CUCKOO CUCKOO CUCKOO

(This is Terri, the girl one- Steve's making me post too. It's like an EST session here today. "POST IN THE BLOG OR NO BATHROOM KEY" he's saying. It's terrible. People are sobbing brokenly in the corners and Ron's trying to chew through his wrists. Although that might be more because of the music we're playing)Anyway. Parker came back from the South with a cuckoo clock, which he put up in

Steve said I'm supposed to post...

...So here's some stuff from my sketchbook. And remember, kids, it's a crime to eat the breadsticks and NOT eat the pizzacrusts. And when in doubt, the answer is "The Beta Band".David Hahnwww.hahndynasty.com

"Dean Martin never sang about minestrone"

An important discussion at 1:28 pm: What is the difference between minestrone and pasta fazool?

Optimism and pessimism at the Byrne Board

There was a big thread on the Byrne board over the weekend, dealing with the future of the comics industry and the comics medium. Here are a couple of my contributions, addressing why I'm optimistic."There's a lot of doom and gloom, and for the life of me, I don't see why. I don't think there's ever been a better time to read comics. An enormous amount of the best work of previous decades is

The 2nd Flytrap printing isn't as impressive.

So I've got those second printings of Flytrap in. No, I'm not going to do a press release. Good lord. Anyhow, these have a plus and a minus. The plus is that I ran the the art a little bigger and on heavier, slightly whiter paper, so art-wonks can study my virtuoso brushwork more closely. The minus is that the printer didn't trim the books or score the cover edge for a flatter fold, so as

Fill our ears.

Thanks to airtunes, we've been playing a lot of music in the studio, and it's always a challenge to find stuff that'll keep the energy level up without distracting people from their work. I've been putting a lot of Beach Boys and Buddy Holly out there. James Brown seems to work well, (and you can crack up the room by hitting them with "I Feel Good" right after Springsteen's "Nebraska.") Beta

Taking a whiz in the Mighty Mercury Manner

Our front door keys no longer work for the bathrooms, so we've been forced to humiliate bathroom-goers the same way our favorite cafes do, with conspicuous keychains!

The Wizard of Zzzz.

Now the up-to-the-minute hipsters of Mercury Studio are discussing the mind-blowing synchronicities that happen when you play Pink Floyd and the Wizard of Oz at the same time. Cutting edge stuff, here. Somehow this came out of Parker's suggestion that one could mash-up Zapruder's Kennedy film with the Patterson Bigfoot footage.

Hushabye Geekroom

As I write this, the studio is engaged in a fierce debate over how best to re-edit Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Developing...

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Parker here– and here's Lieber's strip about his father that I talk about over on Mystifying Oracle. This orginally ran in Portland Monthly magazine. If it isn't loading for you, go here.

Off to Gotham.

I'm about to be busy for a month or so, so let's get some blogging in while I still can. Word has it that Parker will be back in town soon. Everyone wants to know if he's got his North Carolona accent back, and if those crazy rumors about him actually drawing again are true. Inker Jeremy Colwell has been working with Mercury a lot recently, doing great stuff. Looking for inking? Visit his

Monday, passionate Monday.

Everyone else has linked to L'il Rivkah, so I guess I should, too. The best adverserial response I've seen was on a comment thread on ">Chris Butcher's blog. It came from the always quotable Abhay Khosla , and I hope he won't be too pissed that I'm reprinting it here:"not to be the Grinch, but if i spent long hours sitting at a desk, not getting enough exercise, worrying about wrist injuries or

Thursday linkblogging.

Linkblogging. It's what's for dinner.First things first, The Willamette Week has declared Mercury the "Best Hall of Superheroes." Um... Okay. Cool. They ran our picture and everything. When they took the photo the week before their "best of" issue, we kind of thought they were going to use our name to take a shot at the competition: "Best Portland Mercury" or something like that.Kind of

Heartbreakers Meet Boilerplate- In Stores Now

Paul Guinan and Anina Bennett's latest graphic novel "Heartbreakers Meet Boilerplate" is in stores now! A year in the making and executed in a revolutionary new illustration technique Paul calls "paintography," a new art style that combines drawing, painting, and photography.The Heartbreakers, a family of clones created from the DNA of a beautiful redheaded scientist, team up with Boilerplate,

Off to Chicago

The WizWorld Chicago con starts on Thursday, and I'll be there. Big Surprise. Look for me in Hall B, table 1886. Truth to tell, I never knew there was a Hall B. Please god, don't let that be the new name for the plexiglass habitrail that connects the hotel to the convention center. Or maybe I'll get lucky and find they've put me somewhere on the ramp overlooking the main room- the one with the