I’ll be in Toronto, one of my absolute favorite cities, this weekend for the Toronto Comic Arts Festival. I’ll have both of my brand new books with me - CRYING IN FRONT OF YOUR DOG AND OTHER STORIES and my BENIGN KINGDOM art book. I’ll mostly be hanging out at the Grimaklin Press booth (table 103) but will also be signing at the Benign Kingdom booth from time to time (tables 218 - 221).

I’m also doing a couple of drawing events at TCAF! Here’s the info from the festival’s website:

Making Faces - For kids on Saturday from 10:30 - 11:15am in the Novella Room in the Toronto Reference Library.

Join children’s illustrator David Huyck (That One Spooky Night) and Mad Magazine cartoonist Phil McAndrew on how to make a face that sticks. Learn how to show emotions through facial expressions and body posture — make your characters pop off the page! What do the eyebrows say? And why the heck are the eyebrows talking in the first place?

Live Drawing… 2! - on Sunday from 4:00 – 5:00pm at The Pilot Tavern (2nd floor).

Four creators enter, one creator leaves!  Come watch four artists draw for their lives – and for your entertainment.  Winners will feast on the souls of the losers (vegetarian option available).  Featuring Phil McAndrew, Lucy Knisley, Jim Rugg, and Scott C.!

I hope to see you in Toronto!

Infinite Phil.

It’s a little rough around the edges (literally), but I made a pattern for the endpapers in my book.

You can read a little about the book over here and you can pre-order a copy for yourself over here.

24 HOURS LEFT! IN THE BENIGN KINGDOM KICKSTARTER! GET YOURSELF SOME AWESOME BOOKS AND PRINTS!

YOU GUYS. I’ve been working on a book for a long time now. I’ve mentioned it here a few times. There was a wildly successful kickstarter for it a while back. Well, the book is almost done! It’s coming out this spring! And if you missed out on ordering a copy when the kickstarter campaign was going on, don’t worry! You can now PRE-ORDER your very own copy through my publisher, Grimalkin Press! And for anyone that pre-orders the book, there is a special free bonus item: an extremely fancy full color limited edition print, only available to those that pre-order.

Here’s a little bit of information about the book:

CRYING IN FRONT OF YOUR DOG AND OTHER STORIES by PHIL McANDREW - Over 200 pages of new and collected stories about life, death, love, ghosts, cats, time travel, humans, literature, fear, magic, evil organizations, happiness, television, secrets, dogs, loneliness, house plants, ancient dark rituals, pizza, failure, power, money, nature, government conspiracies, regret, the internet, horrifying monsters, awful jobs, wizards, the ocean, aliens, dads, kissing, crying and teeth.

Come In, Bald Eagle is a comic I drew back in 2008 for the third and final volume of the You Ain’t No Dancer anthology books that New Reliable Press published. That book is now out of print and New Reliable Press isn’t publishing anymore so I figured I might as well go ahead and stick this story up on my website for you nice people to look at.

Some notes about this story:

• The first draft that I thumb-nailed out was over twenty pages long. The version that I ended up drawing is only eight pages long.
• One of my friends used to work as an assistant to an eccentric old stamp dealer. Part of her job was scanning in extremely rare, valuable stamps so that they could be sold on the internet. She’d occasionally email me the scans of some of the more interesting stamps, one of them being a stamp that was in fact sent on an envelope from the Titanic. Mary’s code name, Penny Red, is also a reference to stamp collecting.
• The movie Charade was a major inspiration for this comic.
• One of my best friends has been listed in my phone under the code name Bald Eagle for as long as I’ve had a phone.
• The Living Sea is a real book by Jacques Cousteau. It’s great, you should read it.
• All of the buildings you see in this comic are based on real buildings on Marshall Street in Syracuse, NY. My old stomping grounds.
• I forgot to draw eyebrows on certain characters in at least two different panels. How embarrassing!
• I originally planned to draw more comics about Mary and Steven (or Penny Red and Bald Eagle). Maybe I still will!?
• The two main characters, Mary and Steven, are supposed to be in their mid-twenties, though they seem to be living in a perpetual childhood.
• I haven’t yet decided if I’ll include this in my book or not.

website :: twitter

Drew this at the beginning of 2010. I’d like to do more illustrations like this at some point.

BOOM. Another three pages of my book completed.

I just sent a peek out to my kickstarter backers. But if you follow me on twitter you might remember this short story from a while back…

Grilled cheese sandwiches, beers, ice cream, a Bergman film, and some inking before bed. Friday night.

Tonight’s work in progress.

SHOW ME SOMETHING AWESOME. (photo reply turned ON)

A self-portrait of my future self at the age of 100. Drawn in 2009.

A page from BOOK COMIC, a mini comic I drew in 2009. You can still read the whole thing online over here. It will of course be one of the short comics that will be collected in my upcoming book!

(Source: philintheblanks.com)

A little advertisement that’ll go in my upcoming book, which is really starting to come together! Click through the image for a closer look.

Also: please consider treating yourself to some nice things so that I can continue to live in an apartment and buy food. There’s currently FREE WORLDWIDE SHIPPING on all items in my society6 store through Sunday.

My very first contribution to the much missed Picture Book Report. This went up on the internet just a little over two years ago. Contributing to Picture Book Report was huge for me in terms of pushing myself to create some of the best work I’d ever done at that point, which in turn lead to some really neat opportunities (some of which are still unfolding).

darksilenceinsuburbia:

Phil McAndrew. The Cat Relaxes. (unpublished).

I recently added prints of this to my store! I don’t know if I mentioned that anywhere.