Dov’s travels have taken him from his ancestral homestead of Gay Paree to London where he will be staying with the Grandmother of a friend from high school. Kind of creepy.

-Ben

Our writing collaboration (the way I see it anyways) goes like this:
1.    I feed Dov raw material like hibachi chef.
2.    Dov produces the first draft in segments (usually turning out 5 pages of manuscript every ten days or so). This is a lot of heavy lifting, so I have to give him the props for his plots..
3.    I give feedback and we begin to choose our battles over which jokes get changed to what. We fight tooth and nail over lousy puns and tasteless language. Sometimes we’ll seek the opinions of arbitrators. Then what happens is everybody agrees with one of us, but the other STILL doesn’t think it’s funny. Fuck it.

We usually do the art with  full text on the boards, so whoever does the pencils gets first say. This is where the final blows over semantics are struck. Whichever of us scans  the artwork just takes off while the getting is good and starts lettering the book with the computer while the other does some really tedious task. I always try to scan the pages, that way we get to see MY jokes FIRST.

Anyways, for all you nerds out there, we stole a line from ‘Ferris Bueller’ on this page.

Enjoy,

Ben

The work on this book both follows up and moves beyond our previous collaboration on “Dingleberry Blues” (http://benvsdov.com/dovs_comics/db_index.html). We plan on sticking to poop-themed titles until the ideas stop coming.

We’re going with a Cerebus-style production assembly on this one; that’s to say that Dov draws the figures and I handle the backgrounds. We’ve been drawing and writing together since elementary school and ‘TP&TP” is our most elaborate scheme to date.

A page a week!

–but I’ll give you three to start things off…

-Ben

Dear Vaughn Bode,

I was fifteen when I first saw your work. It was like the brightest light bulb I had ever seen went off in my head. Lush, vibrant and toothsome, your cartoon universe is a place that I’ve visited with joyful satisfaction time and again. You’ve been gone since 1975 but the spirit of your work has been kept alive thanks to the sweat of your son, Mark and graffiti writers the world over who made you their Godfather. They painted your characters on the sides of trains and drew endless inspiration from your typographical stylings. Since you were such a big sexy perv, I thought it would be apropos to wish you a very happy (would be) 69th birthday.

Ben

http://www.markbode.com/site/vaughnbodetwo.html

Or so we’ve been lead to believe.

When I was a youngin I used to walk around comic conventions with my portfolio and ask pros to critique my work. A couple butt faces would flip through my pages, find a break in the 180 degree rule, and then scoff at how I’d never make it in this industry.

The truth is that the 180 degree rule CAN be broken. What?? BLASPHEMY you say?!! I’ll explain…

The point of the 180 degree rule is to prevent confusion amongst readers…but what if you want your readers to be confused? What?? BRILLIANT?!! Allow me to continue…

Breaking 180 degrees can be used to great effect during scenes in which the protagonist of the story is shocked by a certain event. This creates a symbiosis between the reader and the protagonist because they are both experiencing the same emotion…confusion.

A great cartoonist who breaks 180 degrees all the time is Osamu Tezuka. I attached a fight scene he did from “Buddha” below.

The last panel on this page breaks the 180 degree rule (note how in panel #2 the bearded character is on the right side of the page and then in panel #5 he’s on the left side).

The bearded character is shocked and confused that his bow and arrow were knocked out of his hands by the boy. As a reader, we are also left disoriented as the characters have instantly switched positions on the page.

90% of the time you see a cartoonist breaking the 180 degree rule they are in the wrong/being lazy…but occasionally you see a master like Tezuka break it to such awesome effect that it blows our minds out of our butts!

Remember: art theory is not about memorizing rules, but about understanding them.

-Professor Dov

It’s great to see friends and acquaintances (to say nothing of the handful of folks I worship at my art-nerd alter) at  conventions, but the sensory overload begins frying my brain as soon as I hit the floor.

Dov and I had the first 12 pages of “The Prince and The Pooper” to show and the reception we got was encouraging. We’ll begin serializing that comic online a page weekly in the near-near future. Stick around, wontcha?!

What I’ll remember most from this show was that I brought my 1981 Dungeons and Dragons ‘Fiend Folio’ to collect yearbook style monster doodles in. It was a pretty good idea if I do say so myself! All in all I collected over 50 doodles, drawings and sketches
from bigshots and buddies alike.

Maybe next year I’ll bring the ‘Deities and Demigods’ handbook and ask for doodles of GOD.

-Ben!

The story is basically an over the top, politically incorrect comedy-adventure that brings up serious questions about the quest for success, the corruption of power, the meaning of religion, and the importance of friendship.

It is also filled with psychadelic visions, an assassination plot by the pope, alien abduction, religious warfare, and a menage a trois.

Fun for all ages!

This will be the longest book either of us have ever worked on (48 pages total) which is both pretty exciting and frightening when I think about how long it’s going to take. The project will hopefully be done sometime during the summer…maybe.

We’re not posting any pages on our site just yet, but I took a photo of some random pages so you guys can get a taste.

–Dov