April 8, 2005
Got ink all over my hands. The curse of a left-handed draftsman. Been to the bathroom twice to clean up. Just finished a scratchboard of Wyatt Earp blazing away outside Fly's Boarding House. Good smoke effect. Sweet mustaches, the trick being to go lighter than expected and don’t be afraid to cover the lower lip. I cribbed the pose from a two-part book series on Spaghetti Westerns. Lots of great imagery I had never seen before.

And speaking of the resurrection of the Spaghetti Western, Salma Hayek and Penelope Cruz have finished filming Bandidas in Durango, Mexico and it's supposed to be a Hogleg Heaven production. With those two honeys it should be. Steve Zahn (That Thing You Do, Sahara) is also in it. I hope they can pull it off. It seems like such a natural: a female buddy picture a la Sergio Leone. Ay-Yi-Yi!

Our own Phil Spangenberger is getting a Golden Boot this year for all his work in Westerns. There isn’t a more deserving guy around.

"Beany Bob" Steinhilber has a film debuting tonight at the Phoenix Film Festival called That's My Terrorist. It’s animated. Bob is the artist who lettered the title for Classic Gunfights and for my Wyatt Earp, Billy the Kid and Doc Holliday books.

Finished a book proposal for The 66 Kid this afternoon. It's a combination story of growing up on Route 66 and how that led to my obsession with all things Billy the Kid.

For some reason our foreign distribution sell-thru as gone through the roof. The Dale Evans issue (December) is the issue that spiked, tripling in sales all over Europe. Don’t quite know why, but something happened.

Talked to Terry Goddard about the White Hat piece of art he wants for the Attorney General's office. He wants a courthouse in it. I don't mind. More of a challenge. I may drive down to Florence to sketch theirs. It's probably the most Old Arizonan of the state's courthouses. I recommended we do a series of seriographs with John Armstrong. Terry agreed, and we are going down to look at Armstrong-Prior next week. They have hand-presses and do chine collet also. Great little are techniques which I'll explain later.

So the doctor told me yesterday I've got too much iron and to watch what I eat because so much processed food is fortified with iron. Lo and behold I looked at a box of Grape Nuts (my favorite cereal) this morning and it has 90% iron, although, it may mean that’s 90% of the daily recommended blah blah, but I don’t know. Now I’m iron-anoid. Like I needed another paranoia problem.

Going to dinner tonight with Wonderful Russ and his wife Wendy. Got big plans for this weekend. We'll see. So did Custer.

"There are lots of ways to become a failure, but never taking a chance is the most successful."
—Harvey Mackay