Oh, you know, life and all that

Wednesday! And there’s a Dicebox page, or the large part of one. (permalink)

There are a few reasons for me not to have gotten a full page done. And here’s one; I said I had lots to report last week, which is true, but can really be summed up in one statement: I’m pregnant.

Say hello to our now and future daughter:

This picture is from her landmark 20 week ultrasound yesterday (she has all her organs, we’re so proud!) Her ETA is October 31st.

This is my explanation for my somewhat erratic Dicebox updates, unanswered email and lack of internet presence. Well, along with the day job and other factors, the Kid just added another obstacle. And will probably continue to mess around with my schedule and plans for the near future.

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I have been doing things…

Some of the things I’ve been doing and not mentioning here are Dicebox updates. Though I’ve actually had help in that department: here is Billy Mudron’s The Illustrated Dicebox. And my updates, including today’s, can be found here. (Note: all of the above is NSFW)

But what’s been keeping me really busy these past few weeks (besides the day job) is my work as part of the Stumptown Comics Fest organizing committee.

As you all probably know, Stumptown was this past weekend and it went really swell. I’ve added my photos to the Stumptown Comics Festival 2008 Pool but have no real report to make. Instead, I direct you to the observations of others: Dylan’s, Ivy’s, Bill’s, Sara’s, Barry’s and Brenna’s - part 1, part 2 and part 3. More reports are appearing about the web, you can find some press reviews right here.

I was actually out of it most of the weekend and missed a lot of great things, including most of what was offer in the exhibit hall. One of the events I deeply regret having missed was the Comics Art Battle at Cosmic Monkey Comics Saturday night.

Photo by stutefish

Above is a great picture of Team Web: Christopher Baldwin, Dylan Meconis, Barry Deutsch and Bill Mudron. Or, as I like to call them, my people. Actually these folks really are my people, I have shared residence (and a bathroom) with all of them at one point or another. Nevermind than Dylan, Barry and I all updates our comics on Wednesday and take part in the same “collective storytelling experience” (aka, a role playing game) Oh, hey, and all four have done Dicebox fill-ins for me. Crazy.

It might be later than you think!

Or, why I hate Daylight Savings Time.

Okay, in other news, I finally got my Dicebox update done for this week, being a revamp of Part 7: Chapter 3. And there are notes. And, cause I promised, the old pages.

As you might notice,Scenes are Chapters now, and what were Chapters are now Parts (I’ll rename the archive pages appropriately as I revamp). And these pages are far from being from the beginning, as they are pages 192-195.

This was so I could include them in the current show at the PCPA Art Bar curated by Kaebel Hashitani:

MEANWHILE…: An Exhibition of Comic Book Art, featuring artists from the Stumptown Comics Fest, a collection of comic book pages, covers and crossover art. Featuring artwork by Ryan Alexander-Tanner, Jon Ascher, Matthew Clark, Paul Guinan, Seamus Heffernan, Garret Izumi, Indigo Kelleigh, Carolyn Main, Kip Manley, Jenn Manley Lee, Larry Marder, Dylan Meconis, Erika Moen, Bill Mudron, Sarah Oleksyk, Jesse Reklaw, Craig Thompson, Jim Valentino and John C. Worsley.

The ArtBar and Bistro inside the Antoinette Hatfield Hall. 1111 SW Broadway at Main St. Portland, OR.

The art will be up for the next couple of months. The opening reception was this past Thursday–which I had to miss myself due to a fever. I hear it was swank.

And, if you’re reading this in LiveJournal, you’ll notice a cross-post footer at the end of this post. That’s because I have a brand new website, JennManleyLee.com. This will be replacing the ol’ Jennworks site–I’ll be implementing the redirect code and everything later today. It’s a brand new design with a much more satisfactory art gallery.

This only took me, oh, four months to do and it’s still not 100%–some wonky formatting and broken links in the early journal entries from my old Moveable Type blog among other things. But I’ve figured out most of the bugs and believe I’m done breaking the code. So.

‘Cause let’s face it, books are sexy. As are maps.

It’d be very easy for me to essentially become a mirror site for BibliOdyssey, the excellent book art blog, because I just get so darn excited about so many of the things PK manages to find: A Physician’s Handbook from the 1450s, spirit books, cyanotypes, Buddhist tantra art, Leonard Baskin’s work with Gehenna Press and so on.The samples seen above are from two of today’s entries, one on British Geographical and Trignometrical Surveying History (image on the left) full of nifty maps and survey imagery and a link to more from the collection at the British Library.

And the other focusing on the Alchemy Notebook found at Ninth Wave Design Blog, created in a Moleskin journal. The description from the artist, L Laughy who seems delightfully obsessed with Moleskin journals in general:

These are the pages from my ongoing project titled “Alchemy Notebook”. I have been creating this series of images in a Moleskine Classic Pocket Sketchbook using a variety of materials. These images are a visual exploration of some of the ideas I have been reading in Jungian psychology, specifically those that draw from the rich archetypes of Alchemy.

Beyond all the maps and allegorical drawings in this art book, I’m particularly taken with the cypher table, the cypher wheel and the pendulum diagrams. All in all, a beautiful object that makes me wistful for the time to try something similar.

Stupid text tricks

Actually some sophisticated java applications that allow you to interact with text in interesting ways: chronotext.org. I’m particularly entranced with Sketchbook on the Book and The Book of Sand. (found via BibliOdyssey)