If anyone is interested in commissioning a drawing and is planning on attending the NY Comicon--or MoCCA, Heroes, Wizard Chicago or San Diego--I'm offering a special Saving-Me-a-Trip-to-the-Post-Office rate of $25 per character instead of the usual $30. For details about commissions go to the bottom of this page: http://comicbookalex.com/Store.html

An interesting commission from a few years back:

Box Office Poison/De Mal En Pis page 143
Malas Ventas Voume 2, page 20*

The strange thing about looking back at old work like this is that I sometimes can't recall what I was thinking. Part of me has to admire whatever idea I had to include such an odd sex scene, since it's probably not something I would do now. 
At the time, this early in the story, I was still releasing these as mini-comics and hoping a publisher would be interested (which makes my inclusion of a potentially offputting scene all the more amusing to me). This would've been the last chapter in this particular issue, and my thinking was to continue the sex theme established in the previous chapter. I also wanted to contrast sex in a new relationship versus sex several years into a longterm relationship. Another reason I think I would hesitate to include a scene like the one between Jane and Stephen is that it seems, strangely, invasive. I'm almost embarrassed to look at the pages** since I feel like it's like watching two people "make love" instead of "fucking." I'm also embarrassed to even admit such a thing, so perhaps it's best to move on.
Much is made of the nudity, especially the male nudity, in Box Office Poison and as I've explained many times, you can all thank my wife Kristen for that. She insisted that fair was fair and that any female nudity be balanced out with some male equivelent. I think it also, um, stands out because most of the people are types you wouldn't normally see naked. Over the years, I've found it easier to draw regular looking people naked, since there's less pressure to make them unrealistically "hot." The problem with drawing "hot" people is that there's a lot of pressure: one line out of place and it looks like an unsightly wrinkle or bulge and the game is up. Plus, as a look at many superheroines these days can attest "hotness" has a sort of universal boringness to it. 
The other challenge to this chapter was coming up with a variety of poses and whatnot that could be drawn in a relatively discrete manner. 
Elihu Root was, among other things, Theodore Roosevelt's secretary of war--a pretty good president under which to have that title. 
That's Ivan Brunetti on Stephen's shirt. That's another thing I would do at the time but wouldn't do now: it's unlikely Stephen would wear such a shirt (although with his girlfriend being an indy cartoonist not impossible) but my urge to include plugs and shout-outs overwhelmed the consistancy of character. 

Box Office Poison/De Mal En Pis page 177
Malas Ventas Volum 2, page58

I really loved coming up with Irving Flavor's history in comics and all the fake titles and characters it required. Trying to come up with stuff that would plausibly be from the "golden age" was a lot of fun. 
As I'm sure I related elsewhere, I actually came up with the Nightstalker character in eighth grade, when I first got into superhero comics and started creating my own. Years later, when I needed to have a character for Irving Flavor to have created, I remembered reading an interview with Dave Gibbons. He said that when he designed the golden age version of Nite-Owl for Watchmen he dug out a superhero he created as a kid and used that. I thought that was very clever, since virtually all characters from that era have very primative, childlike tone, so I did the same thing. I'd like to think that my thirteen year-old self would've been very pleased to see his character in print in a real comic at last--even if it was only in black and white.


*The good news is that I finally received the hardcover, one-volume edition of Malas Ventas. My hope was that the page numbers of all the various editions would match up, making this a little easier. Alas, as great as the book is, there are no page numbers, so the only option I can see is to continue to use the old, multi-volume edition for these commentaries. 
** In addition to the embarrassment I feel looking at just about every page I've ever drawn, but the less said about that the better. A friend of mine says my self-deprecation schtick is tiresome. Clearly, if someone is  reading these commentaries (and footnotes, even!) they're not one of those people who thinks my work is completely awful, right?

Box Office Poison/De Mal En Pis page 215
Malas Ventas volume 2, page 99

Another variation on the "dumb customer" idea pioneered on page 40. At the time I started Box Office Poison I made Sherman a bookstore cleark because I was a bookstore clerk and needed a place to vent my anger (if that's not already obvious!). I worked at the Barnes and Noble on 18th St. and Fifth Avenue (their first store and, at the time, the biggest) for seven years and it was the best worst job I ever had. So these questions were things people acutally asked to me or one of my co-workers. 
Actually, I think this might've been around the time I quit the store to try and make a go of doing comics as a full-time gig. This would've run in issue #6 of the Antarctic Press series and I was having a hard time working at the store and keeping the book on some kind of schedule. You'll notice that after this, there aren't nearly as many bookstore scenes. 
So, the gimmick with this page, of course, is that all the customers are characters from other people's comics (almost), providing a sort of interesting snap-shot as to what I was into in the late '90s. They are:

Panel 5 Annadette from Terry Laban's Unsupervised Existence. I was really disappointed when he ended that book and has since moved out of the indy comics scene altogether. His book was a tremendous influence on BOP.
Panel 6 Ivan Brunetti from his comic Schizo
Panel 7 Chester Brown from his comic I Never Liked You 
Panel 8 Gahan Wilson, inspired by a drawing from Tony Consiglio. This is more or less an inside joke which isn't worth explaining here, trust me. It's just not that interesting a story, so you aren't missing anything. No, really. Okay, okay, fine: Tony and I went to SVA where we were both students in legendary cartoonist Gahan Wilson's class. We were also in a class taught by legendary comics writer Denny O'Neil. At one point in O'Neil's class, Tony produced an incredibly inept caricature of Gahan Wilson, recreated here, which had us laughing so hard we almost wet our collective drawers. You know, how when you aren't supposed to laugh it makes it all the harder not to laugh? That kind of a thing. At one point, Denny O'Neil told us to quiet down. The end. See? I told you it wasn't worth going into.
Panel 9: Homer Simpson from The Simpsons.
Panel 10: Bacchus from Eddie Campbell's Bacchus
Panel 11: Robert Crumb from Weirdo, etc
Panel 12: I'm pretty certain this was supposed to be my version of an adult Lil from Daddy's Girl by Debbie Dreschler, though I'm puzzled as to what I was thinking with her hair. 
Panel 13: Madame Asgar from Carol Lay's Story Minute.
Panel 14: Rob from Bob Fingerman's Minimum Wage.
Panel 15: Dr. Physician, PhD from Tony Consilglio's Double Cross!! Actually, this looks like it was actually drawn by Tony Consiglio himself, since we were roommates at the time and that's just the sort of wackiness we would do. 

One possibly interesting other thing to add is that, piecing it together, I'm guessing I wrote all the word balloons first and only later came up with the characters (I might not have even come up with the alternative-comics-characters gimmick until after I'd lettered the page). You'll notice none of the questions are especially relevent to the characters asking them and there are oddities like Robert Crumb talking on a cellphone and Dr. P speaking somewhat broken English.