Free Comic Book Day Crogan Story!

Anyone who didn't get a chance to go to Free Comic Book Day, don't worry - the Crogan Adventures story is up for reading in the "comics" gallery!

Click the Pic to read!

Pencils and one great sweater

A couple of pencils from the ten-page story I'm doing for the Crogan's Vengeance / Salt Water Taffy Free Comic Book Day comic.

 This first page was an attempt to try and go back to the style of pencilling I did with Crogan's Vengeance - small fixed-weight pen drawings with spotted blacks. I actually did this about a third smaller than I did with Vengeance, drawing it at about 4" tall. After doing the second page, and realizing that my gutters were actually twice as wide (working this small it was hard to guage) and that I couldn't accurately estimate how big my letters were going to be when I tightened them up, I decided to go back to the NEW way. Here's the third page:

 This is the method I used on Crogan's March - a 4" x 6" template in which I used blue pencil. This has a downside - it's hard for me to clearly envision my black-and-white ratio, but the benefits outweigh that. My hope is that I've had enough practice over-analyzing the black/white composition thing and that now a kind of developed instinct will carry me through. In the final version of this page, the bottom panel has actually grown a little taller to include the top of the pulley-thing, and the row above has gotten shorter - it was only as tall as it was in order to fit in young David Crogan's dialogue in that right-hand panel, and in measuring it out I found that it required less space than I originally thought. In other news, I found my old J. Peterman "Nantucket Sweater" that I stole from my dad when I first went off to college. He had worn it for years and years before THAT, and for the past couple it had somehow ended up in a storage box. I found it when we were unpacking, and I've worn it pretty much every day since. It's ridiculously comfortable. Peterman clothes last decades; there's not a hole or fray in sight, and I am REALLY hard on clothing. The fact that it survived my undergrad living and a Europe trek is a testament to its stability. So if you're looking for the world's greatest sweater, this one gets my vote, and it pops up in their catalog every few years, so keep your eyes peeled.

Catching Up - The Book is Done!

Okay. I need to apologize for not updating more. My excuse is that... well... it had been a long time since I'd updated. It's like when I kept a journal. I kept it every day for a year or so, and then had a one-month stretch where I didn't write, and I never picked it up again. Too much time passed, too much to fill in!

So here's the short rundown version of the last month or so:

• The Book
Crogan's Vengeance is DONE. It clocked in at 177 pages, and I finished on the 10th. The book itself will be 189, and is coming out at SPX this year. It'll be hitting shelves nationwide on October 7th, I think.

• James comes to town
James Lucas Jones, my editor (Oni Press's editor-in-chief) came to Atlanta, and I passed off a finished draft to him. He's been pricing the books, and it sounds like they're going to be REALLY cool, in that classic kid's library edition aesthetic. Hardcover, with a gold leaf/foil title. Samples:


• The Barbecue
Shawn Crystal hosted a dinner for James and his minions - Atlanta folk who work for/with Oni (Hunter Clark, who's doing the art for the much-hyped Return of King Doug; Justin Wagner, who's doing the art for CBLDF director Greg Thompson's Lonesome Town; Me; Doug Dabbs, who's doing the art for some Resurrection specials coming up; and our spouses, Liz and Nicole), with SCAD honcho Pat Quinn and his wife Pilar there as well. We had chicken sausage (delicious) and strips of some sort of bourbon-marinated steak. I'm either not a steak man at all OR I'm the biggest steak snob in the world - I've had three steaks in the past ten years that I thought were good, and I LOVED those, but everything else was just hefty meat. The stuff at the barbecue was one of those three, and topped with a homemade guacamole. Mmmm!

• Free Comic Book Day
Shawn and I drove up to Charlotte, North Carolina where we were honored to be a part of the FCBD celebrations at Heroes Aren't Hard to Find. I did about thirty to forty sketches, for folks of all different age ranges.

I did a lot of Iron Man, quite a few Narutos, and more than one Batman... here's one of 'em!


• The Interview
Adam from The Dollar Bin interviewed me about Crogan's Vengeance and working with Oni as FCBD was wrapping up. Listen to it HERE.

• Editor's Day
We went down to Savannah for SCAD's annual Editor's Day. Me, Shawn, James, and Cara McGee made the trek, talking about Oni and Scad and the state of the industry and whatnot. And editor's day went really well - I always love seeing the Savannah folk, plus those editors with whom I'm already aquainted. And the whole thing really climaxed with...

• Karaoke!
I sang a duet of the Queen/David Bowie classic "Under Pressure" with Kevin Burkhalter, and it was, without question, the best Karaoke moment of my life. I did the Freddy Mercury part! Subsequently, I made into not one, but TWO Burkhalter Journal Comics this week! Liz reads Kevin's comics, so anytime I'm in them she treats me like a star.


• Ummmm...
That's it, for the most part. I think. I'm a week away from finishing the last class of my MFA program, and am starting to buckle down on my thesis...