Man, I felt so old when I turned forty. Now that I’m 57, forty seems like the prime of youth! This portrait of me is by Ceil Walcott, an accomplished painter who had worked on a daily comic strip titled “Yak A Day”, in England before the Second World War. She was in her 80′s when she nailed me with these few simple lines.

Sorry it took so long to get to the punch line of Wednesday’s post! To recap: Ric Estrada’s first assignment to us Kubert School students back in ’76 was to make two drawings. The first would depict how we saw ourselves at the time and the second what we envisioned ourselves becoming in the future.

After doing the self portrait posted below, I flipped the page in the sketchbook and, using a light box, imagined myself as an old man in the drawing you see above. My rationale when I showed the class was that the best one could hope for was to be alive into old age. Everyone, including Ric, got a big kick out of me being bald. (For the record, I’ve since cut my long locks and have at least a bit more left on top.)

Bulletin: I’ve just received word that NYMAG.com’s Culture Vulture blog is now running the complete 6 page NEIGHBORS story I drew from Harvey Pekar’s script!

I’ve recently been in touch with Ric Estrada, world class cartoonist and one of my favorite teachers back at Kubert School. Digging through my notebooks from that period I found what I think are notes from his very first “Business Of Art” class. Ric’s first assignment was to execute two drawings: one panel showing how we saw ourselves at the time and a second panel showing what we expected to be.

Here’s my first, a self portrait from life, standing in front of a mirror. Pencil in sketchbook, 1976.

Tomorrow: What 25 year old Rick expected to become!

Another giant of European comics I was lucky enough to meet when I visited Lucca in 1980 was Hugo Pratt, author of CORTO MALTESE. Here’s my watercolor and pencil portrait of Hugo for HEAVY METAL.

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.