July 21, 2008 Bonus Blog Post
Yesterday afternoon, around four, Kathy and I bailed into her book project, "Bob Boze Bell In Black And White," which is a retrospective of the best black and white illustrations of the past 30 years. She was going to call it, "The Best of BBB In Black And White," but I started telling her how I needed to get a scan from the office of the skeleton Billy that graced the cover of True West (August 2003) because Craig S. bought the original, and she just shut me off and said, "Nope. Too complicated. We'll just change the title and you can publish that image in a future book."

Man, she's tough, but then, this is her book, based on a bet, made while we were driving out to Jeff Gordon's RV at PIR last November. The bet: she and Theresa B. at Tri Star can produce a winning book, if I would simply butt out. I told her she had a bet, and I must admit, this would be a bet I wouldn't mind losing. We'll soon find out (we're taking the boards to Tri Star on Sunday and handing off to Theresa and her crew). I told Kathy I had only one request: I don't want shadows on the art, or Photoshop tricks larding up the pages, just straight up images, warts and all.

She assured me she would talk to Theresa about it. Ha. She's so good, she could be a publisher. She never said she would, she said she'd talk to Theresa about it. I don't know if I can stand it, when we come to the cover design. I'm already getting the heeby-jeebies just thinking about letting go of that design aspect.

We got 75 captions done with me typing in the medium (mostly pen and ink, scratchboard and Grafix paper), the size, the year and notes about what I was influenced by when I did it.

Went home for lunch today, and after a vegetable omelet we went out to the studio and whipped out another 45 captions. Quite a few elicited laughter (Thomas Charles in gangsta pants, Charles Barkley ramming his big butt into an opposing player's face). When we got to this one, Kathy asked me the title and I said, "Honkytonk Bondage," but then on further thought, I came up with, "The Man Whisperer." We both laughed and I kind of stared in wonder that I had illustrated this complicated puppy. This is all pen and ink, no scratchboard knives or optical tricks, just flat out rendering. Of course, it's Honkytonk Sue calming a frisky honkytonk male while he's tied to the snubbing bedpost:



This was an illustration for the proposed graphic novel "The Man Canyon" (1989). Perhaps I need a disclaimer at the end, "No men were hurt during the making of this comic."

Or not.