Doodle fabric designs!

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Masheka and I spent the evening making fabric designs out of some of his doodles. Fun, no? We're going to order the fabric through Spoonflower to make stuff for this year's MOCCA art festival (June 6 and 7 in NYC).

Busy Painting Billie, or Mikhaela and Masheka Mural Madness, Pt. 2

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Here's another peak at our little collaboration piece (again, full details to be revealed later). I'm terrified of heights and working on a scaffold caused me to cry in terror a few times. But getting to paint Billie Holiday with a big flower in her hair made up for it, sort of.

You might wonder whose drawing/cartoon style that is--it's both. I did some of the caricature sketches and Masheka did some (well, most) but then we both played with inking them so it was one consistent Mashekaela style.

Masheka and Mikhaela Mural madness, pt. 1

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I can't show you the whole mural or explain what it's for yet, but here's Masheka painting Will Rogers...

Mikhaela in the news: "Political cartoonists sing hail to the chief"

My cartoon "Bush vs. My Cat" (above) is currently featured in the exhibit "Bush Leaguers: Cartoonists Take On the White House" (at American University's Katzen Museum in DC, on view through July 29). I've even been mentioned in an article about the piece in the Examiner:

Through “Bush vs. My Cat,” freelancer Mikhaela Reid envisions a battle of wits. One of several women selected for the show, this hot hand is among the growing number of female cartoonists.

Full article here (warning: link is to a PDF).

I was also included in a story in Editor and Publisher about the AAEC convention panel on cartoonists and blogging. I was actually in the audience, but panelist Tom Tomorrow kindly suggested I might have two cents to put in:

Mikhaela Reid, speaking from the audience, said cartoonists such as herself who aren't daily newspaper staffers often want to do a blog because it helps build readership. She added that freelance or self-syndicated creators may not do as many editorial cartoons each week as staff creators do, so a blog can be "a valuable place to vent" when not drawing a cartoon that day.

Which I did.

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.

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.

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).

Other Heroes Art Show Opening today in Jackson, Missisippi

Cartoonists With Attitude members Keith Knight, Masheka Wood and myself all have work in this show, though Masheka and I won't be able to get to Mississippi to see it. Here are the details from the curators:

Other Heroes: African American comics creators, characters, and archetypes opens today, on Thursday, April 5th! There will be an opening reception for the show Apr. 5 from 4-6pm in the Jackson State University Gallery, located in the Dollye M.E. Robinson School of Liberal Arts Building, Jackson, MS. It will feature a gallery talk by the curators of the show, John Jennings and Damian Duffy. Everyone's invited. If you can make it, bring yourself and some guests. We can guarantee this will be an unprecedented and outstanding exhibition of comics art. With artists like these how could it be anything but?

Meanwhile, the Other Heroes Catalog is ON SALE NOW! Available for purchase online, and chock full of all the fantastic art from the show, the catalog also features essays from a serious line up of comics creators and scholars. The contents are:

• -intrOH!- Damian Duffy w/ John Jennings
• -E. Sims Campbell: Comics Pioneer - R.C. Harvey
• -Da Rise of Da Blackuns and Da Black Age of Comics - Turtel Onli
• -Jackie Ormes Biography - Nancy Goldstein
• -Here Come the Sisters! - Prof. Bill Foster
• -Somewhere Between Here and There is Me - Alex Simmons
• -Finding Other Heroes - John Jennings w/ Damian Duffy

178 pages. $50.00. All proceeds past printing costs donated to Scholarship America's Disaster Relief Fund, helping low income students displaced by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita seek post secondary educations.

We're excited to finally get it all together, and we hope you are too. Please help spread the word about the show and the catalog. If you have any thoughts or questions, feel free to contact the curators: Damian Duffy, duff@eyetrauma.net, 217-355-8569 and John Jennings, jayjay@uiuc.edu, 217-244-8539.