Super Secret Project Revealed

I've mentioned a Super Secret Project here once or twice. Actually, I think I use it to describe a lot of things. But now I can reveal what the latest SSP is...

Toon Tumblers DC Glasses.

That's right, Toon Tumblers, one of my favorite pieces of comic book merchandise and the good china here at Casa de Zahler, will now be making DC glasses. I dig the Marvel ones to be sure, but I've always been more of a DC guy. It's going to be cool to get some of my favorite characters on glass.

Now, I can't reveal the first image or where it will appear, or characters in the planned lines. That I'll save for Toon Tumblers to reveal, but once they do I'll post it here. If you wanted to guess that I've lobbied for a certain Nuclear Man to make his appearance early in the line, though, you wouldn't be wrong.

The Bobble Fish was a Tremendously Useful Creation

Here's the first photo I've seen of the first bobble fish I designed for the Lake County Captains. It's Buster Bluegill. I'll be at that game, June 28th, signing statues for anyone who would like. I haven't done too much three-dimensional stuff, and I was a lousy sculpture student, so it's cool to see something I've drawn in three dimensions.

Well, a two dimensional-photo of said three-dimensional item, at least. I'll let you know when I actually get my mitts on one.

Does she speak eloquently? And would she have your baby?

Here we go, page seven. This has one of my most in-jokey jokes ever, and it's visible here in panel one. Anyone want to take a guess as to what it is?

I thought I was hitting a nice little roll here, but now I'm a little stymied as to page eight. A lot of times, I have the writing work done on the next page while I'm working on the current one. It's not that I don't know what happens next. I certainly do. It's just a question of feeling like I need another beat before going on with the story.

Still, I'd like to get page eight done by the end of the month. Then I'd be a third of the way through the book and a third of the way through my self-assigned deadline of end-of-July. That may change a bit given that I do realize that San Diego is the end of July and that does take some time up. Even so, I should be doing well on getting three months ahead of things, which I need to do to have a certain amount of safety room to get the next FCBD issue printed in time.

My Dulcet Tones, Yet Again

I had the pleasure of doing an interview with JJ from Fist Full of Comics and Games. You can check it out here. Hopefully I don't sound like too much of a dolt.

Grand Theft Auto: Tremont

Here's why I love working for Scene Magazine.

With Scene, I get to do some really fun stuff. I get to mess around in styles that I wouldn't normally, and they're very supportive of such experiments. As a result, I think some of the best stuff I've done has been done for them. This one is just a little different, as it was very art-directed to start. My AD e-mailed and said "We want to do Grand Theft Auto Tremont." (Tremont is a Cleveland neighborhood, for those of you living in the great unexplored non-Northeast Ohio part of the world.)

I had to break it down and figure out how to do the GTA style. It's fun to do different styles, and learning how to break something down like that gives you another tool in your graphics toolbox, and that's always good. I like the angry eyes at the bottom, and the picture of the yuppies at the lower left. Especially the way that Lolita is treated as a background. I'm sure I'll be using that approach again.

It's out on newsstands now. Check it out!

Numero Ocho

I decided to take a crack at the cover for Love and Capes #8 today. It's Memorial Day, so things are a little slower than normal, but that's cool. It gives me the chance to do some stuff that I wouldn't have the uninterrupted time to do otherwise. And this cover will be due in a couple of weeks anyway.

I was thinking of what to do for a cover. There's always Mark and Abby. And I know what happens in the story, so I could have done something on that. But then it occured to me that this will be the eighth cover (tenth if you count the two alternate Free Comic Book Day covers) and Darkblade hadn't appeared on a one. Amazonia, the Arachnerd, Major Might and Steel Worker all had. So I started thinking of things that would include him.

My first idea was to have Darkblade coming out of a shower on the phone, calling me saying "Zahler? When will I get a cover? What do you mean 'what am I doing right now'?"

I didn't like the idea of Darkblade not looking heroic, though. And worse yet, something that wouldn't put him in costume. It's a bit of a risk to not put Mark and Abby on the cover. It's why Abby appears in that heart shaped balloon on #6... I couldn't have her missing from the cover of the final issue of the first arc. So I needed to have some typical hero trappings to make it work.

Then, in the shower today, I got an epiphany. What if Darkblade was threatening a thug? And what if I was the thug?

So I did a rough. Darkblade was on camera left, and I was on camera right, and he was holding me straight. I scanned it and dropped it into the Love and Capes template that I designed and it didn't work at all. But that's why you scan the rough. I started to see that if I reversed the positions that I had more room for the dialogue. And if I had Darkblade lifting me up, the diagonal making it more interesting and creating more dialogue space.

There's a trend in covers to not put any words on it. I figure, if it works, do it. And here the dialogue is definitely needed.

I've also been accused of making Mark look like me. I honestly don't see the resemblance. We've both got brown hair. I use myself as a model, but I model for all the characters, so I don't see why he should be any different. So now we can see what I'd look like as a Love and Capes character. And I even worked Abby and Mark into my shirt. A shirt which is available for sale, in fact.

Nothing like a little merchandise plug every now and then.

Tell me what it's like to be the last one standing

I've mentioned it before, but there's something I really like about doing the quarterly Love and Capes series over the semi-yearly Raider books: How quickly it goes. This is page six, and with that, I'm 25% done with the book.

The page has very little dialogue. Technically, there are only four words spoken on the entire page. I'm kind of known for my dialogue, and it's definitely my favorite part, so it's nice to do something different. It's largely decided by the joke, but once I realized the silent nature of the page, I really tried to play that up. There are things, like panel five, where I could have cheated and added a whisper, but I really wanted the body language to carry the message.

Because it's such a cool page, and because it doesn't spoil the larger plot of the eighth issue, I'm linking to the whole thing. Yes, that's right, you can both click and embiggen!

There's nothing to do that can't be done

There's nothing to do that can't be done.

Things are starting to pick up speed on the marathon that is Love and Capes. Here's page five, and I got it done yesterday. A lot of pages take two days to hammer out, this one took only one. And, if I'm not careful, I'll have page six done today, too.

I particularly dig the art on this panel. It's an expressiveness that I don't often get to do with Mark. He's rarely irritated the way that he is in this panel. It's also neat the way that I got to reverse the shadows, putting Mark's face in the darker area, really getting his feelings across.

As for what else goes on this page, you'll have to buy the book. It is one of the plot-heavier pages, although it doesn't look like it at first glance.

For those of you following my Twitter feed, Twitter was down yesterday. I'm trying to tweet the whole creative process, but it seems like they keep crashing whenever I'm working. I don't think it's my fault, but who knows?

Process Crimes

I love process stuff. I love books that go behind-the-scenes of TV shows and movies (like the way-cool Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion) and into artists' studios and especially Steven King's On Writing. So, in that spirit, here's a glimpse into the way I write.

I got a little stuck on page five of Love and Capes, so I grabbed my iPod and took a walk. It seems to clear my head, and by the time I got to the beach, I'd gotten two and a half more pages of LNC #8 plotted. It's amazing how well that works, and I wonder why I don't take walks to get over writer's block more often.

Being an artist, I tend to think visually, so I keep my plot for the book as a series of Post-It notes. I keep them on my kitchen wall, which is close to my studio and is the largest empty wall here in Zahlerdu that's not in the living room. Not that I have that many visitors, but I like to keep the public areas a little clearer than my work areas.

Each Post-It one represents four panels of the book, and has some note, usually the punchline, to help me remember the bit that I'd written. And having this in such a visual medium lets me plot the pacing of the book and see how many more pages, how much more I have.

You'll notice one note in the lower right hand corner. That's the last page. I always have the ending planned out before I do the middle. It gives me an idea of where I'm headed. As I plot other sections, they'll appear in other places on the wall so that I can see the book as a sequence of scenes rather than just one age at a time.

Morning Had Broken Me

Man, waking up at 4:00am will mess you the frak up.

I felt like I was in a haze all day, even after I slept for an hour after the show. I managed to pump out a couple more parts of the Scene cover I'm doing. I even finished it this morning (and by morning, I mean something like seven or eight, not four) assuming my art director gives me the big okay. Part of said cover is even shown here. I'll post another image or two, probably, before I show the full cover on Wednesday when it prints.

Anyway, Good Morning Cleveland was great. I was surprisingly conscious for that early in the morning. Everybody there, from Todd the producer to Paul and Kim and Susanne and Patty to everyone else were fantastic. And a big shout out to Kimmy, who I went to Lake Catholic with and brought me to their attention to be on the show. You can see a slideshow of those caricatures here. I think most of them came out pretty well, and I was lucky enough to get the subjects to sit down for me. Last time I was on the show (it can't be seven years ago, can it?), I had to look across the studio to try to get a glimpse of them. There's probably one of the set I did yesterday that I'd do differently, but I won't out it here.

I think I even came across well in the interview, although I must admit that I've not had the intestinal fortitude to pull it up on the TiVo yet. I'll probably burn it to disc and never look at it again. I really have a hard time watching myself on TV.

But don't let that stop you if you're the producer of another morning show and want to bring me out to your studio. Good Morning Dallas... Good Morning Poughkeepsie... whatever. It's all about the self-promotion.