Spelunkin'

This weekend Liz and I drove up to Chattanooga, Tennessee to spend the day with Chad and Jill. I met Chad at Heroes Con earlier this year, and he was gracious enough to come speak to my class this summer. I'd met Jill before with Chad in Nashville, but neither had met Liz.

First off, Chattanooga's downtown is extremely pleasant, and they have a GREAT used bookstore on the corner of 4th and Broad. I picked up an old Rafael Sabatini book, and they had quite a few other old writers that I like, including Farnol and tons of out-of-print Dumas books, but none that I felt I had to have right then.

We had breakfast and went to Ruby Falls, a cave system under Lookout Mountain.

Me, Chad, Jill, and Liz in the cave.


It was fun, though there was a lot of standing and waiting while other tours passed by on their way out. Chad and I both went nuts for this little underground lakey thing:


It'll probably serve as inspiration for locations in both of our books, so keep your eyes peeled.

Driving home, Liz helped me make an SPX plan. I'm going to try and have Giovanni in print (in extremely small quantity) and for sale, and I'm gonna have the minis I've already done - Goodbye Beard and Shoot the Moon. I'm also going to put together some portrait books. The first is going to be Authors of Adventure Novels. I've finished all but one, Russell Thorndike (author of the Doctor Syn books), because I've spent hours looking for a picture of him online with nothing to show for it.

Here are two of the new ones:

James Fenimore Cooper, author of the Leatherstocking Tales:


Baroness Orczy, author of the Scarlet Pimpernel novels:


In addition to working on Crogan's I'm going to try and do 5 portraits a day as a warm-up. Hopefully I'll have a few mini-comic portrait book volumes come October.

Elisha and the She-Bears

In trying to come up with a good silent comic, I started thumbnailing out an interpretation of the Bible story about Elisha and the She-Bears. Not familiar with that one? It was always one of my favorites. From 2 Kings 2:23-24:

"...as he was going up the road, some youths came from the city and mocked him, and said to him, ‘Go up, you baldhead! Go up, you baldhead! So he turned around and looked at them, and pronounced a curse on them in the name of the Lord. And two female bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the youths."

The sheer wantonness of Elisha's vengeance for teenagers/children making fun of his lack of hair always struck me as horrifically macabre and somewhat hilarious. Until I started trying to draw it:





Now I'm not as much of a fan. I've abandoned the project, as drawing a bunch of middle schoolers getting mauled by bears is an emotionally taxing experience, and is probably not all that psychologically healthy. Don't want to give myself whatever the artist version of PTDS if I can help it.

Which means I'm still at square one. No good ideas. Crogan's is back on track, but I'll be hornswaggled if I can think of any non-swashbucklery comic ideas. I want some stuff for SPX, which is only six or seven weeks away, and the SCAD anthology is having a contest with a scholarship prize that would cover my last two quarters. Grr!

Liz and I are going to Chattanooga on Saturday to spend the day with Chad Thomas and his girlfriend Jill. Hopefully talking with him and spending the day away from the drawing desk will help me come up with some ideas.

A few ink drawings

I did some small drawings today. The last one is on a 5x7 piece of Bristol, the others are three inches tall and of varying widths. Oh, the Creepy German Flying Ace I did last week or sometime thereabouts. The others I did today.



Liz gets home tomorrow! With temperatures of a hundred degrees, I'm looking forward to having a car, rather than walking everywhere. Got a hat though, to keep my cooler; it's somewhere between a panama hat and a straw hat. Also, I've been listening to Rilo Kiley a lot lately. Can't stress how much I love that band, and the members' side projects.

This page took me twelve dang hours to ink

To start off this missive, I did a picture of Dean Trippe's Butterfly. I was reading Drew Weing's Journal Comics (somewhat famous in the comics world for being very good) for the first time (I'm late to everything) and Dean was in them here and there. That reminded me that I'd been wanting to do a butterfly drawing for a while now. Here 'tis!



Man! Cartooning has become REALLY hard and stressful over the past few weeks. I'm doing that "try and make everything as perfect as possible" thing with my pages, and as a result they undergo a ridiculous amount of revisions. If the speed at which many of my friends and contemporaries work is to be the standard, then I work very fast; this page (well, the last panel), however, went through no fewer than a dozen significant changes and redraws, and rather than finding myself occupied for the usual hour or two of inking, I've been at it for nearly a half-day, from 11am this morning until 10:30 tonight. This is in addition to the hours I've spent thumbnailing and planning said page, so all in all this is probably a 24-hour panel. Disappointingly, though, it seems no more special than any other panel I've done, though I suppose that is good; I wouldn't want it to stand out and pull the reader from the narrative. The final page looks as you see it here, though the last panel has four layers of glued paper and a LOT of white acrylic paint slathered on, and all of these additions have been drawn upon, in many instances more than once. Anyone who thinks me infallible (no one comes to mind) would have their faith sorely tested by seeing this collage of inkwork.

Here's the page, though without the first panel. Though satisfactorily completed, it gives away a plot point better kept under wraps, and remains hidden lest your future reading experience be marred by knowledge of things to come.



I find myself continuously tweaking the dialogue, rearranging phrases, removing words, taking things in a slightly different direction, eliminating unnecessary information, and other steps of that nature. As panels and pages must be redrawn to accommodate these changes, it is harder and harder for me to jump into the inks, knowing as I do that they will likely be but the first of what should be a one-time exercise. So I'm trying more and more to tighten my thumbnails.

For those of you who don't like shop-talk, sorry for such a boring and indulgent entry! Here's another drawing to make it a little more worth your while:




It's the Captain Alatriste character I mentioned in the previous blog.

Back to the Thumbnailing Board

Although I thought I was well along on my pencils, turns out I'm gonna have to do some reworking. I was going over them with Shawn Crystal and he pointed out that I wasn't directing; I was showing part of this particular scene with no narrative decisions (just a flat, straightforward portrayal of the action and dialogue), and as a result the reader doesn't know whether to be concerned, relieved, etc... and he was 100% right. I'm not pushing my angles in this scene, I'm not playing with action or body language, I'm not using my "camera," I'm just not using all the storytelling elements at my disposal, and I'm gonna have to rework the latter part of this scene (the preceding pages are fine).

Here's a page which will most likely never be seen; a few panels might make it out, but the rest... ces la vie.



The little ship (while in reality being far more menacing and dangerous than its cumbersome counterpart) doesn't look like much of a threat, and its diminutive appearance in the wide shot sort of negates the intended impact of its own arrival. Setting up that shot was a real pain, though. There also needs to be more going on aboard the larger ship to build tension for the (probably murderous) consequences of the smaller ship's arrival. Anyway, the next few days will be a "back to the drawing board" type of deal.

Liz looked extra cute today when she came home from work, so I drew a picture of her. She was wearing a black dress that apparently she's had for a while but that I don't remember seeing.



And, as usual, research excites me. As I read further back from the period on which I'm working in order to gain a better comprehensive overview of that period, I start to get into the aforementioned preceding timeframe. Now I'm considering pushing the Crogan family tree back to the early 1600s, but if I do that I likely won't stop. If I focus on the Baroque then I'll want to get into the Elizabethan, which segues oh so smoothly into the whole Henry VIII stuff, with the Irish rebellions and the dissolutions of the Monasteries, and if you're doing Henry then you may as well play up the intrigue of the whole Tudor transition, and then you're smack in the medieval, and how can you avoid those delectable Crusader possibilities? It's a slippery slope, to be sure; the family tree is going to be poster-sized before long and I'll be stuck making Crogan books for the next seventy years... but that probably wouldn't be so bad.

Here's a sketch I did in studio today: a potential villain for a Baroque-era Crogan who serves as a diplomatic envoy to France and Spain? Literal "cloak and dagger" stuff...

Crogan's Vengeance: my new book

Well! It's been a semi-productive weekend so far. I've got the next scene pretty tightly thumbnailed, and I'm doing my pencils as we speak (taking a break to do this blog). I'm hoping to be completely done with the first third of the book (a fair chunk, to be sure) in two weeks - up through page 38 by Friday.

Oh! For those of you who haven't heard the specifics, my book deal was announced at the San Diego Comic Con last weekend! Here's the skinny:

Oni Press (publishers of such great books as Scott Pilgrim, Northwest Passage, Courtney Crumrin, and Capote in Kansas) is publishing my graphic novel series the Crogan Adventures.

The first of these books is Crogan's Vengeance:



Each book (to be released every 18 months) will feature a different member of the fictitious Crogan family as they have a variety of exciting adventures. I'm having a great deal of fun doing tons of research (you'd think that part would be over by now, but I end up having to look up something -- usually multiple somethings -- on almost ever page on which I work), drawing, writing piratey dialogue, choreographing action scenes, etc.

Woo! I'm now allowed to talk about it in detail to anybody, so anyone writing comic-related news stories feel free to pester me.

The Oni announcement has already been covered by a few news sources: Newsarama, Comic Book Resources, even some foreign-language sites. The best advance press of all has come from Indie Spinner Rack, a great comic review and news podcast based out of NYC. One of the hosts read the 26-page preview I gave them, and was REALLY complimentary. If you want to find it on iTunes, it's episode 91, at 50:05. If you want the highlights, phrases were thrown around like "I was rivetted," "I couldn't put it down," and "look for this book, it is so good, it is SO good." Wooo! That's the best review I've ever had, and the book ain't even done yet!

On another note, I've been reading some AWESOME books by an author whose stuff I've enjoyed in the past,
Arturo Perez-Reverte. He's penned a series about a Spanish soldier-of-fortune named Captain Alatriste, and I'm enjoying the heck out of 'em -- it was originally a research purchase, but I'm totally enthralled. Under the hopes that there may have been a movie made at some point, I IMDBed it, and had a real shocker --
there IS a movie.



It's starring our fellow countryman, Viggo Mortenson, and for some crazy reason it doesn't have a US release date, even though it's already on DVD in Spain. If anybody has a copy of this puppy (it's called Alatriste, by the way), let me know! I'm dying to see it. All I watch anymore are period pieces set between 1600 and 1820 (I'm trying to stay in the right mindset for working on the book) and I've just about run out of new ones.

Back from SAN DIEGO

Wow! What a weekend.


Dean Trippe and Me - Both of us had our books announced at the Oni panel on Saturday, but that doesn't stop us from having "hero hands."

I spent the last six days in sunny San Diego, perhaps the most comfortable place on Earth, at the San Diego Comicon. For those of you unfamiliar with the SDCC, it is the biggest comic trade show/convention in the world (as far as I know), with a hundred and fifty thousand people packed into a room roughly the size of three or four city blocks. It's a big deal, too - video game companies, movie studios, toy manufacturers, all sorts of bigwigs abound at this thing.

I shared a hotel with Hunter Clark, Chris Bruner, Andrew Robinson, Shawn Crystal, and Jason Latour.


Me and Hunter, giving "a look."

I helped sell books at the Oni Press booth. I've been unable to speak freely about it until now, but Oni is the publisher of my new book series! I'll write another blog specifically about that in the very near future. Although I'd met editor-in-chief James Lucas Jones before, it was my first chance to meet managing editor Randal Jarrell and C.E.O.(?) and founder Joe Nozemack. I also got to hang out with some Oni cats whom I had met on prior occasions, like Capote in Kansas writer Ande Parks and Northwest Passage auteur Scott Chantler, whose original pages are more than any books can do justice to, even the beautiful new hardcover edition of Passage, AND I got to meet a lot of the artists and writers with whom I'd had no prior contact, like Brian Hurtt of The Damned. It was a lot of fun, and Oni treated us like KINGS. Let me elaborate.

On Friday night we had a party through United Talent Agency, who represents Oni through the production studio Closed on Mondays, bringing Oni books to the big screen. I'd never been to a fancy private club party before, with the guest list and the bouncers and the open bar and all that. It was LOTS of fun. All the Oni creators were there, and the editors, and a bunch of producers and a variety of celebritites - a few of the guys from NBC's Heroes, the kid from Arrested Development, Edgar Wright and Nick Frost, Liv Tyler, X-ibit (the rapper - is that how you spell it?), etc... I had no idea how "in" with the Hollywood crowd Oni was until that night. There were producers and stars in the booth throughout the weekend, which sort of surprised me - it's hard for me to think of comics as "more" than comics, even though I know that, in terms of licensing potential, they're a multi-million dollar industry. Strange, though, how that doesn't translate to comics being more of a standard in terms of the literary market. Oh, well - we're getting there.

I gave Stan Sakai my Usagi Yojimbo drawing, and he was very kind - he gave me his sketchbooks and signed a couple of Usagi trades for me, and offered to do a pin-up for the back of my book, which elates me to no end, as he's one of my all-time favorite cartoonists. His comic is the embodiment of what a monthly book SHOULD be - well-written, well drawn, a complete story in and of itself but contributing to a larger overall story. Perfect for new and old readers alike.


Justin Wagner, probably griping about how we should all be watching the Simpsons movie, with Joey Weiser and Doug Dabbs.

I picked up Joey Weiser's book The Ride Home. It looks GREAT. Can't wait to read it.

I spent most of my money at the Stuart Ng table, purveyor of amazing comics unavailable in the US (nothing bad or illegal, just not published for American editions). I got a couple volumes of Loisel's Peter Pan, one volume of the Marquis of something-or-another (great ships and sea art), and the most expensive but so-worth-it Belladone books, which, as Scott Chantler put it so well, are "exactly what we're trying to do, only much, much better." I got off easy at Stuart's - a few of the other guys who I was there with dropped a lot more than I did - but had you seen the books offered, you'd be proud at our restraint. I DID get a great watercolor sketch from Belladone artist Pierre Allary. It's going on the wall soon!

I also got to know Jared Jones, brother of James, and his friends Corey and Shana. They were amazingly interesting and fun people, and it's rare that I get to meet non-industry folk at these things and have such a good time with them.

I spent all of Sunday-day at the San Diego Maritime Museum, which was just as much fun as (and maybe MORE fun than) the con. I'm such a nerd when it comes to nautical stuff, and one of the highlights of my summer (and it's been an amazing summer) was getting to spend five hours aboard the HMS Surprise, the ship built for the Master and Commander film. It was amazing! While prohibited from actually climbing the shrouds, you could go just about anywhere you wanted, and I DID. I examined and sketched just about everything that I could - mostly knots, splices, tackles, and the like, to better prepare for my book, and I took about a hundred and fifty carefully chosen photographs to use as reference. I was in heaven, all the moreso because of the constant light wind and the Baroque string music that carried over the deck. Heaven, to me, would be that ship with that music, only I'd be allowed to dive off the sides and climb the rigging.



The last night was the "Dead Dog" party, which James invited me to and which I assumed was a smaller Oni party - boy was I wrong! It was another of the guest-list and bouncer parties, this one populated by the cream of the crop of the comics world. Jeff Smith and Sergio Aragones were at the table next to us (us being myself, Comic Book Legal Defense Fund honcho Greg Thompson and his wife (whose name I can't immediately remember and can't find online) and one of their friends; Paul Pope and Jim Lee were about, Stan Sakai was there - even little Alexa Kitchen. It was a great way to wrap things up.

More on the book - and the additions to the website - tommorow!

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.

My Very First Mini!

I've been spending the last week and my parent's house while I'm teaching this workshop. It's been fun. The house is SO different from when I lived here - gardening and landscaping and remodeling and the like. I never really liked this house as a teen, but now it's really nice.

One of the perks of overdevelopment is that it encroaches on the natural habitat of the local wildlife. Why is this a perk? Because it pushes all of the animals into my parent's backyard, which is all woods. Ever since Boomer (my Golden Retriever) passed awaya few months back, my parents have been leaving out his old dog food out for some raccoons. About seven come out onto their deck every night to chow down, including some babies. They're fine with you watching them from a few feet away if you're in the house looking out through the big window, and will come up if you're already sitting outside, but will run if you walk towards them. They're really cute - I drew a couple.



We also saw a group of turkeys yesterday that walked right up to the deck - two adults and twelve or thirteen babies. Then they all ran off, and it looked like the scene in Jurassic Park with the herd of struthiomimuses, or whatever the ostrich-looking dinosaurs were.

Also, me and mom went through the family chest, which contained a few hitherto-undiscovered gems, among which were my (probably) first mini comic and perhaps the earliest existing Chris Schweizer pirate drawing.

The pirate drawing is from early 1985, which puts me at four years old.



And this comic I remember drawing. This is from when I was five years old, and I made it in Kindergarten. I think that it was bound BEFORE I drew it, and probably each kid got a little book of paper in which to tell a narrative, but I don't think that it's less of a minicomic just because I didn't staple it myself.


Notice the extra "m" on his costume for "man."


As you can see, a man on his way to work (you can tell he's on the way to work because of his hat and briefcase) turns into a monster, for no apparent reason. Notice that the sun is shining. Mighty Man is flying around overhead. Apparently I chose to make him a stick-figure for the purposes of scale.



Mighty Man swoops past the monster, which is knocking over a telephone pole.



The monster's tail smashes someone's house as he breathes fire. Mighty Man still eludes his grasp.



Apparently a hill has formed, because the monster, having finally caught Mighty Man, is standing on one. Little firemen rush to the aid of a person who is preparing to leap from a burning building. Notice that the lone cloud has begun to darken ominously.



The monster continues to hold Mighty Man as the cloud moves in front of the sun. People are still atop the burning building, apparently unassisted by the fireman, who seem to have left.



I'm not sure if Mighty Man is being knocked from the monster's hand by the force of the blast, or, if free, is simply flying away, but cloud has released a lightning bolt which strikes the monster. I think that he's shrinking as a result of this zapping, but this panel was probably drawn as class was coming to a close, and so it's a little less detailed that the previous page depicting such a transformation. The occupants of the burning building are still pleading for assistance.



The monster, changed back into a man, continues on to work. I'm not sure if Mighty Man is shrugging here or what. It's raining!

Anyway, that's it! My first mini. Woooo!

I also just finished a drawing that I'm RIDICULOUSLY happy with (full color, no less), but have to keep it secret for another week and a half - gotta wait for an announcement in San Diego. And I finally got a font I've been drooling over for more than three years: "Spills"!

"I thought this was supposed to be a puff piece."

Big week! Sorry I haven't updated more often, I've been so swamped.

I've finished the first week of a two-week workshop that I'm teaching in my old hometown of Hopkinsville, Kentucky. The newspaper came by and talked to us, but I assumed that it would be burried in the "living" section. Imagine my surprise when my mom (I'm staying at my parents' house while I'm here) showed me this - front page!



It paraphrases me a little to the point where it sounds like I'm very lackadaisical about the class, which is not true, but it was a really cool article and a neat experience. The reporter did some of our drawing exercises with us.







How cool is that, huh?

The class is going really well. At first I was nervous because there's a BIG age range, 8-16. With that comes a big skill range. The kids didn't know each other, weren't socializing - I was SO stressed at the end of the first day. But after seeing what they could do? These kids are AMAZING. Some of them (one in particular) EASILY rival some of the intro students at SCAD, and with proper teaching and encouragement could really be something in this field. Oh, and the talk to each other now.

So far we've gone from the relatively simple stuff like panel direction through decidedly more advanced stuff like line weight and line quality, the use of the three planes in panel composition, making environments unique, etc, and they're catching on so well. It's really amazing - I guess they wouldn't have signed up for the class without a predisposition towards making comics, but the level that these kids are on just astounds me for their age.

We've done a LOT of pages - self-done comics (a couple of the kids are real powerhouses, cranking out five pages a day or more), jam comics, plot-builder exercise comics, etc. Dozens now, and I'm spending almost all of my time scanning them in so that we can make minis. -Ugh- I love it, it's just taking an extra three or four hours a day.

Tuesday should be a big day - Nashville cartoonist Chad Thomas (whose stuff is just constantly amazing me and making me feel like my own has so far to go) is going to be coming in to speak with/show his stuff to the class, and I think that they'll really dig it. And he may not be coming alone - there's a chance that Dean Trippe, everybody's favorite chronicler of the adventures of tween superhero Butterfly may come, too. It's gonna be a blast for the kids (and me, of course). We're going to hit Cancun's, my favorite Mexican dive from high school.

Oh, and just for the heck of it, I drew Gambit from the X-Men. He's supposed to be Cajun, so I hate that he always looks like a matinee idol. I never met a Cajun that didn't look a little bit scrinchy. Nice, sure, but scrinchy nonetheless.

Kentucky, Here We Come!

Well, I'm getting my stuff together today to head up to Kentucky for the Making Comics workshop. I'm excited - there are 11 students, ranging from 3rd graders through 10th graders. I'd be concerned that the big spectrum of age would be a hindrance, but I think that it's a small enough class that we should be able to keep everyone interested and challenged. I'm making handouts drawing attention to some of the more important aspects of comics-making: balloon placement, simplified emotions, reading direction, etc - I may put them together as a mini when it's all over with. Who knows? Maybe I'll have it at San Diego, or I may try to expand it into something longer.

Dusty at Heroes Aren't Hard To Find has offered me a place in Indie Island at Heroes Con next year, which I'm really excited about - I had a great time at Heroes, and am looking forward to having another go at it. To give him a promo image, I decided to color a panel from Crogan's Vengeance, so here it is.



I also finished that Usagi Yojimbo drawing a few days back. Here's a glimpse of it:



I've packed up my computer, printers, scanner, guitar, some fencing equipment, and lots of books and supplies, and Liz is going to, so we'll have to see if we can fit into the car. Can't wait to see all the Kentucky and Tennessee people!

Playing Two Instruments and Drawing Harry Potter

I'm not afraid of much -- dying in a plane crash, trying to walk on stilts while having my arms bound by my sides, etc -- but I AM scared of vacuum cleaners when other people are using them. It's my one crazy and irrational thing, and it's been so since I was a kid. So while Liz was vacuuming today, I consoled myself by practicing on my tiny accordion. While I was doing so, I realized that I could play a number of the parts of Pachelbel's Canon in D Major (provided that I played it in the key of C). But I really wanted it to sound more full, so after a good ten minutes of maneuvering I successfully figured out how to play both the accordion and the guitar, although neither one particularly well.



I can squeak out the full song, though, but it sounds pretty rough. Maybe with work I can have a talent show talent besides the old standbys of the "chalk talk" and turning my legs backwards.



I've spent my week putting together promotional imagery for the San Diego show for the book I'm working on. Still can't post them here, but fifteen seconds after the announcement they'll be all over this blog - I'm very proud of how they've turned out. But I've also been thinking about putting together some prints for the Comic Con, and have been thinking of what might be fun. One thing that sprang to mind was Harry Potter. I drew this picture of Remis Lupin...



...and it got me thinking that it might be fun to do some sort of thematic portrait page, and with the Order of the Phoenix movie coming out what could be better than to do a big picture of the various members of said Order? Here are the pencils, sans Lupin:



I may repencil Mrs. Weasley and Tonks, as (a) I stink when it comes to drawing females, and (b) I made them a little too big. Overall, I'm going for a sort of halfway between the books and the movies, which isn't hard as the movies did excellent casting and design work.



I'm also wanting to do a good Usagi Yojimbo sketch to pass on to Stan Sakai at some point while I'm down there. Usagi is probably the best floppy comic book being made today. Go to your comic store and pick one up - you'll enjoy it, there's no question. Here's a thumbnail, with Usagi fighting some 17th century pirates (had to tie it in to my stuff somehow).




Oh! In my last post I had a sketch of Dean Trippe taking a picture of me upon which he was going to draw his character Butterfly - here's that picture, from his now-famous MOCCA report.

Back from MOCCA

Woo! Well, I'm back from MOCCA! It was my first trip to New York City, and although I didn't get to do any touristy stuff I did have a really good time.

I flew into La Guardia on Friday morning via Chicago. The last time that I flew was right after the Louisville-to-Atlanta crash, and I was terrified, but this time I actually enjoyed it. Seriously, how amazing is it that we're actually flying?!!! Sailing through the clouds in a big flying machine - in strains credulity. So I spent the whole time being thunderstruck at how awesome it is that we were actually flying. I know that millions of people fly all the time, but that doesn't change how cool it is.

I got in around 1pm, and waited for an hour or so (drifting off regularly) for my friend Hunter, who was also up for the show. We went to Brooklyn where we spent the first night at his friend Danny's place (thanks, Danny!). Brooklyn was like a cartoon version of what I thought that New York would be like - people throwing baseballs against ten-story buildings and catching them in their gloves, old guys in wife beaters lined up in chairs outside a butcher shop, trampily-dressed ten-year-olds, people of varying ethnicities who were almost like caricatures of their respective backgrounds, couples yelling to/at each other through the windows, clothes hanging to dry between buildings, people hanging out on rooftops, etc. It was great. We had pizza that afternoon that really wasn't very good and later made me ill; we found out that evening that the pizza parlor we had chosen was voted "worst pizza in New York."

The festival was great. The only reason I was able to make it is because J.P. Coovert and Stephen Floyd, the founders of One Percent Press, graciously allowed me to set up on their table. Joe Lambert, another cartoonist publishing under the one-percent banner, was also at the table, as was Alexis Frederick-Frost, the Xeric-winning cartoonist behind Maria of Montmartre and La Primavera. Everybody had some new stuff, it seems - J.P. had a new issue of his autobiographical mini comic Simple Routines and a small and beautiful book called Adrift, which was easily the most popular item at the table, followed closely by one of Joe's books (I think I Will Bite You).

We were set up around a variety of fun people, most of whom I'd had the pleasure to meet before (excuse the crude drawings - my camera got turned on in the plane and its battery ran out, and I left the replacement disposable camera that I purchased in the hotel by accident, so this is the next best thing):



We were right next to one of my favorite comic creators, Alec Longstreth, whose last couple of issues of the Ignatz Award-winning Phase 7 are easily among my favorite minicomics ever. Alec is so nice and personable, and always had someone at his table buying something or another. He went through his entire run of Phase 7 #11. Sharing his table was indie comics mainstay Greg Means(Clutch), who traveled up from Portland for the show. Greg, in addition to being a cartoonist himself, publishes a small anthology series called Papercutter, which I'd not read before, but which I happily picked up. The newest issue features another story from the world of Kazimir Strzepek's Mourning Star, which did not disappoint. I also got one which has an Aaron Renier short story (Aaron made Spiral-Bound, my favorite comic of last year) and one by J.P. I hope that I can get a story in Papercutter one day - I dropped a few not-so-subtle hints to Greg that I felt that way.



Across from us was the AdHouse Books table. I had met Chris Pitzer and the Aviary cartoonist Jamie Tanner last weekend at Heroes Con (jeez, it seems like that was a month ago), and it was good to see them again. I got to meet Fred Chao, the cartoonist behind Johnny Hiro, and his girlfriend Dylan, both of whom are amazing dancers. Dylan is a big pirate buff, so we talked about Crogan's Vengeance a little bit. She also did the grays for Johnny Hiro!



Also at the AdHouse table was Joel Priddy. We talked about historical comics and research and whatnot and I got a copy of his book Pulpatoon:Pilgrimage, which I read on the ride home and really enjoyed.

I also met Kevin Burkhalter, who is friends with everyone that I know but who for some reason I'd never had the chance to chat with. His story is the first and best one in the new SCAD anthology, so I was glad to put a face to the work. Stephen calls him "the funniest man in comics," and he calls him that about every twenty minutes. See?



Turns out that Kevin is of Swiss descent, too, so I may try to get him to contribute to that Swiss Tales mini I've been kicking around.

I also got to see some folks that I always like to run into - Pat Lewis, who's got a book coming out from IDW, Charlito and Mr. Phil from the Indie Spinner Rack podcast, the Top Shelf crew, Alex Cahill, and lots of others, including Dean Trippe, who I got to hang out with last weekend at Heroes and will probably get to hang out with again in a couple of weeks when I'm teaching that workshop in his neck of the woods. Check his Butterfly page over the next few days to see if there's a picture of me with everybody's favorite sidekick, jr.



I also got to meet some folks for the first time - Aaron Renier, who did an amazing drawing in my sketchbook (as well as an equally amazing drawing in J.P.'s), Raina Telgemeir (whose comics I've always loved and now actually own), Monica Gallagher, Dave Roman, Hope Larson (who was my first sale of the day), Christine Norrie, Evan Dorkin, and tons of others.

It was a great weekend - the first such place where I made enough and traded enough that I only spent about $10 that didn't come from selling comics, so that was very exciting! Oh, and I got a great Nick Bertozzi original. Here's a scan:



Although I'm inspired to get back to work (I've got the next five pages of Crogan's Vengeance tightly thumbnailed and ready to pencil), I'm probably going to have to forgo comics work this week and instead start getting the materials together for the workshop, which begins in less than two weeks! There still aren't a lot of people enrolled, so if you know a kid or teen who is on the fence about it, push 'em over!