Scott Pilgrim & the Infinite Sadness: I started putting the notes and outline together May 19, 2005. Drew the first interior pages starting July 19, 2005. A few hiatuses in there, the big ones being September (long driving trip to the southern U.S., including SPX) and November (we moved to the country and painted and fixed up a lot of stuff, so I hardly touched the book until December).

Anyway, I got done on April 4th, 2006. If anyone has time to kill and wants to figure out how many days that was or whatever, I'd be interested to know.

For what it's worth, I desperately wanted to push the release date back last August, but James didn't let me. He is now very sorry. :(

I'm working towards an outline for Vol 4 now, and doing some promo art. And I have a few outstanding pieces that I owe people which I'm going to try to do ASAP. I might redesign my website, too.

This is the cover. Click on it to go to flickr where you can see it a bit bigger. That's all you get until it's out, though. Tentative street date: May 24.

The Fiery Furnaces album: I have been listening to it for about a month now. At first I hated it, but then I grew to like it, as has been the case with most of their other stuff. But one of the big things I liked about them was their lyrics, which have previously been weird, obtuse narratives about a million different things. On this album they are mostly either (a) repetitive nursery-rhyme type things, or (b) played backwards so you can't understand them.

My other problem with this album is that he chops up the songs all weirdly, and THEN presents the nice sweet straightforward edits of them at the end of the album! What's with that? So willfully difficult! The straightforward version of "Benton Harbor Blues" is such a great song. Sticks in my head all the live-long day. I'm sure I would have liked the long, cut-up, "difficult" version better if they hadn't SHOWN me the wonderful breezy pop version. Whatever that means.

Anyway, I still like it, and I plan to buy it or whatever. I like the cover.