Rehabilitating Mr. Wiggles

It’s been a pretty busy week. On Tuesday I got a fun illustration assignment for The Pittsburgh City Paper that had me doing their cover and four interior illustrations for the annual Summer Guide. The interiors were due on Thursday and the cover on Friday so it was kind of a tight, although definitely doable, deadline. I handed the last of it off late last night and have been spending today recouping, watching Dr. Phil (So what, I like that show. Shut up.), eating leftover Thai, and working on a novel jacket design project for HarperCollins. I keep hoping for some down time so I can work on some of the projects for myself I’d really like to get done—the Mr. Wiggles comic strip animations and new t-shirts, the movie I’m trying to write, and the graphic novels/books I’m developing—but I guess being busy is good in this business. At least I’ll soon be able to afford the new solid gold grill I’ve been dreaming about. It has the letters “N” and “S” in diamonds on the two front teeth and the rest are embossed with dollar signs. Goddamn, it’s gonna be fucking awesome!!!

I had an interesting offer come my way this week as well. I’m not sure if I should talk about it or not so I won’t name them until if and when it’s official, but a very cool, well-read website asked me if I would be interested in writing a bi-weekly column for them about comics, art, and design. I told them I absolutely would. I’ve got to get back to them this weekend with some ideas about what exactly the column would be about and see if that gels with what they were thinking. Hopefully, it will, because I think it would be sweet. Almost as sweet as my solid gold grill! Holy shit, just thinking about it makes my teeth ooze rainbows! Rainbows!!! It’s like a gay pride convention in my mouth! Wait—that didn’t come out right. Shit, I hope my parents don’t read this.

I’ve got a brand spankin’ new book that just hit the streets a few days ago: Yet Another NASTYbook! The book is a collection of ultra-short stories for young adults authored by the deliciously surreal and wicked Barry Yourgrau and published by the fine folks at HarperCollins. I art directed, designed, and illustrated the entire thing. It’s a pretty fun package. A lot of the design of the book interacts with the stories in a playful manner. Some stories use really tiny fonts, some run only a few words on each page, and some are even printed backwards so you have to read them in a mirror. I think there were something like 25-30 illustrations I did for the book? I can’t remember exactly. Anyway, so far it’s gotten good reviews by Kirkus and is currently featured on Barnes and Nobles as one of their Noteworthy Children’s Books. I have a few sample pages posted in the design section of my portfolio site over at neilswaab.com. If you’re interested in checking out an actual physical copy, it should be in all the big chains by now.

In general, I’m a pretty trusting guy. I tend to take everyone for their word and believe them to be pretty decent folk until they give me a reason not to. That being said, there are some groups of people I just don’t trust. I don’t trust men with two first names, men with ponytails, people who like Rod Stewert’s music far too much to be normal, and anyone who works in advertising. I know it’s wrong to generalize like that, but in my life experiences, I’ve found it to be true. My advice to you is that if you ever meet a copywriter named Michael Frank who has a long, flowing ponytail and is really into “Forever Young”, you run. You run as far as your little legs will take you.

There’s a short interview with me up on Associated Content. Check it out!