Every now and then another angry or threatening comment will crop up because of my Muhammad piece from Muslims who miss the point, and exacerbate unfortunate western perceptions of them. A sampling:

From “Muslims community” on my original video blog post:

We Muslims from all over the world celebarating antidraw Muhammad PBUH day. Don’t do this again difficulties more for you.Go to hell shitty cartoonists

Various YouTube commenters:

thats one of ur unknown dad ,bhenchod, that ur mom dont know, u fucking bastard, he should have fucked? ur mom wearing a condom, that u would have never born.

muhamad man its you son of? the bitch where are u pal you should come now and share us our sit in gay marriage

After the second one I told him to try a translator because I couldn’t even understand how I was being insulted. He responded thus:

hay muhamad its you? son of bitch where are you fucker we suppose to meet in our set in gay marrieg

The commenter is from Egypt, so I assume that’s meant to disparage me in some way, but I can’t exactly deduce how.

Today I woke up to this in my inbox, a full 8 months after my Everybody Draw Muhammad Day post:

from:          hassan <so_what0**@*****.com>
to:                luke*****@*****.com
date:           Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 8:30 AM
subject:    (Website Mailform) ur site gona banned

remove the picture of our MUHAMMAD (Peace be upon him).otherwise ur site gona be closed.i m gona take strik action

student

I’m fairly sure this is an empty threat, but I wanted to make it public just in case he tries to hack me.

It saddens me when I get comments like this on my Muhammad piece. As I wrote in May:

Freedom of speech and belief are linchpin virtues that civilized society and discourse are dependent upon. You have every right to believe that Muhammad was a prophet and that he instructed not to be depicted, and you even have the right to be offended when people don’t follow that. You do not have the right to demand that people who don’t share those beliefs adhere to them, and you remove yourself from serious discussions of respect when you threaten censorship and violence upon other people for exercising their freedoms.

I was never trying to be overtly offensive. Sure, the face I drew was intentionally goofy (and smiling), but believe me some artists took it much further. The point of Everybody Draw Muhammad Day is that in a society that values freedom of speech it is precisely those beliefs and expressions that we find distasteful that must be protected. To threaten and exact violence on those who offend beliefs they don’t even hold is barbarous in the extreme.

Respect for a belief, authority, person, or ideology must be earned. To attempt to impose it collapses the very idea of tolerance.

Studies from The Big Picture.

We’re printing up some physical copies to pitch and we thought we’d do another piece to fill out the inside cover. A darkened version will actually be printed so as to not distract from the story, but I thought I’d post the original.

Some shortcuts were taken for some of the photos (like reusing a panel from the sample page) but I’m still pretty happy with it.

Here’s the cover and pages for the pitch I’ve been working on for a while now. I was fortunate enough to be really involved with crafting the storyline and I’m very proud of how it’s developing.

And here they are with the lettering:

I’m pretty excited about this project. We’re about to start showing it around to publishers, so I’m crossing my fingers.

I’ve turned the first image into a flyer for the show that fans can download and print out/xerox and distribute at shows or just post places.

download color PDF

download black and white PDF

I started listening to this most excellent political podcast/radio show Citizen Radio. It’s exactly what I’ve been looking for and has really motivated me to get more involved. They recently went independent so they could stay free of corporate sponsors they didn’t support, so now they rely on listener donations and memberships to continue the show. Membership isn’t something I can afford at the moment, but I wanted to do what I could for them so I offered my artistic abilities and sent an unsolicited interpretation of their logo:

They were super awesome and really receptive, so I’ll be doing illustrations, cartoons, flyers, etc for them in my off time. Often I’ll think about, or worse, commit to, projects for my free time that never happen, but this is something I believe in and have had nothing but fun doing.

Even though I think it stands on its own to some extent, the second image I’ve done is a bit of an inside joke so you should really just go listen to the show to get it:

…

Hopefully someone can tell that the guy is Tony “I’d love my life back” Hayward.

The convention went well. Big thanks to anyone who came by my table. We got moved to the back of the show at the last minute due to space restrictions so we got a lot less traffic but it was still a good time. Friday was a pretty nerve-wracking, but Saturday was great and Sunday nice and chill.

Some sketches I did for folks:

Friday night there was a drink and draw at the Pour House where the artists sketched on a canvas which was auctioned on Saturday to benefit the Alzheimer’s Association. We also did sketches in some sketchbooks being passed around the con that’ll get raffled for charity at some point. My contribution:

Hy Eisman would be proud. Or abhorred. Probably both.

Here’s a t-shirt graphic I designed for birthdayshoes.com. I had a lot of fun doing it and I’m a big supporter of the site and barefoot running.

You can buy the shirts here.

Before starting on the new project I wanted to do some test panels to find the right style. It ended up being more of a process-finding exercise than a style thing, but now I feel pretty prepared for the actual pages.

Note: nothing’s going on in the page story-wise. I just made up random crap that I thought would be relevant to the book.

My girlfriend sent me this picture while she was road tripping with her friend. I couldn’t resist.

We have to do are doing Next Gen for Hallowe’en.