Sheldonista Patrick J. wrote in with this awesome tidbit:

I just had to refer to this strip to remember how to tie up a cord. And I’m not sure weather I should be proud that I actually took the time to actually tie up the cord or be ashamed that I didn’t remember how to do it on my own…

Rad.

For those wondering, the last three installments of “Drive” have been drawn digitally, without pen ‘n paper, on the Cintiq.

For those who didn’t spot it — great, that’s the goal! For those who did spot it — also great! That means you’re keen-eyed enough on my style to spot minor(ish) differences…which I take as a compliment. So! Win-win, really!

Today’s strip was really just an excuse to come up with fun names. “Chitners,” as a last name, made me laugh out loud. If you say it with a bit of Appalachia, it sounds so perfect.

Anyway! A lot of you wrote in to defend the banjo, which is great. It’s a pretty rad instrument.

A great many of you sent along great YouTube clips of cool people doing cool things with the banjo. (Note, though: Sending in videos with musicians named “Earl Scruggs” doesn’t particularly help the joke, but I suppose what’re you gonna do? There are no “Lord Biggles-worths” playin’ the banjo.)

Here’s a particularly nice YouTube video of Béla Fleck playing Bach and talking about the improvisational skills of the composer. Well worth the watch, both for the talent and the humility of the performer.

San Diego Comic-Con, as you guys know, is the big enchilada of the comics world. It’s 130,000 folks gathering over five days for comics and pop culture. And this year, we’ll have TWO new books premiering at the show!

The first book will be centered on a theme, like the popular Pugs collection, which gathered all the pug strips into one book. The new collection is themed for book-lovers: It’s called LITERATURE: Unsuccessfully Competing Against TV Since 1953, and gathers all the Sheldon bibliophile strips into one book. It’s everything from Twain to Tolkien, Seuss to Shakespeare.

The book will be available at SDCC, and then will be available in the Sheldon Store a week or so later, when we’ve had the big LA book-launch party. Here’s the cover (or click here for a larger image):

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The second book will be the first collection of DRIVE strips! It’ll have the same shape as the Sheldon books, but will feel closer to those 50-page Marvel/DC novelettes, with glossy interior pages. I’m excited for it! Here’s the cover (…for a larger image, click here):

The Drive book will have a super limited print-run — just a few hundred copies — but remaining copies will be available in the store after the San Diego show ends.

Anyway, I can’t wait for you guys to see ’em!

Something about today’s strip reminds me of this Sheldon strip from 2003.

It’s the historical revisionism of naval battles, mayhaps. 🙂

Looks like Monday’s strip appeared on the site early on Sunday. My apologies for that!

After my last blog post, a whole lot of you wrote to me, asking for the details of the robberies I mentioned in that post…99% of the letters ending with “Dear Lord, Dave, you’ve got to move from where you live.”

So! With the goal of reassuring you that they didn’t all happen in the same place, and that I don’t live in a crime-ridden cesspool, here’s a brief history:

GRAND THEFT AUTO:

I grew up in San Diego county, and was the lucky recipient of not one, not two, but three cars stolen from me while I lived there. In fairness, two of those cars were my pop’s, but I was driving them at the time they were stolen…so I take responsibility for those as cars stolen under “my” watch.

HOME INVASION/BURGLARY:

This one happened when I lived in London. When it was reported to the police, we were super excited to take advantage of the (kinda Orwellian) CCTV system that London has in place. If we’re going to be watched by hundreds of thousands of secret cameras every day, then by gum…how exciting to put the system to use and catch a criminal with them! But dang it all, after watching tapes of the criminal run past like 20 cameras at the police station, darn it if the dude didn’t *disappear* between two cameras. The little jerk knew where the blind spot was!

ROBBERY W/ A DEADLY WEAPON:

This one was a genuine bummer. On my third day of living in Los Angeles, my fiance, good friend and I were robbed right outside my new apartment. And from the three of us, the guys got like $17. And I know you won’t believe it when I say it, but the whole thing just filled me with a tremendous amount of sadness, not rage or vengeance or anything like that. Even with the gun to my head and all…it was just a sad, sad moment. For lack of a better phrase, I was very aware of the *humanity* of the person holding the gun to my temple.

And while it sort of put a stink on my initial impression of LA, I’ve never had an ounce of trouble in the following 10 years… so it’s been a nice place to live.

Anyway! Those are my crime stories. Nothing extraordinary, nothing particularly terrible (thank God). Just a string of unfortunate events, really.

Los Angeles, as it turns out, has more juried trials than any place in the world (true!).

As evidence of that, I get summoned for jury duty roughly every 1.5 weeks. Or at least it feels that way.

Anyway! The other week, I got summoned to jury duty, and I’m sitting in the massive “waiting room” along with 300 other Los Angelenos, when a Sheldon reader named John walks up and says “Excuse me, are you Dave Kellett?”

Now keep in mind: I’m a cartoonist, not an actor…so the rarity of someone knowing me A.) At all, B.) By the look of my face, and C.) Enough that they’d actually want to talk to me…

All of those are pretty rare things.

Anyway, John and I struck up a great conversation about the background politics in “Drive”, and I sketched up a picture of Nosh for him while we waited for our courtroom assignments. It was the best possible way to pass the wait for jury duty — and I couldn’t be more thankful that John introduced himself. So thanks, John!

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Oh! And as it turns out: The defense decided to use one of their peremptory challenges to excuse me from jury duty during jury selection…so I never got to be on the actual jury. It turns out a robbery defense team doesn’t want a guy on the jury who’s had three cars stolen, a home invasion robbery, and a stickup with a 9mm to his temple.

So…lucky me!*

*And thanks, past-Dave, for takin’ it on the chin all those times, so present-Dave could get out of jury duty! You’re a sport!

The new Cintiq 21UX — the digial canvas — is here and installed in the studio, and I’m stumbling into it like a child picking up a brush for the first time.

In talking with my wife about it, I compared it to learning a new medium: I go into with all my skills as a draftsmen…but am presented with a new type of canvas I’ve never worked with before: The angles are weird, the feel of it is weird, the scale and scope and sights of it are weird. But it’s good…and exciting to be drawing digitally.

Sheldon, as you know, will be staying a traditional, hand-drawn strip…archival inks on acid-free paper. But Drive will become an all-digital strip. So keep an eye out on Saturdays for a strip that’s drawn without paper.

As suggested by Fleen’s editor Gary Tyrell, I won’t tell you when the first, all-digital Drive shows up: It’ll be more fun to see if I can make it “pass” for ink-on-paper. 🙂

But rest assured, it’ll be a few weeks until I’m up to speed on this thing. The phase I’m currently in could best be described as “grandfather setting up a DVD player for the first time” phase. I need to fly up to Seattle and watch Scotty draw on his for a few hours.

Courtesy of the blog Drawn, I came across this excellent short “Time & Again” by Jacques Khouri. It’s so rare that I find sequential art (comics) successfully (and interestingly) incorporated into sequential film (movies) — but this does it beautifully.

It’s filled with melancholy, but whaddya gonna do…artists are nothing if not filled with melancholy. 🙂

time & again from jacques khouri on Vimeo.