Triple Shots: Wonder Woman and Harry, Hermione & Ron

My travel schedule hasn't let me finish these Triple Shots until now. I drew Wonder Woman and a set of the three main Harry Potter characters, Harry, Ron and Hermione. Since those were for the same person, I tried to give them a common feel. Click any to embiggenate!

Huh. It feels like it's been a while since I did these? Maybe it's about time to do it again?

I'm Coming to Seattle for Emerald City Comicon

I'll be in Seattle this weekend for the awesome Emerald City Comicon. I'll be at booth B-04 in Artist Alley, set up with my friend Ben Thompson of Badass of the Week fame. He and I will also be hosting a panel, So Much Cooler Online, Sunday at 11:00am, dealing with maintaining a digital profile, promoting yourself online, and not tweeting stupid tweets. More panelists to be announced. And, as I've been doing for a while now, a new con means a new con print. Here's my Seattle image, available at the show and through pre-order.

Kickstarter Bonus: Up and Muppets Pitches

I promised that if I made $5200, I'd post my pitch documents for Up and Muppets. I cleared that by $6.29, and I'm a man of my word. There are two Up pitches here, Up: Down Under and a second one, getting into the source of the talking dog collars. Up: Down Under was the clear winner, but Disney had some changes. I made those changes and it became Up: Special Delivery. Honestly, I think it's better than the original pitch (as much as I love the heck out of the original title).

There are also three Muppets pitches. Boom was doing the Muppet Show, as well as the Muppet adaptation series. These were for the first. I did pitch the latter, including an awesome (and rejected) pitch of The Muppets: Hamlet where Miss Piggy plays Ophelia and, upon finding out she dies in Act IV, goes about rewriting the play Duck Amuck style so that she becomes the hero. Yeah, I found a way to give Hamlet a happy ending.

The three Show pitches were to have them become the House act at a Donald Trump-esque casino, to have them become a reality show where someone got voted off every issue, and one where a big star (a la Tom Cruise circa the couch jumping era) becomes their guest host.

If the stars ever align, I'd love to do any or all of these. But for now, you can enjoy them in this PDF.

Kickstarter Bonus: The Time I Almost Did "Up"

One more time, today is the last day of my Kickstarter project. It's completely funded, but I'd like to overfund and add some other benefits. As bonuses, I'm offering some art that's never been seen and won't be in the final art book.

I completely fell in love with Up when I saw it. It was a heartbreaking, nearly perfect film. Boom had the Pixar license, and they were talking to me about Muppets, and it took all of seven hours for me to write them an e-mail begging to do an Up comic.

At the end of the movie, Carl is clearly living in the zeppelin, and hanging out with Russell and Dug. It was just begging for a sequel. You know why? Because with that setup it's Uncle Scrooge! Old guy, boy scout tagalong, going off having adventures.

The idea was almost instant, too. Living aboard the zeppelin, Carl finds a never mailed letter from Muntz. And while Muntz was crazy, he was still young Carl's idol. so he decides to deliver the letter himself. The letter takes him to Australia and gives the book the awesomely awesome title Up: Down Under.

I'm still proud of that, title, pitch, concept and everything.

Here's the thing: it got approved. The pitch went to Disney where we were told that they didn't really see Carl traveling much or very far after his adventure in the movie. But they thought the idea had merit.

So, here's what I did: I realized the end scene of Up takes place at a famous ice cream place near Pixar. That meant the movie took place in Northern California. That meant I could use Southern California. So the trip to Australia following in Multz's footsteps instead became a trip to glamorous 1930's Hollywood. My Outback Flying Doctor was replaced by an actress who, Doris Day-style, started an animal shelter/farm.

And you know what? It was better. The dog shelter made Dug even more important, and Hollywood was a better backdrop. I liked it more, even if I had to lose the title.

In my dream world, one day I'll pitch it to Pixar and we'll make the thing. It sure would be swell. And it could happen someday. After all, adventure is out there.

Kickstarter Bonus: My Incredibles Sample Pages

Today is the last day of my Kickstarter project. It's completely funded, but I'd like to overfund and add some other benefits. As bonuses, I'm offering some art that's never been seen and won't be in the final art book.

So, I, like everyone, wanted to do The Incredibles. I think my Love and Capes artwork style was absolutely perfect for it. So I put together this two page sample page showing how I'd handle the characters.

Compared to the previous Muppets piece, I tried something more standard for the lettering, a more traditional comic style for a comic book family.

This was also a soft pitch for a plot, too. I don't remember all the details, but basically I wanted to focus on Frozone (because he's literally and figuratively cool) and give him an ex-girlfriend super villian as a bad girl to mess around with him. It'd also show some great contrast with Mr. Incredible and Elasti-Girl's marriage, and even Frozone's own marriage,

Alas, not to be. Maybe someday.

As I type this, you're $55 from seeing the Up pages. Have at it!

In Which I Reveals the WonderCon Exclusive Print

WonderCon means another one of my local Con Prints. This one was a little tough, since Anaheim is mostly known for Disneyland and that puts me in the same bind as my Orlando print. Plus, WonderCon is traditionally a San Francisco show. So, in this case, I figured it would be okay to go ahead and do the original location rather than the new one. Plus, I was just in San Francisco a month or so ago and I really wanted to draw it. Click for a bigger version.

Sunday Sketch- Adam Strange and Alanna

Today's super couple sketch is Adam Strange and Alanna. I always thought this was ripe to be one of those syndicated or SyFy type shows. Exotic locations, CGI villians, and a cool love story between a disappearing hero and his girlfriend. Would have worked better than Flash Gordon. The plan is to have four more of these done before WonderCon. We'll see how I do.

We Did It!

With seventeen days left, my Kickstarter project is funded! I'm astounded by your support and how fast it happened. Thank you all so much. There are still some overfunding bonuses that I hope to hit in the next two and a half weeks, including extra pages in the book at $5000 (including a page by page breakdown of the Love and Capes Valentine's story), unique bookplates for backers at $6000, and at the highest level, a new Love and Capes t-shirt. All of which is to say that, while we've hit the funding goal, I'll still be promoting the heck out of it for a bit.

For those of you who funded on or before Leap Day for the $29+ event, I'll be making and designing the original artwork and it'll go out in the next month or so.

Also, I'll be posting some of the finished pages here in the next few days on the Kickstarter site. I reserve the right to be an irritating perfectionist and tweak them after they appear here, but you'll get to see a closer look inside the finished product either way.

Thank you all again!

Leap Day Means Superman's Birthday!

So today is Leap Day. It's your Once Every Four Years Day to mangle a song from The Pajama Game. And, it's also Superman's birthday.

Well, technically it's Kal-El's birthday. Krypton rotates slower around it's red giant sun than Earth does, so their year is four of ours. The man who would be Superman was conveniently born on February 29th, even though Clark Kent celebrates his on June 18th, the date his rocket landed on Earth.

Interestingly, Kyrptonian birthdays were not a celebratory event, instead one of great sadness… okay, maybe that's just interesting to me and to Joe Murray of Captain Blue Hen Comics in Delaware. Joe, you see, is celebrating The Man of Steel's Birthday in style today, complete with an auction by one of his guests for this year's Free Comic Book Day, Thom Zahler.

Hey, that's me!

Yeah, that's right, I did a new Superman piece for Joe's auction. You'll have to find out from him what you can to do bid on it, but he told me I could share it. Hope you like it!

And as always, click the image to super-size it.

Leap Day Kickstarter Specials!

It's Leap Day, I'm at Disneyland for their 24-Hour Park Day, and as I write this I'm almost at $3000 on my Kickstarter project. That's a lot of awesome, and I'm blending it together today,for one day only.

So, if today from now until March 1st at 8:00am Eastern, if you contribute $29.00 or more to my Kickstarter campaign, you will receive a link to the Love and Capes Valentine's Special, previously only available from the Mary Sue, as well as a new original postcard not available after today. What will it be? I can't say. But it'll be brand new and something only for today's backers (and anyone who donated more than $29 already… I want to be fair to them).

Also, I'm sure you wish you were at Disney with me. So do I. Since I can't make that happen, I will tweet a random picture of me at Disney for every $29+ backer or upgrade I get today. Given that I'll be sleep deprived and hopped up on sugar, I'm sure you'll get some interesting ones. So go Kickstart my Art now!