In just over a month I’ll be heading for beautiful Banff, where I haven’t been since the summer of 1977, when my mom and dad packed us all into our maroon station wagon and drove from Maine to Washington. Instead of going on a guided horseback ride and holding up the entire group by bursting into tears because my horse scared me, I will be delivering a workshop for my fellow non-fiction writers about graphic memoir. It might be a little less scary.

See the conference program on the Creative Non Fiction Collective website.

Here’s my first stab at political/educational sort of cartooning.

Watch it on prezi.com.

For a while now I have been drawing illustrations for my favourite spam subject lines. Most of them I can’t really post here, because, well, I have not been sufficiently creative to stray far enough from the original intent of the spam — if you see what I mean. Basically, I just don’t want my website to be full of drawings of penises. But I thought I could post this one.

I’m slowly recovering from a week of yucky flu. Man, I watched a lot of TV this week! I felt like such a loser for not working on my art. So I brought my sketchbook to the couch last night in an effort to redeem myself.

First there was the classic Law and Order SVU… God, why do I watch this stuff?

Larissa, known as Brandy by the disgusting abuser:

And Daniel, victim turned abuser:

I don’t consider myself a Trekkie at all, but I super love Star Trek Voyager more than any other TV show ever… But they started putting it on so late that I couldn’t stay up to watch it anymore. But last night I did! And it was awesome. Bellana was in a bad situation.

Luckily they did not leave it up to Tuvok to resolve the situation… Those silly Vulcans!

Anyway, that’s my first attempt at doing something useful with couch time. Perhaps more to come.

My friend Terra Poirier took these photos at the Vancouver International Writers Festival in October, and Donimo added effects and animation. She says it proves that cartoonists are weird. I think I agree.  That was such a fun day! At some point I might stop talking about it, but don’t hold your breath.