I’m still working away at the new illustrations for The Lair of the Clockwork Book – mostly – but I had to set aside a little time to finish this piece, an entry for a Starbucks contest at DeviantArt. Really, I had to. I had enough time invested in it already that it would have been wasteful to be more responsible and stick to what I really should have been doing. Besides, there’s some neat swag. And I do like my swag.

Whatever happens in the contest, though, I have plans for at least one of the elements in this picture… because shortly before I got to work on the Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual site I had an idea for a series of travel posters from the Retropolis Travel Bureau. I still want to do those, but the Thrilling Tales have turned out to be a pretty demanding project. So I haven’t been able to, yet.

But anyhow, on the Thrilling Tales front I am indeed gradually filling up my buffer of illustrations for the Clockwork Book, so that before too long I should be able to go back to Part Two of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS as planned. But since I’m late in filling that buffer it’s now getting used as I go: in order to have my roughly 32 unseen pages banked in advance, I have to keep making even more till the buffer’s full. The longer it takes, the more I have to do. Math is cruel.

Anyway, at the right is a little snippet from something that’s coming up for The Lair of the Clockwork Book. I know you need proof, and I don’t blame you: it’s because I’ve got these shifty eyes.

Over at Pappy’s Golden Age Comics you can see two different Gray Morrow comics from 1965’s Creepy #3. As Pappy rightly observes they’re interesting partly because they’re so different, although drawn at about the same time.

Morrow was all over these old Warren magazines – and of all the things I wish I still had, well, those are high up on the list – and his was a familiar hand on paperback books and their frontispieces back in the day. Very nice stuff.

Yep, it’s time for another easily comprehended T-Shirt sale at The Retropolis Transit Authority and Saga Shirts: just in time for lawn mowing or machete season, depending on what sort of yardwork you have ahead of you.

From now until Sunday, the eleventh of June, you can save $5 on any t-shirt order just by using the coupon code DOGDAYS when you check out. There are no minimum orders. It’s dead simple. You can order a single shirt if you like and still chop (or mow) a staggering, stupendous, superlative five dollars off its price.