My first exposure to David Hahn’s comics was Private Beach, a bizarre sort of merger between X-Files and Love and Rockets. Strange things mixed with relationship drama and a sharp wit is my best description of the book. When I met him at San Diego in 2002, he was one of those people that was so amazingly friendly and likable that you were almost relieved that he was such a good artist, because you wanted him to succeed at everything.

Since then, he’s drawn two Bite Club mini-series for Vertigo (think Miami mafia meets vampires), and is also drawing the all-ages Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane comic. The fact that he can switch from adults-only violence to fun and cute kids comics? Well, it’s nice to see that the industry knows how good he is.

His drawing below is also a take on one of his Private Beach covers. I must admit that whenever I see it, I always wonder what would happen if this sketch would suddenly collide with J.G. Jones’s wine sketch…

Ah, Kelley Seda, how I miss you doing things in comics. Seda’s debut work was a strange little mini-series called Rare Creature that… it’s kind of hard to describe, to be honest. But it’s about a girl named Amelia who is pregnant, and in love with the boy with huge hands next door. It’s an odd, almost fragile-feeling story that was like nothing else on the market.

She did some work designing books for other comic publishers for a while, but she seems to have left comics entirely for other art forms. It’s a shame, although I don’t think the comics industry ever really caught on to her brilliance. Very, very much our loss.

I’m not even sure I can really begin to sum up the amazing talent that is Scott Morse, here. When he first appeared on the comic book scene with his book Soulwind (back when he was still C.S. Morse), it was a beautiful, contemplative work about swords and aliens and small boys and zen. Since then he’s done things in every genre imaginable and then some. He also creates animation for Pixar these days, with former stints at Disney and Cartoon Network.

If that’s not enough, he’s also one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet. Thoughtful, kind, always ready to lend an ear. I have really fond memories of the post-Ignatz Awards party from SPX 2004 of having drunkenly rambled to him about some relationship problems and him just nodding sagely and offering advice and being supportive. The number of people (of all genders) who have a crush on him is understandable.

One of his more recent projects at the time was a comic called Magic Pickle, about… well… a pickle created through experiments that has all sorts of super powers and fights other evil vegetables with the help of the little girl who lives in the house atop his secret lair. (The original comic just was republished by Scholastic, plus two more prose books with spot-illustrations from Morse hit stores as well.)

So to say that a sketch about wine was perfect for Scott was, well, an understatement. This one still makes me laugh, in a good way.

Dean Haspiel is someone that I’ve known in comics for at least a decade, certainly much longer than that. A mainstay of the Small Press Expo for many years, I remember reading his Billy Dogma comics and loving their over-the-top masculinity and hidden vulnerability all mixed into one. These days he’s illustrating books like Harvey Pekar’s The Quitter and posting his comics on the ACT-I-VATE online collective.

More entertainingly, he’s always been a good friend and a fun guy to be around; I miss chatting with him at SPX, and the inevitable jokes from everyone about how he only owned one shirt (seriously, there are five or six years worth of convention photos where he’s in the same shirt every time) and how sooner or later it would always come of. “Dean puts the X in SPX!” was a hysterical rallying cry at one of the picnics.

This drawing was actually begun by Dean at the first MoCCA up in NYC, but he asked if he could finish it off later in the summer at San Diego. The first day at Comic-Con that year, I sought him out and sure enough, he finished it then—putting himself front-and-center and with his characters Jane Legit and Billy Dogma in the background. It was worth the wait.

Nick Bertozzi is a great guy—every time I see him, he’s got a big smile on his face, and you just know he’d give you the shirt off of his back if you needed it. I first discovered Bertozzi’s comings through Boswash, a comic having to do with surveying that was formatted and unfolded like a gigantic map.

Since then, he’s had graphic novels like The Masochists and The Salon, plus a wide plethora of online comics; his current story Persimmon Cup is like a strange little puzzle box that keeps revealing new hidden compartments every time I look.

For his illustration in my book,  Nick took up the entire page, every last piece he could. And the result? I think it’s lovely. This was the last sketch that was finished at MoCCA back in 2002… although there is one more piece that was started then. But you’ll have to wait until next week for that story.

Matt Madden is one of those creators for whom I don’t think there’s ever an appropriately huge amount of buzz around, even as he continually turns out smart, literate pieces of work. I really liked his graphic novel Odds Off, and in the past couple of years he’s put out two very good books on the making of comics; 99 Ways To Tell A Story: Exercises in Style takes the same script and shows 99 different ways to tell it, and Drawing Words and Writing Pictures: Making Comics from Manga to Graphic Novels (co-written by Jessica Abel) is hitting stores later this year.

More people should read his comics, they’re great stuff… just like this drawing. (I love that he didn’t erase the pencil marks after he inked it. Seeing the genesis of the drawing entrances me.)

Josh Simmons is an odd person, but I think he’d be happy to hear me describe him as such. His first series, Happy, was a deranged collection of short stories, many of which could best be described as having the intensity cranked up to 11. He also did comics about a sideshow carnival called Know Nothing Zirkus, a group that infuses its performance with sexuality and gross-out tactics.

He recently shifted into a different genre of comic; his graphic novel House was a silent journey into horror and claustrophobia. He also has the first volume of a new book called Jessica Farm coming out later this year, one where he’s drawing one page a month for the next 50 years. Which sums up Simmons in a heartbeat, really.

It’s hard to describe meeting Simmons in person, but there’s a combination of intensity and playfulness and insanity wrapped up into one.

This drawing, like Simmons himself, makes me laugh.

Renée French is a real treasure. Her books are a combination of sweet and creepy, some titles meant for older readers like The Ticking, others more squarely at children like The Soap Lady. She has a soft, gentle art that feels at times like if I blow on the page it will just float away.

Her compilation of short stories, Marbles in My Underpants, is out of print and fetches really high prices on the secondhand market, but I can’t bear to part with my copy. It’s such a great combination of amusing and strange and bizarre that I don’t think I’d ever be able to find again.

This cute little drawing from French at MoCCA just makes me smile. There’s something about a faceless stuffed toy walking around with a glass of wine that just seems right.

It’s no secret that I love Kris Dresen‘s comics. Her collaborations with writer Jen Benka on Manya are beautifully drawn, and echo Benka’s thoughful, introspective scripts. Dresen’s also a great writer herself, though, with her humor strip Max & Lily forever making me chuckle, and I adore her current project Grace that she’s serializing online.

She gets a lot of bonus points here for being the first person to not only go for the wine/whine pun, but also still tying it into wine. And as an added bonus, it’s Lily! He’s my favorite of her characters, probably because he’s utterly out of control. In a good way. Honest.

Going through these sketches lately, I’m starting to feel like this stretch of art was almost a curse—draw in my book, stop producing comics!

Scott Mills used to be super-prolific, turning out graphic novels on a regular basis like Big Clay Pot, Trenches, and My Own Little Empire. These days, we haven’t seen much from him, although his website does say that he’s working on a new book. I, for one, can’t wait to see it.

This sketch is great because it’s got a nice combination of whimsy and seriousness about it, to me.  In short, what I’d always liked about his comics. And who hasn’t felt like the character here during a night out on the town? Here’s to more Mills soon!