Yeah, I Just Like Seeing My Name In Print

Years ago I went to the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Arts to train to be a cartoonist. Given that I actually am a cartoonist, it seems to have been a pretty good choice.

The Kubert School runs ads in comic books. It's one of the ways I heard about them. They've put together their ads for the new year, and look who's on it… me! Yeah, it's an ego stroke, but it's also just kind of cool to be recognized by your alma mater for the work you've done since graduation. I'm pretty proud of it.

It's too small to see here in the full page, so I've reproduced it, color added for clarity.

Now, if I could just get Lake Catholic to build that statue of me, everything would be perfect.

It's an Honor Just to be Mentioned

Publishers Weekly has their Comics Week Third Annual Critics' Poll. And guess what perfect-for-Valentine's Day collection made it on the list of Honorable Mentions. If you guessed Love and Capes: Do You Want to Know a Secret, you're right. If you guessed anything else, you probably landed on this page by mistake.

I'm mentioned alongside Joss Whedon and John Cassady's Astonishing X-Men, Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson's Astro City, and Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' Criminal, among others.

Anyway, it's great to be noticed. And yay, me!

Single Digits, Baby!

Nine left!

Page fifteen is done. There's a lot of cool stuff to it, I think, unfortunately nothing that I can post without spoiling too much. So, you get this establishing shot. Well, there are some sound effects. I'll let you figure out what's going on inside the First Colonial Bank.

And yeah, it's First Colonial Bank since Battlestar Galactica is on my mind. It's coming back you know, and it's gonna be awesome!

Call for Ideas

Time to do some crowdsourcing.

I mentioned this over on my Twitter, and want to bring it here. It just hit me that Valentine's Day is coming up, and I produce a romantic comedy comic book. Weird, huh? There's got to be a way for me to turn the holiday to my advantage.

I've received ideas to do a special Valentine's Day comic. That's a great idea, but it's a little late in the game for that. What I might do is have a special web-only Valentine's Day comic here on the site. That could certainly work.

The other one I've received is to put up a photo gallery of happy couples enjoying Love and Capes. That one's great, too, so if you want to send photos of you and your Significant Other reading the book, go ahead. Send them to me here at thom(little squiggly at sign)loveandcapes.com. I'll set up a gallery and show them off.

A Love and Capes Valentine is an idea, too. Maybe I'll design a Valentine's Day card that I can give out at New York this year? Like one of those grade school Valentines? Maybe I Choo-Choo-Choose You?

Any ideas? Give me a shout and let me know.

Look What's Done!

Ah, if only pressing that Easy Button made issues of Love and Capes fall, fully-formed, from the sky.

Still, they're printed and look wonderful. They'll be in stores soon!

And yes, the Mocha of Victory will soon follow!

Page Fourteen

I think this marks the first gunfire in Love and Capes. There's a weapon fired in #9, but you haven't seen that yet. (It should be soon, I think they're done printing it, so it'll be in stores soon.) But that's more a sci-fi thing.

I've always wondered why people shoot at Superman. I mean, you have to know he's invulnerable, right? Maybe it's just tradition. Afriend told me the next scene should be someone throwing the empty gun at Abby, too, in full Adventures of Superman tradition.

I made sure to draw all the bullets bouncing downward, and Mark catching the one stray. There's no crowd behind him, but still, you can't have stray bullets flying around a city. Mark's nothing if not responsible.

I'm down to ten pages now. It'll be a couple of days before I can get to the next one and down into single digits. Still, this one is going pretty quickly, and that's a good thing.

Another Year, Another Page

The first new page of the new year is page thirteen. It's an okay page, but it's by far not my favorite.

It's one of the few pages I've ever done that I rewrote/redrew a joke after it was done. The joke was funny, but the replacement joke was funnier.

I think some of the frustration came about because this sequence features a Plot Joke. To my mind, there are two types of jokes in Love and Capes, Plot Jokes and Joke Jokes. The latter are jokes that are just funny on their face, and the funny is written first. To use issue eight as an example, Mark and Abby going to a comic book convention, that's a joke joke. The situation is set and the jokes pour out of it.

The other type is a Plot Joke, which serves to advance the story or rearrange characters on the stage first. I can cover a lot with caption boxes, but sometimes you need to show Mark flying Abby to Paris or something along the same lines. In issue eight, the bit where Crusader is set up to fight Psi-Clone is a Plot Joke. I have to introduce Psi-Clone, introduce his powers and have him change into the Crusader. There's a lot of business there to cover. On top of that, I throw a joke in it.

Page thirteen starts with a Plot Joke. Abby's co-worker Jason has to walk into the bookstore. That's very much moving characters on the stage. He needs to be introduced, have a joke, and leave. For four panels, that's a lot to do.And it woks fine, it just doesn't sing the way some of the other jokes have.

Oh well, ever forward. I have to go write another page now, which will feature a couple of Joke Jokes. But they also advance the plot. The lines, they are a blurring.

Happy 2009!

Happy New Year, everyone. Whatever last year was to you, I hope 2009 is everything you could wish for. It's a brilliant, fantastic world with endless possibilities. Go out and make it your best year ever!

Mission Half Accomplished!

Yes, I am all about the schedule, baby! Page twelve is done!

I really like the panel shown here. The body language and cartooning works really well. I like how Mark is using his chin to balance the stack of books. Abby's turn is pretty natural, and she looks very cute.

I'm sure in six months I'll hate it, but for now, it's kind of cool.

I think I even have pages thirteen and fourteen planned out. We'll see how they break…in the New Year!

Limit Not My Comics

Over at Comics Unlimited, Johanna Draper Carlson reviews the Love and Capes: Do You Want to Know a Secret trade.

In Love and Capes, Thomas Zahler does a perfect job combining romantic comedy with superheroics.…The book is structured as a series of comic strips, with two punchlines per page (made up of eight panels). Zahler's cartoon-influenced style is appealing and well-suited for both action and comedy. There's a lot of humor to be had in daily life with a superhero. (Presents are never secrets with x-ray vision, for example.) Also entertaining are Mark's relationship with his best friend, hero of the night Darkblade, and Abby's interaction with her observant younger sister Charlotte.

Read the full review here.