I've Hit the Big Time! USA Today and Pop Candy!

Hey! I wrote a guest blog for Whitney Matheson over at the USA Today blog. She was taking a well-deserved vacation, and asked for some guest bloggers. I threw my oversized hat into the ring and she, in a rare moment of poor judgment, said "okay". Click here to check it out. It's all about what it's like to be an exhibitor at a Comic-Convention, San Diego in particular.

I've been bad about posting panels, I know. It's been a crazy summer, and it's just getting crazier, in a good way. And soon I'll be heading to the aforementioned Comic-Con in San Diego and off doing the LA thing, and a side trip with some friends, for three weeks or so. I'll try to post, but expect a little slowdown to be sure.

This is an image from page six of Love and Capes: Ever After #2. Charlotte's got a bigger part in this issue, so we'll see more of her.

I like throwing little things in to amuse myself. Here, you might recognize some of the other patrons of the Café Mobius.

Here, Fishie Fishie

When I went to the Lake County Captains game with my father, I got some of these stuffed Racing Fish from the Cargo Hold shop. These fish are based on the Bobble Fish designs I did a couple of years back. I have to say, they look pretty darn cool.

Carry On My Wayward Bobble Head!

This Saturday, July 3rd at the Lake County Captains game at Classic Park in Eastlake, Ohio, you can get this Skipper bobble belly. Hey, wait… I designed it! I knew there was a reason I was posting it here.

It's the second of three promotions that I've been involved with this year involving the Captains. The first was the Captains Free Comic Book Day comic. And coming later this month, there'll be a Skipper leg lamp, to tie in with the Christmas Story house.

As soon as I get one of those, I'll show it off here, too.

In stores now: Love and Capes- Going to the Chapel!

The second Love and Capes trade is in stores now! I've gotten my copies and it looks pretty good. Issue #7 of the series was the last issue that I thought printed a little dark, and it's nice to see it printed the way that I meant it to be seen. And the word balloon glitch in issue #10 is fixed, too.

(Full disclosure, pages 120 and 121 are reversed in order. It's a little speed bump in an otherwise great book, and not all that confusing, really. And, if you all buy enough that we sell through, we can fix it on the reprint.)

I'm thrilled with the IDW people and their collected editions. And, coming soon, IDW will be publishing the new mini-series, Love and Capes: Ever After. I'm working on the second issue of that right now, in fact. Heck, have a panel of it.

I really dig that image. It's got just the right feel to it. I love the darker colors and the lighting. It's always a bit of a challenge to make Mark and Abby work in the same space because of their size difference. The poses are pushed just enough to. Mark's really putting his weight onhis right hand, and Abby's leaning back against him just enough.

Anyway, the second trade's in stores. Please buy it!

Painting my Old School at my New School

If there's one thing I learned in art school, it's get paid!

But, if I learned two things, it's I hate painting.

I do. I hate acrylics, it's like painting with toothpaste. The only thing I hate more is oils. Like painting with butter. I hate not being able to wash my brushes with water. And I don't really care for airbrushing either. (Actually, I'm okay with watercolors, but just barely.)

But, in my second and third years of art school, I had to do a fair amount of that. I took a painting/color theory class with Joel Naprstek, a talented artist, wonderful painter and great guy. As opposed to other teachers whose names I won't mention here, Joel actually worked with you. I can't say I liked painting, but under his auspices, I got better at it.

As I recall, about the same time I went through a breakup and kind of threw myself into my work. One classmate of mine remarked on my improvement and said "You need to get dumped more often." Ah yes, pain, the great motivator.

It does work though. Later, after getting back together with that same person, we broke up again, and I threw myself into getting work on the Warner Brothers comics just to spite her. (She was a WB cartoon fan.) And, yes, I did wind up lettering three books for them. So, you know, win.

Anyway, this is one of the paintings I did that actually looked decent. It's of my home church, Immaculate Conception in Willoughby. It's where I went to school. You may also recognize it from Love and Capes #12, as it's the basis for the church in which Mark and Abby get married.

It's weird looking at it now. Part of this assignment was to work off a photo, and take a piece of white cardboard with a small square cut in it to isolate areas of color. This way you were looking at just the color and you could try to match it and learn how color worked. I remember thinking I did a good job, but that something was off.

Now, I can look at it and say "the front of the building is way too cool". I know exactly how to fix it. In fact, I've done so here if you want to see it.

Sometimes, it's good to see how far you've come and that you have really made progress. But I'm still not planning on doing any more painting anytime soon.

Captain's Log

So here's my latest Stupid Idea. I've mentioned incessantly my love of "process" stuff. My latest foray into this being the awesome Art of Toy Story 3book. But one of my favorites is the Deep Space Nine Companion, which goes behind the scenes of the tragically-underrated series. You get to see what plots were, what they became and why.

So I've decided to do this for Love and Capes.

I'm working on the second issue of the new IDW Love and Capes: Ever After miniseries. So I'm keeping a journal of sorts that will go page-by-page, explain how I wrote the jokes, call out geek references, show sketches and layouts and things like that. It's designed to be something I can photocopy and sell at conventions, and maybe I'll make the PDF available too.

So, my question is, do you think anyone be interested in this?

Wayback Wednesdays: Hulk Sad

Wayback Wednesday is back! I've dug up some new stuff with which to horrify and embarass myself.

This is a Hulk illustration I did for my Methods and Materials class in my first year at Kubert. Mark Pennington was my teacher, and I really wanted to learn some back anatomy drawing this. Clearly I didn't. I can't count how many things are wrong in this piece.

I don't remember the specifics of the assignment, or if I had a storyline in mind where Hulk would be at Banner's grave. It just seemed like a cool visual. I do know it was inked with brush and pen, and colored on a photocopy with Dr. Martin's Watercolor Dyes.

The big reason I show this off is what I did with it in my second year. One of my second year teachers gave us an assignment where we had to pick a title off of a lost and do an illustration from it. I picked the title "Sing Me No Sad Songs", and took a copy, lettered that on the top, and presto, reused it in the second year.

Hey, that was the year that I worked at Arthur's three days a week and was definitely overworked.

I tried to go for the hat trick and reuse it in my third year. I had an opening, but it was for the same teacher as second year, and I thought he'd remember it. Too bad. Would have been a nice capper to the story, wouldn't it?

If Love Were a Red Dress

I love tackling other characters, but it's always a treat when someone actually wants one of mine. Here, the requester wanted Abby, specifically in the red dress she wore in issue #2. This was a lot of fun to do.

Insert Clever Backwards Title Here

Zatanna was really popular at Charlotte this year, including having a set of Zatannas be the artwork models at the charity auction. It's always good to see Zee, but I thought it was particularly cool to see this George Peréz 80s-version.

Here was my run at the character, harkening back to her live magic stage show. This was done at the table at Charlotte, and then taken back home to color.

Black Cat Scratch Fever

This commission came across my website. He wanted a picture of Spider-Man's ex-girlfriend the Black Cat. I haven't done a lot of pictures of her, and didn't know her costume was revised until I started looking for reference. I think this one came out really well.