The week started off with my weekend at the wonderful Newport Film Festival, one of my favorites. Great programming, super people and an amazing city. All the animators stayed together in a turn of the century carriage house, dorm style.

The weather sucked, but the films and parties were super. I recommend all you filmmakers to enter your films in this festival in the future.

We saw a wonderful film called "EvenHand" by Joseph Pierson, shot in Texas about two cops trying to keep the peace in a low income part of San Antonio. It's surreal, funny, and terrifying and not one car chase in the entire film.

And the mansions - wow - each house is bigger and more beautiful than the next. One of the great things about the Newport Film Festival is the parties in these great houses, where we get drunk and crazy and pretend we're the Great Gatsby.

Back in New York I went to a celebration of 25 years of Garfield at the Animazing gallery. I got to meet Jim Davis, but the highlight was Garfield himself. He was there, much bigger than in the comics, a very friendly cat!

Sunday was the Mocca Art Fest, one of the great comic events in New York. It's strictly small press, so we get to see allthe new artists coming up. I got to hang out with Steve Brodner, Mike Mignola, the great Frank Miller, Art Spiegelman, Dan Piraro and I shared the table with "the second most loathsome person in New York" Ted Rall, who's really a pussycat.

The fest was a smashing success and sold a lot of DVD's and books, met a lot of fans, then finished with a panel discussion on animation, sharing the table with Debra Solomon, R. O. Bechman and Mo Willems. We had a lot of fun and showed some great animation.

The whole Fest is run by Lawrence Klein of Mocca and it's so popular, they may expand to 2 days for next year. Check out www.moccany.org. Be sure to come in 2004, you'll love it.

The cartoon for this week was inspired by a NY rain storm and I noticed how it was fashionable to have a very large umbrellas, which is fine, but a problem when it's on a crowded NY street, where everyone else also has a huge bumbershoot. So this is the natural result. You can see again this is a very early cartoon, around 1972, when I was fresh out of art school, my style was still developing. Cartoon reprinted from "Sloppy Seconds", 2003