In Which I Explain DC Comics Geography
According to my good friend Paul Storrie, Superman's east-to-west Walk Across America is taking him from Michigan to… Ohio? That seems like the wrong direction. It's obviously of note to us, since Paul lives in Michigan, and I live in Ohio. Paul asked me, as a Supermanologist, how this was possible. I could only come up with ten reasons. A Top Ten list, as it were…
10. Road construction detour re-routed him back into Ohio.
9. The little known Flint, Michigan Stargate messes up everyone.
8. JMS is bringing back rarely remembered Silver Age Geography Vision power.
7. Superman walked into Detroit, got scared, and slowly backed out for a couple hundred miles.
6. Lexcorp GPS sucks, although the downloadable Clancy Brown voice is pretty cool.
5. Red Kryptonite caused Superman to briefly lose his sense of direction by a lot.
4. Superboy punched the walls of reality and Ohio and Michigan have flopped places in the DC's United States.
3. Realized too late Columbus is hosting the Michigan-OSU game this year.
2. Superman tried walking backwards to reverse the spin of the Earth and fix the Ohio-Michigan War of 1835.
1.He heard about Melt Bar and Grilled and had to rush back to try it.
Of bigger note to me is that Superman is somehow skipping Cleveland, the land of his literal birth.
Wayback Wednesdays: Superman Cover
In my third year of classes at the 
Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art, we had a class taught by Joe himself. One of our assignments was to do five pages from a comic, as well as a cover. I decided to do a Superman book.
Big surprise, right?
I've got the interiors somewhere, but I couldn't dig them up. What sticks out in my mind was the cover. I got this idea to impose two characters over a three-point perspective background. This was back in my George Perez crazy detail phase.
Backgrounds weren't my favorite thing, and while I understood perspective, using it in a panel always seemed to trip me up. So, I drew a complicated background on a separate sheet of tracing paper, and blew it up to ink it. But, when I made it larger and put the characters in front of it, I thought it looked cool as it was.
But, the assignment was to ink the cover, so I inked the background on a sheet of vellum. When I showed it to Joe, he said "You know, the pencilled version looks better. I'd keep that" So I went back to the enlarged pencils.
Happy accidents, I guess.
What always got me about this assignment was some fellow classmate who didn't like the cover. He said he didn't like those tight three point perspective covers where the buildings were so close to each other that there was no room for streets or anything. I thought it worked. In fact, I had ideas of drawing stock backgrounds like this and dropping flying characters on top of them.
So I was surprised and a little validated when I saw DC do a series of covers for the Superman books featuring the same idea just a couple months later. (And no, in no way am I suggesting DC borrowed my idea. They never would have seen it. It was more, as noted philosopher David Addison once said "Mediocre minds think alike.") I can only find one of the covers online, so my memory may be off. But I'm pretty sure that all the Superman books that month used that idea.
The DC Three
Remember when I said I'd post some new glass art when I could? Well, now I can.
I will not be at WizardWorld Chicago, but the Mark of Zahlero will be 
Who are they? I shall not say. We're building excitement. Four of them you should be able to guess. There's one that you will never, ever, ever guess. The sixth? Well, all I'll say is...
FZAM!
So, if you're at WW Chicago, be sure to stop on buy and get a glass or seven. Better my clients do, the better I do. And y'all want me to do well, right?
Neverending Battle Part Two
I've mentioned before that I'm taking place in a charity auction for the Candlelighters. There's a pretty slick flyer that's been designed by Jesse, who's also part of the event which I'm showing here. Follow this link to the full story, and see how to download your own flyers.