Mimi Pond's Blog

GOOD NEWS! The Customer is Always Wrong is finished and will be published in April 2017. This is the 448-page, long-awaited sequel to Over Easy, my Pen-award-winning, New York Times Best Seller List-worthy graphic novel of 2014. The Customer is Always Wrong is the continuing saga of art-student-turned-waitress Madge, as she attempts to navigate her way through the moral swamp of the late 1970s and early 1980s in an atmosphere of sex, drugs, rock and roll, and eggs. Surrounded by a tribe of charismatic, epic underachievers, Madge struggles to forge her identity as a cartoonist outside the all-consuming madness of the Imperial Cafe. 

Fans should also know that I plan to navigate most of my posting over to my new site at mimipond.com! 

 

Since Over Easy was published on April 15, reviews and interviews have been through the roof!

First of all, there was the USA Today story on Popcandy and the LA Times interview, and then there was this amazing piece on Buzzfeed which has over 100,000 views! This one on Paste is hilarious because it says "Disco Was Horrible. Mimi Pond Exposes the Seventies."  Even the San Francisco Chronicle chimed in! Finally people are listening to me!

Besides that, on April 17, I had an incredible reading at GROUND ZERO, Mama's Royal Cafe, in Oakland, Ca, which is the inspiration for Over Easy. So many old friends and co-workers from my time working there came to show the support and love. It was totally overwhelming! 

Here's a drawing I did of the exterior of slightly fictionalized Imperial- aka Mama's Royal -Cafe

They packed the house!

they lined up for signed books!

Pegasus Books  sold out quickly!

 

We even had celebrities in the house, like brilliant graphic novelist and Oaklander Dan Clowes.

We had a joyous waitress reunion! Imagine all these beautiful creatures in funky thrift store dresses! They are some of the most awesome women I know, all united by a unique shared experience working with the great and brilliant poet John Veglia, aka Nestor Marzipan, our restaurant manager, inspiration for the character Lazlo Merengue in "Over Easy." You should have seen the hands raised when I asked the crowd, "How many of you who worked here back in the day had sex in the restaurant with a co-worker?" NO JUDGEMENT! This was the beauty of that time. No one cared! Reading Over Easy, I hope you all have a sense of just how different things were in the late 1970s and early 80s. 

here's our fearless leader, Nestor Marzipan, aka John Veglia. See if you recognize him in Over Easy!

I look forward to seeing more of you at upcoming events, at Skylight Books, on April 30, in Los Angeles, at TCAF, in Toronto, from May 9-11, at McNally Jackson Books, in NYC, and at Comic-Con in San Diego, July 24-27.

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via www.facebook.com

Tom Spurgeon, intrepid comics scholar that he is, asks me everything right about Over Easy!

Hello, dear friends. It's been a long time between posts, but I am here to tell you that my magnum opus, my 15-years-in-the-making graphic novel, Over Easy, a tale of sex, drugs, rock'n'roll and eggs in the late 1970s in Oakland, CA, will be in stores April 15, or you can pre-order it on Amazon by clicking here.  

Yes, it's over 270 pages all about my post-art-school waitressing career in a world awash in cocaine, weed,  and pre-AIDS-era promiscuous sex.  In this nifty poster designed by my fantastic publisher, Drawn and Quarterly, you can see where I'll be if you want to come out and say hello. I would love that! What is not to love? It's got it all: vituperative fry cooks, sultry-but-vindictive waitresses, clever repartee, and all this in a world where no one was saying "Just say no." Everyone was saying "YES!" to EVERYTHING.  So here, at the intersection of hippie and punk, in this fictionalized memoir, my alter ego Madge attempts to navigate the moral swamp of a cockeyed decade. If you lived through this decade yourself, or you wish you had, this book is an absolute MUST! You haven't seen anything like this in the world of graphic fiction before. 

 

I have been pathetically lax in keeping up with this blog, I confess. Big things have happened. The documentary about my husband Wayne White's work and life (which includes me and our children) , Beauty is Embarrassing , came out last year and now it's all over the Netflix etc. We never could have predicted the enormous response of the public to this film! It's been a wild and humbling ride. Wayne and I were honored and thrilled to have been chosen to be month-long residents at the Robert Rauschenberg Residency on Captiva Island, Fla, this past February and March. Following that I just spent 11 days with Wayne while he finished up a month in Oklahoma City working on a gigantic cardboard cubist cowboy installation for the Oklahoma City Museum of Art. And the fruits of these travels are that, when I leave town I am able to get tons of work done on my graphic novel, "Over Easy" which I am still toiling over for pre-emininent Montreal graphic novel publisher, Drawn and Quarterly. Part one of Over Easy, which will be about 260 pages, comes out next spring. Our son, Woodrow White, will be a senior at my alma mater, California College of the Arts, this fall. Our daughter, Lulu White, has been accepted at Cooper Union in the fall, in apparently the last class in Cooper's 154-year history to get free tution.
And, oh yeah, I changed my hair color. But besides that, I am almost finished with my very first exclusive web comic, which I promise to debut here in the next day or so, as soon as I figure out a clever title. 

So, about two months after my inital visit to Phyllis' house, I finally published this cartoon in the LA Times. Because, on January 4th, I got to visit Phyllis again and hang out in her studio with her. I was told by her assistant that she wasn't sure if I would get to hang out while Phyllis painted or if it'd just be a straight-up interview, 30 MINUTES TOPS!!! But luckily, Phyllis was in the mood to paint on January 4th. I took a seat on a stool and sketched her as she painted, all the while desperately trying to think of WHAT to ask her that she hasn't already been asked in her 94-going-on-95 years! I'm no Barbara Walters when it comes to interviews, and I already felt like I was impinging on her private time. I was TORN! Torn, I tell you, between just wanting to watch her in silence, and feeling like I had to get a story. But you know me, I always get my story. Phyllis was very kind, but she wasn't "on." She was painting! And I didn't want to make her work for my cartoon. That was my job. It only took about two weeks of mulling and about an entire pad of the tracing paper upon which I always do my roughs, to carve it out. These little sketchy things I do, of about 8 panels or so, they look like I just dashed them off. BUT I DON'T!!!! It may look easy. Which is good, it's supposed to. BUT IT AIN'T!

Good lord, I have been hideously remiss in keeping up with this blog. Let's dust things off around here and...HEY, WHO LEFT THAT GLASS OF MILK SITTING HERE? It's cheese now. Hm. Not bad. Anyway,  here's links to my latest stuff from the LA Times. 

Under the latest cartoon, about a Civil War Reenactment in Moorpark, CA, are links to more of my most recent cartoons,  including one about the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, a visit to Richard Simmons' gym in Beverly Hills,  random odd things spotted around L.A., and Carmageddon back in July. 

Next up in the cartoon docket? A trip to Phyllis Diller's house for her art party this weekend! Phyllis is 94 years old, and having just seen both a documentary about her and having rushed out to buy her book, "Like a Lampshade in a Whorehouse," I must say that I am filled with admiration for this mother of five whose career as a comedian did not start until she was 37 and utterly desperate. She's 94, for god's sake! She still does art! How amazing is that?

So Drawn & Quarterly wants me to split my graphic novel up into two parts. BECAUSE IT'S JUST THAT HUGE!  It just keeps getting...bigger. So this way I have a more manageable deadline, which could be in like, oh, I don't know, a year or two or three ... anyway I am WORKING ON IT, OKAY!?

I did another cartoon for the Los Angeles Times about dressing for "cold" weather in LA. It looks great online but their printing methods continue to lag behind in about early-1960's quality color separation, making it look in print like you should be wearing 3-D glasses to be able to read it at all. It's depressing.

 

Finally cranked out another one for the LA Times today.I have to thank my odd-jobbed friends for their generous observations about maintaining sanity in the New Depression-and for their willingness to be cartoons!