We had a raucous time at Collaboraction’s Dome of Doom in Logan Square on Sunday! As soon as I get the video and pictures, I will post them. Thanks, Collaboraction and Unity Park Advisory Council!

In the meantime, check out some more great art from the Order of Odd-Fish art show back in April by Dawn Heath. It’s Jo’s first morning in Eldritch City, when she and Ian are riding an elephant down to the Municipal Squires’ Authority. I love the lush, medieval feel Dawn gives Eldritch City, and the colorful jumble of architecture, especially the bulbous Russian-style onion domes! Thanks, Dawn, for another fantastic piece.

In case you missed them the first time, here’s Dawn’s other two paintings for the art show: the Grand Feast of the Odd-Fish, and Jo with her father’s manuscript in the archives (click on the images to get a larger version).

And at last, before I sign off for today, I’d like to share something special by an old college chum Ted Leo.

Ted and I both attended the University of Notre Dame. I first heard of him when I was a high school senior, mulling whether or not to go there. I’d signed up to visit campus overnight, and was assigned to stay in the dorm room of someone named Bob Eberhardt.

Bob was part of a music scene that centered around the campus radio station WVFI. The day before, Bob had gone all around the university, scrawling “FREE TED LEO” with chalk on the sidewalk. (He was also scrawling things like “HAVE A DUODENUM? CALL x4561″). I’d never heard of Ted Leo. Bob told me that Ted was in an incredible campus band called Chisel, but he had been kicked out of school. People wanted him back.

I picked up the Scholastic, the weekly student magazine. In the back was a review by Jeff Jotz of an album called Spiderland by a Louisville band called Slint. I bought the album and I was astonished. Who were these WVFI people, who knew of such amazing music? Who was this Ted Leo, who inspired such devotion?

I decided to enroll at Notre Dame. However, when I got there, I was in for a rude awakening. Notre Dame was nothing like the mecca of punk rockers and indie aesthetes I’d expected from my brief visit. It was a pretty conservative, football-driven place. (Duh. What did I expect?) However, there was a very small, enthusiastic, supportive music scene. Ted Leo indeed came back, and I saw Chisel at a Halloween show in 1991. It was like my skull had been ripped off. I had never experienced anything like it. Whatever was going on, I wanted to be part of it.

And so I started being in bands. I was no musician. It doesn’t matter whether my songs were good or bad. They were probably all bad. That wasn’t the point. There was something about the 1990s that encouraged the inspired amateur. It was liberating. And the music scene was small enough that the barrier to entry was low. Anyone could do it, and everyone in the scene supported each other. I’m certain that it never would’ve happened if it wasn’t for real musicians like Ted Leo, who created a context for it. That group of people was, by far, the best thing about my four years at Notre Dame.

That’s Chisel. From left to right, that’s Ted Leo, John Dugan, and Chris Norborg. I became good friends with Chris. (Indeed, I ended up marrying Heather, his sister.) After university, I moved to Washington, DC and lived with Chris while Chisel was making a name for themselves. They broke up in 1997, but not before unleashing a series of incredible albums, culminating in 8 A.M. All Day and Set You Free.

I remember coming home from Chisel shows and writing for hours. I kept thinking to myself, “Ted and Chris and John have their thing, what’s my thing?” Seeing them perform inspired me to try harder at writing, to take it seriously. If they could make such electrifying music, why couldn’t I at least try to write novels?

Also, I never danced so much as I danced at Chisel shows.

Now it’s years later. Ted has had a successful post-Chisel career in his band Ted Leo & the Pharmacists. My favorite Pharmacists album remains 2003’s Hearts of Oak, but right now Ted is promoting his latest, the pretty great The Brutalist Bricks.

One of the things that was always admirable about Ted was his punctilious sense of punk rock integrity. Nowadays, it’s a category that some feel has become quixotic. But in the nineties, it was everything. The idea of selling your song for use on a commercial, while grudgingly accepted nowadays, was anathema back then. The ideal was Fugazi: cheap, all-ages shows, lots of touring, living sustainably on a modest income. You wouldn’t become a millionaire, but you could eke out a living making music with integrity for the rest of your life.

For various reasons, that model has collapsed. (For instance, people were actually asking Ted on Twitter where they could find pirated copies of his new album.) There was a much-talked about article in the Village Voice about Ted Leo’s “retirement.” Then, on his blog, Ted started to say mysterious things about perhaps reconciling himself to what used to be called “selling out.”

That all led up to this video, which showed up on Funny or Die yesterday. It’s about Ted taking his music to Broadway. I really don’t know what else I should say about it, other than I giggled maniacally. It’s got Paul F. Tompkins and John Hodgman in it, and it’s directed by WFMU’s Tom Scharpling. If those names mean anything to you, you’ve probably already seen it. But if not, please enjoy. (The song’s good, too.)

It’s refreshing to know there are people who stick to their ideals. It’s even more refreshing when they have a sense of humor about it. Stay gold, Ponyboy.

If the animation above takes a few seconds to load, wait for it—it’s worth it. It’s by Swisidniak of DeviantArt, and it’s a doozy: a 6-frame animated .gif of the giant fish vomiting the Odd-Fish lodge. Amazing work! I especially love the queasy look the fish gets before he hurls, and how the the stomach goo coats the “lens” of the “camera.” If we ever have another Odd-Fish art show (and I’d like to), this should definitely be in it, playing on a loop on a monitor!

Swisidniak tells me that he and his friends are “creating our own mini Dome of Doom for fun . . . We are trying to follow all of the traditions but it is a bit difficult finding double sided flaming lances and flying ostriches so we expect we might have to improvise a little. We hope to finish it soon and plan on video taping the whole thing to put up on YouTube. There will most definitely be pictures, and many bloopers. ” I CAN’T WAIT.

Speaking of the Dome of Doom, this Sunday the theater group Collaboraction (with whom I did the Odd-Fish art show back in April) is going to haul out their geodesic PVC dome for another Dome of Doom costumed dance party!

This will be an all-ages, family-friendly event. It’ll be this Sunday (August 22) at Unity Playlot in Logan Square in Chicago (2636 N. Kimball) from 6 – 8 pm, followed by a Movie-in-the-Park screening of Where The Wild Things Are.

I’ll be judging the fights, along with Collaboraction honcho Anthony Moseley. The crazy costumed marching band Environmental Encroachment will be there as well!

Meet us at the Eagle Statue in Logan Square (Kedzie and Logan Blvd.) at 6 pm to march to the Dome of Doom for the open dance battles! Dress as a God or Monster, or get costumed on the spot by the Collaboraction team. Summer fun, and it’s free!

(Unsure what the Dome of Doom battle-dancing is? Here’s our brief video explanation:)

What else is going on? The lovely Kate Elstad interviewed me at the website Eve’s Fan Garden. I talk about how I’ve found that young readers are often better readers than adults, I make some book recommendations, and I lay out the dream cast for an Odd-Fish movie.

I’ll leave you with this great picture by Freya of Jo hiding in Snoodsbottom from the rampaging Wormbeards. I love Freya’s attention to detail: the Apology Gun tucked in Jo’s pocket, the alien clothes hanging from laundry lines, how the composition traps and squeezes Jo (and the viewer) into a confined space while Fiona and the other Wormbeards look for her.

Thanks, Freya! Hope to see you and everyone at the Dome of Doom in Logan Square this Sunday!

This is great! Chicago’s amazing Museum of Science and Industry is holding a contest to find someone to live in their museum—for someone to eat, sleep, and breathe nothing but science and industry for thirty days. Seriously! From their website:

We’re looking for someone to take on a once-in-a-lifetime assignment: spend a Month at the Museum, to live and breathe science 24/7 for 30 days. From October 20 to November 18, 2010, this person’s mission will be to experience all the fun and education that fits in this historic 14-acre building, living here and reporting your experience to the outside world. There will be plenty of time to explore the Museum and its exhibits after hours, with access to rarely seen nooks and crannies of this 77-year-old institution.

Further requirements: “sleeping in confined or ‘untraditional’ spaces” (ooh, do we get to sleep on the U-505 submarine? the lunar lander?) To apply, you have to fill out a detailed questionnaire, write a 500-word essay about why you want to do this, and most fun of all, make a 1-minute video explaining why you should be chosen. My video is above.

Thanks to MaryWinn Heider and Chris Norborg for camera work, Thomas James of the Oriental Institute, Paul Bryan of the Smart Museum of Art, my wife’s father (for playing my own father), and of course my wife Heather and daughter Lucy for their star turn. (I used music from The Go! Team.) It was fun!

Hey, wait—the applications are due today! I’m off to hand-deliver it to the Museum of Science and Industry right now. Wish me luck!

Anyway, back to the ALA. I signed books at the Random House table and did a “YA kaffeeklatsch,” which was kind of like speed-dating between authors and librarians: authors would get four minutes to speak to a table of about 10 librarians, then the shriek of a whistle meant we had to move on to the next table. It was nice to see YA heavyweights like Laurie Halse Anderson, Holly Black, and newly minted Newbery medalist Rebecca Stead rubbing elbows with the rank and file.

By the way, I’ve noticed that when describing events like this in conversation, most of my friends and family have no idea whom I’m talking about. I’ll say something like, “I was talking with Laurie Halse Anderson” and most folks will say, “Who?” I have to assure them that Laurie Halse Anderson is huge in the subculture I’m talking about. (It’s what I imagine, say, the Christian rock scene is like. “OMG I just met Mac Powell of Third Day!!!” Nobody cares.)

My favorite part of the weekend, however, was a leisurely lunch with Betsy Bird (NYC children’s librarian and mistress of the essential Fuse #8 blog) and her husband Matt Bird (screenwriter and keeper of the meticulous, fascinating Cockeyed Caravan, a blog that alternates between astute storytelling advice and reviews of unjustly forgotten films). We were joined by M.T. Anderson, who goes by Tobin, and who thrilled me a couple months when he emailed out of the blue to tell me he enjoyed Odd-Fish. I loved Tobin’s whip-smart dystopic satire Feed and his ingenious, heartbreaking two-part historical epic Octavian Nothing, and we had exchanged some emails, so I was eager to meet him in real life.

It was a heavenly lunch. We talked about Scientology, urban exploring in Detroit, G.K. Chesterton, story structure, Japan, foppish Cambridge drinking societies, fake “underground railroads” for tourists . . . these were my people. I could have chattered all day.

By the way, Tobin has a great video up promoting his latest, The Suburb Beyond the Stars, which starts out as a standard book trailer, then heads down a deliciously weird sidetrack: part Blair Witch Project, part Zork, and then suddenly it’s Evil Dead II. I admit I jumped a little at the end, but I did watch it at 2 a.m. The music choices are impeccable. It’s probably best to watch the larger version here, but here’s the embedded version:



(You should really also check out his very funny Tourist’s Guide to Deepest, Darkest Delaware, “in aristocratic full color!”, describing the milieu of his middle-grade books such as Whales on Stilts!)

That night Tobin and I crashed the Newbery / Caldecott Awards Banquet. We didn’t have tickets, but managed to finagle our way to a table with two confused Nigerians who got up and left midway through, and some mild-mannered librarians who weren’t sure whether to be peeved at us or not. “Do you know who this is?” I roared at them, waving at Tobin. “This is M.T. Anderson! He won the National Book Award! This guy’s a big deal!” “Who?” they politely responded.

Rebecca Stead gave a lovely Newbery speech for her unanimously beloved When You Reach Me (just as affable and approachable as when she visited Chicago) and Jerry Pinkney was similarly eloquent when accepting in Caldecott for The Lion and the Mouse.

The programs for the Newbery / Caldecott award banquet are often done in the style of the Caldecott winner, and this year’s was a real stunner, a beautifully illustrated book in its own right. Betsy Bird also has a tradition: temporary body art inspired by the Newbery and Caldecott winners! Below: program on left, Betsy on right. Check out Betsy’s complete description of her tattoo strategy here.

My personal climax of the evening was a bizarre conversation with, you guessed it, Laurie Halse Anderson. She was good-naturedly kvetching about her son, who was between high school and college, and apparently a bit of a handful around the house during the summer.

“Tell you what, why don’t I sit down with your son for a man-to-man chat,” I suggested in my light-hearted way. “I think I can talk some good old-fashioned horse sense to the boy.”

Laurie Halse Anderson’s face went ice-cold. “Don’t speak to my children,” she said flatly.

I went on to say something else, but Laurie wanted to make her point clear. “We have guns at our house,” she said slowly and deliberately. “Stay away from my family.”

I went from discomfited surprise to sheer delight. “Do you have any daughters?”

“My daughter would break someone like you in half.”

“I don’t know about that,” I mused. “I’m pretty flexible.”

Nervous laughter. Clearings of throats. We subtly but resolutely drifted away from each other.

As a writer, I’m sometimes asked where I get my ideas. The answer is that all my ideas, no matter how ludicrous, come from the real world.

For example! The villain of The Order of Odd-Fish is a celebrity terrorist called “the Belgian Prankster.” He goes around the world doing insane stunts like filling the Grand Canyon with pistachio pudding, or turning the Eiffel Tower upside-down, or releasing 10,000 bichon frise puppies on the streets of Osaka. He’s like a whimsical Osama bin Laden with his own reality show. Here’s what he looks like, courtesy of fan artist Kathleen Simmons—a hulking giant always clad in a ratty fur coat, green ski goggles, and a rawhide diaper:

Although the Belgian Prankster is probably the weirdest character in the book, he is actually based on a real man named Noel Godin. (I’ve mentioned him before, but today I’d to dwell on him in loving detail.) Godin first came to my attention in 1998, when he smashed a pie in Bill Gates’ face in the streets of Brussels. Video here:

Strangely, as if they’d all agreed on this beforehand, every newspaper and TV reporter invariably referred to him as “Belgian prankster Noel Godin” or just “a Belgian prankster.” I’m sure I’m not the only one who found the phrase Belgian Prankster irresistible. It has a sinister lilt; it sounds like the name of a supervillain. (It’s kind of like how, during the 1989 US-Panama War, journalists would never say “Manuel Noriega,” but always “Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega.” Panamanian strongman—go ahead, say it out loud! It trips off the lips.)

I thought, what if this Belgian Prankster graduated from mere pie-throwing to more insane, dangerous, and finally supernatural stunts? A man in pursuit of the worst practical joke, the most apocalyptic prank? And thus the “Belgian Prankster” of The Order of Odd-Fish was born.

As a fitting wrap-up to Avant-Garde Pie week, let’s take a closer look at this remarkable man, Noel Godin:

Apparently Godin, under the pseudonym “Georges Le Gloupier,” is notorious in France and Belgium for attacking pretentious public figures with cream pies. Targets include director Jean-Luc Godard, writer Marguerite Duras, and Nicholas Sarkozy. Godin has invented a verb for this, entarter (to attack with a pie). Each attack is a meticulously planned team effort; his accomplices (known as entarteurs) shout out “Gloup, Gloup, Gloup!” after a successful attack.

Godin’s peculiar bête noire is French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, whom he’s assaulted five separate times. I find the relationship between Levy and Godin fascinating. Let me quote at length from The Observer Magazine:

“I flan people in the spirit of the abusive letters the Dadaists sent to worthless celebrities,” [Godin] said. “The aim is always to denounce them in some way. I do not want to slide into facile sensationalism. Every victim has to be thoroughly justified.”

Few have been more outstanding flanees that Bernard-Henri Levy, a man so sensitive that he was once credibly reported as observing that “when I find a new shade of grey, I feel ecstatic”. He has also famously remarked that he dislikes seeing a woman pay in a restaurant. “I think,” Levy explained, “that money does not suit a woman; or rather that I would not fall in love with such a woman.” His own varied talents constitute, by his own account, “a landscape which does not have a fixed place in the classic topography of culture.”

These are the kind of observations that guarantee the philosopher express deliveries of creme chantilly for years to come. “He is the worst,” says Godin, who, on the subject of Bernard-Henri Levy, tends to sound like Herbert Lom on Inspector Clouseau. “He is the worst this decade.”

Here Godin attacks a young Levy in 1985 (that’s a long-simmering grudge!). After the attack, Levy knocked down Godin, but Godin said later, “I didn’t even feel the uppercut, because I was so happy to gaze up from the floor and see the peak of French intellectual thought so thoroughly snowbound.” Levy shouts at Godin, “Get up, or I’ll kick your head in.”

(This is great stuff, but not quite as good as when Norman Mailer threw a drink at Gore Vidal, and then punched Vidal out, at a literary party in 1977. Vidal’s legendary response, delivered when he was still on the floor: “Words fail Norman Mailer yet again.”)

But what are the origins of this marvelous man? Consulting The Observer Magazine again (it’s really worth it to read the whole article), we learn about his first job, in 1969, writing a news column for Friends of Film, a cinema magazine published by the Belgian Catholic League:

“I started to print complete falsehoods—gradually at first, then routinely,” [Godin] recalled. “I invented non-existent films that I illustrated with snapshots of my relatives. I wrote face-to-face interviews with hundreds of artists, including Frank Capra and Robert Mitchum, without ever leaving my bedroom.”

Readers of Friends of Film were introduced to the work of imaginary geniuses such as Sergio Rossi, Aristide Beck and Viviane Pei, the Thai director of such films as The Lotus Flower Will No Longer Grow On The Shores Of Your Island. Pei’s acheivements, ceaselessly lauded in Godin’s column, were the more remarkable, he reported, in that she was “the only blind director in the history of cinema”. He enthused over Vegetables of Good Will (1970, Jean Clabau), in which Claudia Cardinale played an endive, and Germinal II, a Maoist cartoon featuring Jean-Louis Barrault as the voice of a cold chisel.

“The only blind director in the history of cinema”? Vegetables of Good Will? *Swoon*

In other issues, it was revealed that Roger Vadim (former husband of Brigitte Bardot) was “a DIY fanatic secretly obsessed with small balsawood aircraft,” that Marlene Dietrich led expeditions to hunt down the Loch Ness monster, and that Michael Caine had a motor that ran on yogurt. “I got away with it purely because I had a credulous editor and the magazine was not distributed outside Belgium,” Godin said.

If Godin is to be believed, his grand crusade has only begun. One day their slogan (according to some websites, “Let’s pie! Let’s pie! Nincompoop guys!”) will be shouted from the barricades. Godin again:

“We are just beginning. We feel ready now. Ready to attack another sort of target. A genuine International Brigade Patisserie has been born. We believe that we are capable of achieving great things in the near future . . . No obstacle can stand in our way. Like Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Gene Tierney and Barbara Stanwyck in the old Hollywood films, we have a crazed belief in ourselves . . . I hope to brighten the lives of my British friends . . . Tell them to expect me when they see a cream-colored shooting star traverse their cheerless skies.”

Noel Godin, please, I beg you, come to the United States. You are our only hope.

Some new “Belgian pranksters” have even emerged, though they are not actually associated with Godin. For instance, one of them put the entire country of Belgium up for sale on eBay.

That said, there are some pretender Belgian Pranksters, some amateur Belgian Pranksters, who have tried to claim the title “Belgian Prankster” and failed miserably. Here’s a prank gone horribly wrong on a Belgian TV show. Frankly, it’s a stupid prank; the amateur Belgian prankster throws a weird little green net on his victim, a stranger at a shopping mall (why? what’s the point?). Unfortunately for him, one of the bystanders is a martial arts master:



If you look at it on YouTube, the comments are hilarious: “But you have to agree his stance is common in TKD not KF. That is a classic TKD form or stance for sparring and fighting but as I watch repeatedly, his kick is not an authentic TDK style.” Why do I have the creeping feeling this commenter knows neither kung fu or tae kwon do, but has just played a lot of Mortal Kombat?

The auction for Evanston Public Libraries is over. They raised $39,000! My ridiculous “Night with Audrey Niffenegger as Played by James Kennedy” contributed a tiny bit. Two nights, actually: it sold for $60 to someone called “Mamaro” and for $65 to someone called “lmur988″. I really hope one of those people is secretly Audrey Niffenegger. Our dinner would be a total Niffeneggerammerung. Margo Gremmler has the wrap-up here.

Earlier this week I kicked off “Avant-Garde Pies Week” by featuring Mason’s drawings of strange pies from Odd-Fish. For Part 2 of “Avant-Garde Pies Week,” check out these amazing actual pies created by fifth graders at Near North Montessori! They’ve been reading The Order of Odd-Fish for class, using my Odd-Fish reader’s guide and curriculum. As a fun project, some students baked actual avant-garde pies from the notorious La Société des Friandises Étranges visited by Ken Kiang and Hoagland Shanks.

Above: a kind of video game pie. Deliciously brilliant. And they only get more avant-garde. I give you the “pi pie”–which is filled with baked apples cut into the shapes of the first ten or so digits of pi:

That is seriously clever! I don’t think I even knew what pi was in fifth grade!

Next: have you ever heard of synesthesia? It’s when you can taste colors, or hear smells, or smell shapes–when the different senses get mixed up. I have a feeling that’s what would happen if we ate this rainbow pie:

That looks gorgeous and tasty. But save room for the mud pie and the street pie!

I love the Gummi worms poking out of the mud pie, and the traffic jam on the street pie. Great job, Near North Montessori! I think you all deserve a place in Mason’s “Order of Pie.” These fifth graders came on a field trip to the Order of Odd-Fish art show, so I recognize the faces in these pictures. I’m honored you did this.

Thanks again, and thanks to Cynthia Castiglione, one of the teachers at Near North Montessori, for setting this all up. What a great idea!

This week on the blog, I want to highlight Order of Odd-Fish fan art I’ve received that has to do with avant-garde pies. This first is by “Order of the Pie” founder (and eleven year-old) Mason, whose illustration of the La Société des Friandises Étranges chapter (above) was featured in April’s Odd-Fish fan art gallery show. I particularly liked Mason’s letter explaining his art, so I’m reprinting it below!

Bonus: Mason’s mother is children’s book author Deborah Diesen, whose hilarious picture book The Barefooted, Bad-Tempered Baby Brigade is a favorite bedtime read of Baby Owl’s. Check out Deborah’s blog here!

OK, take it away, Mason . . .

I am a big fan of the book The Order of Odd-Fish. I decided to create this picture because in most fan art showcases, people usually draw stuff that’s important to the story, right? Well, I have decided to do the exact opposite because of this book’s dithering and bumbling yet captivating manner.

If I were doing fan art for any other book, I would have drawn the main character, or the most important part of the plot. Instead, I have done the exact same thing a knight of The Order of Odd-Fish would have done. I have drawn some of the pies featured in The Club of Weird Desserts, and come up with some pies to put in the drawing as well. I drew this because I am the founder of the not-so-secret-anymore organization, The Order of Pie.

The pies of The Club of Weird Desserts that I have drawn are as follows, from top left to bottom right:

Molten Money: The filling is made out of pure 24 carat gold.

Total Taste Sensation: This pie is made of a substance that activates dormant taste buds on the inside of your bloodstream.

Chocolate Hell: The filling is made of chocolate heated to a temperature hotter than the surface of the sun, and sealed inside the pie so that not even one degree of heat can escape from the pie.

The Calibrated Cataclysm: Juicy quinces and persimmons soaked in liqueurs measured out in single angstrom drops, served flaming in a dish of richest creams.

The Phosphorescent Fascination: Made out of an edible plastic made out of Neptunium, a radioactive material.

The Pie of Innocence Slain: This pie has dreams curdled for filling and the young’s dreams squashed into the crust. At the center of this pie is the rarest delicacy of them all: the pure and uncorrupted human heart. (But it still tastes like peaches.)

Mr. Kennedy, I liked your book because you could not count on it for anything. Of all the books I’ve read, this one is like no other. That’s a good thing.

Sincerely,

Mason, Age 11

P.S. The Order of Pie is an organization dedicated to making pies. I am currently trying to locate a headquarters for this organization, other than my Mom’s basement.

Thanks, Mason! Count me in as one of the charter members of the Order of Pie (and I think you might meet some other potential members later this week on the blog)! Don’t worry about relocating headquarters out of your Mom’s basement just yet. Remember, Sir Oliver’s rigorous training for dithering involved sitting for twenty years in his mother’s basement doing nothing at all. If it’s good enough for Sir Oliver…

UPDATE! To my astonishment, people are actually bidding on the chance to have dinner with me dressed as Audrey Niffenegger. As of this writing, this instance was bid up to $30, and this one is bid up to $20. So that’s $50 raised for the Evanston Public Library. As far as transvestites go, I’m a pretty cheap date. Or a cheap, pretty date. Everyone wins?

I still haven’t posted all the art from April’s spectacular Order of Odd-Fish fan art gallery show. Here’s three late entries from Breanna Bliss, a.k.a. “I Was Bibliomaniac” on DeviantArt. Above: a kind of LP album cover for a theoretical Odd-Fish album? I’d love to hear Nora, Ian, Jo and Audrey singing in four-part harmony. I also like the Eldritch City fashions: waistcoat-centric for the ladies, and a cropped collar for Ian. Bravo!

Breanna got in touch with me a while ago and we had a spirited email exchange—indeed, she’s a hilarious emailer. When I asked if I could put her art in the Odd-Fish gallery show, she wrote back, awash in italics and bolds, “I feel so unbelievably happy that I am simply OOZING bliss from every single pore. Thank you very much then! You do that, and my astral projection will watch, tears of utter joy streaming down my face. OR, IN THIS CASE, MY SOUL’S FACE. I anticipate they will fill several buckets, two (2) Hefty bags, and—just maybe—ONE (1) KORSAKOV DUODENUM. I will then put these tears in five (5) aerosol cans and mist myself and anyone else present with the tears as I sing a heart-wrenching rendition of ‘Dancing in the Rain’.”

Needless to say, receiving emails like this makes me extremely happy.

Also what makes me happy: Breanna’s collection of Odd-Fish-inspired sketches:

I love the unwieldy absurdity of Jo’s Hat of Honor (which, according to Breanna, includes “a watermelon, a lemon, a biscuitsword, a Cavendish head, an Aznath Silver Kitten of Deceit, a Ken Kiang symbol, a fish vomiting a lodge, an Awesome Face, a pie, and the Belgian Prankster’s goggles.”). Jo’s slightly peeved expression is priceless.

Also FTW: Korsakov and Sefino “gallivanting,” Korsakov enjoying his digestion, Nora enjoying her conspiracy theory, and the demon not enjoying potato chips. And it’s all done in such a lively, bustling style. Great work! (I also like how, whenever Breanna draws Nora, she always hides Nora’s hands. It’s irresistibly cute.)

Here’s one more sketch from Breanna Bliss, from the Mr.-Cavendish’s-flying-head scene (By the way: Breanna Bliss? Brilliant name. With a moniker like that, you can’t go too far wrong in life):

I think it’s cool how Breanna takes excerpts from the text and wraps them around different elements of the illustration. Few have attempted to draw the Dust Creek Cafe scene—I don’t know why! Breanna gives it the treatment it deserves: the blissful look on Cavendish’s face, Jo’s nonplussed startled gawping, and the Belgian Prankster’s mischievous chuckling, all splendidly done.

Thanks, Breanna! When the art is this good, I don’t mind it being a little late!