As Paul Harvey used to say, "Page Two"
Here's a part of the splash of page two of the new issue. Wow, I'm already almost nine percent done with the book. I love the floppy format.
Oviously Mark and Abby are going to Paris to visit Charlotte. It's become so routine over the last three issues that I'm sure it's no surprise or, worse yet, no spoiler. It's also a three-panel page. After this, I should be back to the eight panel grid again. And hilarity should ensue, too.
Here Little Piggy
It's been almost a commission a day since I announced the St. Patrick's Day special. One of the more fun ones I got was this one asking for Zatanna and Wonder Pig from the great Justice League Unlimited episode This Little Piggy. It was a lot of fun.
I brightened up Zatanna's costume a little bit, so it was different than the last Zee I drew. And I added a tiara to Wonder Pig, which she didn't have in the actual episode, but I thought it looked funnier.
Drobo Domo
I'm a huge fan of MacBreakWeekly. (Hey, there's a new episode recording tomorrow. Yay!) It's not just a good show for those of us Of The Mac, but it's also a good show because it's a good show with great commentators.
I've done little things before about them, too. Mark wears a TWiT sweatshirt in Love and Capes #2, and Charlotte drinks out of a MacBreakWeekly coffee mug in issue #4. I've even included Andy Ihnatko as a background character in the just-posted page one of the new issue. But I think I've hit a new level here.
Scott Bourne, photography and backup guy, has been raving about the Drobo. I think he's right to. As a backup nut myself, since my Big Crash of 2006, I really need to get one sometime this year since they make backing up so easy. Because of that, my brain just clicked a certain way and I started imagining a comic strip with Scott and his Drobo. I went ahead and did a couple of strips to get them out of my head and sent them to Scott, who liked them muchly. He's even called me out on Twitter for it, which I appreciate.
So, especially if you're a MBW fan, here's a sample strip, with links to the other two I did.
The Rockewho?
Yup, it's another commission from my current sale. This time I was asked to do a duo, Bettie and the Rocketeer, 
from the late, great Dave Stevens book. Of course, I'm nowhere near the artist Dave was, but I think there are hints of his work in this. I know he was on my mind.
The movie is worth checking out too. It didn't seem to catch on the way it should have. Among other things, it has one of the best and most perfect casts of all time, with Billy Campell as the Rocketeer, Alan Arkin as Pevey (who gets the best line when Cliff tags him for not having a date since 1932, and he responds "Flora Maxwell. There wasn't any point datin' nobody after her"), Jennifer Connelly as Jenny, a pre-Lost Terry O'Quinn as Howard Hughes, and Timothy Dalton and Paul Sorvino to boot.
And Id be remiss if I didn't mention that the publisher of my Love and Capes: Do You Want to Know a Secret trade, IDW, is going to be releasing a collection of his Rocketeer work. I've already bought it, I just don't know it yet.
Well, Her Cape is Green
I had a little time to play around today, and I've wanted to mess with this Catwoman drawing for a while. It's based on a tracing paper rough from Baltimore Comicon 2008, I think. The last two Catwoman images I did were done in Illustrator, and I wanted to try something completely different. Textures are handled by some new brushes I downloaded for Photoshop, and they worked really well.
One of these days I will do a picture of Selina in her current tight catsuit number. I just dig drawing and coloring this purple and green one too much, I guess.
Torpedoes Away
I just uploaded the print files for Love and Capes #10 to the FTP site of the book's printer. Yay!
It's probably about time to start the next one.
Stop a Bullet Cold, Fight a War With Love
While I was sitting at my table at MegaCon, I did a couple of warm-up/sample commissions. At the very least, these help me fill out the next edition of Powerful Women, which I hope will be out for my trip to Heroes Con.
I haven't done a proper Wonder Woman image in any of the books. There's one with her and Wonder Girl, and another with her and Power Girl, but I wanted one that was her by herself. This is still a little different, compositionally, than most of my other pieces, but I think it works well.
Because If You're Gonna Build a Robot, It Might as Well Look Good, Right?
I got a commission request to draw Cameron from Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which happens to be one of my favorite TV shows. (Please don't cancel it, Fox. Please. Don't you have enough blood on your hands already, killer of Firefly, John Doe, Lone Gunmen and who can remember what else?) Anyway, I had to draw Summer Glau.
Summer's got a really exotic face. I drew her years ago for the program book for the first Flanvention. I was having a hard time with her likeness, and I got lucky in that she was a guest at that year's WizardWorld convention and I got to meet her and actually see her face in three dimensions. Still, it wasn't an easy likeness to achieve.
Here, I needed to mesh that caricature quality with the stylized cartooning that I use for my Powerful Women books. I think they blended together fairly well. As much as the face, I think I got the cold, intense stare as well as the pose.
Oddly, my favorite part is the rifle she's carrying. I did the reference on it, it's an LR-300, I think. It's getting those little details accurate that I dig. And it strikes the right chord between cartoony and realistic.
When the Free Comic Book Day Book is a Little Less Free
Taking a step back, here's the alternate cover for the retail version of Love and Capes #10. Because of the new Diamond minimums, these won't be available through the Previews catalog, but they will be available on the Love and Capes website the Monday after Free Comic Book Day. They will be available for direct order by comic shops, too. I'll post more information about it soon.
NYCC2009 - Day Three, a bit late
I never did finish talking about New York, did I?
I should be used to this. It's so hard to write up the last day of a show because it tends to be your getaway day. And then you get back and you're busy and you just don't have time. Plus, things were really crazy back home with work that came in.
Anyway, the last day of the show was pretty good. The crowds were still thick, and I sold pretty well that day, too. I think as a lot of these shows max out and become almost exclusively 3-day attendees, Sunday becomes a huge sales day. After all, if you have until Sunday, why buy until Sunday? Well, because Love and Capes: Do You Want to Know a Secret? was almost sold out, of course. By 1:00 or so, I was sold out, and only had single issues left. I'll have to keep that in mind when I go to San Diego this year.
I did a couple more caricatures, including Jennifer Kale from Marvel's Man-Thing. Yeah, I had no idea who she was either, but the customer had reference, which was good. There were a couple more that escape me, too. Kale and the Spider-Woman that I did are now colored and here on this page. Make with the clickin' and embiggenin'.
Let's review: I did a panel, sold out of a product, did some sketches, and lined up some work. Yeah, I think it was a success.
Bob and I helped Toon Tumblers take down their booth in trade for borrowing some space in their van to get our gear back to the hotel. I had a taste for pizza, so we wound up at Antonio's next to where the Late Night With David Letterman show tapes. It was pricey and it seemed to take forever, but the pizza was good, and it was a great end to a great show.
On the way back, I wanted to stop at the Kubert School to buy some brushes. Good art brushes are hard to find, and the Kubert art store stocks a lot of them. I kind 
of need to see a brush before I buy it as there's a whole process to choosing one. They only had one of my current brush, the Windsor Newton Series 7, but they had a selection of the Rafael, a brush I hadn't used since art school.
I bought three.
I even got to go into the school, which had been extensively remodeled since I'd been there. 
The school, the old Dover High School, had been lopped in half and a chunk of the JKS parking lot had been sold off. Kubert had a lot of unused space in it, including a full auditorium and a gym. Now those are gone. Computers are all around, the windows have been replaced (a source of contention for all of us in the old days) and they even have air conditioning now.
Man, these soft, coddled artists today. In my day I drew in the cold and the heat and lived off a box of Captain Crunch because I couldn't afford it and... well, I hated it, but I did it anyway.
Mike Chen was kind enough to give Bob and me a tour, and we even dropped into a couple classes. Bob had asked if I got the shakes coming back into the building. Truth be told, I did get the wiggins when we waited in the waiting room. I don't think I'd been in there since my first day at the school, or maybe when I came out for my interview when I was applying. That room brought back some worries. Everything else was fine, though.
Bob also said he had to get used to seeing classrooms without desks and instead with drawing tables. That never occured to me. I'd just gotten used to it.
The school looks good. The students seem the same, bantering with Mike when he brought us in. Well, there is one big difference: girls. The school got girls since Iwas gone. There were I think three women in my first-year class of 150. Now, with the success of manga and the like, there's a bigger female component, which is very cool. The school even has dorms for them now, which previously they weren't able to provide.
Big thanks to Mike Chen for taking the time out of his day to bring us around the school. It was a great time.
Now I'm back and working again. I've got a couple of weeks before my trip to Orlando for MegaCon, so I'm trying to clear some things out before then. Thankfully, Love and Capes #10 is done, so it's just doing client work, of which there is a lot, thankfully. I've got some cool things coming up, which I'll tell y'all about as soon as I get a chance. So stay tuned, cool things are happening.