In 1980 I traveled to Lucca, Italy to attend the city’s annual Comics Festival; reporting back to HEAVY METAL in an article titled “The Tip of The Iceberg at Lucca 14″. I illustrated the piece with some color sketches of things I saw, hot political issues I heard about and people I met. Here’s Jean Giraud, who’s Moebius work was then revolutionizing American readers’ perception of what comics could be. Jean was about 42 at the time of this watercolor and pencil portrait.

Proglo Edizioni has just released an Italian edition of Alan Moore’s updated essay, “Writing For Comics”. As a design element they’ve embedded a wash drawing of Alan, taken from the famous photo on the back of WATCHMEN, behind the text on every page. And since I wrote the introduction there’s this illustration behind my text which might be me. And might not.

Let me explain: comics creator and journalist, Stefano Priarone, is the guy who contacted me about writing the introduction. And he has long been told by people who know us both that, except for the twenty year difference in age, we could be twins! And since I don’t recognize the source photo that Massimiliano Padelli used to create his wash illustration, I’m wondering if Stefano just gave him a photo of himself to work from?

I come from a big Catholic family, with six wildly creative kids. We ended up in different corners of the world in the 1970’s, so when we finally got back together for a complete sibling reunion in the early 1980’s it seemed appropriate to create a commemorative T-Shirt of the event.

I based the design on the infamous “Pep Boys’ logo, expanding Manny, Moe and Jack out to all six of us. That’s younger brother Mike on the top left, me at top center, younger brother Pete at top right. Older brother Rob on the lower left, oldest brother Tom bottom center and older sister Wendy at bottom right.

The image here is way skewed since I glued my last remaining shirt onto the cover of one of my sketchbooks and didn’t quite get it on there straight. Silkscreen on cotton, 1982.

Here’s a portrait of my son, Kirby, working in his sketchbook when he was about 8 years old. These days he’s a strapping 19 year old who will begin in his third year of art school in September. He’s majoring in illustration and seems to like watercolor quite a bit.

Marker in sketchbook, from life, 1997.

I haven’t been doing new dream comics for awhile, but whenever I have a powerful dream about a friend I’ll usually email them a description of it. Once in a while a dream really seems to hit the bullseye on something going on in their lives; a reminder perhaps that consciousness intersects reality in surprising ways.

Such was the case this week with a dream I had about reading a new comic book by Steve Bissette. When I sent Steve the dream, it turned out he really was working on a comic about dreams and intuitive connections for the upcoming SECRETS & LIES anthology at The Center For Cartoon Studies, and many of the images I’d seen in the dream were integral to what he was doing.

Steve ended up working me and the whole psychic event into the strip, which is where these two portraits will appear. You can read Steve’s post on how it all went down, along with directions on how to order a copy of SECRETS & LIES, over on his always entertaining blog.

This is a portrait of one of my personal heroes, Neil Young, done for BOOK OF CHANGES; a collection of interviews by Kristine McKenna published by Fantagraphics. This scan’s a little muddy since I no longer have the original art and had to take it from the printed book. Pen and ink, 2001.

Found this one in COMIC BOOK REBELS, a collection of cartoonist interviews by Stanley Wiater and Stephen R. Bissette, published by Donald Fine in 1993. Bissette drew a bunch of portraits for the book in his patented brush style and here’s how he caught me. The printed pic is only one square inch so I’ve blown it up here to bring out the mad slasher effect for which Steve is so rightly famous. Was there ever an artist who’s work was more perfectly suited to horror comics?

A page from CEREBUS #204, in which I battle BACCHUS for the aardvark’s soul. Dave Sim writes, while penciling and inking the figures and lettering CEREBUS’ speech balloons. Gerhard pencils and inks backgrounds. I helped out by lettering my character. 1996.

Another portrait of me from the hand of Paul Pope. Marker in sketchbook.

Those are my blurry young fingers inking a panel from ABRAXAS AND THE EARTHMAN back in 1982.