Eight to go...!

Love and Capes #5 is now old enough to drive. I hit page sixteen last night.

Here Mark's Dad, Jerry, and Abby share a quiet moment. I've been beating up on Abby in this issue, and needed to give her a good moment. It's especially important as she's not going to have a great rest of the book either.

And, blissfully, this page was a lot easier since I was able to reuse the stadium from the previous page and they went inside the stadium for most of the sequence.

Eight to go…

Glass Houses

I'm always looking for more cool things to do with Love and Capes. That's part of why I'm going to the Licensing Show in New York next week, attempting to arrange Love and Capes underoos and video games and who knows what else. One of the things that I've managed to prototype, thanks to Toon Tumblers, are these slick as can be Love and Capes glasses!

There's a tweak or two that needs to be made on them, but nothing too major. I'm working on figuring out a way to make a production run of these, and hopefully you'll be able to order your own Love and Capes Toon Tumblers.

Would anyone be interested in that?

And The Crowd Goes Wild

My computer is back home and running quite smoothly. Big thanks to the Apple Store for getting it done on Sunday so that I would have it to start my week.

In fact, I got it back in time to finish page fifteen, which is the hardest page I've drawn so far. My stupid writer decided to set a scene at a baseball game. This means drawing crowds and rows of seats, and so on. For this page, I actually designed a series of heads and bodies of people to use in sitting crowd scenes. I'm sure I'll have to draw another crowd of people sitting in rows sometime in the run of the book, so I've got them on file. I also had to design logos for the Deco City Architects and the Chronopolis Dragons, as well as a logo for the stadium itself.

Well, for that, I took another logo I designed for RAP Promotions, the promoting arm of friend Roger Price, purveyor of my favorite convention on the whole darn planet, Mid-Ohio-Con, and used that as the corporate sponsor of the park. Hey, it's no more awkward than "Quicken Loans Arena."

This page also features two rather unique jokes. The first is one of the few times I borrowed something so obviously from my own life. My experiences shape the book, obviously, but there's never been a point where Abby acted exactly like some girl I dated. But, Joanne Spencer is loosely templated on my mother, who's a Steelers fan, so you might be able to guess what happens.

The second joke required a lot of clever staging (at least, I thought it was clever) and a little bit of trust, too. I could have spoon-fed the reader the joke, but I'm hoping that they'll make the connection. And it was a hard connection to draw.

All right, I'll be heading to NYC for the Licensing Show next week, so I have a lot to do and not a lot of time. Back to my now much-cleaner studio and to work…!

Words I've Always Wanted to Type

"I'm proofing the galleys now."Galleys are the just-as-it-will-appear proof of a novel or story. Friday, I received the galleys for "Til Death", the Star Trek: The Next Generation story Bob Ingersoll and I wrote for the forthcoming short story collection (available for purchase at the sidebar to the right). It's been a trip writing a prose story, and I certainly hope it's not my last such trip. Regardless, I'm enjoying the whole journey, including the proofing process. Incidentally, yes, there's a change or two, but very minor. It's amazing what little things can slip through so many people and proofs...which is why I guess we proof them in these stages. I'm proud of the story, and hope you enjoy it too. I'm looking forward to October.

Big and Beautiful

My buddy Jamar Nicholas is a wonderfully talented artist, and possessor of the greatest self-promotional prose since Stan "The Man" Lee. When he's not working for Tokypop, or creating things like Detective Boogaloo, Hip Hop Cop, he runs BBWW: The Fat Wonder Woman Blog. It's hard to explain, but a heck of a lot of fun. Clearly scraping the bottom of the barrel, he's posted a new image by some Ohio hack artist.

Wanna see it? Click here.

With My Sword and Magic Helmet

I can't talk too much about this one, but I'm kind of jazzed about it. Raider is going to appear on a mass-marketed helmet. (What kind of helmet? Why a helmet? All will be revealed in time.) I got to go through previous issues of Raider and grab panels to create a collage, kind of a wrapping paper, really, that will be used for said helmet. The process, as my addled brain understands it, is similar to shrink wrapping. I design the flat sheet, and then it will be melted onto the helmet itself.

So, click on the thumbnail and see the black and white artwork for the helmet. Once the client approves it, I'll color it and apply a halftone filter to it so it looks like a big comic book page. Which, I guess, it is.

Going through the art kind of makes me want to get back to Raider, but with Love and Capes doing so well, as well as the rest of my freelance work, it'll be a little while. Unless, of course, some publisher backs a truck full of money up to my front door. I'm not made of stone, you know.

In other Raider news, I am officially sold out of Raider #1! It only took five years, but better late than never, right?

Order It Now!

Love and Capes #5 is in Previews this week! It's order code JUN07 3740, so be sure to ask for it, well, by numbers I guess. Here's the official solicitation:

Spend some time with comicdom's favorite super-couple, and this time Abby's finding out that time is the problem. She's dating the world's mightiest workaholic, and getting some time alone with her boyfriend - the Crusader - is becoming as much of a battle as any menace he has to fight. How do you share your boyfriend with the world? Plus, learn how Darkblade stays sharp, and Amazonia continues to make her presence felt.

And, since I really, really want you to buy it, I'm posting two full pages of the book for you to check out. Here's page five and page eight. Enjoy!

The book will be out in early August.

Lucky Thirteen

Page thirteen is done! I can't show too much of it, as there are a couple of fun reveals in the joke panels, including one that allowed me that allowed me to draw a sixties-Kirby-style monster. He'll be called the Kirbivore in later pages.

Once again, we get to see that Mark has an iPhone, too. One of these days, I'll have to start charging for this product placement.

Hopefully, I'll have room to explain that Mark's parents are very concerned with the appearance of normality, and as such don't let Mark fly them to visit him in Deco City. Wouldn't want people to think that the Crusader makes his parents fly coach because he's lazy or anything.

Colorin' Books

I'm not just cranking out Love and Capes here at the Thom Zahler Art and Coffee Emporium. I just finished a caricature for the Chalmers-Tinlin Team of real estate agents located around Akron, Ohio. I've done a bunch of work for Phil Chalmers, from cartooning to logo design to t-shirts, both for his real estate and speaking work. He's great to work with, and I'm proud of the work we've done over the last few years.

This is a caricature of the entire team for a coloring book. A black and white version of the art will appear as a coloring page in said coloring book.

Halfway Home, Baby!

The pages are finally starting to come a little faster. I wasn't sure I was going to make the halfway mark before the end of the month, but here it is, the last day of May, and here's page twelve, too.

This page requires a little bit of explanation. For the last year or so, I've been driving to the West Side of Cleveland on the first Wednesday of the Month to play Pub Quiz with a bunch of friends. The quiz I played was a ten round, intensive trivia competition, including a picture round and a video round. Our team, the brilliantly named Team Eleven, was the scourge of the pub we played at. I may have participated in fifteen quizzes over the last year and a half, and I think Team Eleven only lost three times.

The host, MikeD, did a great job running the show. He even helped me change my flat tire in the middle of a spring snowstorm. He left with my wheel lock, but that's another story. After that, though, I wanted to do something to show my appreciation. So I thought about putting him in Love and Capes.

I came up with the idea that Darkblade, in his secret identity, would attend such trivia contests to try to hone his skills. After all, if you fight villains like The Quizzler who leave clever clues for you to figure out, it's probably good to keep sharp on these things. Later in the strip, there's even a reference to Charles Goren, best known to me as being part of my last question when I was on Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

Last month was the last pub quiz. Brendan O'Neill's, our host restaurant, lost its lease and has closed. I know MikeD is on the search for a new location, and I hope he finds one. When he does, you should make sure to come on by and play the Quiz. Team Eleven would love to take your money, too.