Ho Ho Ho, My Goodness, It's Almost That Time, Isn't It?

Yeah, it's getting to be that time again. Halloween is over, so we're coming up to that four-play of holidays: Thanksgiving, Mid-Ohio-Con, Christmas and New Year's.

So, bound and determined not to be cutting it close again, and not having a new issue of Love and Capes to worry about, I've started work on my annual Christmas card. These have become both a marketing piece and something of a collector's item. If you'd like one, just give me a shout with your address and I'll get you on the list. My mailing list is always in flux, as every year it seems I need to rebuild the list or transpose it into another program to generate the mailing list.

Anyway, I've got The Idea for the Christmas cards and may actually finish them up tonight. It's good to be ahead for once.

Trick or Treat!

The Weekend With Links

Another Boo at the Zoo is in the books, and it was another good time, aside from my currently withered drawing hand. It's like Dumbledore after wearing the ring. I'm a little wired, though, and have some randomness rattling around in my giant brain cavity, so I thought I'd share.

The Zoo is between half an hour and an hour away from my house, depending on traffic and what day of the week it is. It was on these prologed Zoo trips that I got hooked into podcasts. I always love listening to the Comics Pants guys. They do a topic, rather than current news, focused show. It makes them a little more timeless, so I can save it to listen to anytime during the Zoo trip. Their podcast is a recorded version of those sometimes silly, sometimes sublime conversations that you get into at comic conventions.

I'm also a huge fan of the This Week in Tech network. This Week in Tech is a great podcast in and of itself, and This Week in Media covers a lot of interesting stuff. That includes the upcoming writers' strike which is becoming more and more likely to impact upon my day. And yes, that's a veiled reference to some of those things that I Can't Talk About, but isn't it good to know there are still such things churning in the background?

The Zoo is a fun for a bunch of reasons, but one of the big ones is the people. The kids are fun, and a lot of the parents are, too. It's fun joking around with everyone. My current favorite was when my Zoo-assigned assistant asked me if I wanted some coffee. I said "hells, yeah" and he asked "What do you take in it?"

"Cream, sugar, and Bailey's." Oddly, the Zoo had no Bailey's.

I ran into an acquaintence of mine from high school, Mike, and his two lovely kids. I also worked with Mike at the News-Herald, and then we both left, he to become a golf pro and I became a full-time freelance cartoonist. Such chance meetings are a nice bonus of doing the Zoo thing.

Most of my weekend was Zoo based, but I did get the chance to see 30 Days of Night with the Mikes Cubed on Saturday. I haven't read the IDW series, but thought it was a decent movie. There are a couple scenes where people who should be running aren't, and I think it's missing at least one crucial bit of dialogue. It's not a spoiler (I wouldn't do that) but how does Josh Harnett's character never ask his brother exactly how he escaped the bad guys.

All right, that's weekend wrap up. Hopefully I'll have some art eye candy to post soon.

Torpedoes Away!

Love and Capes #6 went to the printer today. I'll be seeing a proof shortly. Big thanks to Christine, Dee and Jesse who proofed the book for me. I'm really looking forward to seeing this one.

Down in a Hole

The Fort Worth Weekly is one of my frequent and favorite clients. They sent up the Thom Signal for me to do a cover for them. It's Yet Another Crane Cover, as the development of Ft. Worth's end of the Metroplex is a big story out there. Most of the cover was their suggestion, I just changed the angle to make it a more interesting downshot.

For those of you process junkies, the cover was sketched by hand and then taken into Illustrator, where I build the crane and the buildings. I inked the hole and debris by hand, composited it in Photoshop, and three hours and one venti mocha later, lo and behold, there was a cover.

And speaking of the DFW Metroplex, I've been to Dallas a few times, Fort Worth a few fewer, and in my experience, this recent survey saying Dallas-Fort Worth has the nation's second most unattractive citizens. Clearly, those people have never been to a Rangers game or downtown. Hot-itute abounds there. I got your back, DFW.

Here We Go Again

The design bug hit hard this week. I've redesigned the Love and Capes site, too.

When you design a site, you have how you think it's goingt to work. Then, as time goes on, you add more things to it, and it gets that "made up as it went along" kind of look. So, eventually, you have to rip the whole thing apart and start over. So I did.

The new site is much cleaner and easier to use. The strip of the day is placed better, and the whole first issue is available to read online. So, it's all the Loveliness and Capeishness of the old site, with a slick new coat of paint. Drop by and check it out.

Lest Things Get Boring

For those of you who read me Weblog on the 'Blog itself, as opposed to an RSS feed, I've rearranged the furniture a little bit. Let me know if you like it.

I See a Pattern

So, I've been working at Boo at the Zoo and...

Hmmm. Let's see, have you ever seen 300? Where all trillions of Persians attack the three hundred Spartans? Last night at the Zoo was like that, except the Persians all wanted caricatures, and I was 299 people shy of an army. Now don't get me wrong, I love doing caricatures and I particularly love the Zoo event, but yesterday was the busiest that I ever saw it. My line was an hour deep within fifteen minutes of opening up and didn't get any lighter until we closed the line. I'm posting some photos from the line, all of which were taken at the same time.

The massive amount of break-less drawing aside, it's great to see that many people come out. It's good for the Zoo, obviously, as they're a client and a great bunch of people. It's nice to see them do well, and it certainly justifies them hiring me. And for me, every year there are more and more people who say "You've drawn my kids every year for the last five years, and we always come back here first. Our basement has all your caricatures framed." Hearing that is just really special.

What amazes me is that the line is so long. The Zoo's only open for three hours during Boo, and these people spend a third of their time at the Zoo waiting to get a caricature from me.

I was also impressed at how crowded it was on a night where the Indians were playing.

Ah, the Indians...

I've written some cheers for the team on the blog for the last couple of weeks, so I figure I'd better at least mention their final loss last night. Here's the thing, (and I wish I could remember who said this) I don't get how watching nine millionaires chase a ball in a private park affects my mood so much.

There's a few things I'd change about myself. I'm always trying to lose a little weight, and I know I have a confidence that borders on arrogance, but I think right now I'd just get rid of my optimism if I could. No Cleveland team has won a championship since 1964. I've seen The Drive, The Fumble, The Shot, Red Right 88 and that base hit that ended the 1997 World Series. I should know not to get my hopes up. I should know not to believe because Cleveland teams always seem to choke.

And don't give me that "It was a good season and they gave a good effort and lost" stuff. They choked. I'd give you the valiant effort thing if the last games were 4-3, 5-2, and 2-0. When you have three chances to win one game, and you lose all of them by between seven and ten runs, that's choking.

Put me in the "it's better to never loved at all than have loved and lost" column. I would have rather they hadn't gone into the post-season at all, rather than invest that much in watching them get one game away from the World Series.

I suppose I could take some solace in that it was only the League Series and not the World Series. It would have been far worse to watch them choke in the World Series. But there I go being optimistic again.

What's This?

I'm just messing around today. It's good to do that every now and then.

I've started doing my Boo at the Zoo tour this week. As of Thursday, I'm up at the Zoo four days a week, drawing kiddies (and some adults) in costumes, often in the cold. It's a fun time, if a bit draining. The Thursday and Friday drive out to the Zoo through Cleveland rush hour traffic is the worst. It doubles my time to get out there, and cuts my normal workday short.

But the event itself, and especially the people, are great. This is my fifth year doing Boo, and I don't see it stopping anytime soon.

After the movie last night, I met up with Brothers #3 and 4 in the Series, Robert and Michael, and some of Michael's friends to see the re-release of the 3-D version of Nightmare Before Christmas. I love the movie, although I actually haven't seen it as many times as you might think. The art and design draws me to it more than anything else. Which isn't to short change the story or the music, which are also very good. It's just, well, the design is what causes me to get things like my Nightmare baseball jersey. (Sah-weet!)

It was a nice time, and always cool to get time to spend time with the bros.

All of that is to set up today's drawing. You might not think this makes sense, but I don't think I do enough drawing sometimes. I'm doing work stuff, and Love and Capes, but you need time to experiment and hone your craft. I'm usually so booked with paying work that I don't always have time to play. And it's the play that keeps you fresh and trying new things.

So I decided to play in Adobe Photoshop today. For those of you not in the field, Photoshop is the Swiss Army Knife of image creation. You can do the same thing six different ways, and like the myth of the human brain, I think people only use ten percent of what it's capable of. I wanted to do more, so I started playing around with the brushes and wanted to draw something completely digitally. So I drew Sally from Nightmare.

There's lots of little experiments in here, from the rendering to the brush strokes used, to just being able to draw without any scanned pencil sketches. It's also done mostly from memory, which is why everyone's favorite rag doll is probably wildly off model.

I think it's a nice attempt, and I found some new tools that I can put in my Box o'Tools. Now to get better with them...

So There I Was

I needed some filler info for the back cover of Love and Capes #6, since there's no next issue (at least at this point), so I started writing some trivia about the book. How characters got their names, inside jokes, stuff like that. The comic will even feature the original test page I did for LNC, which features a different looking Mark and Abby.But then I found that I really liked writing the trivia. There's all sorts of little stuff that I put in there that I find funny, and I wanted to share it. It makes sense, since the Trivia section of the Internet Movie Database is one of my favorites, too. So I wrote an issue-by-issue breakdown of trivia for all six books. I've posted the first five, as well as a general section, at the website. You can click here and read all the trivia you'd like. So, if you want to know why Mark's last name is Spencer, where Abby got the Wizard of Oz picture in her apartment, or why there's a Charles Goren joke in book five, you can learn why.