January 31, 2008
Deena got back her photos from her trip to Peru and I purloined two that showed a demented dog, standing on a roofline. I was immediately inspired to add this to a scene for our graphic novel: as Mickey Free rides into Los Muertos, he encounters a similiar devil dog leering at him from the top of a burned out adobe:



As I have been developing this sequence I've been studying aerial photos of Old West towns. Here's a study of a photograph taken of Tombstone from Comstock Hill in 1882 (bottom). Trying to capture the rocky terrain and the footpaths and roads leading into town:



For quite a while now I've been studying mules and their unique gate:



Two crazy incidents while on the trail of mules. The first happened when I read the recent biography of cartoonist Charlie Schulz and discovered that his ex-wife and her daughter are big mule proponents. Two nights ago while perusing a book I got last year, "The Natural Superiority of Mules" by John Hauer, I noticed there is an entire chapter on "Logical Long Ears: Resistance-Free Training Techniques" by Meredith Hodges. Well, that's Charlie Schulz's step-daughter! I had been drawing from several photos in this chapter and they are photos of her riding her mules. Amazing.

It gets better. In October of 1995 I was working on my second, revised edition of The Illustrated life & Times of Billy the Kid and I was in Lincoln, New Mexico doing photo research. I found myself eating like a horse multiple times a day, but I was losing weight. When I got back to Phoenix I went to a doctor and discovered I had developed a hyper-active thyroid. On my way back to Phoenix, I stopped in El Paso to visit with my friend Paul Northrop and he took me out to visit his newest member of the family, and he asked me pose with "Boze," and here we are:

A Hyper-Active Jackass On A Jackass


Small world, no?

"“I’m not gonna tell you anything but the truth, but there is a lot of the truth I’m not gonna tell you.”
—Benny Binion, legendary Horseshoe Casino owner