Happy Halloween!

Justice 2001 - 2009

Justice 2001 - 2009, linocut, 10.5" x 7" image area, Marc Snyder 2008

You might just remember Fragments From a Journal of the Secret War, a broadside that I designed around Ron Offen's poem. At the time I mentioned that the lower third of the broadside would be a stand-alone linocut that I would edition at some point in the future. Well, the future is now, and the first linocut from the edition is now available for purchase on eBay. As a matter of fact, odds are this will be the only print from this edition that I will sell at auction - the rest of the edition will be available for purchase directly from FIMP after the auction is over.

I've scheduled the auction to end one hour after the polls close in California on Election Day. This image is my portrait of the state of Justice after 8 years of the Bush administration. It's my great hope that an image that I might make four years from now of the same topic would be much different than this one. Maybe we'll see some hope of that on November 4.

new horizons in crime

Woman arrested for killing virtual reality husband.

Talking Monkey, continued.

Here's the current proof of the talking monkey etching. You may have noticed the first proof here.

It's probably a few aquatints and a good bit of scraping away from being done.

If you want it, here it is. . .

As promised a post or two ago, you can surf to this auction to pick up Crow IV. The auction finishes up next Sunday.

That dog's got quite a habit.

A couple of month's ago I was doing my version of "research" for the book of the month, the topic being the great conflict between hat-wearing and cigarette-smoking. One thing I noticed which I didn't make use of was the presence of smoking in children's books. My favorite example is this one from Richard Scarry's "Great Big Air Book", published in 1971. In my daughter's library I can also find Curious George smoking a pipe, and numerous instances of people smoking cigars and pipes in various Dr. Seuss books. I'm not sure when the exact cut-off date is, but I don't find any smokers in any of Rachel's contemporary books, which probably doesn't surprise anyone. They only show up in those books that are from my childhood or earlier.

Now, of course, there shouldn't be books out there for kids that encourage them to smoke. And I understand why publishers and educators have a list of "taboo" subjects for children's books. But the avoidance of these taboos can sometimes create a world in the books that is just too sweet and light and too far removed from what my daughters see when they're walking down the street with me. Now I wouldn't tolerate racist imagery in any of her books, and I have very little patience for all of the princesses and other helpless females that tend to appear in Disney offerings. But for some reason the smokers in these old books seem like a breath of fresh air, so to speak. Knowing how difficult it would be to publish them these days, finding them in the older books just amuses me.

Admittedly, this image is from a story on air pollution. Dogs using the beach as an ashtray don't appear in other contexts in Richard Scarry books. But the fact that Father Cat is allowed to smoke two big cigars over the course of the story, and the only repercussion is that his white suit gets dirty, is somehow oddly refreshing to me. You just couldn't get that published now.