P.S... My dad is so ridiculously awesome.

The love of pirates is an inherited trait with me. My dad got me hooked on 'em at an extremely early age, and he still loves 'em as much as I do.

In addition his many musical and literary projects, he has also taken to playing with the liturgy of the Episcopal/Anglican church. One of his more recent creations? The Pirate Eucharist.

And guess what. The Archbishop of Canterbury - the HEAD of the Anglican and Episcopal churches - the "pope of the protestants" - a position held by such esteemed historical figures as St. Thomas a'Becket and St. Augustine - will be participating in my dad's service.

Read an article about it here.

My dad is so cool.

Back from the Top Shelf Warehouse; Tampa

Here's a close up of part of the poster I'm doing for 24-hour comics day.

Man! It's been a busy week. I need to be better about updating this...

A week ago me, Hunter, and Allen Spetnagel went to the Top Shelf warehouse to help publisher extraordinare Chris Staros with a big shipment of samplers. Top Shelf is a great publisher and was one of the big reasons I became a cartoonist; I'm sure many of my peers could say the same. We spent a big part of the day stuffing envelopes and packing boxes, etc. Afterwards Staros took us out to dinner and got heaping amounts of delicious Thai food. I'd never eaten Thai before, and loved it. I also got some books - Matt Kindt's 2 Sisters and SuperSpy, and Jeffrey Brown's The Incredible Changebots.

This weekend Liz and I went to Tampa, where I presided over the wedding of my sister Lindy and her now-husband Ryan.


• Me, Ryan, and Lindy at the wedding •

We had a great time, I got to swim in the ocean, we saw a fire-eater, etc.


• Liz and me on the Clearwater Pier •

Ryan's a great guy, and he and my sister seem to make each other very, very happy, so I'm very glad to welcome him into the family.


• Me and my lil' sister •

I also finished Regina Rich! Expect copies at SPX.

Tomorrow is my first "real" lecture with the Introduction to Sequential Art class. It's on character design. I'm expecting it to go well, but cross your fingers for me!

Making more stuff for SPX...

Sorry it's been so very, very long since I last updated the blog. I've had a lot of stuff going on lately -- mostly it's been getting minis printed and assembled for SPX with Liz. I had a week of pretty much no drawing, but it worked out well - I've got twenty copies of Giovanni Potatoe and the Pizzas of Love, eighty portrait books, about a hundred Goodbye Beards, etc. Lots of fun stuff to sell and trade. I've also decided, since I'm so far ahead of what I expected to be, to redraw and color my 24-hour comic from last year. It'll be twenty-four pages, color. I knocked out these pages yesterday - consider it a sneak preview.

*edit: thanks to Sarah Case and Daniel Crawley for pointing out the typo - on page three "you" should be "your." I'm not gonna bother reuploading it here, but it will be fixed in the print edition. Thanks, guys!

















I've also been doing a TON of color sketchbook drawings, but I lost my sketchbook on Friday, so no scans. I'm only cavalier about it because I expect it to turn up; I helped man the Sequential Art table at SCAD's major fair, and left it there. I didn't return until later, when everyone was gone and everything with them. I'm hoping one of the professors took it with them. I forgot to write my name in it anywhere, which was idiotic of me.

I'm currently assistant teaching my first class at SCAD - Introduction to Sequential Art. It seems like a good crop of students - four girls and a guy, which surprises me, considering the traditional gender inequity in the comics field. I'm also taking an advanced inking technique class with veteran inker Roy Richardson, and it's a really good class mix.

Aside from that, not a ton of new stuff. More portraits, new comic ideas, all sorts of fun stuff. Oh, and Liz and I are taking a surprise trip to Tampa on Friday!

Getting the Mini-Comics ready for SPX

First off, my beard turns one month old today!



On the drive back from Chattanooga, Liz gave me all sorts of great ideas with how to prepare for SPX. I always wait until the last minute before shows and subsequently pull a few all-nighters trying to get ready; Liz insisted that I prepare ahead of time this time around, and I'm glad that she did, as stuff is gettin' done!

Part and parcel to this is a sort-of gig with the UPS store. I discovered a while back that the UPS store one block from our apartment is, perhaps, the greatest place for printing on the planet - Megan (the manager) has a lot of print experience and keeps the machines (which have a crisp precision you wouldn't believe) in tip-top shape, not like those over-saturated smudgy monstrosities at Kinko's. Plus, their prices are great, they let you do test proofs without charging, they're just perfect for color jobs. Anyway, I'm in there ALL the time, and somehow I've taken on a position as an occasional-graphic designer/printer, when they need extra help or when I need printing done. I did some training on the wide format printer (gorgeous twelve-color 44 inch thing, prints on canvas and everything!), and next week I'll learn the shipping side. I'm very excited, 'cause I am really passionate about the quality of the place, AND I don't have a set schedule. It's perfect, 'cause I get "paid" in printing -- I got all of my portrait book mini-covers up and ready to go this week.



I also have finally figured out a financially, time-and-labor viable way of doing Giovanni Potatoe. Say hello to the world's longest mini-comic! (316 pages... 'course, I have no idea if that's the world's longest or not):



Yes, indeed. Four paperback-bound tomes in a handsome slipcase. Fits in your pocket! I'm hoping to have twenty or thirty for SPX.

Oh, and Hunter Clark and I are going to Washington, DC by TRAIN! Yeah! Dining car and everything. Liz and I were looking at three hundred dollar plane tickets and then we found that round trip via AMTRAK is only $197, plus buy-one-get-one-free. So Hunter and I are splitting the cost, and are each only paying ninety-something bucks for overnight transportation.

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"!