DTWOF: The Blog

This morning I went to an art supply store on Great Russell Street, which looked like the wand shop in Harry Potter, lined from floor to ceiling with rows and rows of mysterious black drawers labeled in gold lettering. I spent £15 on a selection of Gillot pen nibs, which I can never find in the US. Edward Gorey used Gillot nibs, a kind that he referred to as “tit quills,” but the ones I got didn’t have exotic names, just numbers. I also got a very appealing mini eraser. I have an eraser fetish.
I also went to the British Museum, which was great fun. The other museum-goers were wildly international and hardly anyone was speaking English. So if people were saying trite, annoying things, I couldn’t tell. Indeed, I was suffused with an uncharacteristic wave of philanthropic feeling. Here’s a mummified Egyptian hand, with my live hand in the foreground. An Italian couple in black cowboy hats was kissing obstreperously in front of this exhibit, but because they were doing it in Italian, I didn’t mind. I saw the fragments of sculpture from the Parthenon that Lord Elgin ripped off from Greece in the early 19th century. The British Museum’s line is, at least he protected the stuff from further damage. And the pieces were so stunning that I’m inclined to agree. Here’s a close-up of a centaur’s elbow. Look at that vein over his bicep, and that crease of skin in the crook of his arm!

Sorry I haven’t been posting. My longtime and esteemed assistant Cathy Resmer recently left my employ because her partner is about to have a baby any second now. Cathy would always remind me to put something on the blog. She was my blog prod. Without her prods, I nod. Also, I’ve been recovering from my own recent delivery of a massive, 240 page graphic novel to my publisher, after seven years of labor. No big loss, though, because there hasn’t been much to report. But now I’m going to the UK for two weeks, as part of something called an Associate Fellowship Scheme with the University of Kent’s Research Centre for Law, Gender, and Sexuality. See? I’m also doing a roundtable with some other cartoonists in London, a joint event with the Kent Centre and the Cartoon Museum. I’ll try to blog from the road. I like blogging while traveling, because all the fuss about finding internet access and downloading photos and keeping my devices charged fills up that annoying empty time that I would otherwise spend relaxing and observing the world around me.