Labor Day Nitty Gritty

If you find yourself nearby a St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Thursday the 31st, check out the Get Out section to see a bunch of illustrations I did, including the cover. Reporter (and pal) Diane Toroian Keaggy wrote a bunch of funny descriptions of Labor Day events around town this weekend, specifically regarding the real men and women whose hard behind-the-scenes work manufacture good times for the rest of us. I drew them in kind of a Labor Propaganda / WPA poster mode, both to reflect the origins of Labor Day and in fear that my normal cartoonier style would be overkill alongside Diane's funny character profiles. The one at the top of this post is for an unsung hero of the St. Louis Labor Day Parade, and here are ones for the Fall Festival of Art and the Japanese Festival at the Botanical Gardens, which will feature displays of Sumo Wrestling.I love the crisp shapes and interlocking 2-D "clockwork" compositions of those old WPA posters, but also the dramatic lighting and textured shading. Ideally, I would've actually painted my illustrations also - especially to to get those kind of textures - but given the mechanical concerns of newsprint reproduction (and the practical concerns of newspaper deadlines) I decided to suck it up and give it my best shot using vectors (warning: shop talk ahead!). I've experimented in the past with achieving a gritty blend using series of dots, like here:
But that still feels too digital. This time I tried creating a custom "pattern brush" tile using more jagged organic shapes, like charcoal on a toothed paper might create:
It still looks kinda crummy up-close, but looks okay in print. If anybody out there has better suggestions on how to create this effect, short of actually using scanned or pixel-based textures (my antique computer can't handle humungous file sizes), give me a holler. Happy Labor Day!

"Instead of thinking we play Donkey Kong"

In honor of seeing the almighty Gorilla Biscuits last weekend in Chicago, here are a couple of ape related drawings. I had recently watched the movies King Kong and War of the Worlds and was inspired at Drawing Club to deviate from my normal diet of hot-rods and white-out to do these:

Bowling Archaelogy / Private Stash

The other night I unearthed a bunch of my old bowling scoresheets from the Saratoga. I had it in my head that I'd do doodles every week of the 2004 Fall/Winter/Spring League and make a zine out of them. It looks like I made it four weeks before cramming the results between a dirty Blues Rally Towel and my teammate Will's spare ball in our rusty old locker. (I'm actually trying the project again right now, during the less ambitious Summer League). As you'll see, most of my doodles fall into one of three categories: 1) Peculiar shots executed that night 2) Plotting future bowling-related projects (like fashioning a model rocket built out of a bowling pin) and 3) Expressing my irritation at shitty songs coming out of the jukebox. Click for larger views:I would've just cropped those images down to just the doodled areas, but in the interest of providing any armchair sports psychiatrists out there with a data set to analyze (comparing my drawings to my actual performance during that game), I decided to show all the gory details. Oh, and in case anyone's curious - when you see a little drawing of a beercan or mug next to a bowler's name it means that unlucky soul got beer framed.
In other bowling/art related news, I've got a keggling-themed drawing in Private Stash, a new accordion suite of pin-up drawings done by some of the world's greatest cartoonists (plus me), published by Buenaventura Press. The images at the top of this blog entry are tantalizing tidbits from my sexy (I'm talking about that cut-away of the bowling ball) pin-up. Also, see if you can pick me out in the awesome wrap-around cover by Rick Altergott:
Finally, here's an old photo of me at St. Louis' own International Bowling Hall of Fame, standing in the hall of Women's International Bowling Congress, which houses beautiful and life-like oil paintings of each inductee. I highly recommend visiting next time you are in town!
(photo by my friend Alyssa. Hi Alyssa!)

Power Trivia Recall

My buddy Paul C. put on a real clinic the other night, showing off his powerful metal recollection abilities. Not only could he recognize every song in the "name that monster ballad" category within 1.5 seconds - often sooner! - he regaled us with various details surrounding the song: back-up guitarists, what the tour t-shirts looked like, etc. Needless to say, we scored a perfect 20 that round. Take note of Adam laughing all the way to the bank (the bloodbank).
Note: after I made the drawing at the top (ink and white-out on construction paper, 6" x 5.5") I remembered that the Scorpions song they played wasn't "Still Loving You" but "Wind of Change". Anyway, we did just well enough in other categories (e.g. "Obscure St. Louis Cardinals Stats", "Historical Assassinations", "Scientologist or just Nutjob?") to come out on top. Here's the loot we took home:
A) Hostess® brand lip balm (HO-HO® flavored)
B) Novelty Washroom Placard (Text reads: "If you sprinkle when you tinkle... Be a sweetie and wipe the seatie")
C) "Animal" Kaleidoscope (supposedly "Lion" themed - just looks like the standard colorful polygons and shit to me)
D) $56 (most of which was spent within an hour on fried egg sandwiches).
In related news, congrats to Paul and Meghan on an awesome wedding shower and upcoming nuptials! I heard Nuno Bettencourt is playing at the wedding.

McFlys 2015 Sneaker Campaign

Here's an illustration I drew this week for the local weekly paper about a grassroots campaign to convince Nike to manufacture Marty McFly's futuristic sneakers from the movie Back to the Future part II. Here's a video presentation:

I was telling my friend Jon about it and he asked me if the campaign was spearheaded by the same dude who was petitioning McDonald's to bring back the McRib. I wish I had an illustration of a McRib to put below (Hint Hint, Art Directors!).

Kramers Ergot #6 | Illusion Box

I've got an eight-page comic strip, entitled CROSS-FADER, in the brand new Kramers Ergot #6 anthology published by Buenaventura Press. The thumbnails above give you get a sneak peek into the early stages of my working process, which consists mostly of me scribbling with ballpoint pens to see if they contain ink. Once I get a bit further along, I gather up all my reference. Here's the critical piece I needed to begin my strip (© 2006 Don "Toots" Zettwoch):
CROSS-FADER takes place inside and adjacent to a haunted house, and features many real-life Zettwoch scare-traptions. Included is the the On-Coming Car, the Vibrating Floor, and most importantly the Illusion Box (shown in the excerpted panel below).The Illusion Box is a variation on Pepper's Ghost, a classic magical/optical illusion pioneered in the nineteenth century for Victorian stage-shows. I first experienced it at the far-end of the John J. Audubon Elementary School fall festival, when I saw my principal turn into a werewolf. Thanks Dad!
Anyway, Kramers Ergot #6 contains work by some of the world's greatest cartoonists past and present - all much better than me - and should be a great book. It debuts next week at the San Diego Comic-Con (I'll be on-hand to test ballpoint pens in your copy) and will be available in stores in September.

Model Rocketry Corner

A couple of weeks ago the MissileFits got together a launched rockets into stormy skies over St. Louis. Above are the plans I drew up for my weird homemade rocket, which is sort of a rocket/glider combo (based loosely on Estes' Scissor-Wing Transport). You can see actual photos of it here or here. It worked pretty well after I reinforced the fins with electrical tape. Here's an action photo of Billy K, owner of the world's scariest briefcase, helping me prepare for launch (photo by Ben Kiel):
All in all it was an awesome time. For next year, I am planning on building a rocket that I can physically travel in. It is gonna require a lot of balsa wood and Elmer's white glue. See you there!

Mardi Gras Bingo / Cartoons vs. Pictograms

Apparently, last week at the annual awards gala of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies in Little Rock, Arkansas, a piece I worked on with the Riverfront Times won a 1st-place editorial award in a category called the 'Format Buster' (I'm not sure what the trophy looks like). The piece, master-minded by the fine dudes at the RFT, was a series of clip-able Bingo cards designed for attendees of the world's third largest Mardi Gras celebration, in the Soulard neighborhood of St. Louis. I did all the illustrations for the cards (downloadable as a .pdf here) and also for the cover:
It was fun making all the funny little drawings (funny because they're TRUE) and also figuring out how to construct convincing beer stains and crummy pink halftones on a trump l'oeil, beaten-up Bingo card. If you were around during Mardi Gras, you probably stepped over actual beer-stained, beaten-up copies; but what you didn't see was the first, alternate version of the Mardi Gras Bingo game:
As shown, my first inclination was to establish a system of pictograms for each Bingo card. The system I had in mind existed somewhere between the famous library of glyphs developed for Montreal's Expo 67 by Paul Arthur (coiner of the term "signage") and Otl Aicher's icons for the '72 Olympic Games in Munich. My thinking was that this kind of scientific visual language would be a funny contrast to the content, and that maybe vector/diagram boobs are classier than brush & ink/cartoon boobs? I'll let you be the judge; here are all the pictograms versus their more cartoony counterparts (click for larger views):
Obviously, we ended up going with the more illustrative approach and never looked back. The pictograms may have provided more streamlined gameplay in terms of congitive speed - your eyeballs and brain aren't wasting time decoding hand-drawn beads of sweat flying off an ornery handcuffed hoosier's wrinkled brow (and furthermore, if and where it appears on your Bingo matrix) - but who cares? Every one at Mardi Gras is totally trashed anyways. An argument could also be made that well executed pictograms are more universally recognizable to people from different cultural, educational, and economic backgrounds. In my experience though, Soulard Mardi Gras is not exactly the Montreal Expo, if you know what I mean. In closing, sorry to Paul Arthur and Otl Aicher, but give me a nicely tapered cartoon boob any day of the week!

Father's Day Screenprint Archive

A few years ago, I came across a treasure trove of my Dad's cartoons that he drew in the seventies and eighties. More recently, I found a stack of yellowed pieces of paper and ripped halves of manila folders containing screenprints he made around the same time. I rarely saw him working on the cartoons, which were drawn while he was at work. The prints though, he'd work on in our basement(the old way: hand-carving lacquer film into stencils with an exacto knife) and I'd stand by watching as long as I could on a school night. Sometimes I'd make it up late enough to see the first print pulled on the custom contraption pictured above. The next morning I'd go downstairs and see every surface - the work bench, counter-tops, ping pong table and floor - covered in drying T-shirts. Here's a bunch of his designs as I found them, not on T-shirts once worn by Church Volleyball Team members or Rolling Stag passengers but proofs printed on the backs of recycled schematics and office memo's, organized into three categories. Also: there's a lot more where these came ffrom. Hopefully my Dad, his buddies, old co-workers, fellow parishioners, schoolkids, and neighborhood business owners enjoy looking at these. At least they don't have to rummage through the bottoms of their T-shirt drawers. Happy Father's Day!
WORK/UNION/SOFTBALL:
COMMERCE/SCHOOL/TEAMS:
HUMOR/FAMILY/OTHER:

Mystery Cyclist/Model-Maker of Maplewood

Has anyone else ever seen this dude, cruising up and down Arsenal or Manchester? Or better yet, the elaborate cardboard/wire/toothpick (?) model/sculpture/contraption (?) strapped to the handlebars of his old ten-speed? Because I'm always either on foot or in my car, and he's always on his bike, I've never gotten a good look at him or the model. I see 'em all the time though! The model looks like a complicated overpass or industrial bridge structure, with lots of wire scaffolding, obsessive ornamental detail, and enough bulk to make bicycle balance difficult.
Here is a quick map I made of my most oft-traveled corridors in southwest St. Louis City, and where I usually see the mysterious model transporter. Take note of how closely our beaten paths mirror one another. I've never seen him east of 3-Ring Binder Worldwide on Jamieson or west of the White Castle on Big Bend. Where does he come from?! Where is he going?!
My most recent sighting of the dude was a couple of days ago, and he's modified his rig for summer. The over-sized flat-brimmed ballcap has been replaced with an over-sized bicycle helmet, and he's now got a weird rectangular box strapped to the rear of his bike, sticking out well beyond the back wheel. I could've swore I saw little silver cardboard wheels on the box, making it look like the trailer of an 18-wheeler. Does the model go inside the trailer? Why is he carrying this stuff around in the first place? Do I really want to know the truth?!
Disclaimer: all drawings made from brief field-sightings. Ink and White-Out on construction paper.
UPDATE! This fellow's name is Raynard Nebbitt. He's a pretty well known and well liked figure to neighbors living around and truckers driving beneath the South Rock Hill Bridge, the overpass which he carries a replica of on his bike. Read more about him and the grassroots campaign to re-name the overpass after him here.

Ink & Paper Smorgasbord

The Rock 'n Roll Craft Show is taking place this weekend (June 3 & 4) at the former Junk Junkie store at 6933 Hampton. Lots of great artists will have stuff for sale, some bands are playing, etc. Here are some items from the "Manly World of Dan Zettwoch" (quote by my pal Mardou: seek out her great comics, collages, and sculpted punk action figures at the show!) that will be available: 1) Missilefits Rocket Club Poster: 3-color Screenprint with metallic blue ink, 20" x 26".
2) Catastrophe Shop Poster: 2-color Screenprint, 10" x 20"
3) Redbird #1: 36 page mini-comic with 3-color screenprinted cover
4) Schematic Comics: 48 page comic with 2-color screenprinted cover and fold-out centerfold
5) IRONCLAD: 26 page comic with 3-color screenprinted cover, dual 34" x 11" gatefold civil war battle scenes. Back in print for a limited time!
6) VS: 24 page mini-comic with hand-colored cover.
7) Leadville Poster: 2-color screenprint, 18" x 10"
8) Ink About It! Poster: 3-color screenprint, 20" x 12"
9) Bowling pin I fished out a dumpster behind the historic Saratoga Lanes in Maplewood (not for sale)
I'll be working at the Show Sunday afternoon, maybe I'll see you there! PS: this post was an obvious excuse to make one of those silhouette key things.

Action is Fantastic

Last night at Drawing Club we all made Bigfoot drawings (again). Excited about an upcoming weekend of playoff action I drew mine playing basketball (above: White-out and ink on beige construction paper, 5.5" x 11"). Also, I recently came across a little suite of vector drawings I did depicting NBA superstars of the '82-'83 season:
And finally, here a couple of snapshots of the Zettwoch basketball club, Louisville Kentucky, circa 1985. The first shows me hustling to get a hand-in-the-face of my brother Jake as he prepares to launch a sweet J:
The second shows the custom basketball goal at the Zettwoch facilities. The backboard is mounted on a pivoting mechanism, which allows it to be lowered to various intervals lower than the regulation 10 feet. The reason for this: DUNK CONTEST. The chicken wire barrier behind the goal was designed to prevent errant shots from leaving the yard, and the long-handled fishing net is there in case a particularly errant shot missed the basket and the barrier altogether. Also note the homemade birdfeeder built out of a two-liter Big Red bottle, able to be refilled via a pulley system, and the plexiglass Red Baron weathervane sitting atop the goal.