THE EVENT everyone here at Cartoon Books has been waiting for finally arrived, and we couldn't have been more excited. When we first arrived and took the stairs down to the exhibit, we were greeted by the huge mural Jeff did exclusively for this show. The place was packed!

Jeff meets some young fans.  On either side of him are his parents, Barbara & William Smith.

Left to right: Ron Price, Raphael Rosado, Leslie Hough and Jeff.

Jeff with Harvey Pekar. 

Harvey Pekar, Jeff, and Jenny Robb from the Cartoon Research Library

Jeff and Scott McCloud. 

The Moores, Robin & Terry. 

Terry Moore givin his thumbs up to Jeff's work. 

Robin and Karen Shaffer.

Steve in front of the mural that he colored… 

…Jeff and Steve discussing who did the most work on the mural. 

Incredible food and drinks.

Kathleen with her folks.

Vijaya and Tom Leckrone. 

Steve with our friend and clay artist extrodinaire Lisa Bare Culp.

Jeff with Jenny Robb and Karen Bell, Dean of the College of the Arts. 

Animation pals: Jeff, Jim Kammerud, and Dan Root. 

Charles Vess, Karen Shaffer, Jeff and Jenny Robb.

At the end of a long evening, we all head out to a favorite watering hole to unwind.

On the way, as the gallery is closing down, we all get our pictures taken in front of the mural… 

Terry Moore, Jeff, Vijaya, and Charles Vess. 

Cartoon Book Staffers: Kathleen, Jeff, Tom, Steve and Vijaya.

And finally, J & V by themselves.

Related links:

The Daily Cartoonist interviews BONE AND BEYOND curators David Filipi and Lucy Caswell  

The Columbus Dispatch

Newsarama

The Beat 

Hi everybody, Tom here with another update on the exhibition that is only days away. Things are really starting to come together as you can see from the following pics.

Steve, Vijaya and Jeff waiting for the gallery space to open. 

Vijaya admiring a Geo. Herriman original. 

Jeff can't take his eyes off the E.C. Segar strip. 

V & J with Fone Bone. 

Jeff just noticed that the Carl Barks Uncle Scrooge page is signed! 

The original art for the final cover of BONE, issue #55. 

A  double page spread from  SHAZAM! The Monster Society of Evil.

The six page preview story from RASL. 

Just outside the gallery, a huge mural that Jeff created is being hung one panel at a time using hydraulic lifts. 

Jeff checks out the seam between panels. 

The first two panels are up! Kathleen and I (Tom) stand next to the wall for scale. 

Steve and Jeff chatting with Ohio State University President Gordon Gee. 

Congratulations Steve! This is a great accomplishment. Good Luck, I hope you win. Here are a couple of examples of why he was nominated.

Steve will attending the San Diego Comic-Con where the Eisner Awards will be held on July 25, 2008.

You can see the complete list of nominees here. 

Hey all! The cool cats over at Webcomics Weekly and Halfpixel asked me to sit in on their latest podcast and talk about coloring! I'm a fan of the show, so it was a bit nerve-inspiring, but I survived, and I hope they ask me back.

Click away to load up the file and listen!

Thanks to Scott Kurtz, Dave Kellett, Brad Guigar, and Kris Straub for the fun chat about comics!

I love the way Neil Gaiman talks about the process of writing. This is from yesterday’s blog entry:

“I'm more or less happily writing Chapter Six of The Graveyard Book. I say more or less as I'm at that place where I hope that the book knows what it's doing because right now I don't have a clue — I'm writing one scene after another like a man walking through a valley in thick fog, just able to see the path a little way ahead, but with no idea where it's actually going to lead him.”

See what I mean?

… 

My friend Jennifer Oliver, who designed the Thorn cold-cast statue from Graffitti Designs a few years ago, and was one of Disney’s top clean-up artists during the 80’s and 90’s, has created a new fantasy print. She doesn't have a website, so the print is up on e-bay. Jennifer adds: "Every print plants a tree. I'm sick of my work being a drain on the environment, so I plan to keep up the tree planting policy from this point forward." You can see the picture better here.

… 

James Robertson, who helps Bryan Talbot with his website has sent me a note to say that there is a new CD ROM of Bryan’s critically acclaimed book Heart of Empire.  For Heart of Empire fans (including myself) there's a tremendous amount of process material, like pencils and annotations. You can read the first chapter online for free by clicking here.

… 

Here are some last minute Best Of 2007 lists that included SHAZAM! The Monster Society of Evil:

2007 Glass Eye Awards

Innocent Bystander's Best of 2007 

Blog@Newsarama Our Favorite Comics of 2007

Geekanerd's Top Ten Video Games, Comics and Movies of 2007

… 

There are quite a few new SHAZAM! MSoE reviews out there, but I'll save those for a later blog. For now, though, there's this fun one from a site called Shuffleboil that I'll run in full:

“Shazam: The Monster Society of Evil” by Jeff Smith

Finally, a superhero comic we can wholly endorse! Bringing some of that Cartoon Book whimsy to the World’s Mightiest Mortal, Smith reinstates the qualities that actually made this mortal so mighty in the ’40s and ’50s — an absurdist fairy tale quality with just the right dash of innocence, while not being so naive as to be stupid! If Captain Marvel had been the same as all the other superheroes, we wouldn’t remember him today — and Smith is here to make sure no one forgets the real thing. Besides, Dr. Sivana is totally Dick Cheney!"

Dr. Sivana is totally Dick Cheney?  

You know, I've read that in a LOT of reviews (with varying degrees of approval), but I honestly was not trying make Sivana into Dick Cheney, I was just trying to make him a greedy, ego-maniac like Daffy Duck or Phoney Bone…

 Oh, what’s the use? You don’t believe me anyway.

Happy New Year, everyone!