(Narnian) Monsters By Mail

Sort of a shameless bit of self-promotion here, but I thought maybe a few of you might be interested. Read on:

As you all probably know, I'm a big fan of the Godfather of Geek Rock, Jonathan Coulton. He won me over with his song, 'Code Monkey', and after seeing him live in St. Louis last October, I've become a die-hard fan.

Mr. Coulton began his beguine by putting out one song every week for a year. He called this project his 'Thing A Week' project, and as improbable as it sounds, he actually pulled it off rather nicely. There are now 52 songs up at his website that make up his work in 2007.

Along with each Thing A Week (or TAW), there was usually posted a VTAW, or a 'Visual Thing A Week', which is an illustration to go along with the song. The artist responsible for these is Len, the host (along with his wife, Nora) of the podcast known as Jawbone Radio.

Len is a talented artist, and he and Nora are the proud parents of six children. The most recent, Kateri Elizabeth, was born in October, and to help pay for the medical and other expenses the new baby was expected to incur, Len started up a project he calls "!Monsters By Mail" . Basically, it's just what it sounds like: you send Len $25 (via Paypal) and the name of a monster, and he draws an original 4x6 image (suitable for framing, of course) of that monster and sends it to you in the mail. If you're feeling really splurgy, you can pay him an extra $10 and he'll film himself drawing the monster and post it to Youtube. The action there is speeded up some to save time, but the result is downright fascinating.

The project took off pretty well, I'd say. Anyone who has tried to get a commissioned art piece done of their character can tell you that $25 is a really awesome price for something like this, and the $35 for drawing plus video is just plain cool. Originally Len had in mind to do about 150 of these, but the demand has been so high that he's continued well past the 700 monster mark by this point. And, as narcissistic as it is, I've thrown my own rodent hat in the ring. Sometime in the next two days, Len will be drawing -- AND filming (I splurged) -- Wix the Overlord Squirrel.

Now, it bears noting that the ONLY information Len has to draw from is the phrase 'Wix the Overlord Squirrel'. I'm dying to see what he does with that, actually... But the point in telling YOU all about it here is that A) if you're curious, you'll be able to see Wix the Overlord Squirrel come to life on YouTube, and B) I think it's even possible you can watch him draw it LIVE using UStream . If that's the case, I'll post it here.

Either way, since the price is pretty good, I also wanted to suggest that if anyone ELSE has a few bucks lying around and wants to commission a freaky version of their NarniaMUCK characters, they let me know. I'd love to post the links somewhere on the site. (If you don't get the video, Len will still put your image up in his Flickr photostream ) It's also just plain fun to watch him draw. He uses a lot of Jonathan Coulton background music, for obvious reasons.

Thanks muchly!