John Martz

Remux

Out of procrastination comes another Muxtape.  The tracklist:

1. Ramones - Needles & Pins
2. Crooked Fingers - Hurricane
3. Graham Coxon - You & I
4. Martin Tielli - Cold Blooded Old Times
5. Bob Dylan - Moonlight
6. Vetiver - To Baby
7. The Beatles - I’ve Just Seen a Face
8. Camera Obscura - Lloyd, I’m Ready to Be Heartbroken
9. The Magnetic Fields - If There’s Such a Thing as Love
10. Leon Redbone - She’s My Gal
11. Woody Allen and his New Orleans Jazz Band - Swing a Lullaby

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Time-lapsed illustration

Here’s the illustration I created for The Box Salon, and you can view the time-lapsed creation below.  The inking stage turned out a little blurry after uploading it to Vimeo, so I clearly need to tinker with my compression settings next time.

Timpe Lapsed Illustration from John Martz on Vimeo.

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Catch me at the Box Salon

I keep forgetting to post this, but I’ll be presenting some of my work at the Box Salon this Wednesday evening (July 9) at the Rivoli here in Toronto.

The Box is a quarterly salon night of readings, performances, screenings, interventions and networking that aims to bring diverse communities and audiences into an environment of artistic and social intermingling.

I’m still not entirely certain what I’ll be presenting, but it will most likely be a hodge podge of comics, illustrations, movie poems, and subway anagrammery.  If I can find the time between now and then I’m going to try to put together a video/screencap of an illustration being completed from start to finish, which will no doubt work its way onto this site eventually.  Recent deadlines have pushed my procrastination to new limits!

Anyhow, there’ll be plenty of varying presentations of art, music, and words, so it promises to be fun.  See you there?

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Cottage sketching

I’ve uploaded some sketches from a recent marathon drawing session up north at a friend’s cottage.  Check ‘em out at Flickr.

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FiveRuns makeover

I contributed a number of illustrations for a recent makeover of the entire FiveRuns website. The illustrations were art directed by the handsome and talented Scott Boms of Wishingline Design Studio. FiveRuns delivers management solutions for Rails developers, and it was fun to create a series of mascots/characters and various illustrations throughout the entire site.

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Doug Wright Award nomination

Yesterday the nominations for the Doug Wright Awards for Canadian cartooning were announced. I’m thrilled to have my yearbook project, Excelsior 1968, nominated for the new Pigskin Peters Annual Award for Non-Narrative Canadian Cartooning (what a mouthful!).  The new award celebrates works that are experimental in nature, or don’t follow a traditional narrative structure.  Cool beans!

It’s an honour knowing that my work was selected by the likes of Seth, Chester Brown, and Jeet Heer to be included for consideration. I’m nominated alongside some tough competition: Emily Holton’s Little Lessons in Safety, Julie Morstad’s Milk Teeth, and Chris von Szombathy’s Fire Away—my book being the only self-published one in the group.  Wish me luck!  The ceremony is on August 14th here in Toronto.

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Home from New Orleans

I’m home from another trip to the National Cartoonists Society Reuben Awards. This year the awards were held in New Orleans, and one of the highlights of the trip was spending a day building a house with Habitat for Humanity.  There were plenty of jokes about the structural integrity of a house built by cartoonists, but at the end of the day I think we were all pleased with the effort we put in, and humbled by the entire experience. The subsequent tour through the devastated lower 9th ward where the levees broke during Hurricane Katrina was especially sobering. 

It was great to catch up with all the friends I’ve made over the last few years, and spend time with some new faces as well.  I was particularly glad to finally meet The Daily Cartoonist’s Alan Gardner, and Cul De Sac artist Richard Thompson.

There are some photo-rich updates from the weekend online from Mike Lynch, MAD’s Tom Richmond, and The Daily Cartoonist. Eagle-eyed viewers may spot a certain robot cartoonist in these links.

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New Six Chix website

I recently designed and put together a new website for my good friend Rina Piccolo and the five other ladies behind the collaborative all-girls comic strip Six Chix.

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Teen Meme

Couldn’t help but participate in the draw yourself as a teenager meme floating around the net. 

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Warm-Up Drawings Reach 100

As you can see from the previous entry, I’ve reached 100 in my series of warm-up drawings.  Check ‘em out on Flickr or in my portfolio.  It seems like just yesterday the series reached 50. 

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Design Inspiration interview

Oops, I keep forgetting to link to this. Jeff Andrews interviewed me a while back for the Design Inspiration website, and the interview is now online.  LEARN! Startling facts. DISCOVER! The secret to long life. BEHOLD! My hairy face.

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Huffington Post on Excelsior

I’m tickled by this surprisingly thoughtful review of Excelsior 1968 by Jeremy Axelrod of the Huffington Post. Some choice quotes:

On its own terms, though, the project is evocative. Something about sampling that convergence of lives—a Venn diagram of bygone adolescence—has always had a voyeuristic (even poignant) appeal, and this is no less true of Martz’s blandly exact adaptation.

And:

Martz bills his mass-portraiture as an exercise, but it’s also a prodigious visual study of a small universe of personalities, now long dissipated to cubicles, fortunes, graves.

Well, golly.

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Links on a Thursday

Some quick links for this Thursday afternoon

More Yearbook Projects
I’m thrilled with the positive reception to my crazy yearbook project. I mailed nearly 40 books today, each with a drawing inside, and the orders continue to roll in slowly, so thanks to everyone! Now, I am not the first person obsessive compulsive enough to attempt an exercise like this.  John Ralston’s The Liner, was the first such project I was aware of, and here are two others: Joshua Bienko’s The Girls of Delta Zeta, and most recently, The Beauty of Graduation by Justin White.  I’m glad I’m not the only one with this obsession.

Cardiggins
Looking for greeting cards? My good friend Becca has started making cards with calm, reflective photographs on them: Cardiggins.  Perfect for when you want to say, “Happy Birthday,” but also, “Relax, pal.”

Logo Design Love
I helped judge the Logo Design Love Awards, a competition for blog logos, and you can check out the winners, and read my commentary.

Plagiarized Illustration Book
This is disgusting: Darren Di Lieto was tipped off that hundreds of illustrators’ work and the interviews he conducted with them for the LCS have been plagiarized in a book. I’ve been interviewed by Darren as well, but it looks like the book was published before then, so my work escaped the poaching. Darren has photos of each page of the book. Ugh.

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Yearbook Project: Excelsior 1968

Last year I redrew my mother’s entire high school yearbook from 1968—over a thousand heads. Good cartooning, to me, is all about simplification, and this was a fun experiment in distilling each person’s likeness down to a simple cartoon version and learning to draw efficiently, with both speed and as few details as possible.

I’ve published the project as a book called Excelsior 1968, which I debuted at last summer’s Toronto Comic Arts Festival. You can buy the book from my new online shop, and you can see entire thing over at Flickr.

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Sir Mux-a-lot

I finally jumped on the Muxtape bandwagon.  Enjoy my mix...er, mux… robotjohnny.muxtape.com

1. The Dramatics - Get up and Get Down
2. Aretha Franklin - Save Me
3. Solomon Burke - Cry to Me
4. Otis Redding - Respect
5. Carla Thomas - I’ll Bring It Home to You
6. Shirley Ellis - The Nitty Gritty
7. Lee Dorsey - Holy Cow
8. Elvis Costello & The Attractions - Secondary Modern
9. Nick Lowe - I’m a Mess
10. She & Him - You Really Got a Hold On Me
11. Leon Redbone - She Ain’t Rose
12. Ike & Tina Turner & The Ikettes - Goodbye, So Long

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