Howefitz Blog

I have been a fan of Kyle Baker‘s for a while now. Actually, it’s been a decade. I remember seeing a lot of Y2K-themed books in 1999, but ‘I Die at Midnight’ popped from the shelf. It was how I ‘found’ Kyle Baker. The artwork looked more like animation cels than a comic book. And the story of a man who wants to end it all after getting dumped must have struck a chord in my 21 year old heart. The subsequent return of the girlfriend with our hero attempting to vomit the pills he just overdosed on, well, pure comic genius! It is the only Y2K book that I will still pick up and read and enjoy. (You can read the entire graphic novel for free at kylebaker.com!)

A brief explanation of the new Adult-Friendly Children’s Book feature: No doubt everyone loves Dr. Seuss, but there’s only so much Green Eggs and Ham that one adult can mentally consume. Here I will highlight the children’s books that I feel are just as note-worthy. And maybe just a bit more off the beaten path…

It’s no secret that I hate Neil Gaiman. He continuously pumps out great work, and I hate him for it. ‘Crazy Hair‘ is another such work. I brought it home to my nearly three year old, and she made me read it. Twice. This was after I read it to myself a couple of times.

The air smelled of stale pages and small children. The teenagers jostling in to the room reminded me of the wildebeasts that make short work of Mufasa, leaving Simba fatherless. I shed a tear for my daughter Calli and my unborn son. They will never know what it is like to have a father. My oldest, Kat, had betrayed them. She had led me to this pack of wolves, this den of geeky jockularity. I stood before them, notes quivering in my hand.

I was going to teach comic books to teenagers.

Kirby help me.

I continue my intention of posting things my kids do here in this blog, and measuring how much I can puff up my chest. The previous Talent In The Family post on this blog featured two colored pencil drawings of dragons by Kat (the 15 year old) that she was submitting for a mascot for Red Canyon High School.

This time around, I thought I’d present you with one of my all time pieces of hers:

The Dragon Hunters crew look for the 'World Gobbler' as their planet crumbles around them.

It seems that it’s always on the weekend that I post about children’s entertainment. That’s probably because that’s when we generally watch movies!

Last night’s selection was ‘Dragon Hunters‘, a French computer generated feature film originally titled ‘Chasseurs De Dragons’.

My 15 year old step-daughter plopped down next to me last night and said, “Ya know what would be sick?”

Unsuccessfully suppressing a shudder, I asked, “No, what would be ‘sick’?”

“If you put a gallery of my artwork on your site!”

Not one to refuse anything to my kiddos, I agreed. So for the first in what I hope will become a long series, today’s work from Katrina are a couple of designs she proposed for a logo for her school. The school is called Red Canyon High School, and their mascot is a dragon. It is an Expeditionary Learning School, sort of an experimental idea that I’m sure I’ll explore in more length in the future.

Just thought I’d play around with wordle for a minute, and look what I made!

I discovered wordle through Rebecca Bollwitt’s incredible blog Miss604.com.

With wordle you can be as restricted or as free as you like. You can enter a stream of words, or plug in your blog’s URL and it’ll automatically generate a work of art! You can then work with the colors, number of words, size of the image, etc. Pretty fun. I expect to do more with this in the future…

-Justin

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