Hoka-Hoka Jeff Smith!

Oh man.

In all the excitement of the last few weeks, I've overlooked something very important.
Time to fix that.

I want to thank my ol' pal, Jeff Smith, creator of BONE and RASL, for writing the introduction to "Remember Here When You Are There!"

While we were working on the first hardcovers, I told my editor, Diana Schutz, that it was my dream to have Jeff write the intro to my comeback book.
She agreed. Great idea!

However, I confess I was a bit nervous asking Jeff for this favor.
Even though we have known each other for a very long time, I know how busy he is and how many requests of this sort he gets on an almost daily basis.
So I waited until the very last moment to ask.

How last moment?

Uh...Diana writing and saying that solicitations are due now and and asking if Jeff going to write the intro so it can be solicited properly.

Uh-oh.
That's what I get for being so procrastinatingly shy.

So I wrote and asked Jeff, and asked him if he could find the time to do it, and how I really regretted waiting until the last possible moment to do so.

His answer was brief and to the point.

"Lar, if it wasn’t last minute, it wouldn’t be comics.
Of course I’ll write it. I wouldn’t let anybody else touch it!"

What guy!

I can not begin to tell you how wide my grin was when the piece came in and I read for the first time his words "Beanworld is a mixture of Krazy Kat, Tinker Toys, and Haiku… "

Cracked me up then, cracked me up just now.

So a very big Hoo-Hoo-HA & a Hoka-Hoka HEY to Jeff plus a hearty Wahoolazuma for the great news that The Cartoonist is going to be aired on PBS.

Oh yeah, the above drawing, as you can probably figure out, is from The Bean Book.

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.