A Nice Hard Slap – What Are You Drawing?

A Nice Hard Slap – What Are You Drawing?

I don’t know if you know this or care about this, but over the past while I’ve been slowly amassing a lot of comic book artwork for the site both through the somewhat legitimate titles I’m working on with pros and little tinkerings I’m doing on my own now that my former collaborator Lewis “Bert” Cox has dropped off the map. I’ve also become very good friends with an amazing artist whose work earned her mucho kudos in college, and her desire to get back “in the game” has inspired me to take my meager skills with a pen and put them to middling use.

So, we hook up and draw a lot. We do blind contour drawings where you draw something without looking on the page. Sometimes it’s something we’re looking at and sometimes we give each other requests.

We’ll draw the people sitting around us (we draw either at a bar or a coffee shop). We’ll get a page and take turns adding to the picture until it makes less sense than Rosie O’Donnell’s success. A recent example: I drew a guy sleeping on a sandwich. On a dish. With place settings. Andrea added Zeus’s trident to the place settings. I added Thor’s Hammer. She added her ex-boyfriend’s studded ass dildo. I added the fetus currently growing in a stripper we both know.

Then it got weird.

Shit like that. Fun for us, baffling for the rest of a civilized world. Or shit like this:

Inevitably when you draw in public, some jackass walks over and asks to see what we’re drawing. It never fails. See, I’m not a good artist. I can make pictures decent enough so that you know what I’m trying to draw but that’s about it. Typically I draw with talented people so their stuff is great and mine is balls. Or, because of how I draw they ‘slum” and draw like I do so that we can work fast and free and entertain ourselves. But it’s never for public consumption (unless it’s the brilliant and eye-popping stuff we do FOR public consumption by my new strip right over here). When I used to draw with Bert we’d constantly get approached and I’d promptly point to his art pad with its myriad wonders and splendid creations. I’d cover mine like an inmate protects his lunch plate, lest their eyes be burned by my interpretation of a six-legged nun blowing a Klansman.

The other day, I drew this bearded guy who was sitting down the way at Cafe Intermezzo (my favorite place around). She put him in a silly medieval outfit, sans arms. I then drew an airplane dropping a naked man towards him. She added a stork dropping babies at him.

So of course he gets up and asks to see our stuff on his way out of the place.

We didn’t show him his crowning glory as she luckily had brought a sketchbook from her legitimate school days for him to see. Turns out he was an artist too and had a sketchbook of his own. Pretty good stuff, detailed line drawings of pretty places. But the bottom line is that he approached us in the first place.

My instinct when seeing someone at work in public is to leave them the fuck alone. Now, granted… we looked IMPORTANT. I’m a very famous looking guy. I get approached all the time from people wondering just why the fuck someone as famous as me is hanging out at the local gay bar and Andrea’s almost nearly as attractive. I get it. But to approach a stranger doing something intently never crosses my mind.

Yet they do it all the time.

It probably hurts me too, because I have all these nicely printed trade paperbacks of the comics I’m putting together and people often ask to see them and I make some sort of negative comment and reluctantly hand it to them, which surely has to set things off on the wrong foot. I just typically don’t understand the mentality. Maybe it’s me.

Bottom line, if someone’s BUSY doing something you probably ought to leave them be. They might very well be drawing a picture of you sucking the balls off a bobcat.

– Nick Nunziata is most likely drawing a man with 30 cocks.