Tip of the Quill: A Journal

Category Archives: Life

Hear This Now: The Winterpills.

Courtesy of the lovely Small Beer Press newsblog comes my discovery of a new favorite group. Ever heard of the Winterpills? No? Then get thyself over to their official site or their Virb.com page and give their stuff a listen. Close harmonies, beautifully wistful and poetic lyrics (as SBP notes, yes, “You were born immortal […]

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A great year for meeting people.

If you had told me when I was sixteen that later in my life I would, in the course of approximately one year, spend some genuine facetime with Neil Gaiman, James Morrow, Mike Mignola, Kelly Link and Jonathan Carroll I would have said that you were nuts. (Well, I would have also said “Who’s Kelly […]

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Death of a black bag.

It saddens me to announce that this morning I was forced to part company with something dear to me, something that had been with me a long time. We had literally seen the world together, but in the end, it wasn’t enough. When you come home from a trip and one of your cats pees […]

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Graphic Journalism.

One day this week I came into the lab and discovered a big, hefty box on my office doorstep. In it was the large order I’d sort of forgotten that I’d placed from the big huge sale that Top Shelf was having earlier, including a big stack of the diary comics of James Kochalka, Superstar. […]

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Money well spent.

There are an uncertain number of things in this world that are worth every penny you spend on them. This summer I’ve been blessed with two of them: our trip to Greece in July (especially the extra time Laura and I spent on the island of Santorini) and now, as of this afternoon, the two […]

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Greece 2008 Part III: Athens.

I carry a small black Moleskine with me at all times with five colored pens clipped to its outside: black, red, green, blue and purple. Every week I recopy my to-do list from an old page to a new page, gritting my teeth and grumbling as I transcribe all the stuff that I’m meaning to […]

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Greece 2008 Part I: To Santorini.

I’ve been meaning to write up my thoughts on this month’s trip to Greece for weeks now, but things immediately became so hectic upon my return that it’s kept slip-sliding down the to-do list. (Case in point: I’m writing this over my lunch hour, which is falling at 2:30.) Things are good, mind you – […]

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On George Carlin.

Fuck. George Carlin was one of my all-time favorite comics. When I was in high school, my friends and I used to listen to Carlin and Denis Leary while we were out driving around. When you’re a teenager in the middle-of-nowhere Ohio, driving around listening to stuff is what you do. We’d drive to Akron […]

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The tranquility of travel.

I never would have thought that I’d be hearing advice on the tranquility of anything from Uncle Warren Ellis, but there you go. Me, I enjoy traveling as well, except for the fact that I still feel like I’m paying penance for making a friend’s cousin miss her flight when I was a freshman in […]

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Where to begin?

The last week has been an absolute blur. There are many, many things I should be posting about, but much of it is simply too big to fully report, so I’ll take a stab at some of the general stuff here. First of all, the Julius Schwartz lecture was an amazing success. We sold out […]

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