Off to San Diego (No Harry Potter Spoilers)!!!

First off, here's a pinup I did for Sea Monsters and Samurai, Chad Thomas's incredibly awesome new project. While there is not a giant anchor-swinging alligator gar in the book (as far as I know), Chad's very permissive when it comes to what he let me do with this character for this one. Keep your eyes out for this one, it's premiering at Wizard World in Chicago!



Well, I'm back in Atlanta and everything is back to normal... for the next twenty hours or so, and then I'm off to San Diego!

The workshop went extremely well. The first day everything was sort of slow, and the kids didn't seem all that responsive, and I thought "Oh, no!" The next couple of days were horrible, stressing out while trying to develop riveting lesson plans, and I remembered why teaching was so hard - it wasn't the teaching part of it, it was the preparation! I got extremely concerned, as I'm really banking on teaching comics when I get my MFA, and all of the sudden the horrible truth of it hit me again (I have an affliction where I remember everything, even horrible things, fondly).

Luckily, though, I got my feet and by the end of the first week we were soaring. By the end of the program I was positive that I want to teach comics for a long, long time.

Dean Trippe and Chad Thomas DID come down a week ago for the class. They showed the kids pages that they'd done and drawings, gave 'em a lot of good info. I was really, REALLY impressed with how they never talked down to the kids, they treated them like peers. Watching Dean talk about the business end of negotiating the price of commissions with ahttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif nine year old is something you really don't want to miss.

We had dinner at my parent's house on the deck - grilled Salmon and a really good salad and all sorts of other goodies. We got to watch the raccoons come up and chow a few feet away, which was fun, and in chatting we had a really, REALLY cool idea for an anthology. It's relatively secret at the moment, but I'm going to start sowing the seeds at San Diego - this is going to be THE anthology of '08.

Oh! And today was Liz's and my three-year anniversary! Wooo! We had a wonderful day, and she got me The Art of Bone, which I've been yearning for ever since I heard it was going to be coming out!

The last couple of weeks have been very Harry Potterish. Liz and I went with my high-school friend group to see Order of the Phoenix, which was a lot of fun, even though I missed significant portions from being ill and having to duck out of the theater. The book was my least-favorite, the hardest to read. You know what I said about only remembering things fondly? Well, the character of Delores Umbridge, an unfair and bureaucratic teacher, brings all of the bad parts of childhood back to me in a flood. Everything that was horrible about childhood is suddenly at the forefront of my thoughts, and it's practically crippling when I think about it too much. I'm a really happy guy, and that character just strips everything out of me. If you're familiar with the books, then you'll know the Dementors: creatures that suck all happiness and hope from whomever they come in contact with. Umbridge does that to me whenever I read about her/watch her on the screen. The actress playing her was great, though, and the movie was good - I was never a fan of the ending of the book, and thought that the movie did a better job flushing it out for me.

I finished it, and won't say anything about it except that it was very good.

I was looking at Lucy Knisley's website (she's one of those cartoonists that both inspires you and makes you sick with how good she is), and realized that I need a LOT MORE stuff on mine. So when I get back I'm gonna overhaul, and give each section some more stuff. I may even be able to put a preview of my big book up, when my publisher makes the book announcement this week.

One of the things that I think I might do is a Harry Potter gallery in the illustration section. I was trying to think what to do with these, and I finally decided that a set of playing cards, as a self-promo thing, might be fun, so I'm gonna crank out 54 of these babies. The only hard part is narrowing the characters down to 54!

Here are three:







I'm getting into San Diego on Wednesday. If you want to find me, I'll be back and forth between the Oni table and the SCAD table, where I'll be selling minis and original art and doing sketches/taking commissions. Keep an eye out!

On another note, this will be the fifth or sixth state where I'll have hung out with Dean in five months. We're keeping score.