In honor of the International Day of the Number that Helps us Calculate the Dimensions of All Things Round – we’re offering a steep discount of our very special Dragon and Goat book: PI-RAT ISLAND! Today only you can buy the book from our website for 3.14285714286% off!
Full of Mathe-magics, squid-footed pirates, and, of course, Pi-rats, this book is a great introduction to teh Dragon and Goat series for you all ages readers!
Just click the book below to hop on over to the Ye Olde Dragon and Goat Shoppe and check out some pages below!
Well, a bit late- but here’s to a happier year in 2024! This is our holiday card from this past season. Our kid wanted to have us in an elf toy workshop, and while I was really wanting to do a holiday Star Wars card (maybe next year?), I realized that my step-dad’s hardware store would make for a perfect toy-making studio, so we elf-ed up.
It was definitely a bittersweet year-end since we had lost my step-dad this past May, and I’ve been scrambling to deal with everything in the wake of his passing. Even though my dad was and is still very much my dad, my step-dad was a father-figure for me growing up with him and my mom.
He owned a hardware store that he had for two decades at the center of my hometown. I grew up working there at the age of nine, running the register, loading and unloading straw and concrete fountains, and building wagons. He made his own wreaths (hence Alli making the wreath) and sold Christmas trees (never cut- always balled) that I would drive over to North Carolina with him to get in the winters, rolling down the window so not to breathe too much smoke from his ever-present cigarettes while writing and drawing in my notebooks.
Joe Waggoner Hardware pen and ink wash on paper. from 1999.
Over the years I drew his shop a couple times for him in pen and ink. The first was a Christmas present I made in high school and the other was one that he had asked for of the original site when it was a service station. He gave me an old print out that someone had brought him of the photo, and I finished it the summer of 2019.
I have a lot of fond memories of the place. I learned to work, use tools, make stuff. I learned to sit around and be bored and find things to do whether it was smashing nickels in the vice or making keys. The back office was one of my first studios where I’d devour comics, build worlds for Dungeons and Dragons, or write and draw inspired by the muses in Playboys that I would sneak down from the upper shelves.
Early on he sold ducks and chicks until that operation got shut down, my step-sister sold lemonade out the front, and somehow my step-brother and I ran a burger and Coke stand during the Iris Festival- and were not shut down by the local food inspector. We helped haul and unload pumpkins, concrete, and loads and loads of flowers to his enormous green house. A forest of banana trees grew up behind the green house out of the plant clippings he composted that kids from local elementary schools would visit.
I helped him make signs to put out front, carving out a gigantic goose and a rabbit out of plywood as well as a nine-foot tall five-headed pink flamingo that I made at art school. He always supported my weird art even if he didn’t always get it.
One of my happiest moments after I had moved out and gone to the University of Tennessee was when I came back to the store and found a plywood board that he had painted completely abstractly- a technicolor Jackson Pollock drip painting. I had myself been slinging paint in a pretty abstract phase of art making, and he told me my latest paintings had inspired him to throw some around after he had finished painting some of the concrete rabbits and other critters he had put out that season.
I still haven’t even begun to really unpack the loss of my step-dad, but I was pretty glad to have gotten to go back to the Corner (that’s what we always called it) after his passing. While it had been a kind of albatross for him once he had closed shop and had difficulty selling the property, the store somehow avoided demolition and became a taproom. It opened right around his 75th birthday about when he was dying and I had came back to help. Though he wasn’t able to make it, my step-siblings were able to have a few drinks in the bays that we spent so much of our childhoods.
Since his passing I’ve been pretty busy managing things for my mom, my family, and, of course, teaching. While it’s caused a back log in creative output, it’s also been a good time for me to future-think and decide what it is I’m wanting to do in the near and far.
Unbeknownst to me Amazon is, I guess, doing a Flash Sale of my book- the Monkey Prince! Now is a great time to pick up a copy (it’s like $3.23 as of this posting?!) and I’ll still get normal royalties, so almost no money will be going to Jeff Bezos! Pick up a copy or two for early holiday presents and be sure to leave some positive reviews! Feel free to grab any of my other books from the Dragonandgoat.com website and you’ll get a signed copy from me!
I realized I never posted my Lego Dragon and Goats I made a little bit ago, but I ended up doing a few iterations of Dragon and a couple of Goat- I still need to do a small Goat, and I’ll probably shoot for a couple super smalls of the pair!
So these (above) were the first two and fun to get a sense of working with the bricks that can send Legos out in multiple directions- that we didn’t have a lot of back in the day.
The next 2 I decided to take advantage of the curves that are now available. The mouths were pretty tough to figure out in my head before buying the bricks and hoping that I was guessing right as to how everything would come together!
Not visible here is that on the Big Goat his ears and tail are hinged to move. I still want to make a Dragon that chomps, though…
So which of the five is your favorite? I’m still partial to the first Dragon (above in the middle), but we’ll see how the littlest Goat turns out once I make it!
(But seriously playing around with 3D printers is fun- I just don’t need more things to distract me these days- see the Lego post in the next week!)
So every Christmas I sculpt a new Claynimal (or sculpey) critter for my kiddo, and since this past year she’s been pretty into Saber-tooth Tigers (or Smilodons because of their big toothy grins). This year she knew right off which box it was because I was constantly saying, “Be careful with that one!”
Kid Fotos’s Winged Saber-tooth Tiger (I don’t think the Smilodon had wings but the fossil record is always fuzzy, right?!)
In years past when I did them for nieces and nephews (and I’ve been making them for about 20 years or so), they would be somewhat small but they’ve grown in size -sometimes quite a lot. (You can see my video building a T-rex a couple years ago on my Youtube channel here.) So for the 2022 Saber-tooth, I wanted it to be a little smaller but still have some fun details.
I started with the wire frame to get a sense of the size but knowing the clay bulks it out, I tried to keep the ‘skeleton’ smallish to reign in the bigness. I use a lighter gauge wire now to bulk out the body first with the armature instead of old-school soldering wire I used to use (and if you get soldering wire- get the lead free kind). Generally I just recommend lighter wire for smaller figures- even thinner than what I use would be ideal for lots of wrapping!
These figures are fun but they also stress me out a bit because it’s always the end of the semester, amidst the holiday rush, and they have a very specific deadline. But they always manage to come together.
The Saber-tooth particularly came together quicker than I had expected- maybe it’s all the Lego builds I’ve been doing lately? I did a lot of pre-thinking of the various parts and how to glob together the various shapes. One of the tricks using light and dark colors is working light to dark, and making sure to wash your hands between colors with degreasing detergent since it’s easy to contaminate colors- especially the bright yellow I was using.
I was pretty happy with how the lil’ Smilodon came out at the end of the day, and I don’t know how it did since we were still reeling that night with finding out we had a positive COVID case in the house! Still I managed to finish bulking it out, and we did manage to carve out pretty fun, if not a little isolated, holiday times.
Plus it was exciting that our kiddo got her own oven baked clay animal kit from family in Colorado. It was one of the first ‘toys’ she wanted to crack open and she spent the better part of the day reading every single step-by-step direction in the handbook!
Kid Fotos’s collection of claynimals: a white kitty, bunny, yellow kitty, and guinea pig (my favorite so far!)
I had Alli take this pic a week ago as we dealt with COVID disrupting our travel plans over the holidays, but I didn’t post it because we were still trying to get out of town. I didn’t want to get cocky since things were looking good for us to just postpone the trip a week but then…I got the COVIDs myself and we were grounded once again for New Year’s Eve.
It’s been frustrating since the past few years we’ve been so careful and only recently had begun to relax some of our social restrictions that we’ve made for ourselves since the rest of the social world is mostly ignoring the virus that is still ping-ponging through our communities.
We’re what has now been deemed ‘heavy-maskers’ since we consistently wear masks indoors, but there’s only so much you can do when people no longer care to restrict what they’re doing- but also, like me, may be completely asymptomatic (at least, so far!). I am thankful that we have been pretty insistent on testing at home and going in for PCRs or else we would have gone back to home in Tennessee and NC, plague ratting our family there.
All this to say I had great plans for some posting and art-making as I was looking forward to 2023 – and while that hasn’t happened, I’m hoping to get in a couple before the next semester starts up.
For sure the line ‘Don’t Panic’ from Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, has been my mantra these past 3 years and looks like it’s gonna be good one for the next.
But we have been lucky in what we’ve had to deal with, and I know a lot of you out there have dealt with a lot this past year and even just in the past couple weeks. Things will continue to change but as long as a Vogon doesn’t show up with a planet-dozing ship, we can work together to adapt and change ourselves and our communities for the better. So I’m optimistic- even typing this through the fog of my glasses quarantining in my basement- that we can make 2023 better… But I’ll still have my towel (and mask) packed, just in case!
Be sure to stop by Stern Glass Works and Great Sip Cafe Tomorrow Dec. 17 to see me and stock up on the latest Dragon and Goat comic- MAGIC MOUNTAIN! We’ll be there from 11am-4pm at 817 & 818 Oak Park Ave. in Oak Park, IL. I’ll have several other D&G books to round out your collection as well as limited stock of Alli’s comic- PUMP STATION.
We are thankful to everyone who have been fans and are newly discovering Dragon and Goat in our last 20 years as an all original comic. So thanks! We hope you have a great Thanksgiving and enjoy feasting on whatever tasty vittles you typically feast upon this time of year.
These are a few throwback strips from Dragon and Goat’s early days in the papers where Dragon agrees on a bet to get their Thanksgiving turkey from a tofurkey farm.
It’s one of the mini-stories included in the latest Dragon and Goat book MAGIC MOUNTAIN where you’ll see Dragon and Goat not just venturing to a magic mountain to resurrect a unicorn fur coat- but in a few other adventures from back in the day.
This weekend (from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday) any Dragon and Goat book order of the MAGIC MOUNTAIN will come with a hand-drawn Dragon and Goat drawing (up to the first 30 orders!). We just got the batch of books in and will be sending them out (and the other pre-orders) next week!
Don’t forget to add any other Dragon and Goat books or enamel pins you might need to have them by Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Boxing Day, Ōmisoka, Saturnalia- or whatever Winter Solstice oriented extravaganza that drives your shopping this time of year.
These comics were originally printed in black and white as strips and are now available in full color- fully remastered as full page comics in this newest D&G anthology. It will be the LAST anthology of the ole Dragon and Goat strips as we prep for the next D&G graphic novel!
Thanks again for following along for the adventure!
