The Next Gig

Capital Post

APE at the concourse!

I'll be tabling with Derek, Hellen, Calvin, Ryan, and Evan.

Ryan and Evan showed me their 'zine Electric Ant last night.  Their inagural issue's theme is "Your First Kiss,"with short comics/stories about first kisses, along with a gallery of dark lords, Trent Reznor ad-libs, and an insane surrealist comic by Aaron K.  It looks damn good!

 

Also Hellen will be debuting her comic book "Jin and Jam" at the show.  When I saw her drawing some pages last year, they depicted a fight between a girl and a pair of super-strong siamese twins joined at the head.  The story is also about friendship and stuff.

 

I am stoked - this APE's gonna be great!!

Higher Frequencies

Pinup for the next volume of Amazing Joy Buzzards.

Joy Buzzards created by Mark Andrew Smith and Dan Hipp.  Mark is the editor for the Popgun anthology I was in - a righteous fellow who runs a tight ship.  Dan, in addition to drawing for AJB, has a killer book out with TokyoPop called "Gyakushu!".  I met him at Comicon - nice guy.

Prepping for APE

 

 

I'll be at APE again this year, tabling with my homies the Bang Gang.  I dunno exactly the entirety of what I'll bring, but above is a peek of what I have so far. We'll just have to wait and see what kinds of other merch I can come up with - the printing will be very last-minute, contrary to what I keep promising myself every time going into this convention.

Alternative Press Expo
The Concourse
620 7th Street
San Francisco

Nov. 1st 11am - 7pm

Nov. 2nd 11am - 6pm

*exhales*

My Seed Could Find No Purchase

Hurm.  My panties were in a bunch to find some work this past spring, and one of my attempts was to score an illustration spot in Tokyopop's line of Blizzard-anthologies.  Sadly, my ink-splattered gang of Protoss and Night-Elves didn't make the team.  I *was* noticed enough to find some other work though, on which I'll update you later.  For now, here's proof that there's no such thing as a shiruken that's too big (and just to combat my being typecast as "that fight-scene guy," this sequence was scripted for me by an editor):

 

The rest of my sample sketches are grouped together at DeviantArt.

Oh, and check out the existing Warcraft and Starcraft manga!  I recently picked up the 1st volume of the Starcraft anthologies, and there are some undeniably sick pages within.  The cover by UdonCrew is especially juicy, as is the epic epic writing by Josh Elder on the opening story.

phool 4 pho

Play With Pink

They Travel in Groups

I posted about the first volume a few months ago.  And now, it seems, via some unspoken comics fraternity that is more networked than I'd initially thought (thanks Derek, Lars, and Mark!), I have been sucked into the second volume.  Get all the info here.  Below is the cover by Paul Pope:

 

And here are the first five pages of my 14-page story in it, titled "Kid Revolver.":

 

 

FYI: I will be at San Diego Comic Con this Sunday (tomorrow!), and I definitely aim to swing by the Image booth and indulge my narcissism by signing a few copies of Popgun II.  If you give me any copies of Popgun I, Spawn, and Invincible, I'll probably sign those as well - just to throw you off.  Have a good day!

You'll Saw Your Legs Off

 

 

*shrugs*

It Could Happen

 

Pug of Ages 02, 03

 

More Colors Than the Rainbow

SPEED RACER

Strokes of genius:

1. Pop's wrestling ring.

2. Racer X keeps his "anime" voice.

3. Car combat. Duh.

Weak:

1. Asian men are all sell-outs.

2. That kid. Ugh.

3. Corporate (re: all of the) subplots coulda been truncated.

Consensus:

Yeah, so there's no point of reference between what's considered mundane and spectacular in this movie-universe's physics. Who cares? It's an easy hump to get over if you retain any semblance of that thing from your childhood called "a sense of wonder." Much better than Indy 4.

Pug of Ages 01

Pug of Ages

 

This is my attempt at doing a "Yacin the Faun"-type narrative (thanks to Derek for introducing me!). For now I'm calling it "Pug of Ages." It is about a giant pug/pachycephalosaurus hybrid that tends to a flock of sheep, in case you can't tell what those weird shapes are in the above painting.

WTF

Seriously. What the FUCK!?

Everybody hates on Tokyopop's "Pilot" contract for prospective cartoonists. Also, here is a list of offenses the company's made over the past two years.

I'm involved somehow - hopefully something good will come out of this.

(-_-)

One time when I was at Comic Relief, Rory and I started talking about means to get in the "biz." He tells me about self-publishing, and finding difficulty in explaining a concept so that my ape-like mind could understand, he pulls out Larry Young's "True Facts" from his voluminous shelves. "Here this guy wrote what I'm trying to say. I will look it up for you," says Rory except with better words, because Rory was a facundious dude. After a few moments searching for the concerned text, Rory calls up the book's publisher and bitches them out for not including a table-of-contents, those idiots.

(EDIT: Woah, I skimmed the above paragraph again and it reads like a diss towards AiTPlanetLar, which was unintended. I got nothing but love for the publishing house that brought "the Couriers" unto existence. Mainly I wanted to relate a really vivid "Rory moment" I had. Here was the man, over a span of like ten minutes, inspiring a comics-noob to follow through on the urge to create, giving some really meaningful advice, then asserting his influence on the bidness with a spontaneous phonecall. I was pretty impressed.)

I didn't know Rory too well - I just frequented his store, helped at a con or two, and was good friends with some of his employees. But Comic Relief changed my life, and Rory Root is Comic Relief, and it was terribly sad to hear that he passed away yesterday.

Nobody Tells You About the Disco Inside

 

The Ting Tings are too much. And plus Katie White in the "Great DJ" video wears her bangs like Megan from 100 Bullets. Jeez.

okay this is the last one, i swear

Some practice.

 

Pretty much a Perfect Movie...

... except for when they forget to draw in Ashitaka's nipples.

My Dad invented RoboCop.

You're WELCOME.

Ariel was a minor, too.

"That Ego Trip I Took," or "I Believe in Cheese"

Okay, so like two years ago I got called upon by the Academy of Art to be one of their Illustration Dept. representatives via these banners they put up on the sides of their 79 New Montgomery building. Here're some photos that Jenn took:

You may notice that beneath my three names (artsy!) and that photo of my swollen, swollen head is an "artist statement" that I drunkedly composed one night, set aside for soberer times, and whittled from like 1,000,000 words down to 150. I wrote:

“I’ll try not to just draw and wait for something to happen. Too often people think that logging hours into a craft is enough to master it, as if skill were a paycheck. Awareness is just as important as time invested – the artist has to be conscious of where his drawings take him, good or bad.

This awareness can be faked to an extent, and even result in financial success. But in its purest form it could be described as love. Love for craft such that the artist treats art as something to fight for instead of a means for self-promotion. Success will come after love by nature, though other people might find it hard to define what exactly that success is.

Sounds pretty naive, right? But still. I don’t think my 50-year-old self would regret that I wrote this.”

I regret the grammar and some of the word choice, but not the cheese. At the end of "Serenity," Malcolm Reynolds says more or less the same thing about flying spaceships (and life - duh), but with much cooler verbage.

You know what's neat, though!? The posters've been taken down since the Academy's fall semester started, but they're up on google streetview! HahahahaHA!

*zzzt*