Fleep had a very successful web run on Moderntales. But the run has ended. Now you can access it here at shigabooks for FREE!!!
Hey everybody! I won an Eisner Award for talent deserving of wider recognition!
PJ Williams! Whoever you please send me your address! I'd like to send you some comics but I got a return to sender stamp when I sent them to the address you gave me.
An unfortunate book jacket design for Jackie Collin's new book, The Bitch
I've been nominated for two Eisner Awards!!! If you're going to San Diego comicon this year make sure to vote for ME and not the other losers I'm competing against. No, just kidding.
Demian Katz is my hero. He has tirelessly read through thousands of absolutely dreadful Choose Your Own Adventure type books and come up with the single most authoritative listing of gamebooks in the world. He has even reviewed some of my books! I am deeply honored by this review and am touched by his obsessive dedication to his site. His site is a marvel and one of my favorite places to go on the web.
Shaenon Garrity wrote this article about me for the new online comics magazine comixpedia. It's a great article!
What happened to my weblog? I moved it to livejournal!
Another interview with yours truly. This one's a little different though. It was conducted by Anton Summers. For those not in the know Anton Summers is an obsessive 13 year old fan living somwhere in the midwest who can't spell.
Buzz Alrdin's rebuttal to the conspiracy theorist notion that the moon landing was staged.
I know SPX came and went months ago. But I wanted to wait until my photos were developed before sharing my adventures with you. Unfortunately I'm one of these annoying people who keep film in my camera for months because I don't want to waste pictures just to finish off the roll.
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| Somewhere in Wyoming |
Anyways, the trip was a real learning experience. I learned that next time I will take a plane! True, I saved about $78 by taking the bus. But it literally took me seven days to get there and another five to get back! Then there's the smelly teenagers who were making out behind me and the ex con in front of me who told me he was involved in an "accidental fatality". During one of the rest stops I accidently dropped my luggage from the overhead rack right onto his head. After apologizing profusely and saying "I'm sorry" about a dozen times, he looked me right in the eye and said, "No you're not." I just about peed in my pants.
Aside from nearly being accidently fatalized, there was the first day of my trip when things went horribly wrong! During a 40 minute layover in Salt Lake City I went to explore the city a little and missed my bus... which had all my luggage on it! And the next bus wasn't coming until 12 hours later at 7:30am. Luckily I had my bus tickets in my pocket and about $20 in cash (They eventually found my bag in Dallas Texas and sent it back to me a month later). I had actually sent my comics to the East Coast ahead of time so I knew that if I could just make it to the con, I could sell enough books to fund the rest of my trip.
For some reason, the bus station closed at 11:00 so I spent first night of my trip curled up behind a trash can at the mormon convention center. After two mormons chased me off, I wandered to a bus stop and read the Salt Lake City Tribune for 5 hours. That newspaper lasted me two more days as I made my way to Chicago. I read every scrap of information in that paper including obituaries, the bridge game, and Mary Worth.
I reached Chicago with the clothes on my back, $3 and a phone card with a minute left on it. I called my friend Willow who I was planning to stay with in Chicago. But as I was giving her the number of my payphone, the time on my card ran out! I felt like crying. But being clever, she starting calling all the possible permutations of numbers begining with the five digits I gave her. After 42 wrong numbers she eventually reached me and I was so happy to hear the sound of her voice, I felt like crying again. I hadn't bathed in three days. Willow took me underwear and sock shopping, lent me $30 and her roomate Nesca lent me some of her exboyfriend's clothes.
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| Misun and John |
I also got a chance to meet up with my friend Misun Oh and her husband JOHN PORCELINO!!! John is my minicomics hero and a huge influence. Then we went to Chris Ware's house! Then Ivan Brunetti stopped by with a salad he picked from his garden! Chris Ware's house is a fun and magical place filled with lots of toys. I've been describing it to people as Pee Wee's Playhouse if Pee Wee's Playhouse was filmed in the 1940's. I simultaneously wanted to hump his leg, eat his brains and borrow $20 from him.
I left Chicago in good spirits and arrived in New York the next morning. I called up Gabrielle Bell and spent my first few moments in New York helping her collate and staple her new comic. She lent me $40 and I was off to Bethesda. The con itelf was just about the most exciting convention I've ever been to in my life. I was constantly star struck by the likes of Alex Robinson and Tom Hart and Sam Henderson. I even had a breif conversation with Joe Matt brainstorming on how he could rip off the Xeric grant with faked reciepts. I had thought ahead and sent my comics to the East Coast ahead of time so I was able to sell my books. And I sold more at SPX than at an APE, Wondercon and Comicon put together!!
I felt like throwing all of my cash onto the hotel bed and rolling around in it. But since I was sharing the room with four other people it seemed inappropriate. Later, I began to worry since I lost my ID on the bus and that meant I couldn't deposit the money. I'd have to carry around these huge wads of cash bulging out of my pockets as I rode the subways of New York and sat next to more escape convicts on the bus ride home. For the first time in my life I concluded that I needed to buy a moneybelt, but that's as far as I got before I couldn't figure out where to get one. I ended up just stuffing the tens and twenties into my shoes and the ones and fives into my pockets.
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| Me and Steph in France
(Just Kidding, this is really Washington Square) |
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| Fellow Conventiongoers |
I got a ride back to New York with some fellow convention goers and spent a week in New York throwing my cash around like a big shot. I'm sure I annoyed everyone by insisting to treat all my friends to meals and then paying in ones. I stayed with one of my best friends named Stephanie who was working on her illustration portfolio at the time. She took me all around the city including the famous New York Public Library building, Washington Square and Chintown! By the way, the Ghostbusters Library building with the lions in front is a reference library!!!
New York is the funnest most amazing city I've ever been to. I got to hang out with Jesse Fuchs and played video games with him at his apartment. He had home versions of Dance Dance Revolution and the Maraca game. Later, Jesse took me to meet with a journalist named Lawrence Weschler. Jesse told me that Weschler might be intereted in writing an article about me. After I returned home, I checked out a bunch of his books from the library and they all seem to follow a similar plot. Every story is about some eccentric charcater with minimal social skills but an obsessive devotion to a particular narrow subject. He never followed through on writing the article but I wasn't sure whether I should've felt offended or relieved.
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| Brooke Young and the Joseph-Sphinx |
On the way back home, I stopped off in Salt Lake City again. But this time, I decided to miss my connecting bus on purpose. I arrived in the morning and there was another bus leaving at night. The Salt Lake City Public Library contains the nation's largest collection of zines and minicomics and I spent several hours devouring them. I spent the rest of the day exploring the city with Brooke Young, the periodicals lirbary assistant for the SLC Public Library Main branch.
I returned Tuesday morning, three hours before I had to be at work. The money I made at the con was hidden in my shoes during the five day trip home and was sopping wet with foot sweat. It smelled so nausiating I had to bottle it so as not to stink up the whole house. I showered, left for work and managed to get through the day without fainting. When I got home, I collapsed onto my bed and woke up 15 hours later dazed and disoriented. Next to my bed was a jar of wet money covered with pink mold fuzz.
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| Me standing next to Sam Henderson! |
You could say that cartooning was in my blood. My father was an animator and worked on such shows as Obake no Q-taro and the legendary Bas Rankin Rudoph the Red Nosed Reindeer Christmas Special.
At the age of 15, I started animating as well. My first cartoon was called Midnight Snack. This 30 second movie featured one man slowly eating another man's head. Incredibly, I drew the 180 frames which composed this movie in an hour and a half flat! I continue to this day to hold to this standard of quantity over quality.
I continued animating through highschool and into college where I discovered comics. Comics it turned out was just like animation but without the labor. I could literally increase my output 70 times by making the switch to comics. Not knowing any better, I put out a graphic novel every month for the first 5 months I was making comics.
In 1998, I graduated from Berkeley with a degree in... pure mathematics. What is the connection? Well ever since I was ten years old, I had always thought that math was the best subject because even if you're locked in a room for 25 years you can study it. And the same can be said of comics. I always have and still do love math and try to incoporate it with my comics when I can.
Currently, I have a job at the library. It is relaxing, pays well, and is only five minutes walk from my house! I have a good life. You can contact me at jshiga@hotmail.com