Science Comics: Polar Bears | Zack Giallongo | Macmillan
My entry into First Second’s Science Comics series comes out in two weeks!
With gorgeous art by Zack Giallongo, Polar Bears: Survival on the Ice follows a polar bear mother and her two young cubs as she teaches them how to survive in the Arctic. Her lessons are a virtual guidebook on polar bear biology, behavior, and habitat from the point of view of one of the world’s fiercest predators and loving parents. Filled with advice and warnings, tips and tricks, and a lot of humor, this book celebrates the unique ways polar bears pass their knowledge onto their young.
Available in hardcover or paperback - you can pre-order the book NOW! If you’ve enjoyed my comics in the past, I think you will get a kick out of it (even if you have to learn stuff).
Every year I draw a snowman Christmas card. This year’s has an educational theme.
LEXICON is this Friday!
Check out some of the special guests who will be participating in IRON CARTOONIST! Zack Giallongo has been invited to pit top cartoonists against each other in a live drawing event at Lexington High School. Artists will each compete to win the ultimate cartooning title.
HOST: Zack Giallongo
CONTESTANTS: Holly Foltz, Braden Lamb, Dan Mazur
JUDGES: Jesse Lonergan, Jason Viola, and LHS junior Helena Strenger
SPECIAL GUESTS: Matt Smith, Ansis Purins
So excited for this Friday to be with my students and friends at LEXICON.
My Self and I | Pangyrus
My autobiographical essay about autobiographical comics was republished today by the fine Harvard-based online journal Pangyrus. Give it some love!
Happy Star Wars Christmas Holiday Seasonal Time! Here’s the card I drew this year. You can see previous years’ here. I hope your home is full of warmth!
Sunflowers print now available
Hello.
I made a few comics about flowers for a mini called “Fear of Flowers.” The one about sunflowers has been re-imagined as a print for you to hang on your wall. It’s now available to you in my store. Please help me spread the word.
You can hang it on your wall and think about how spooky those sunflowers are. Or you can think about how pretty they are. Or you may wish to buy one for a family member who knows how pretty they are but not yet how spooky they are. Now this family member will know.
It’s a 13x19 digital print on watercolor paper. I may do more like this if you like it. Here are some pictures of the print, with another link. Big thanks go to @kenanrubenstein for his help putting this whole thing together.
https://squareup.com/market/manateepower/sunflower-print
MICE invades Cambridge, MA on October 17 - 18, 2015! This free event features over 150 independent comic creators along with special guests Gene Yang, Ryan North, Lucy Knisley, Dustin Harbin and Jennifer Hayden. It’s a whole weekend of comics programming and cartooning workshops! See you there!
www.micexpo.org | Illustration by Jon Chad
This weekend is the 6th annual MICE, a free comics festival in Porter Square, Cambridge. Rebecca and I helped organize it and we would love for you to come! I will be selling comics and sunflower prints at Table A21 and I can’t wait to see you.
Come to my table E9 at SPX this weekend where I will be selling many comics, as well as some very special sunflower prints!
Volunteer Sign-up | MICE 2015
We’re looking for some helpful folks to Volunteer at MICE this year and join in on the fun! Sign up here!
The Greatest Cat of All Time written by Rebecca, drawn by me.
First published in The Greatest of All Time Comics Anthology.
I’m reblogging this comic because Po is now in his final hours, about seven weeks before his seventeenth birthday. I write this waiting for a call back from the vet so we can arrange his last visit. There are lots of things about him I will miss - some things that may impress you (if you’re impressed by cat behavior) and many that will bore you. There are several fun stories, but it’s the mundane everyday sounds and gestures of being with each other that I will miss.
In college, a friend who got me seriously into the Cure and Twin Peaks (a friend of the first order) presented her cat’s litter of polydactyl kittens for the taking. A housemate and I picked out two five-week old kittens with heads and feet that seemed too big for their fluffy bodies. They rode home mewing on my lap in his jeep, and we decided somewhat arbitrarily who would be paired with whom. I named mine Po - after the Teletubby - because it’s an awesome name (see above). We became friends very quickly. He became buds with all of my housemates over the following three years, although I made a conscious effort to get to know him and he recognized that. I can’t discount the influence of drugs on my attempts to understand him (I mean really understand him, man), but the bond we made was genuine. Although wary (and seemingly jealous) of Rebecca when we first started dating, she won him over and they forged a bond of their own. For us, a childless couple, he became a focal point.
Seventeen years is a good chunk of my life. I was a spectacular mess when I met him, I have changed a lot since, and part of what I am mourning is the end of my young adulthood. I’ve felt physical signs that I am getting older and I’ve begun to feel anxiety about my age, but Po was a real and constant part of my life who will soon be gone, is practically already gone.
I don’t love very easily; as I grew up I made a lot of effort to distance myself from my emotions, and was proud of how little I felt. A year before I met Po (and with the help of his mother’s owner), I broke down a tremendous wall that allowed me to feel again. I felt pain, I felt love, and I felt who I was. Po soon came into my newly opened heart and I have loved him joyfully and unabashedly ever since. Even as I put up more barriers, he’d already slipped in during that window and so remained in my heart. And I have always felt his love for me. It’s the loss of this source of love, both giving and receiving, that I am feeling right now. I know that I’m doing the right thing by putting him down, and it is an act of love in itself, and I do not wish him to continue on in progressive misery. But I feel our love leaving me, and I am heartbroken.
Jean Cocteau called his cats the “visible soul” of his home. And although he implies that his love for his cats stem, by extension, from the love of his home, Rebecca and I have always made Po the progenitor. “Home is where the Po is,” she’s often said. In his lifetime, he’s been moved to five separate apartments. He hasn’t embodied the souls of five homes, but he has made each of them, at different times, our one singular “home.” I’m glad we’re moving at the end of the month because it will good to live with new walls, new people, and a new dog, allowing this whole space to become a memory along with him. But right now, as we sit beside him, listening to his heavy breathing, we don’t know how we will make a home without him.
Picture of Po on his favorite blanket, taken about two months ago.