ABOUT THIS SITE

The basic idea behind this site is to publish for the web a large variety of my non-commercial illustration work, projects, etc. Not exclusively, though: My website guy moved to Thailand, which accounts for why jackienoname.com hasn’t been updated for over two years. I mention that because I expect to also include on this site a variety of recent illustration work, if I think it’s worth a damn.

Right now, the main categories are ABANDONED CARS, INTERSECTION, YOU ARE HERE, and BELLIGERENT PIANO.

ABANDONED CARS: Spotlights work from, and commentary on, my soon-to-be-released graphic novel (published by Fantagraphics Books; expected to hit stores on August 15th). I expect that, eventually, there will be a new category, FOLKTALES (which is the second book in a trilogy of graphic short stories, for which ABANDONED CARS is the first), once more work for that book is completed.

INTERSECTION: While living in New York City, I produced a bi-monthly “illustrated column” for the New York Press from March 2002 to May 2003, called INTERSECTION. The idea behind the column was to combine a narrative vignette (no more than 300 words) with an illustration to capture a moment in time, or a snapshot, of daily life. The posts in the INTERSECTION category are examples of those illustrated columns.

YOU ARE HERE: Based on the work I’d been doing for the New York Press while in NYC, I started producing a silimar illustrated column for the Riverfront Times in St Louis. Although I moved to St Louis in 2003, I didn’t start producing YOU ARE HERE until 2004, I think (incidentally, the examples of both YOU ARE HERE and INTERSECTION you’ll see on this site won’t show the date of their original publication. I frankly can’t remember any of that. Eventually I might go through the mess of original tearsheets of the stuff and include that information, but for now, that kind of activity sounds far too laborious to be anything less than a mindless endeavor). YOU ARE HERE was produced on a weekly basis for three years (I think). In fact, I still do the YOU ARE HERE column for the RFT, only on a once-a-month basis now. For my money, the idea of this kind of illustrated column, first initiated through the New York Press, didn’t really reveal all of its adventurous conceptual possibilities until about a year in to producing YOU ARE HERE. John Strasbough was the editor at the New York Press when I started producing INTERSECTION and Tom Finkel is the editor who took on YOU ARE HERE at the RFT. Both have been great editors to work with, however different their styles are. Tom is much more hands-on and involved; John let me do pretty much whatever I wanted. But I owe a lot to Tom Finkel for his open-mindedness, on one hand, when it came to the introduction of an unexpected concept that deviated from our originally established format; and his ability to reign in ideas that were becoming too “far out”. And, because of those things (among others), YOU ARE HERE became an experiment in different ways of conveying a story snapshot through words and images.

BELLIGERENT PIANO: BELLIGERENT PIANO was my first real effort in comics. I started working on the story when I was in my early twenties, and the main character, Jackie No-name, is the closest thing I’ve ever come to in terms of developing an alter-ego. The initial idea behind BELLIGERENT PIANO was to create an epic story in comics that included all of my interests in American mythology and what I call the Great American Mythological Drama. Jackie himself has, to me, become something of a myth, and, although the story in linear terms hasn’t been completed past two installments in my comic book, Happy Hour in America, the story and the characters have never really escaped me. So the latest incarnation of BELLIGERENT PIANO will take the form of a weekly strip, which I intend to publish here. I think it’d be fun to produce the story as a serial, like the great newspaper strips of old – such as Dick Tracy, The Spirit, Charlie Chan, Steve Canyon and the truly bizarre Dauntless Durham of the USA. But that’s going to take awhile to get rolling. I’m in the process of moving to a new studio and have the San Diego Comicon to go to this July. So please stay tuned…

ODDS & ENDS: A place to dump all the work, both commercial or otherwise, that never really found a place after 1) they were originally published, or 2) never had a place to be published to begin with. This will be the junk drawer category.

Keep in mind, this site is very much in its initial stages of construction.

If you’re interested in viewing my no less than two and 1/2 year old commercial illustration work, please check out my webite at http://www.jackienoname.com. I will be doing my best to update the website in the near future (or as soon as my web guy gets out of that Bangkok jail…so maybe not so near future).