Becoming a Caricature of Myself

Happy New Year, everyone! Whatever you celebrated this past holiday season — even if it was just a chance to sit back and relax for a day — I hope everything went well for you and the new year is off to a good start.

Normally I try not to brag about my holiday haul of presents, but one (well, two, given together) was so nerdily awesome that I just had to share:

My wife had a couple of caricatures done portraying me as Ned Stark from A Song of Ice and Fire and Captain Chaos (perhaps the greatest superhero of all time) from The Cannonball Run (she decided that both should also include representations of our science fictionally-named cats, Ripley and Melanie, making trouble, as usual). The art was done by a friend of hers, Karen Poon, who was one of the animators on My Little Pony.

For years, I'd always thought it would be fun to have a little vanity piece like a personalized comic book cover hanging in my study, and while these pictures aren't quite the same thing, they're pretty cool and will get their place of pride on the wall.