Neil Gaiman and The Bean Book

This past week, on Tuesday, Neil Gaiman tweeted:

19:01 Things that make me happy: Larry Marder is bringing out a new BEANWORLD book! 15 years after the last. bit.ly/67VO1N #

19:04 Larry Marder's Beanworld is a most peculiar comic book experience, a mashup of Jack Kirby, Native American myth, Marcel Duchamp, and R Crumb #

20:04 I should have known: the Beanworld creator is @larrymarder in the Twitterworld. #

And those are words that made me happy too.

Which now, brings us to this:

You see, once upon a time, long long ago, in a land far, far away, Cory and I had breakfast with Neil Gaiman.

(Okay, so you can see it was in 1992 and we were all in Chicago. I'm pretty sure Steve Bissette was there too.)

It was on this occassion that I hit up Neil for a sketch in "The Bean Book."
What's the Bean Book?
It's a 5 3/4" x 8 1/2" black sketchbook that used to be so common on the convention circuit.
Oh, they still exist.
But they are far less common nowadays.

The rules of my book were simple:
"Draw anything you'd like but please have it make some reference to beans."

I carried it around for years.
1986 to 1994 to be exact.

After it filled up, I put the entire project aside.
Last year I bought a new sketch book with the intention of starting a second round....but I keep forgetting to bring the book with me when I travel.

So.
I guess I'm going to add two things 2010's list of things to do in order to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Beanworld.

First.
Scan and post the multitude of amazing pages from Bean Book One.
And really so many of them really are incredible.

Two.
See if I can get a second Bean Book up and running.

But I think today is a good day to give a look-see at what is in its pages by showcasing Neil's sketch.