A Whole New Me

Nov 22, 2006

Look at the upper left corner of any page on my site, you'll see something new: I'm a cartoon! I'm not quite sure where I got the idea (although, admittedly, a number of bloggers are doing it). Since the unifying theme of this site is me, it makes sense to use myself as a logo. But I rarely like photos of myself, and a cartoon portrait seemed like more fun anyway.

The artist is Mike Segawa, whose work I noticed on a (Not Safe For Work) Buffy fan site years ago - he had done some wonderful pictures of Buffy characters and scenes, and I wanted to track him down to find out if he had any more. Eventually I found an email address and dropped him a note, but got no reply - for two years. I guess he had kept my email, because when he finally did get a site up (mikesegawa.com) he wrote to let me know about it.

By then I had come up with the idea of a cartoon portrait for my site, so I wrote back immediately - but again got no reply. I kept Mike's site in my bookmarks and visited now and then to see what was new (lots of yummy artwork besides - yay! - more Buffy). A few months ago he mentioned on his home page that the email address had been wrong, and offered a new one. I wrote to that, and finally we were in touch.

It took a little longer to get the project done, but here we are at last. It's more portrait than cartoon - the family double chin is clearly in evidence - but, hey, that's the real me. And the lean-back air of ironic amusement, with the skeptical Gromit eyebrows, seems appropriate for my site. What do you think?