Testing new blog look/title--thoughts?

I'm trying to do a redesign of this whole site in preparation for my book launch (which will probably happen sometime in June...) so I'm testing a new look and name for the blog. It used to be "Mikhaela's News Blog", then it became "Boiling Over", but that didn't make much sense unless you knew my comic strip was called "The Boiling Point." So I may just give it the same name as the strip. Thoughts?

My current annoyance is that the image now up top of this blog is awfully large, file-size-wise, and takes time to load. I'm going to work on slicing it up or reducing it somehow.

Also, I'm pondering a switch from Blogger to WordPress. I briefly tried to do the Expression Engine thing a while ago, but I don't have time to code from scratch and there really aren't nearly as many templates and plugins for EE as there are for WordPress, plus WordPress is free.

Read more after the jump...

Masheka's book cover: Deep Doodle

Shhhhh, I'm on Masheka's computer so I can give you a sneak preview of his book cover! Click to enlarge and see if you can find the tiny Masheka, Mikhaela and Riley (our cat) doodles.

Read more after the jump...

Book covers, nearly done now!

Sorry I haven't posted my new cartoons lately, but putting together a collection of cartoons like this in less than a week is no joke. When it's all done I'm going to sleep for about two days then post all my cartoons for your viewing pleasure. Meantime, here are the front and back cover + spine of my soon-to-be-released book (click to enlarge, of course).

Read more after the jump...

Quasi-final book cover design...

This is my last post for the night. I need some sleep! (See previous posts for sketch and earlier version of the drawing).

Read more after the jump...

Book cover sketch in progress

So after years of selling little black & white mini-comics xeroxed booklets of my cartoons, I'm finally graduating to a Real (albeit self=published) Book Collection. It'll have a full-cover cover, perfect binding and nice interior grayscale printing. Content-wise, it will feature over 100 of my best cartoons, plus extra bonus cartoons, drawings and historical Mikhaela material never reproduced on this website or in my previous booklets. And an introduction by Ted Rall!

I decided to stick with the Attack of the 50-Foot Mikhaela concept I've been using for my website, but completely redrawing and retooling the image (still using the pretty hilarious photos my friend Stephanie took where I pretended a Beanie Babie alligator was a tiny George W.)

Read more after the jump...

New Illustration: Bringing Down Rumsfeld

Here's an illustration I did recently for the cover of the Metro Times (Detroit) last month, for a story called "Bringing Down Rumsfeld": You can't really see this small (click to enlarge) but those textures in the sky are from a shiny piece of dress fabric I scanned, and the ground texture is from a tweed wool skirt I sewed a while back (I scanned it, didn't actually cut it up since I still wear it). And here's how it looked with the logo:

Read more after the jump...