the teacher of the class, and since he pretty much helped invent modern syntactic and semantic theory, its been a thrill just being in the class let alone getting to teach a lecture or being the TA.

The course so far has aimed less at teaching the students how to do a particular theory of syntax (though it has done that a bit, advocating my advisor's new theory of Simpler Syntax), but instead at teaching them how to be syntacticians. What are the choices to be made? How can you tell what theory is best and why? These are the questions I'm struggling with in my own work, so it's been enlightening for me greatly as well. (Beyond this, I suppose my contribution just goes to make this course even more unique and weirder than the average university syntax class.)

In this spirit, I'm thinking that I'll teach the class my basic theory of VL grammar, then just give them a whole bunch of the more wacky and interesting sequences I've found and see what they can do with them. And, since I enjoyed it so much, I'm going to include Tim Godek's strip from today. Can you figure out what about it's structure makes me like it so much?

Grab Bag Comics

Back in like February of this year when I was living in Chicago, I went out to mail a package at the local UPS store. I happened to be mailing one of my Meditations books and the guy behind the counter, Chuck, started querying me about my interest in comics. It turned out that he had graduated from the Savannah College of Art and Design with a degree in sequential art! So, naturally we hit it off great, and he was one of the people I wish I spent more time with while I was back there.

Chuck recently began posting his online comic "Dumstruck" on his Grab Bag Comics site again after a bit of a summer haitus. I definitely recommend checking it out. He started the journal comic at the start of the Iraq war and has decided to keep on it until the conflict sees an end. (I hope you enjoy doing the comic Chuck, that might be awhile unfortunately...)

The strips now are reposting his summer entries that weren't put up before. Amusingly enough, I found I'm even in one! He does a pretty amusing version of me, complete with exuberance for linguistics and bandaged wrists from my bout with tendonitis earlier this year.

So yah, go check it out!

McCloud at MIT

Well, it seems that nothing brings together comics-folk like a good long Scott McCloud lecture. Scott gave his lecture at MIT tonight to a packed house to promote his latest book Making Comics (which I just finished reading... review coming soon).

We got there fairly early, so I actually got a nice long chat in with him before things got too crazy. It's been awhile since I've gotten the opportunity to chat with Scott, so I was greatful for the chance. As I intimated, lots of comics folk turned out, and several of us went out to dinner afterwards...



Present were the "Comixpedia quartet" (upper left) of Bryant Paul Johnson, Me, Alexander Danner, and Kelly Cooper, along with the ever-entertaining duo of Jeph Jacques and his girlfriend Cristi. Along the bottom are some friends of Kelly's and one lucky comic fan who we adopted for the evening. (Hmmm...there's something kinda fun about being able to link nearly everyone you had dinner with).

The evening was quite fun and reminded me of college when I used to get together with a bunch of people in the Bay Area comics scene. Hopefully we'll have similar gatherings in times to come.

** Bonus linguistics observation of the talk: McCloud made a great noun to verb conversion with "breadcrumbing" (i.e. making a path for people to follow). **

Webcomics writers unite!

So, I successfully returned from my trip to Boston, having found a place to live, which is good, because then I don't have to start school living out of a U-Haul. On this trip I was given an amazing welcome tour by Comixpedia's very own Kelly Cooper. First Alexander Danner, now Kelly... Boston is having a great showing by webcomics writers! It bodes well I think, since they can recruit subjects for my mad experiments for me.

Back from Beantown

So, I arrived safely (and exhaustedly) back from Boston tonight after an enjoyable and draining trip. Don't want to jinx anything, so more details coming soon hopefully.

However, I did have a great endcap to the trip with a quite spontaneous meet up with Alexander Danner and his wife. They quite graciously showed me around downtown Boston as we chatted about comics, libraries, and Aaron Sorkin, and had our full of laughter as a souped-up sedan with enormous almost-monster-truck-sized tires rolled by blasting music. It was absolutely ridiculous looking. With the webcomics community built up around digital interactions, it's really fun to meet up and give a face and personality to an otherwise digital persona. Thanks again, Alexander!