Messy energy

I post somewhere else now

2011-07-12T23:38:00.002-04:00

Check out all the art I've been posting at the Mysterious Transmissions blog! And check out our sick website!

Sock-Monster commission

2011-05-02T20:42:00.003-04:00

Here's a drawing I was lucky enough to get to do for my comic book pal Neil Brideau, of his Sock-Monster character and my Dead Man Holiday protagonist Thad. Neil lives in Chicago, where he works at the great Quimby's Bookstore, and I happened to meet his brother all the way out here in Massachusetts where we coincidentally live in the same town. He hired me to draw a picture for his brother for Christmas, so I busted out what you see above.

Paint and Pixel Festival 2011

2011-04-18T22:48:00.008-04:00

Mysterious Transmissions (being myself and cohort Mark Velard) exhibited at the Paint and Pixel Festival last weekend. Here's a shot of the view of the floor from our table, Dan Berger visible in the foreground:

Here are the books Mark and I both premiered:
Not Comics #1, my long-promised anthology of short stories made in collaboration with people who don't read comics. (The cover is meant to look like a book so that normal people don't have to feel ashamed while reading it in public.) The whole thing will be available to read online... eventually. Heck, it may even be available for purchase online at some point.

A Bosnian bootleg of Mark's eight page story Marooned at High Noon! The Bosnians sure do love bootlegging Mark's comics. Before the books are even released. I don't know how they get his pages into the hands of their children to crudely trace over to produce their own versions, but they do it. Time and time again. And then customs forwards them to Mysterious Transmissions secret headquarters and we sell them at shows.

It was a lovely little show (it's first year) full of pleasant, enthusiastic people. It was my second show as an exhibitor, and my first time exhibiting at a show with any kind of comics focus. That was the highlight for me; meeting other comics folk as a fellow creators and talking shop with them. Hans Rickheit jogged by our table not as a shopper, but to boldly hand us fliers for his excellent comic Ectopiary, as he did with all the vendors (we managed to load him up with our books on his way through). I saw him doing this same thing at NEWW2- the guy knows how to promote! I scheduled a portfolio review with Jon Chad, a professor at the Center for Cartoon Studies whose work I bought and enjoyed at the last two MoCCA Fests. Only when I walked into the review and he asked "Are you thinking about applying to the school?" and I answered "Uh... no?" did I realize that the portfolio reviews were maybe intended for prospective students! (Read: not me.) But Jon was super nice, very enthusiastic about my work and even presented me with a couple of thoughts about composition that are going to come in handy going forward. Best of all, I got to meet with one of my art heroes Jim Lawson. His distinctive style broadened my horizons as a kid, and I continue to enjoy his work to present day.

Here are the few pictures I took throughout the day. I mentioned in the Mysterious Transmissions bio on the Paint and Pixel site that we'd be fabricating our wares mere minutes before the show, but Mark proved me wrong- he was assembling books until about three minutes into the show. That's not cutting it down to the wire, it's biting the wire in half! Here he is displaying the poise and grace of a true professional.

Here are a few shots of our table before customers TORE IT ASUNDER:

Too much color?

This kid got all of the ex-Mirage Studios artists in attendance to draw the Ninja Turtles on his Ninja Turtle hoodie:
Looks like he got Dooney top left, Lawson top right, I think Peter Laird on the bottom left (they must have been lucky enough to catch him when he stopped in) and Berger bottom right. Here's Lawson sketching his contribution:
And that, ladies and gentleman, is the difference between comic book artists and rock stars.

Huge thanks go out to Paint and Pixel organizer Peggy Twardowski for letting the weird kids table and Mysterious Transmissions official buttoneer and hang-outer Jahmai Hill!

MoCCA Fest 2011 report

2011-04-11T19:58:00.011-04:00

My MoCCA Fest 2011 haul:

1) Secret Prison #4. Haven't read it yet, but at initial glance looks like an improvement over previous editions.

2) Symptom of the Universe webcomic promo card.

3) Ghost Throat webcomic promo card.

4) Heather Benjamin promo flyer. I wanted to buy something from her, but her promo card was my favorite thing on the table!

5) Rat Bastard promo card. I read this comic as a kid, but hadn't seen it around for years. They were selling shirts, but no comics. I never saw them at their booth, so I couldn't ask them what the deal was.

6) Benjamin Marra's The Incredibly Fantastic Adventures of Maureen Dowd (A Work of Satire and Fiction). Marra's always a must-buy.

7) The infamous Comics Issue of the Village Voice. Sub controversy: I'm pretty sure that 85% of the "comics artists" featured in this issue are actually illustrators.

8) Maser by Jon Chad. Bought his comic The Ruby last year, loved it, bought this.

9) Quatro Monstro. $1 anthology featuring Jon Chad and three more. Bought based on cover alone.

10) The BAD-ventures of Bobo Backslack. Another Jon Chad.

11) They're Just Like Us! Making fun of the "Celebrities! They're Just Like Us!" sections of tabloids is something I probably would have gotten around to sooner or later, but Mindy Fisher does a fine job beating me to it.

12) Diamond 5. I haven't read this one yet, but the new issue has a killer lineup.

13) Miss Chris by Mickey Duzyj. Not a lot of exhibitors put more thought into their display than slapping a bunch of books down on a table and *maybe* sticking a funky tablecloth in between, so it was easy to fall instantly in love with Duzyj's eye catching and elegant perfume themed display for his book Miss Chris. Here are a couple of photos I took of it:
Here's a better photo that someone else took. Note the lipstick stained cigarette butts. Do you think Duzyj had to put lipstick on himself and smoke a pack to get them? One can only hope. And if so, the book itself was worth the effort; very Clowes-ian in content, but somehow simultaneously less and more overtly humorous. Goregous art and design, presenting an absurdist comedy insisting it's a deeply felt tale of being lost, and doing a great job of it. My book of the show.

14) Two Eyes of the Beautiful II by Ryan Cecil Smith. Bought because I heard Sean T Collins or Groovy Age of Horror or someone raving about it. Really loved it.

15) My week in Bologna by Katie Turner. Free and adorable.

16) The Comix Reader #1.

17) The MoCCA Fest program.

18 and 19) Meat Haus #6 and 7. Bought for $3 total! They were selling these insanely cheaply, sold out immediately and claimed they didn't know the demand would be so high. One of the most well regarded comics anthologies period for about 15% cover price? Duh.

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Random notes about the show:

*I paid $1 for a ticket through Megabus to get there and at no point, as I suspected might, did gas start coming in through the vents leading to me waking up chained to a rock in the desert while being yelled at to dig with all the other passengers.

*I only attended Saturday.

*This was my second MoCCA, and second alt-comics fest ever. Call it a sophomore slump, but I wasn't feeling it.

*Even before the show, I noticed a much lower amount of online buzz about this year than the year before, from the comics blogosphere and even from MoCCA itself. The guest list, programming and poster were announced with little to no fanfare. Afterparties were barely mentioned online, and no posters for them were visible at the show itself. Compared to last year's explosion of Dash Shaw and Paul Pope appearances and posters, this seemed rather subdued. As someone who worked for years at a prominent film festival, I'm fully aware that some years you're able to catch lightning in a bottle and others it can get away from you.

*My main objective at MoCCA Fest is to wander around the floor and discover new and exciting talent I've never heard of before by scooping up interesting looking minis. I struck gold three times last year with Michaela Zacchelli, Jon Chad and Mark Todd. This year I found one, maybe two. That said, I still got a bunch of good shit.

*There were a number of names absent from the floor that would leave a conspicuous hole at any alt-comics show, like Frank Santoro and Mike Bertino. Ben Marra was still out in force though. Why doesn't Jim Rugg exhibit at this show?

*Again, I'm willing to chalk all this grumbling up to my very personal experience of it being my second show.

*I brought a number of non-comics readers to the show, and they seemed to all find something to get really excited about. A friend who is a traveling educator caught a bit of the Brecht Evens/ Dash Shaw conversation, and was impressed enough with Evens to actively seek out his book The Wrong Place, the most coveted of all of our purchases. A friend who's an abstract painter bought Yuichi Yokoyama's Travel from the Picturebox booth, an area I made it a point to show him. Here he is mulling over his purchase:
His girlfriend bought Ken Dahl's Monsters, which they both immediately read and seemed completely absorbed by. They also bought a book of drawings of Portland (they're transplants) but I can't remember what it was called.

*After the show my friends and I headed over to the Limerick House, the annual meetup spot of the comics podcast Indie Spinner Rack. I had a great time catching up with host Mr. Phil and perennial Canadian tourists Bill and Brittany, who always have the best stories. Things seen at the Limerick: a stylish old man (striped shirt, blazer and coke-bottle horn-rimmed glasses, certainly in the mob) eating a huge serving of burger and fries all by himself and immediately slipping into a mild coma, a girl looking up at the sign out front and telling a friend she was at the "Imperial House", a bachelorette party, a girl eating a banana (my first sighting on fruit eating in a bar, no jokes please), and the weirdest, longest blank stare I've ever gotten when asking someone for a lighter.

*I'm again amazed that when looking at other people's pictures of the event, I recognize virtually nothing.

*For some possibly more fair views of the show, here's Tom Spurgeon's round-up of other people's blog about the event.

*For good measure, here's my MoCCA 2010 report.

There went Twist V!

2010-11-17T22:03:00.008-05:00

Hey! Twist V happened! Last weekend! It was my and my table-mate Mark Velard's first show. It was a learning experience. We felt like we were starting out at Level 11- Twist is, from what I can tell, the biggest and hippest art/ craft show in the area and we did a lot of work making sure that we had a good number of substantial stuff to sell at our table so that we didn't look like we broke in a threw a bunch of crap on the table. I think we did a good job, but the show wasn't a great fit for us. I originally applied to it because the marketing material remind me of the Atomic Holiday Bazaar in Sarasota FL, which would fit us like a glove. But Twist was actually a bit more jewelry-oriented. And while I hate to generalize, suffice it to say that people out shopping for jewelry don't often decide to impulse buy a comic book. As I said all weekend "This is a classy, girly show and we're selling trashy, not-girly stuff." BUT, we got our books into a few hands that were really excited about them, and that felt great. There was a lovely woman who did her thesis on horror movies, an artist gentlemen who was looking for some "vague, dark shit" (thanks for coming up with Dead Man Holiday's new tagline!) and even a little kid who is really into monsters. Even better was the stoned gentlemen who threw down Mark's Future Space, casually decrying "I don't get it" and the overweight family trapped in front of our table looking at our wares as if they were slowly driving by a car accident. We didn't win financially, but we feel pretty equipped to take on any size or type of show, and we made some great connections and friends. In the end, it was totally worth it. I would like to thank the Twist staff for selecting us to be a part of the show- we were deeply honored, had a blast, and were happy to freak out so many passerby. On to pictures!

The Mysterious Transmissions table. Unfortunately, our mascot (the "Little Man") on the front of our banner (better view here) failed to hypnotize people into buying our books, but his unblinking gaze did manage to mildly entrance Rob Cartelli Ceramics across the aisle from us.

Closer view of our wares. From left to right: Dead Man Holiday collections, Mark's Refractor Industries poster, our collaborative A Dream of Sheep poster, Twist exclusive Dead Man Holiday poster, Mark's Future Space mini, Mark's Talk Show two pager, Mark Velard buttons and Dead Man Holiday single issues. This was before the shipment of Bosnian bootlegs of Mark's book Bang! Pong! Pow! (titled Rang! Pong! Pow!) arrived.

A closer view of the middle of the table.

Mark showcasing his winning smile and hobo beard that managed to sell so many books for the camera. Notice our port neighbors Rachel Pfeffer Designs, who did a great job not smacking me every time I complained that we were "selling comics at a jewelry show".

My sales pitch: "Uh, sir, look over here? Please?" The lovely and amazing ceramicist Karissa Chase visible in the background.

Hanging with our starboard neighbor, the great t-shirt artiste Miss Wit! I don't often wear T-Shirts, but come on. (Photo ruthlessly stolen from Deb Klein.)

And don't forget to top it all off with a trip to the best Italian restaurant in Mexican restaurant clothing, Joe's Cafe! (Photo mercilessly poached from Deb Klein.)

It's over! I have a life again!

Here comes Twist V!

2010-11-12T00:44:00.005-05:00

Tomorrow (today, technically) and Saturday I'll be exhibiting at Twist V, and alternative craft fair in Northampton, MA. It the first show I've ever tabled at, and I'll be sharing it with the great Mark Velard. You can find us at table #133 exhibiting under the name Mysterious Transmissions. (Check out the Mysterious Transmissions website for a peek at the MT banner that Mark and I put together.)

At the show I'll have the following items available for purchase:

The Dead Man Holiday collection! All three issues, plus eleven pages of dvd-style bonus features, under one cover all for ten bucks. Here's what it looks like, thanks to Kristen Smith who collaborated on the kick-ass cover illustration with me!:

A Twist-exclusive Dead Man Holiday poster! It looks like this:

And lastly, another poster, this one in collaboration with Mr. Velard. He wrote it and laid it out, and I inked it. I've been tearing the face off his style and wearing it as my own lately, a la Leatherface. As a result, my stuff actually looks good now:
What will Mark have for sale? Well, it's 1am the night before the show and he's sitting five feet away from me working like a madman, so your guess is as good as mine!

New England Webcomics Weekend 2

2010-11-07T21:19:00.004-05:00

I attended the New England Webcomics Weekend 2 this weekend. It took place in the Eastworks building, which is about a twenty minute drive from my house. The Eastworks building is an old factory awkwardly (in a good way) retrofitted to be a shopping mall and office space. It's also the permanent home of TopatoCo, who sell merch for most of the biggest webcomics artists on the internet- I never stop learning about this area's importance the the comics world.
The show... I won't say that it was poorly organized, but it was certainly lightly organized. I could not find the registration table to pick up my passes all weekend. It wasn't a problem, not having a pass didn't raise any eyebrow from anyone. I had assumed that they were just not collecting tickets until I finally did happen across it on my way out. Panels started over half an hour late with seat-of-their-pants tech setups. My favorite part was that it took place in the halls of the building, rather than in any of the from what I can only assume are hundreds of empty rooms in the building, and the stores were still open. Women in the salon sporting freshly did hair staring out in a kind of confusion over the circus outside. I wasn't turned off by any of this however, only charmed. All the biggest names in webcomics had traveled from all over the world to exhibit at what essentially looked like a weekend flea market. This thing has every reason to grow by leaps and bounds in the coming years, and I can't wait to snobbily regale people with stories of how I was there when it was so small.

Here's our haul, comprised exclusively of free takeaway promos and items purchased by my girlfriend, as my bank account literally reads $0 at present. Clockwise from top middle: Pugs dressed like peppers salt and pepper shakers (not purchased at show), beautiful pin and postcard from Tiny Kitten Teeth, horrifying postcard from Andrew Bell, those hard to find passes with artwork from Girls With Slingshots creator Danielle Corsetto, Coffee Time sticker from Bad Machinery creator John Allison, card and a copy of French Milk by Lucy Knisley, Hourlies 2010 mini and Darwin Carmichael is going to Hell cards by Sophie Goldstein, free four page mini from Erika Moen, Ectopiary promo by Hans Rickheit (who wasn't exhibiting, we just happened to pass him in the hallway and he handed us this- wish I realized who he was and said hello before he sped away), and Rice Boy promo card (a comic I will surely be checking out some day).

Some exhibitors.

Girls With Slingshots creator Danielle Corsetto, Dr McNinja colorist Anthony Clark and Dresden Codak creator Aaron Diaz (who apparently has three days to live), speaking on the Coloring is Awesome! panel.

Girls With Slingshots creator Danielle Corsetto talking about coloring her strip.

Inking is Awesome! panel with Gastrophobia creator David McGuire (who inks in Flash!), Octopus Pie creator and NEWW organizer Meredith Gran and The Abominable Charles Christopher creator Karl Kerschl.

Meredith Gran shows us some Octopus Pie art files.

A sketch of two women

2010-08-30T01:27:00.002-04:00

Jester sketches

2010-08-27T22:05:00.004-04:00

I did a little spec work recently (I know, I know) in the form of a couple of sketches of jesters.It turns out they were looking for something, uh, completely different, so, surprise surprise, waste of time. I like the way they turned out though. I think they're made of pretty solid and dynamic shapes. But I didn't do any research on what jester's costumes are supposed to look like, so their clothes are pretty bad.

Los Luchadores Mysteriosos sketch

2010-08-16T18:27:00.004-04:00

Here's a sketch I did for comic artist, friend and Canadian Evan Quiring. It's of his character Ave De Fuego. He knocked me out a few weeks back by sending me an original page of his comic Los Luchadores Mysteriosos. (This one, in fact.) I thought I outta do something nice in return, so I whipped up this sketch. I should wait until I actually send it off to Evan to post it, but I liked it and couldn't help myself. You can find out more about Evan and Los Luchadores Mysteriosos here, and buy your very own copy of LLM here.
Below is a warm up sketch I did, experimenting with altering the design of Fuego's mask.

PS- Do NOT get your dog groomed at Grooming At Luca's.

Steve G portrait

2010-08-12T23:59:00.004-04:00

Here's a commission I did for an old (and very patient) friend. A "self portrait" as he put it. It was traced in Illustrator from a photo. This is me experimenting with color some more, as I have been lately. Gotta climb that mountain sooner or later. The photo was extremely lo-res and had no shadows, so I found myself at a loss for detail to put in the face. I compensated by making the face invisible, and letting the background show through it. The client requested different colors for the where the purple lines and hair and red shirt are, but I like my original colors so that's what I'm showing here. I'm a spoiled baby like that.

Anthropologie August 2010 cover girl sketch

2010-08-08T10:35:00.002-04:00

Here is a sketch I did of the August 2010 Anthropologie cover girl (in case you neglected to read the title of this post). You can view the actual cover here. My drawing doesn't look much like the actual model, but she looks okay. The color was kind of lazied on, but it looks okay. It's a sketch!

Comic Book Fanthropology sketch

2010-08-07T00:18:00.003-04:00

A relative of mine did a cool thing; she bought a copy of Sean Kleefeld's book Comic Book Fanthropology, for which I drew the cover, for her son's birthday. Never occurred to me that one of these would exist, but now he has the only copy signed by both Sean and myself. Happy birthday Alex!

War of the Independents X-Heroes card art

2010-07-26T01:24:00.004-04:00

My old webcomic characters The X-Heroes are a part of Dave Ryan's massive comics project War of the Independents, a six issue series coming this fall. I did the above piece for the trading card set coming out in conjunction with the series.The back of the card will read "Sometimes The X-Heroes confuse the words Independents and Independence." Get it? GET IT?!?

The piece is referencing the classic portrait of George Washington. I'm getting more and more into using my tablet, which I used to color this piece in a painterly style. I kept it pretty simple, because it's final card-sized form will be pretty small, and I like the results. The linework was done with old-fashioned pen and ink.

You can be a part of the War, and get a bunch of cool swag, by donating to the project's Kickstarter campaign.

Jontar and Star*Stryke for Indie Spinner Rack

2010-06-18T00:24:00.011-04:00

At last April's MoCCA I was lucky enough to get to hang out with Charlito and Mr Phil of Indie Spinner Rack, a great comics podcast that I've been listening to while drawing for years. They finally posted the material they recorded at MoCCA in their latest episode. In it, Charlito and I have a great conversation about the moral implications of appreciating poorly produced amateur comics (it starts a little over halfway through the episode). The conversation was spurred by the presence of Benjamin Marra at the show, whose excellent body of work is an homage to poorly produced amateur comics. I brought a couple of poorly produced amateur comics to MoCCA to show Ben Marra, and I thought I'd post them here for people to check out because Charlito and I talk about one of them a lot in the episode- in fact, Charlito produced a little music number based around one for the episode.

They say you can't judge a book by it's cover, but those people have not seen Jontar. You can check out the covers on the Mile High site, and they'll tell you everything you need to know:
The original series
Jontar Returns (Dig the cover to #1!)
The book is priced "$1.75 for dead elves and a streetwise barbarian". When I showed it to Ben Marra he said that it was "kind of bumming [him] out". And if I were doing what he's doing I would feel the same way. Jontar is every glorious thing you want from a bad comic. It's a seriously amazing find. I found issue number one in a back issue bin at Modern Myths in Northampton, MA.

The second bad comic I brought to show Mr Marra, which Charlito and I don't mention in the episode, is Star*Stryke. Star*Stryke is a little ashcan-sized, Liefeld-inspired gem from the golden age on 1994, and it looks the part. I couldn't find much about the book or the creators online, so I thought I'd post it below for the public's enjoyment. I found Star*Stryke in the back issue bins of Dark Side Comics in Sarasota, FL. I dare you to try and figure out the basic plot. There's a door, someone that's supposed to be guarding it, and someone that likes to yell at the person who is supposed to be guarding the door. Oh, and they're not people, they dinosaurs. Past that, I can't make head or tail of this beauty:

Just let me stress: Although I refer to them as such, I do not consider these to be bad comics. 90's X-Men comics are bad comics. I picked some of those up a while ago and could not make myself read a single issue from front to back. But I have read Jontar and Star*Stryke over and over again and I never get tired of them. I may not be enjoying them on the exact same level that the creators intended, but I think that they are entertaining, a pleasure to read and look at and have a distinctive voice. In short, they kick ass. And I will fight anyone who disputes that.

Jonah Gregory blog header

2010-06-13T16:38:00.006-04:00

Hey all. I made a choice a few weeks ago to cut down everything in my life that isn't drawing comics to a minimum, so there hasn't been lot of action on this blog. But the comics (Not Comics #1 and a few other short stories) are coming along swimmingly, and I'm sure there will be a flurry of activity when any of that stuff comes out. In the meantime, I will continue to post the spare bits of freelance work that I continue to do.

Like this piece, done for friend and my editor at Wing Damage Jonah Gregory.
This is one of the first images that I've released that fully takes advantage of my new tablet, in that with a tablet you can make blocks of solid color. Jonah had me work off the style of the layout of his blog for inspiration, and we both agreed that it should be done in a simple, webcomic-y, Perry Bible Fellowship-y style. I think I was also inspired by the fact that the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art is about three miles from my new house (although I haven't been there yet). To be completely honest though, I was just trying to draw like my friend Joey Jacco. This style was such a departure for me that I was surprised that I ended up producing something I was so happy with. I just got my head in that zone and busted it out in a few hours. When I went back to adjust a couple of things that I thought needed adjusting, I couldn't get my head back to that place and had to leave it as is. This is one of those projects that I almost can't even explain, because it was a fully formed idea the moment I started thinking about it. Check it out in action at Jonah's blog!

Taking a load off with Dead Man Holiday #-1

2010-04-23T12:11:00.015-04:00

Well, it's been about four months since the third issue of Dead Man Holiday came out, so I better sum up all of my thoughts about the experience before they're gone forever. This article is peppered with drawings I did for people who ordered comics from me. In case you are interested, here are the wrap ups I did for the first and second issues in the series.

Production.
Story-wise, I felt a little painted into a corner here on the third issue. In issue two I was freewheelin'! It was the middle of the story and I had all the time in the world to go with any cool idea I had. Since the third issue is the end of the first arc, I had to wrap it all up. This wasn't nessisarily a bad thing, but being that deliberate is a lot more work and stress.

I had a big breakthrough drawing the second issue of Dead Man Holiday, but I was spinning my wheels a little here in the third. I wasn't drawing as fast as I wanted, and my head was stuck in the future. As a result, I wasn't focusing as much as I should have on what was in front of me and some of the storytelling suffered. Namely, the ten page zoom in sequence is a bit hard to read, but that's a very difficult sequence to convey anyway and I guess it came out okay. There were even some continuity errors. That is Roky, the luchador secretary, has a wedding band that disappears a couple of times. This will be fixed in future editions. So, lesson learned: Don't worry about the future and enjoy what's in front of you.

THAT SAID. I do think this issue contains some of the best storytelling and art in the series.

I would also like to thank Ted Seko and Javier Hernandez for the AWESOME guest art pieces that they produced for this issue (available only in the print edition) , and Alex Bishop for the fun comic strip in the front cover!

Publishing.
The post production process on this issue went smooth as butter. I'm a lot better with Photoshop now than I was before, and that made that whole deal (scanning and adjusting the images for the printer) a breeze. I used Ka-Blam again. They're great. The print editions of the previous issue were a small disaster- it came out muddy. I applied the lessons I learned there to this issue, basically not to make the images too contrasty or dark and to get a proof copy of the issue before ordering the print run, and it went great. I think this is the best looking issue of Dead Man Holiday so far.

Press.
The press Dead Man Holiday gets with each new issue has been getting more and more exciting. I did a bunch of podcast interviews, but only one text interview. And there was some nice general coverage from Ain't It Cool News, Insulin Funk and even Comic Book Resource's excellent Robot 6 blog (!). The real exciting stuff for me though is the reviews.

Sean Kleefeld, who has been in our corner since day one chimed in. Steven Surman wrote a really wonderful piece for Broken Frontier. And then, a couple of months after the issue was released, the great Rob Clough dropped this amazing review on the Comics Journal's website. It's a great review that says some things I had been waiting for someone to say since the beginning.

I made a conscious effort this time to not spend as much time chasing as much press as possible, and just focus on a smaller number quality outlets. It paid off. I spent much less time on it and got much more interesting stuff in return.

One strange thing that happened was that practically no websites ran my press release. I mean, it always kind of struck me as a strange thing for those sites to do in the first place, but the last issue of DMH saw like a dozen sites run the release. This time, there were like two. This could be because I put the issue out at the bottom of the recession and people didn't have time to run their hobby comics news sites, or it could have been because the headline of the release was "Weird 'Haunted Science-Fiction' ongoing comic book series celebrates the end of its beginning by entering the doomed domain of retail pamphlet comics." Speaking of which...

Indy Comic Book Week.
With the third issue of Dead Man Holiday, I participated in Indy Comic Book Week. Since there were no comics shipping the Wednesday of January 30th, 2009, ICBW called on independent comic creators to get their books in as many stores as possible on that day. What this did for me was allow me to ride the significant wave of ICBW's publicity, and it also gave me a reason to try getting into retail stores for the first time (here's a list of the stores I got into). I learned how business transactions with retailers work, what questions to ask them and that, for me, getting my book into comic book stores is not really worth the effort.

I spent a lot of time talking to stores, figuring out their exact needs, packing up books for them or arranging the books to be shipped to them through Ka-Blam, and then staying in touch with the stores that took them on consignment or harassing the stores that bought them wholesale to actually pay me (a process that continues to this day, four months later). The stores that took them on consignment sent back two thirds or more of the comics I sent them. That means they sold a third or less of the comics I sent them. For the amount of time I put into this, time I could have spent drawing comics or making money on freelance gigs, that is just not worth it.

I feel like comics retail stores have changed into something that are not able to sell non-superhero books. The store that I grew up buying from can't even move copies of Madman or BPRD anymore. I think most comics stores are dedicated superhero shops with a narrow clientele that is unlikely to pick anything else up. The percent of people buying Dan Clowes' new book at a store that also sells X-Men comics is likely much lower than when Eightball #6 came out. Frank Santoro said the bridge is dead, and I don't feel like spending any more time throwing my comics in the river. Jeff Smith recently said that he got his start self-publishing by handing his book out to retailers at shows. I don't predict that going well for me these days.

But then again, my comic is not nearly as accessible (or as good, duh) as Smith's either. Maybe most people have to bang their head against the wall for a while before they start making progress. People might pick my book up if they see it on the shelf a second or third time. And it'll be an easier sell because,you know, the art will be better in the future. So, I don't know. I'll probably use the same strategy I'm using with press now; focus on a smaller number of stores that I'm likely to get a better response with. And maybe get some help with distribution, if I can.

The future.
So I'm done with most of the pre press work for the Dead Man Holiday collection. I'm waiting for some stuff to come in from a couple of contributors and it'll be ready to go. I'm not sure if I'll go with Ka-Blam or explore offset printing again. In the interest of raising awareness of my book in the most productive way that is apparent to me, I'll be serializing the already printed issues as a webcomic. I'm also in the final stages of getting Dead Man Holiday on iPhones and iPad.

Then I've got a project called Not Comics #1 coming out. It's an anthology of stories I'm collaborating on with people who don't read comics. I've got a couple of screenwriters, a playwright and maybe an abstract painter in there. Good way to broaden my horizons, I think.

I'm also working on a couple of one to two page stories with other comics people.

After all that's done, I'll be drawing Dead Man Holiday #1. I can't wait. We'll see if I can get it out by the promised 2010 deadline.

Caddy Shanks illustrations

2010-04-19T12:56:00.005-04:00

I did these two fun illustrations for Caddy Shanks, a virtual golf and games facility in Sarasota, FL. I found the gig on Craig's List. I sent some samples of my work in and had a brief exchange with them, but they didn't end up actually hiring me until a few months later. They told me they needed two illustrations based on their pre-existing mascot, Angus (the original drawing of which is viewable in the header on the front page of their website). I was told that they needed a drawing of Angus riding a Mario Kart-like car through a wall, and another of him playing Nintendo Wii, and that these illustrations would be blown up to be quite large and placed on their walls. I did these two rough illustrations for the client:
I was so happy with the composition and energy of these sketches, that I blew them up and traced directly over them to do the pencils:
I had to use a bit of reference material for these drawings. I Google Image Searched racing uniforms and I used Google Sketchup models to draw the Wiimote and the car. I honestly don't know how to draw complex mechanical objects without Google Sketchup. That's one of the reasons, probably the primary reason, that I wish I went to school for illustration. Here are the finished inks:
Since I knew these were going to have to be blown up to a very large size, I made them vector graphics, as opposed to raster. This meant scanning the images at high resolution and contrast and using a program vectorize them. Most people use LiveTrace in Illustrator to do this, but I've never been able to get that to work for some reason and have stuck to Adobe's old Streamline program. I'm not great with Illustrator, so I actually Multifilled and Flattened the images in Photoshop and then vectorized the resulting blobs of color and placed them behind the line art in Illustrator so that I would not have to trace each block of color by hand. I'm sure there's a better way to do this. After selecting each of the colors, and adding some Miis in to the background of the Wii image at the client's request, I had the finished images you see at the top of this post.

I was pretty happy with these. There's definitely a strong Mario influence in the way I drew the character, a choice I made because of the involvement of the Wii and the client's Mario Kart reference. Every now and then I try my hand at drawing some more stylized and light cartoony images. I think I'm getting better by building on previous efforts, and it's a style of illustration that I'm looking forward to exploring more.

Come back next Sunday to see some of the more traditional design work that I've been doing lately. Become a fan of my Illustration & Design on Facebook to keep up to date!

BONUS: Here are a bunch of photos of the illustrations up on location.

MoCCA Festival 2010 Hangover

2010-04-12T20:01:00.011-04:00

Hey all. Here's my haul from MoCCA 2010.

1) The Ruby, a short fold-out horror mini by Jon Chad. Jon is a professor at the Center for Cartoon Studies and seemed a little taken aback when I asked him if he was a student. Sorry Jon! You're looking fresh as a daisy.

2) Never Learn Anything From History by Kate Beaton. A present for my girlfriend, although I'm quite fond of Kate's cartoons myself.

3) Promo flyer announcing Charles Burns' upcoming comic X'ed Out from the Pantheon booth.

4) Tick, On the Beach, Prologue and The Pyramid by Kenan Rubenstein. Kenan was tabling with my friend Neil Brideau (more on Neil below), and I traded him for these books. He has a cool William Castle-esque gimmick going on with each of his comics.

5) Gangsta Rap Posse #1, Night Business #1, 2 and 3 and Zombie Tracy Lords poster by Ben Marra. I brought some comics to show Ben that I thought were relevent to his work, and he really liked them. I'll probably post about them at some point.

6) Invasion Day! by Matheo. I got this off the free table, it's a four page photocopied mini apparently drawn by a child. Anyone know anything about this? A cursory Google search produces nothing.

7) Secret Prison #1 anthology. Free, good looking tabloid newsprint anthology. Apparently based out of Philly. Haven't looked at it yet.

8) Pood Comics #1. Another tabloid newsprint anthology. Seems to be the trend. Picked it up based on internet buzz about it before the show.

9) Unlovable #4 by Esther Pearl Watson and Comic Covers by Mark Todd. These guys make some funny, funny books. My show date and I stood around at their booth for a good fifteen minutes reading their books and laughing like crazy people. Comic Covers is an art book though. I don't buy many non-comics, but this thing is gorgeous.

10) Caboose by the Center for Cartoon Studies. Wouldn't you know it, another tabloid newsprint anthology! Also free and got some pre-show buzz.

11) What Is This?, The Trugglemat and Spitting Pennies by Neil Brideau. I've known Neil for a while through the Indie Spinner Rack Message Board. I hadn't read anything of his before this show, but I showed What Is This? to everyone I met and they loved. Adorableness refined.

12) Trigger #1 by Mike Bertino. Diverse anthology of short stories by one author, a trendy but good illustrator. More conventional than his work and the cover would make you think. Pretty solid.

13) R.AV. #3 and two photocopied posters by Michaela Colette Zacchilli. Savage, fast, raw action comic (or "New Action" comic if you want to be annoying about it). Probably my favorite book of the show.

------

Random notes about the show:

*First of all, I want to thank my host in the city and companion for the show Ashley Hansen. Thanks a million Ash!

*Other than the books I got, the highlight of the show for me was finally getting to meet and hang out with Charlito and Mr Phil of the Indie Spinner Rack podcast. Charlito and I wandered around the floor and recorded a lot of fun stuff on Sunday, despite being very hung over and exhausted. We'll see what makes it to air and I'll update this entry with a link when they post the show. (Links: Part 1, Part 2)

*Other great folks I met include the impossibly pleasant and fun Bill and Brittany from Toronto, Carrie and Bill Tryharder and Peter Rios of Comic Geek Speak.

*I shook Jackson Publick's hand as he was milling about outside the show, and am pretty sure I spotted the lead singer of TV On The Radio on the show floor.

*We barely made it into the packed Superheroes panel, and left shortly after it started. It was great just to see Paul Pope and Jaime Hernandez on stage together, but it was hot and our feet were killing us so we left. Also, I've heard enough panels of people rambling on and on about Kirby for this lifetime, thanks.

*Similarly, we did not attend the Saturday night after party. We were a couple of hours late and didn't like the look of the venue from the outside. We weren't sorry we missed it after hearing people talk about it. Not that it was bad, just that it was crowded and no real highlights were given.

*A tall, wild haired and inexplicably angry sixteen year old kid kept asking the woman at the Pantheon booth "How does it feel? Do you feel cool?". We asked her what his deal was and she said she had no idea, but he had been doing that all day. She also said that he was nothing compared to Comic Con.

*This was my first comics show ever and it was pretty great. Every time I turned around I saw something new. Completely overwhelming.

Press stragglers and a couple of nasties

2010-02-24T15:26:00.005-05:00

I've been on a small break from drawing lately, but I did these two monster sketches the other day and really liked them.

And in other miscellanea, here's a couple of late coming Dead Man Holiday #-1 press bits...

Here's an interview I did with a site called Jazma Online. As far as I can tell there's no way to get to the interview through the main page of the site, so it's probably only been read by the people I've linked to it:
http://forums.jazmaonline.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=1417

But the big thrill is this review on the great Comics Journal's website:
http://www.tcj.com/minicomics/personal-genre-dead-man-holiday
The great Rob Clough wrote about the first three issues of Dead Man Holiday. What the piece lacks in length it more than makes up for in keen observations about DMH on the part of Mr Clough.
The best part, which my girlfriend pointed out, is that a lot of the things Mr Clough says he likes about my book are things that people usually point out as being negative. Give it a read.

Here's another nice little review of DMH on AICN. I'm sick of making special banners for them, so all you're getting for that one is a link:
http://www.aintitcool.com/?q=node/43942#11

Comic Book Fanthropology cover

2010-02-20T14:53:00.008-05:00

I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to draw and design the cover to superstar comic book blogger Sean Kleefeld's debut book, Comic Book Fanthropology. Sean and I already had a light rapport going from when he reviewed my comic Dead Man Holiday a couple of times in addition to some other coverage. So when I saw his call to artists for someone to draw the cover to his new book, I dropped him a line. Sean thought my style matched the concept he had in mind, so we were in business.

Sean's concept was a play on the famous "March of Progress" piece, with different types of comics fans in the place of the monkeys and cavemen. He gave me all of his ideas about what types of characters they should be, and I drew a rough sketch to make sure we were on the same page. I framed it in a rough version of the type of design I had in mind. Since Sean's book sounded pretty academic, I based the basic design on an Integrated Mathematics book I had in high school (unGoogleable, but ask me to tell you a funny story about it sometime). I was always in love with the striking simplicity of that book, and thought something similar would be appropriate for Sean. Here is the rough sketch with layout:
Sean suggested that I tone down the size of the sword (I had been reading a lot of Berserk at the time), and adjust the poses of the two leftmost figures to more accurately match the referenced piece. After that we did a couple of rounds of pencils:
Not much difference between the two stages of pencils, but I do know Sean came up with the ideas for the stickers on the comic book artist's portfolio:
I think Sean asked me to adjust the look on the child's face at this point. In the pencils he looked kind of stupefied, so I changed it to a happier variety of amazement for the inks:
Then I did an ink wash and gave Sean what I thought was close to a final version of the cover:
But as it turned out, Sean had thought the illustration was going to be in color and I thought it was going to be in black and white! Don't know how I managed to leave that detail out of the contract, but it happens. I had been meaning to color an ink wash in Photoshop anyway. I used to do it a lot and I really like the way it looks, but I hadn't had the chance do it in a while. I colored the illustration and changed the color scheme of the cover and ended up with the final version you see at the top of this entry.

At the last minute I threw together some alternate layout ideas for Sean, just to give him some variety and make sure we weren't just blindly sticking to our initial idea. Here's a couple of them:
But as is often the case, our first instinct was the right one.

Here's some more fun process stuff. I use a couple of Photoshop filters called Multifill and Flatten to color my illustrations. At one point in the process of using them, all of the areas to be colored are filed with random colors. It actually produces a very cool effect that I never get to show, but here it is:

Working with Sean was an illustrator's dream. He had a strong vision of what he wanted and was interested in being an active part of the development process. Too often clients just want to tell you their basic idea and get a finished piece. But I find that not only is collaboration more fun, but the more involved they are during the creation of the piece, the more they understand and are invested in the result. Sean was very enthusiastic about the final product, and that was very rewarding for me.
My other favorite part about this job was all the cool stuff Sean put the illustration on in his Fanthropology Cafe Press store. I'm definitely going to pick up that mug, and he Photoshopped some cool "Christmahanakwanzika" cards as well.

Come back next Sunday to see a couple of illustrations I did for the Sarasota, FL virtual golf and games center Caddy Shanks (those are not my illustrations on the site). Become a fan of my Illustration & Design on Facebook to keep up to date!

Deehemayech Peedeeheff

2010-02-18T00:17:00.004-05:00

They've been up for a while, but I wanted to let everyone know that they can download the PDF of Dead Man Holiday #-1 for free at the DeadManHoliday.com store. This means you can now download the series in it's entirety for free.
All issues also available to download at DriveThruComics, if that's the way you like to do things (you sicko).

Atomic Holiday Bazaar '09 flyer

2010-02-15T16:09:00.005-05:00

So, for the past few years I've lived in Sarasota, Florida. There's a lot of really nice stuff in Sarasota (amazing restaurants, breathtaking beaches) but I'm not really compatible culturally. The stark exception to this is the Atomic Holiday Bazaar. It's the one time of year I turn into a huge materialist. I wish I had a bottomless wallet to buy all the cool, handmade stuff there. A couple of Atomic Holidays ago I responded to a Craig's List ad that the event's organizer, Adrien Lucas, posted looking for a designer for a flyer for the show. She didn't have the budget and I didn't have the pro-bono time to work on her greatest dream: an Atack of the 50 Foot Woman style poster of her attacking the Sarasota Municipal Auditorium. I designed a nice flyer instead and time passed. I promptly forgot that the Attack of the 50 Foot Woman idea was Adrien's and came to believe it was my own. I decided that no matter what, I was going to do that cool idea I came up with for the next Atomic Holiday Bazaar. When I saw the poster for the latest Bazaar I thought it was strange that Adrien stole my intellectual property. I sent her an email saying that I was glad she used my excellent idea, and asked her if she still wanted me to make an illustrated version of it. She corrected me straight away and told me she'd had that idea for years. She probably would've been mad, but she happened to be delusionally feverish. I took advantage of her incapacitated mental state and got her to send me an email that seemed like she was agreeing to let me do the poster. I was in business! Thanks Adrien!

I think Adrien came up with the idea of surrounding herself with the crafts of various Atomic Holiday exhibitors. Adrien also gave me this (vastly superior) flyer for a show she had gone to years ago as inspiration:
I kept it's basic layout, limited color pallete and typographical style in mind and did this rough sketch to get the composition down:
Man, there is just a raw energy, a life to rough sketches that you just can't replicate in a finished piece, isn't there? Anyway, I moved from the sketch to the initial pencils:
I sent it to Adrien who asked to have planes circling her, a tattoo of an atom on her arm, and certain *ahem* anatomical enhancements. I decided to keep the infamous and storied Sarasota sculpture Unconditional Surrender crumbling in Adrien's hand like it was in the photo version of the poster. Not as a comment on the hotly debated piece of public art, but just because it made sense to have the most recognisable landmark in Sarasota in her hands. Here are the pencils more fully rendered and with Adrien and I's additions:
After that I colored it, my second piece using a tablet. Here's an isolated look at the illustration:
I then began the painstaking process of designing something with a million names and logos that change every day and ended up with what you see at the top of this entry. I wish I had all the time in the world to rearrange all the names of the vendors so they had even sides but it was a tight month for me, so alphabetical is was.

This was printed up as a flyer and handed out to everyone that came to the show. I'm told there is also a few full sized poster versions of it, and that I have one coming my way. As a part of my payment, Adrien is going to be making one of her amazing spray painted action figure wreaths (Adrien not pictured) out of my childhood X-Men toys.

One thing that I didn't predict was going to the show and seeing a number of the crafts that I drew on the poster up for sale. The stuffed bear on the bottom right is by my good friend Joey Jacco (the primo placement of his work was serendipitous), and the super cool necklace depicting a cat happily eating ice cream in the top left corner, which was bought by my girlfriend, was by Zu-Li Designs who was nice enough to mention us in a this blog entry.

All that's left to mention about this piece is this interview Adrien did with me for Creative Loafing's the941 blog for it.

Come back next Sunday to see the cover I did for superstar comics blogger Sean Kleefeld's debut book Comic Book Fanthropology. Become a fan of my Illustration & Design on Facebook to keep up to date!

Zombie Fest illustration

2010-02-07T18:23:00.004-05:00

I did this promotional illustration for Zombie Fest, which was to be thrown by a certain museum in south Florida. The event ended up moving away from them and I don't really know how or where it ended up. To my knowlege, this image was never used by anyone for anything.

This was my first successful commissioned illustration. But it didn't come easy. The idea is something I came up with joking around at work with my friend Jason. To the best of my recollection he came up with the idea of a brain on a plate with fancy table settings, and I added the skull and the name card. I liked it because while having overt horror imagery, it has an air of classiness to it that reflects the venue where the event was to take place.

I spent a couple of evenings on the composition, and had this to show for it:
I didn't really like it, but couldn't figure out how to improve it. Then I had some sort of a breakthrough that I can't explain, but I've felt on every piece since. I just figured out how to... make stuff good. It seems like I just leveled up in doing work for hire illustration. I sketched out a new, much superior layout, and did the pencils soon after.
The client asked me to make it a little gorier- they were trying to move away from their conservative image. I added some blood and a centapede, fixed the perspective on the card and went to inks:

After that I colored it. You can see the final version at the top of this post. It was the first thing I ever colored with my new tablet (thanks Dad!) I have a lot to learn about the device, but this was a good first stab. I prepared a bunch of different versions of the piece, with varations of vertical or horizonal alignment and color or black and white. Below is a horizontal black and white.

I was pretty bummed when the event fell apart at it's original host, because they were planning on producing a lot of material with this image; flyers, posters, ads, shirts, stickers... But that's the way the cookie crumbles sometimes.

Come back next Sunday to see the flyer I created for Sarasota, Florida's Atomic Holiday Bazaar. Become a fan of my Illustration & Design page on Facebook to keep up to date!

Round and round Colin goes

2010-02-03T00:03:00.003-05:00

I've been busy these last few months. Like, REAL busy. Over the past three months I've done two illustration jobs, a book cover, a flyer, a logo, released the third issue of Dead Man Holiday (and done the requisite web updates, press release, interviews, communicating with and shipping to retailers and fulfilling web orders), produced a twenty page promotional PDF, created a marketing campaign for a book, redesigned my own website (coming soon), and almost finished a website for a restaurant. And, on top all of this, I had a full time job. And a little bit of life sprinkled in here and there (Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Years, trips to visit family, family visiting me, some bowling, etc.) It's been a little hectic, to say the least.

But what this means for you, dear reader, is that I'm sitting on a stockpile of awesome work to show off here on the blog. Over the next month or two I'll be posting something every Sunday. Some of the best work I've ever done. Here's a preview of the first image, which doubles as a portrait of how I've been feeling these last few months:

A great way to keep up with these posts would be to become a fan of my Illustration & Design page on Facebook. Thanks!

Wolverine and Popeye

2010-01-24T18:27:00.002-05:00

I think I will be absent-mindedly doodling X-Men for the rest of my life. Okay, just Wolverine and Gambit. The Popeye was to see what my version of him would look like, from memory. The Wolverine pose was kind of inspired by this recent Ben Templesmith drawing of him, and the Popeye quote is from an old Kyle Baker Popeye sketch that was in this old issue of Draw! Magazine.

Podcast-a-palooza

2010-01-01T21:18:00.005-05:00

I've been podcasting up a storm promoting the new issue of Dead Man Holiday. Check them out:First up was a special holiday/end of year episode on the comic book DIY roundatble podcast Javiland, hosted by Dead Man Holiday #-1 back cover artist Javier Hernandez. You can check the episode out here. We talked about what we did this year, what we're doing for the next and some other general comic book business. Good stuff.

Next was this episode of Wing Damage's Barrel Roll. I contribute to the video game blog Wing Damage when time allows and was a guest on this episode hosted by Wing Damage editors Jonah and Jesse Gregory. They talk about video games a lot and I try to keep up.

Lastly was this episode of the Insulin Funk podcast, a pop culture blog that has been very kind to Dead Man Holiday. In the first half of the episode we talked about the movies, video games and comics that we've been enjoying, and in the second half they interviewed me about my work. I enjoyed it.

Man, New Year's Eve sure was last night. This is the best I can do today, people. Sorry.

BONUS: The great comic book blog Robot 6 on Comic Book Resources ran this preview of the new issue. Very cool!

Dead Man Holiday # -1 on da LOOSE!

2009-12-29T23:13:00.002-05:00

The new issue of Dead Man Holiday has been set free in a number of locations. Can you spot it in the scene above? Here a few other places you can find it:

Comic book stores that are selling it

Buy it online

Read reviews of it

Become a fan of it on Facebook

Read PDFs of the first two issues for free

Here's Wishing You A Very Disco Christmas!

2009-12-25T22:30:00.002-05:00

Did you have one?

Penciled by Sady Horn. Inked, colored and bastardized in Photoshop by Colin Panetta.

Dead Man Holiday # -1 press and reviews

2009-12-20T12:52:00.007-05:00

What with the Dead Man Holiday Facebook page being such an easy way to keep everyone up to date on Dead Man Holiday, I have a lot less incentive to update this blog every time something happens. But a lot has been happening with the new issue, so here's a roundup:

This review from Steven Surman of Broken Frontier is definitely one of the most positive and thoughtful I've ever received. He does a great job of describing the frame of mind that allowed him to enjoy Dead Man Holiday after not being so sure of it the first time around.

Broken Frontier also ran the press release for the new issue. There was a huge drop off in the number of comics news sites that ran the press release. Maybe it's because the third issue of a comic being released isn't big news, maybe there are less people able to maintain those types of sites in these troubled times or maybe it's because I used the sub-headline "Weird 'Haunted Science-Fiction' ongoing comic book series celebrates the end of its beginning by entering the doomed domain of retail pamphlet comics."

Ain't It Cool News previews the first handfull of pages from the new issue of a comic called "Dead Man's Holiday". (To their credit, they did at least get the negative sign in there.)

Perennial Dead Man Holiday commentator Sean Kleefeld chimes in with his thoughts on the new issue. He's still unsure whether or not it's going to be good, but he seems to think it's of merit. "One of the hardest comics I've ever tried to review." -Sean Kleefeld is a possible future pull quote.

Pop-culture blog Insulin Funk let the internet know about the new issue in this post. Thanks!

And last but not least, Dead Man Holiday # -1 back cover artist Javier Hernandez blogs about his experience drawing his piece for the new issue. Thanks a million Jav!

I've been focusing a lot less on getting press this time around. Getting Dead Man Holiday # -1 into these retail stores has been pretty time consuming. I've also decided that focusing on getting reviews from a select group of quality writers is less labor intensive then scrambling to get reviews from everyone under the sun. Probably a better idea anyway.

Dead Man Holiday # -1 at a store near you!

2009-12-04T19:49:00.012-05:00

Here's a list of stores where you will be able to buy Dead Man Holiday # -1 on December 30th in conjunction with Indy Comic Book Week. If there's one in your area, go out and support their excellent taste in comics!

Note: Stores on this list are not necessarily participating in Indy Comic Book Week.

UPDATE (12/12/2009): Added new stores, Quimby's, Astrokitty and Source Comics.

New York City

Jim Hanley's Universe

4 West 33rd St.

212-268-7088

http://jhuniverse.blogspot.com/

Midtown Comics

200 W. 40th Street

and

459 Lexington Avenue

1-800-411-3341

http://www.midtowncomics.com/

Chicago, IL

Quimby's Bookstore
1854 W. North Ave.
773-342-0910

http://www.quimbys.com/

Brainstorm Movies, Comics & Games

1648 W. North Ave.

773-384-8721

http://www.brainstormmcg.com/

Sarasota, FL

Dark Side Comics

408 S. Washington Blvd

941-363-0840

http://darksidecomics.com/

Falcon Heights, MN

Source Comics & Games

1601 Larpenteur Avenue

651-645-0386

http://www.sourcecomicsandgames.com

Lawrence, KS

Astrokitty Comics & More
15 E. 7th St.

785-856-8607
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Lawrence-KS/Astrokitty-Comics-More/23601702636

Texas

Zeus Comics

4411 Lemmon Avenue Suite 105

Dallas 75219

214-219-TOYS

http://www.zeuscomics.com/

Heroplex Comics and Games

6248 Rufe Snow Drive, Suite 418

North Richland Hills 76180

817-581-4376

http://heroplex.net/

Keith's Comics

http://www.keithsneatstuff.com

5400 E. Mockingbird Lane, Suite 120

Dallas 75206

214-827-3060

http://www.keithsneatstuff.com/bm/K2/index.shtml

17610 Midway Rd, Suite 136

Dallas 75287

972-735-833

http://www.keithsneatstuff.com/bm/K4/index.shtml

103 W. Hickory

Denton 76201

940-387-5893

http://www.keithsneatstuff.com/bm/K0/index.shtml

3250 West Pleasant Run Road, Suite 235

Lancaster 75146

972-223-8FUN

http://www.keithsneatstuff.com/bm/K1/index.shtml

Lone Star Comics

http://www.mycomicshop.com

1215 S. Cooper St.

Arlington 76010

817-265-0491

http://www.mycomicshop.com/ourstores/carlington

6465 E. Mockingbird Lane

Dallas 75214

214-823-0934

http://www.mycomicshop.com/ourstores/dallas

3600 Gus Thomasson Rd. #107

Mesquite

972-681-2040

http://www.mycomicshop.com/ourstores/mesquite

4001 W. Green Oaks Blvd, Suite 153

Arlington 76017

817-563-2550

http://www.mycomicshop.com/ourstores/sarlington

931 Melbourne Rd.

Hurst

817-595-4375

http://www.mycomicshop.com/ourstores/hurst

5429 S. Hulen Street

Ft. Worth 76132

817-346-7773

http://www.mycomicshop.com/ourstores/ftworth

3100 Independence Parkway #318

Plano

972-985-1593

http://www.mycomicshop.com/ourstores/plano

Dead Man Holiday # -1 preview and pre-order!

2009-11-13T00:35:00.005-05:00

The above is the first page of a five page preview of the new issue of Dead Man Holiday on the Indy Comic Book Week blog. Check it out!

You can also pre-order the new issue at the DeadManHoliday.com Store. Big discounts for ordering multiple issues!

Dead Man Holiday # -1 release info

2009-10-31T15:35:00.004-04:00

Dead Man Holiday # -1, the third issue in the series, will be released on December 30th, 2009 in cooperation with Indy Comic Book Week. Basically, December 30th is the only Wednesday of the year that no new comics will be shipped to comic book stores, and the organizers behind ICBW would like to have a bunch of small press books in their stead.

A list of which specific stores will be carrying Dead Man Holiday will be made available before the event. Preview pages will be released soon. Click Here to read about Dead Man Holiday on the ICBW blog.

Thank you all for your support and I'm looking forward to showing you the new issue!

Scott Pilrgim!

2009-10-16T21:24:00.003-04:00

This is a warm-up sketch I did of Scott Pilgrim! I think it looks like him!

I don't think the middle of the Scott Pilgrim/ Michael Cera Venn diagram is as big as everyone else does, but I've no doubt that it'll be a good movie.

Colin Panetta conquers Javiland! (And some reccomendations.)

2009-09-16T21:40:00.007-04:00

With Dead Man Holiday # -1 just around the corner I decided to drop by Javiland this past Sunday for this roundtable discussion about self-publishing. Also, I promised the host, Javier Hernandez, I would do the next four shows to thank him for doing a pin-up for said issue of DMH. How about that for full circle?

I also wanted to point people in the direction of a couple of amazing webcomics I recently found that I can'tget over how much I like. I honestly didn't think there was much for me in webcomicland, but now I'm thinking differently. Don't know how much other stuff like this I'll find though. They may be old news to some, but I just found out about them.

Sin Titulo

Kind of like Blue Velvet, hold the sexy but with extra noir.

The Love Eaters

An eight page horror/fable, not unlike The Magician and The Snake or The Crooked Man both by Mike Mignola.

MixnMojo illustration #3: Grim Fandango

2009-08-31T19:02:00.010-04:00

MixNMojo.com's retrospective of Grim Fandango is up, along with the illustration I did for it. This is the third and final of my illustrations for MixNMojo.com's LucasArts Secret History Retrospectives. Grim Fandango is the most beautiful, emotionally resonant video game I've ever played, so I wanted to try and come up with something special for it. Instead of something more straightforward, I decided to reinterpret it.
The world of Grim Fandango is rendered to look like the toys and statues traditionally made for the Mexican holiday Dios de la Muertos (known abroad as Day of the Dead). Here's a screenshot from the game:
I went in the opposite direction and drew the game's protagonist, Manny Calavera, as a real skeleton. When a character dies in Grim Fandango, flowers sprout from their body. So I put Manny in a bed of flowers (I really wish that I had thought to research Dia de los Muertos a little- there are certain flowers that are traditional to the holiday). Next to him is the gun from the game, redesigned a bit to fit this realistic setting. After I had drawn the picture, a story completely different from that of Grim Fandango presented itself to me. Here, it looks like a bed of flowers grew around the corpse of a long dead gangster, and the flower on his gun implies that he might have had some sort of flower based nickname in a morbid show of irony. Johnny the Tulip... why not?

Anyway, I'm pretty happy with the way this turned out, and wanted to share a couple of extra things with everyone.

Here are my pencils, scanned before I inked the piece:
I inked this entire picture with a 01 Sakura Pigma Micron, on a piece of normal copy paper. When I use pens I usually use a 03 and a 05 as well, but I thought that a consistent, thin line width would give this drawing a nice, delicate feel.

Here's the isolated "colors" layer from the Photoshop file:
I use BPelt's Multifill and Flatten filters to color stuff on computer, and they're AWESOME, but it's still pretty tedious work. I just got a tablet, and am looking forward to seeing how that changes my coloring.

After I drew, scanned and colored it I desaturated the colors and threw a texture on top (a photo of an old glass photography plate I found online) and that was it. Here are some preliminary sketches I did to get the character and composition down:

And to top it all off, here's some wallpapers of this image for your downloading pleasure:

480x320 (for iPhones)
(click to view full size, then right click to download)

800x600
(click to view full size, then right click to download)

1024x768
(click to view full size, then right click to download)

1440x900
(click to view full size, then right click to download)

1680x1050
(click to view full size, then right click to download)

Update: This illustration has been featured on Publisher Weekly's The Beat's 21 Days of Halloween!

Children of The Bridge

2009-08-13T21:07:00.004-04:00

Fran Santoro over at Comics Comics wrote a great piece a little while ago called "The Bridge is Over". It was basically about how the culture of comics has shifted; in the 80s and 90s all types of comics were available in comic book stores and now, due to shifting methods of distribution (mostly the internet and comics showing up in book chains), comic book stores carry only "mainstream" (superhero) comics and people who want anything else have to go elsewhere. (The "bridge" that comic book stores formed between superhero comics and a wider market is over, get it?) The article really struck a chord with me. In the introductions to the first two issues of Dead Man Holiday I talk about how I don't feel like there are any "personal genre comics" around, like there were when I was a kid in the 90s. I'm talking about stuff like Madman or Hellboy and Nexus, which Santoro mentions in his article as, for him, marking the end of the bridge. These titles were the children of the two sides of comics that found themselves in a forced marriage during that time. They were the product of Eightball being packed into the same specialty store as X-Men. Now that people buy Eightball on Amazon or at Quimby's they're in a whole different world as the fantastic imaginations of genre comics. And you know, maybe this is the way it was always meant to be. It was, after all, a marriage only of necessity and not something either side would have chosen. But the split of audiences has led to a split in content as well. That marriage produced some work that was extremely enjoyable and completely unique to comics. That dichotomy, of big intentions and small resources, of sophisticated thoughts and juvenile presentation, to me, is comics. And I miss it.

It's a divide that I'm afraid I'm going to fall into. Dead Man Holiday is very much a product of the bridge. If my work was more directly inspired by Kirby or Ditko, or if it was more limited to straightforward "artistic" intentions (like, ack, auto-bio), I think I would have an easier time finding an audience. But I'm the product of Mike Allred and Sam Kieth, and the audience for that work just isn't around any more. There's a chance, of course, that I'm wrong about all of this. Maybe the audience for that work is gone because the audience for comics is smaller and so proportionally the audience for that type of marginal material is nil. But this is just what Santoro's article made me think about.

I Train Your Kids illustrated logo set

2009-06-20T01:29:00.007-04:00

These are a set of illustrated logos that I recently created for ITrainYourKids.com, a Sarasota, FL based youth fitness organization. I was having a bit of trouble coming up with a solid concept for the logos, but after the client sent me some reference material that showed me exactly what they wanted things kind of exploded into what you see now. I penciled and inked them by hand, then scanned and vectorized them and colored them in Photoshop. Yes I do need a tablet, why do you ask? I think the trouble I had early on with this job stemmed from being worried about making my art commercially appealing, but I think I pulled it off.

Hanging out backstage with Dead Man Holiday #-2

2009-05-29T14:27:00.008-04:00

Okay, just like I did with the last issue, I thought I'd write a post dealing with my experiences producing and self-publishing Dead Man Holiday # -2. Accompanying this article are the drawings I did for people who ordered a signed copy of Dead Man Holiday # -2. (Here are the drawing I did for # -3.) The drawings are in exercise in speed in design and production. There are some I think are really cool. There is one of a skeleton moth playing minigolf.

Production wise, Dead Man Holiday #-2 was much the same as the issue before it. I designed the look of the comic before I knew much about process, and did made some choices that are really time consuming that I am now stuck with. One change I did make this time around was to do some of the inking with brush. I think this sped the inking up a bit, and made the book a little more rustic looking. But what I'm still shloshing through are the grey tones. I really hate doing them, I'm not that great at them, and they're something I did to fill up space. When I first started Dead Man holiday I was insecure about my compositions (and rightfully so) and decided to cover the whole thing in grey to compensate. I do think it's adds a gritty heaviness that serves this particular story, but this method will not be following Dead Man Holiday into positive issues where it will no longer fit my process or the story.

One weird thing that happened while drawing this issue was that things all of a sudden got easier. No reason for it, I didn't change my methods or realize anything new. In the middle of drawing the Koreatown scene everything just became a whole lot easier, like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. I think all of the pages after that are better than the ones before, too. Still now sure what happened there.

Publishing wise, everything went fine. I found out about using the "Unsharp Mask" filter on my pages right before exporting the final version, which makes your art look a LOT sharper if you're dealing with stuff you have to photograph/scan (non-line art). I tried to be a cowboy and not get a proof from Ka-Blam before I printed, and they came back looking a little dark and muddy. Totally my fault, lesson learned. I was pretty worried about it, but no one seemed to mind. This will be corrected for the collection.

A lot of the reviews I got praised the artwork really highly, which really meant a lot to me, but expressed concern about the lack of story. As I've said, I think this will iron itself out as people get the rhythm of the series down after a few issues. I had good luck personally reaching out to a lot of sites for interviews, and found that it's really the only way to get them. I only did a couple of interviews, but I think they were really substantial and will really help people understand what I'm trying to do with Dead Man Holiday. I used to be of the mind that I didn't really want to influence people's interpretation of the book, but people seem really responsive when Income out and tell them about it, so maybe that's the way to go. I was really honored to be interviewed by The Pulse, which I didn't even reach out for.

I had another contest over at the Indie Spinner Rack boards, and it went slow but ended up going really well. Thanks neil-brideau, Zach Taylor, DBM, Chris Ruggia and Charlito for participating and saving me from looking like a total chump! It's always nerve wracking starting one of those up because I don't know if anyone's even going to participate. This post from Neil was especially nice.

And I think that's about it. This isn't as long as the one for last issue, because I didn't ha veto climb as big a mountain to get the damn thing done. Like I said, the first one took me a couple of years. This one took me eight months, and the next will be even shorter. I'm right now in the middle of drawing a nine page, diologueless zoom in sequence that make up pages five through fourteen, so look forward to that!

Dead Man Holiday #-1 in-progress panel

2009-05-23T15:22:00.003-04:00

Here's an in-progress panel from Dead Man Holiday #-1, as the title of this blog post so deftly informed you:
The panel is partially inked with the pencils still showing through, but no shading has been done yet. Dead Man Holiday is all on the board; the pencils, the inks, the shading, the letters, everything. Someday I may use computer lettering or something, but I wanted to start out doing everything by hand. I'm having to stick to the look that I set up in Dead Man Holiday #-3. The visuals are going to be very different when the series moves into positive numbers, and I'm really excited about streamlining my process and aesthetic.

WingDamage.com Space Quest retrospective podcasts

2009-05-15T01:04:00.006-04:00

Over at WingDamage.com, where I've been writing some articles, Herder of Cats Jonah Gregory and I have posted a couple of Space Quest retrospective podcasts. Space Quest is a series of sci-fi comedy computer games from the late 80s/early 90s. They're famous for their brutal death scenes and acerbic narrator. I've made my nerd-tastic love of Space Quest known in the past. Some kids had jump ropes and some kids had Nickolodeon, but when I was a young'n I had Space Quest. These podcasts are kind of the accumulation of a lifetime of memories of these games- I wrote college paper style notes on the entire series viewable on the Wing Damage blog entry for each episode. The shows should be interesting to people who already love them and also fun for people who've never heard of them. I had a great time recording this with Jonah, but the session went on for a very long time. I've heard and love the first part, but haven't listened to the second one and hope I wasn't too out of it by the end. Enjoy.

PART ONE

PART TWO

I want these two to cross over

2009-05-09T20:09:00.008-04:00

A couple of my friends just launched their own webcomics, and they are awesome. May I please introduce you to:

B-Daw (Brandon Dawley) is an old friend who did one of the pin-ups in Dead Man Holiday #-3. He just launched The Deerfield Informant, a webcomic based on the half mumbled memoirs of infamous local old bastard Ray Depaola. (Sorry Drawley, I still believe.) Dawlism says that the series is going to get a little heavier, with themes and context and whatnot, but I hope that doesn't mean that we'll stop seeing awesome stuff like old men peeing in each other's bird baths.
Updates Mon/Wed/Fri starting May 18th.

Oh man, Zach Taylor's Bear Quest. Words can not describe how cool I think this comic is. From the bizarre design of the candy-colored, one eyed bear to the weird, dual illustration/pixel format to the hot, mauling action, Bear Quest looks like it's going to be one of those things that excels based on enjoyability alone. The sight of that big, happy alien bear ripping an alligator to shreds brings a smile to my face every time I see it. Shirts, please! And for that matter- Happy meal toys, please!
Updates Tues/Thurs.

Dead Man Holiday fan art by Chris Ruggia

2009-05-01T14:51:00.003-04:00

Chris Ruggia gave me the shock of my week when he sent me this awesome piece of art inspired by the ghost skeletons in Dead Man Holiday. Wow! I really like how he went into his own head and found his own interpretation of the character. I'm finding more and more that other people's interpretation of Dead Man Holiday is influencing my own. Here's what Chris had to say:

I loved how in the first issue the mysterious skeleton-thing looks so moth-like in the shadows, so I did a quick fan pic applying that moth idea a bit more directly

Check out Chris' great all ages nature comic "Jack: Adventures in Texas' Big Bend" here:
http://www.jackcomics.com/

Thanks Chris!

Dead Man Holiday #-2 press roundup

2009-04-26T15:23:00.004-04:00

Dead Man Holiday had a few press hits last week, and I'm playing ketchup. Peep them below, and I hope you relish them.

This is a really nice interview of me by Steven Surman (who reviewed Dead Man Holiday #-2 here) over at ComicNews.Info. I've been worried that I give too much away in interviews about what I'm trying to do with the book and what I want people to get out of it, but I think that may bethe only way people will get an inkling of it. Anyway, if you're interested in Dead Man Holiday, this interview will probably shed some light on it.

This review draws some interesting conclusions about Dead Man Holiday that I really enjoyed, and may be stealing from for future issues. (That page is an isolated frame of the HorrorNews.net website, here is their main page.)

This review of Dead Man Holiday #-3 is short but sweet, and promises a review of # -2 soon!

Dead Man Holiday receives prestigious honor

2009-04-17T16:41:00.002-04:00

Re-enactment.

SARASOTA, FL- The ongoing, self published comic book Dead Man Holiday added another to it's long list of prestigious achievements upon the release of it's latest issue, when it received "WTF of the Week" status from Sarasota, FL comic book store Dark Side Comics. "When I picked up the latest issue of Dead Man Holiday I didn't know WTF I was looking at, so it seemed like an obvious choice." store owner Brian Polizzi didn't say of the event. He didn't add "Like half the comics on the wall get a title, so it's really not that big of a deal. Also, I was in no way pressured to do this by Dead Man Holiday creator Colin Panetta." Dead Man Holiday joins the company of past "WTF of the Week" winners Pigeons from Hell and Helen Killer in this great honor.

Dark Side Comics stalwart Sandy reacts to the latest issue of Dead Man Holiday.

Wii Bowling with the Comic Book Stars!

2009-04-12T21:05:00.008-04:00

Purchase this poster HERE! Only $2.99!

In the spirit of DC comics' Crisis on Infinite Earths and Marvel Comics' Civil War, comic creator Erik Northfell and I have crossed our characters over in the most epic way possible... Wii Bowling to the death! Okay, no one dies. But we did make a cool poster out of it.

Northfell and I have been online comic buddies for a while. I really love his character design aesthetic, and the plots and concepts that he comes up with for his stories. Beyond being really unique and imaginative, he writes stuff that I'm really interested in- magicians in a world that appears to be ancient Egyptian and post apocalyptic simultaneously, a mysterious man who catches the last flight onto a planet about to be obliterated by a dying sun and populated by those too poor to book travel off of it- the basic premises of his books are completely unique and intriguing. Also, I think Erik and I's work shares some common aesthetic and thematic ground that made the idea of some kind of a collaboration seem like a natural fit.

After batting around a few ideas, we decided to make a poster that would cross over Thad from my comic Dead Man Holiday and Mark from Erik's comic SOL under the premise that they would be playing Wii Bowling together. We looked at some old boxing posters for inspiration, drew our characters, Erik worked his typographical magic on it and it was done. Really, it was all an excuse to get to make Miis for our characters. You can purchase the poster for $2.99 on this IndyPlanet page. Here's an early concept sketch that I did to show Erik what I had in mind:

Colin Panetta pulverizes The Pulse!

2009-04-03T20:25:00.005-04:00

There's a HUGE interview with me over at Comicon.com's The Pulse! Check it out here. I was not prepared for how time consuming or exhausting it is to do an interview of this length. But it was really fun and I think it's a really informative, maybe too informative, look at Dead Man Holiday.

War of the Independents page

2009-03-31T22:48:00.003-04:00

I was psyched a few months ago when Dave Ryan asked me to draw a page for the War of the Independents, a massive indie superhero comic crossover that my comic strip characters The X-Heroes are a part of. I jumped at the chance to draw some of the other characters taking part, many of which are childhood favorites of mine. Have fun spotting them in the finished page above. Below is the thumbnails Dave sent me for the page:
Here's my re-do of them:
And here's the finished pencils, right before inking:
I'm still losing life and spontaneity between the thumbnail and pencil stage. I don't think this is an uncommon problem; many people's thumbnails have more character than their pencils. I wonder if I should skip the thumbnail stage altogether, or tone it down at least. See you at the War!

Colin Panetta brutalizes Barrell Roll!

2009-03-25T16:08:00.005-04:00

I was a guest on this episode of Barrel Roll!, the roundtable podcast contingent of the editorial based video game blog Wing Damage, to which I contribute. We talk about casual games, the age of Sega Genesis, and a bunch of other stuff that I didn't understand. I even get a little Dead Man Holiday in there.

Dead Man Holiday crushes comiXtreme!

2009-03-19T19:07:00.003-04:00

Andrea Speed at comiXtreme.com put up this review of Dead Man Holiday # -2 that contains some interesting thoughts about the feeling of disconnect that the reader has with the plot when reading Dead Man Holiday. Not to mention some beautiful descriptive language. Here's a sample:

"This is like walking through a strange room blindfolded – I knew the shapes of certain things, could guess at the functions of other things, but overall I could form a shape of the room and the things in it in my head."

Amazing!

Dead Man Holiday klobbers Kleefeld on Comics!

2009-03-19T15:57:00.007-04:00

Sean Kleefeld of Kleefeld on Comics, who wrote the most substantial review that Dead Man Holiday #-3 received, returns with his thoughts on Dead Man Holiday #-2. Sean thinks that I'm on track to do something cool, but that it might work better as a graphic novel. His and ComicNews.Info's concerns are things that have occurred to me, and it's really great to get their unique perspective on these issues. On this topic, all I really want to say is that I'm aware of them and I'm confident that it'll all come together when Dead Man Holiday rolls into positive numbers.

One thing that I wanted to address about Sean's review is my decision to release this story as issues rather than a complete graphic novel. This was not, as Sean supposes, an economic issue. It would make more practical sense if I released a straight graphic novel for a myriad of reasons (more people buy them, they have a better price point per page, it's more efficient to release one big thing rather than many small ones, etc). The decision was based on the work taking FOREVER, and wanting to get it out there sooner (in order to get feedback, have a sense of accomplishment and for the chance to change up my working methods a bit), rather than drawing the entire work alone in my room with no interaction. By releasing it as issues I've gotten invaluable feedback from Sean and his contemporaries that have informed Dead Man Holiday as a whole much for the better.

Anyway Sean's review, as with everything on his blog, is highly thoughtful and interesting, so be sure to check it out!

First Dead Man Holiday # -2 reviews

2009-03-18T20:07:00.008-04:00

Ambush Bug at Ain't It Cool News posted this review Dead Man Holiday #-2 as a part of his "Indie Jones" column. Aside from being absurdly positive, the review is also rewarding in that it hits many of the beats that I'm aiming for with readers.

ComicNews.Info came in with this very thoughtful review, which steps up with the first negative criticism I've ever had. I'm still early in the game of figuring out what type of interaction/response is appropriate with reviews/reviewers, but I do have the common sense not to dispute anyone's opinion. But that doesn't even matter because there's nothing here to dispute; I understand Mr Surman's reaction to Dead Man Holiday and think it's totally reasonable. He makes a lot of really great points and sure says some of the most flattering things about my art that I've ever heard. This is the best kind of review I could ask for; a good meaty one that gives me something to think about. Plus, I can now put this magnificent pull quote on press releases:

"Akin to watching SCOOBY-DOO on acid"

-ComicNews.Info

Dead Man Holiday # -2 released into society

2009-03-11T00:34:00.005-04:00

Dead Man Holiday # -2, shortly after it's release Wednesday

Little Atlantis, March 11th, 2009- Dead Man Holiday # -2 was released today, Little Atlantean officials having felt that it had paid it's debt to society. Imprisoned for nine months on charges of not yet being drawn, printed or distributed, Dead Man Holiday # -2 maintained it's innocence the throughout it's sentence. "I was not merely scribbled on paper by that chump Colin Panetta, as many mistakenly assume" Dead Man Holiday # -2 told reporters in a released statement "I've existed long since before you meat sticks stumbled upon the printing press, before you flattened a tree to scribble on and certainly before the inanity of PDF downloads." Alleged creator Colin Panetta paints a different picture. "I tried to raise it up right" he said in an exclusive statement, "I stayed up all night painstakingly applying it's tones, braved the wasteland of Kinko's photocopying it's pages for scanning, but none of it seems to have been enough to stop it from becoming the threat to society that it has." There is only one hope, Panetta pleads: "Everyone has to download FREE PDFs and purchase all physical copies to keep watch on them and make sure they don't harm anyone else. They're dangerous!" Panetta then urged any citizens that can to go to DeadManHoliday.com and visit the store, where they can download FREE PDFs and purchase physical copies of Dead Man Holiday # -2. "It's the only way to keep it off the streets." Panetta said "Please, for the sake of your neighbors."

Couple of Randos

2009-03-05T21:47:00.004-05:00

The great thing about being an artist is that you can do a drawing, which is free, and give it to someone as a present. For free. Here's a couple of drawings I've done over the last few month for loved ones.

My Dad has been asking me for years to draw him a tattoo. At first he asked for "a bird's eye view of some trees" which is a cool idea, but impossible to draw. So after a few years of failed designs I decided to go in a different direction:
Yes, I ripped this off from an old Something Awful Photoshop Phriday. No, I don't think he's getting it. Maybe though...

This next one was for my girlfriend, who needed a name tag for her office at work:

Her name is blanked out because I like to pretend that there's privacy on the internet.

Katherine Belching Velveeta

2009-03-01T20:54:00.005-05:00

I don't know why, but my girlfriend's friend Katherine emailed me asking for a drawing of "belching Velveeta". I don't know what that means, so I just drew her doing it.

Wing Damage logo and writing

2009-02-21T19:41:00.005-05:00

I've started writing for Wing Damage, a new editorial focused blog about video games. It's run by Jonah Gregory, friend and writer of Here There Be Robots. You can read all of my Wing Damage posts here. I outlined why I'm writing for the blog and what I hope to accomplish there in my initial post. Here are some excerpts:

Comic books and video games are both active experiences for the viewer. When you watch a movie or listen to music, it’s a passive experience; you’re sitting there while it does it’s thing without you. But with comic books and video games, the viewer takes on a more active role; the viewer takes in the story at their own pace and is free to go slow or fast, stop or go backwards. In this way, comics and video games involve the viewer in the story in a unique and immersive way. This storytelling strength is what attracted me to adventure games. I’ve still never found a video game that even comes close to the storytelling levels that I know they can achieve (except, possibly, for Grim Fandango)... But I’m more interested (in a “finding things to write about for an editorial gaming blog” way) in storytelling games. In fact, since I’m so unlikely to be able make a profession out of exploring storytelling in comic books, I would like to try and make a go out of exploring it in video games... By writing for Wing Damage I’m hoping to focus a lot of my ideas about video games, and also to be exposed to a lot of things that I had no idea about.

I did a banner for Wing Damage, which you can see at the top of this entry. It went through a few different passes with the Wing Damage guys, and I'm glad they kept sending it back because I ended up with something I really like. I like the two different kinds of pixellation (I got the ship to look that way simply by importing it to Photoshop from Illustrator without aliasing). The pink probably came from a general feeling of eighties nostalgia because I was making a piece based on retro video games. Below are some sketches of ships I did for it. The starting point was the Arwing from Star Fox. I ended up having to design something that was very similar to the Arwing because everything that I designed from scratch looked like a weird alien bug. Cool, but not the feel we were going for.

Hot girls in indie bands

2009-02-13T21:44:00.006-05:00

I found out about Jenny Lewis with the Watson Twins and She & Him through an Indie savvy co-worker at an old job. Although I usually don't listen to such straightforward songwriter-y music (I listen mostly to raw rock 'n' roll or hip hop or classical), I really like both of these bands. I think their solid songwriting and musicianship make them a pleasure to listen to. More recently I discovered the band Little Joy, and felt they struck a similar cord to the two aforementioned bands. Probably because their music is light and pleasant, and features a female on lead vocals. But when I saw this stunning video of Little Joy performing, something struck me as odd. People who are familiar with these bands probably have picked up on what I'm alluding to, but for those who aren't here it is:
All of the girls in these bands are hot. Dazzling, super pretty girls. And on top of that, they're all the same kind of pretty. Not the "I'm an idiot, fuck me" kind of pretty that sells men's magazines and movie tickets. They're the kind where they ooze cool and make you want to be with them for the hope that some second hand coolness will rub off on you, and you'll get to lead the super cool lifestyle and run in the super cool circles that they do.
At this point I'm sure you're wondering why I'm taking the time to make a point that's old as dirt; entertainment media has been depicting women at the top the conventionally measured physical beauty scale almost exclusively for as long as it's been around. But I feel like this is different. These bands are independent. Formed by artists, not by a company with a bottom line to meet. It makes me uneasy that this bias toward attractive women is coming from that level. As independently formed bands, I'm given the impression that these bands were formed organically, their members were already friends that started making music together (Yes, Jenny Lewis is a solo act, but she came to prominence in the band Rilo Kiley). Do these circles have an "attractive girls only" policy?
Are there any exceptions to this trend? Any non super hot women in rock? There are, but I feel like they largely get by exploiting and sexualizing their "non-attractiveness":

Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Beth Ditto of The Gossip

Now, let me get something out of the way right now; I don't think any of these people are doing anything wrong. Everyone I've singled out on this page is a talented musician and performer who has worked really hard to get where they are (although I don't know much about Binky Shapiro, I assume this is true of her as well). All I'm saying is that it would put my mind at ease to see more popular bands that have female members whose looks are neither extraordinary nor exploited. Women who are just there simply as musicians.

Disclaimer: I'm a comic book person, not a music person. My presented examples could be sorely lacking as broad representatives of the music world. There could be many living examples of what I'm claiming doesn't exist. If this is the case, please let me, and everyone else who might be interested, know by commenting below.

Dead Man Holiday # -2 release date!

2009-02-12T21:40:00.005-05:00

Whew! Well, there was a bit of a delay in post-production, but the release date of Dead Man Holiday # -2 is March 11, 2009! The cover of the issue is posted above. On this date the issue will be available for free download, and paper copies will be available for purchase at the DeadManHoliday.com store. I don't want to discuss the content of the issue, but I am very eager to see what people think of it.

Colin Panetta heckles Javiland!

2009-02-02T22:34:00.006-05:00

I did another interview over at Javiland. Javiland is a bi-weekly, round table discussion with various comic book artists hosted by Javier Hernandez and his Ed McMahon, Ted Seko. This week's topic was "Pursuing artistic goals in a lame economy". You can read about and listen to the the episode here.

Concrete news on the release of Dead Man Holiday # -2 is coming very soon. Here's a warm up sketch I did recently while being delayed in completing the issue:

MixnMojo.com illustration #2: Full Throttle

2009-01-26T20:14:00.006-05:00

The second of my three MixnMojo.com illustrations just went up over on their site. This time I got to do a drawing for Full Throttle, my video game hero Tim Schafer's penultimate game at LucasArts. You can see my illustration in full, and the excellent retrospective that it accompanies, here.
I came up with the concepts for all of these illustrations pretty much as soon as MixnMojo let me know which three video games I would be covering. For this one I wanted to do something that was kind of a reference to a scene that Schafer wanted to put in Full Throttle, but was not allowed; a scene where the main character takes peyote. The next segment would have taken place inside of his head, where he unlocked some of the secrets of the narrative's central mystery (this concept later evolved into the amazing game Psychonauts). When I started this piece I had just read Peter Milligan and Brendan McCarthy's excellent comic book Rogan Gosh, and liked Hindu-inspired scene where multiple consiousnesses were sitting side by side on one head. (Some info on Rogan Gosh, including an image showing what I'm talking about, can be found here.) I wanted to preserve some of the personality of Full Throttle, so I used a desert color pallette and threw a tattoo like design behind it all. I was really busy when I had to do this illustration, and it became less of an excerize in "How can I carry this concept out the most clearly?" and more of an excersize in "How fast can I do this?" In my rush I forgot that I wanted to draw it a little sketchier, like Doug TenNapel, to give it a rougher feel. I also didn't balance out the symmetry to the degree that I should have. But people in the comments setion seem to like it, so I guess I did okay.
Out of all of the ideas I had for these assignments, I was always the most excited about the next one, Grim Fandango(!!!). It will venture even further from the art style established in the source material than this one did. Here are some sketches I did for the Full Throttle piece, just trying to get Ben's look down:

Café Americano site

2009-01-03T19:23:00.009-05:00

I just finished another Flash website, this time for a local Italian restaurant here in Sarasota, FL. When I first met with the restaurant's owner he was thinking that they wanted a subdued, classy HTML site. But I drew the above image and used it to sell him on the idea of making the site an interactive drawing of his restaurant (an idea I had that came from his suggestion that the front page of the website could be the front of his restaurant). He was interested, and I then drew the sketch at the bottom of this blog entry to show him what the site may look like. We went ahead with the idea, and you can see the results at CafeAmericanoSRQ.com.
The main room or the website and all of the animations are completely hand drawn very large with a big sloppy brush. I took the drawings, scanned them, colored them in Illustrator, and then brought them into Flash to build the site. I ended up using some pre-made Flash files from CoffeeCup.com for the image galleries and calendar. I could have programmed these things myself, but the advantage of using Coffee Cup's (very cheap) software is that I can set it up so that the client can upload and edit their site's photos and calendar by themselves from their own computer. I'm very happy with Coffee Cup's service so far, and even got some free goodies from them for Christmas!
Doing the drawings and color for this site opened a lot of doors in my head that will have an impact on all of my illustration. I was thinking a lot about Darwyn Cooke when coming up with the look of the site, and some of Frank Santoro's recent comments on the relationship between black line and color had been ringing in my head. For example:

To me, most comics are essentially black and white even when they are in color. Meaning most comics artists draw everything in black ink first THEN add the color. Very rarely are there colors without black lines “containing” the colors. (Unless it’s a painted comic) I work the other way around. In Cold Heat, I do my color separations first and build up the forms. Then I draw my “blackline”.

I tried to let the color convey the forms as much as the black lines did. In addition to thinking about color differently, having to ink in this way really broadened my inking horizons, and loosened my hand up in general as well. This drawing of Thad from Dead Man Holiday is me using the inking style of this website on one of my more normal drawings. In fact, even in drawing the last ten pages of Dead Man Holiday #-2, I noticed that even my pencilling seemed more fluid and loose.

Anyway, I had a great time doing this site and I think it shows. Big thanks to Café Americano for going for it. And if you're ever in Sarasota, you couldn't do better than to have a excellent, shockingly cheap Sunday morning breakfast at their fine establishment.

This year's vision of holiday joy

2008-12-22T23:26:00.006-05:00

Please enjoy this year's Christmas card on behalf of all of us at the Hornetta household. My lovely girlfriend has shown marked improvement in her illustration abilities over last year's card, despite only doing two or three drawings in the intervening time. She penciled it, I inked and colored. Thanks for making the present so big, baby.

Make your greatest effort to be merry with your friends and family this season. It's the best way to show them that you love them.

Webcomics are lazy

2008-12-10T13:30:00.008-05:00

Okay, here's something old. I spent my Spring 2003 semester in Florence, Italy at the Scuola Lorenzo de’ Medici . I did this webcomic as an assignment for my Graphic Illustration class. I think we were supposed to draw poses from fashion magazines and make a narrative out of them. The teacher, a really cool guy named Claudio Bounaiuti introduced me to Windsor and Newton black waterproof Indian Ink, and the technique of watering it down to do shading. I used this technique for the first time on this comic, and continue to do it today- it's how I illustrate my comic book, Dead Man Holiday. That said, the drawings are pretty crude compared to my newer stuff. Be warned.
I was inspired to post this comic online because of something Ted Seko said to me, that "we have yet to even touch the surface of [this] new medium". I think this strip tells it's story in a way that takes advantage of the webcomic medium, and I honestly don't see too many people doing this type of thing. Most people just ape what print comics do... they even usualy have the same page dimensions as print comics! (Bodyworld by Dash Shaw is the first webcomic that I've noticed that has thought about how to format itself for the web rather than just replicating print.) Now, I'm not saying that this strip is an important, boundry pushing piece of art (it's not), but it does take advantage of it's format. Here's why; It's more than just one panel after another. There's supplemental story bits in popups that are triggered by clicking on certain objects in the panels (there's two clickable items in each panel). The content of the story, and the way it's presented, was very inspired by Hellboy. First of all, the characters and setting are very Hellboy-esque, but furthermore Mike Mignola does this thing where he'll pop a panel somewhere in a page that has no linear connection to the story. It's just a thematic link. So, to show that there's something wrong in the room that a character just entered he'll show a skull or something. I think that's where the idea for the popups in this strip came from.
If anyone knows of any formally experimental webcomics that I don't, I encourage them to post them here!

Anyway, enjoy.

Bethany Horatio sketch

2008-12-04T13:03:00.002-05:00

Just a quick, horribly proportioned warm-up sketch of Dead Man Holiday's Bethany Horatio

Dead Man Holiday #-2 preview images

2008-11-16T00:20:00.006-05:00

Here's a few preview panels from the forthcoming Dead Man Holiday #-2. I'm 25 out of about 33 pages pages in, and it's looking like the issue will be released around mid-February. I don't really want to say anything about it, and these panels were obviously chosen for their low spoiler content, but during the making of the issue I feel like I've really broken down some mental walls (in addition to the technical changes I detailed in my last entry). I couldn't even tell you about the nature of the blockages or what cleared them up, but a couple of times I've found myself going "Hey, this is getting a lot easier!" Whether or not any difference will be apparent in the content of the issue I have no idea, but I suspect that I will someday soon look back on the pages I'm currently completing and laugh at them as well.

Post-mortem Holiday

2008-11-07T01:20:00.009-05:00

Well, Dead Man Holiday #-3 has been out for a good long while now. No new reviews are coming in and orders have ground to a halt. Even my grandmother has told me that she had trouble understanding it, so if that isn’t the final nail in the coffin I don’t know what is. I wanted to get a post-mortem out before the next issue drops, so I’d better do it soon. Oh, how about now?

Production: So, to be honest, the book took me a long time to do. Years. Two or three. For a thirty six page book. Pathetic, huh? I started drawing this book before I knew anything about making comic books. The pages were the wrong sizes, my drawing technique was slow as molasses and post-production (scanning, formatting for printer, etc) was a nightmare. But, it was my first book and the only reason that it took me so long was because of the learning curve. One of the big changes that I’ve made between #-3 and #-2 to speed up production is my inking technique. The linework in #-3 was inked only with Microns. If you go back and look at the issue, you’ll see that the lines vary in width, which pen inked lines don’t do. This is because I didn’t know that most comics creators use brushes to ink their work, and I was trying to replicate their style using pens. So, I was inking each line up to five times. It took forever, and was extremely tedious. I’m inking most of the lines with small brushes now, which is a lot easier to do than I thought it would be, and looks way better. If anyone is scared to make the leap from pens to brushes, don’t be. I also did all of the shading in DMH #-3 with watered down ink, for which I used the same small brush to ink every area. The brush stroke a small brush gives when inking large areas makes it look like you’re using a marker, which isn’t the look I was going for. I’ve since bought a variety of brushes in all different sizes, and they’ve both sped up the shading process and made it look better. Also, I drew #-3 on large sheets of paper that I cut out of a giant roll that I’ve had since I was a kid. I bought Blue Line Pro pages to draw #-2 on, and not having to cut out the pages and the easier panel measuring that they afford has sped up production as well. All in all, this next issue will have ended up taking me seven or eight months from plotting to printer, and future issues will go even faster. The areas of production that I’m working on improving now are my time management and focus.

In an effort to add a modicum of visual interest to this article, here's a scan of a little display I made for Dark Side Comics, one of two comics retail shops where you can purchase a copy of Dead Man Holiday # -3

Marketing: Okay, so once I got the issue drawn and printed (you can read about my experiences printing here) what did I do? I set up MySpace and Facebook accounts for Dead Man Holiday and started posting ads on people’s comments sections. I did a ton of this for The X-Heroes but I’ve since become convinced that it’s not worth the effort. DriveThru Comics notifies me when a PDF of Dead Man Holiday gets downloaded (I'll be writing an entry detailing my experiences with them in the future), and I’m not sure that the social networking ads really drove those numbers through the roof. Additionally, I just don’t want to devote entire evenings of my life to that tedious task. (Although I do think the Facebook page will function well as a good sort-of mailing list.) I did manage to get Dead Man Holiday reviewed by a few people, and did some interviews in support of it. I thought that this would be a lot more effective in driving traffic to my site (especially from some of the larger sites that I got onto), but no site that ever linked to me from a review or interview ever gave me web traffic in the double digits. Doesn’t that seem crazy? Now, it could have something to do with Dead Man Holiday itself. All that people seem to want out of horror comics is archetypes- Nazi Warewolves Vs Dr. Giggles or Zombies In Bumpercars and easy to digest stuff like that. You can’t really sell people on Dead Man Holiday in three seconds like you can that type of thing, and in the cultural climate of the internet I don’t think it fares as well. Even so, I would have thought that being featured on some of those websites would have given me a little more visibility... but I still think it was good to get my work out in front of people in that way anyway. Maybe after a few more issues come out I’ll start to build some steam. All in all I’ve probably sold about 20 copies if DMH#-3 (exclusively to people I know... really) and had about 100 downloads from the DriveThru Comics page. I definitely could have had more people read Dead Man Holiday on their computers if I had serialized it like a webcomic rather than offer it as a PDF download, but I thought people would pay more attention to it as a PDF. I will likely serialize Dead Man Holiday #-3 through #-1 as a webcomic in anticipation of the #0 issue, which will be a collection all of the negative issues. All in all, social networking was worthless. Online reviews and interviews were also worthless, but I see them becoming more valuable in the future. I think that exhibiting at comics shows will be a successful endeavor for me in terms of getting the book in front of the right eyes to create a little buzz, or anyway it had better be because I really don’t have many other options left.
Addendum (11/10/08): Oh, snap! I totally forgot about another marketing strategy that I employed, that was actually pretty effective. I held a couple of contests for a free copy of Dead Man Holiday #-3 at internet message boards that I thought would be interested. Here's one at the Indie Spinner Rack forum, and another at the Mike Allred Message Board. One was more effective than the other. I'll leave it to you to decide which was. I found that even though I was giving away my comic totally for free, I still had to struggle to get people to pay attention. But I was really happy to get my book into a bunch of people's hands, and one of the winners, Zach Taylor, even wrote a piece about it.

Is all of this a moot point because the book just sucked and that's why nobody cared?: No, I don’t think so. It’s hard for me to look at Dead Man Holiday #-3 and see anything. I spent so long on each page in the production and post-production phases that I don’t even see them anymore. I really didn’t know whether the book was good or bad. I was really encouraged to hear Tom Spurgeon and Sean Kleefeld’s comments on it (especially Sean’s insightful and in-depth review)- they appear to think it has merit. So, after working on the book for so long and getting feedback from no one but my circle of friends (none of whom read comic books), it was incredibly validating and encouraging to read two of the most intelligent comics reviewers online appear to get what I was trying to do. Dead Man Holiday is not something that’s going to appeal to a lot of people. I think you have to be an experienced comics reader to pick up on how unusual the cinematic, largely dialogue-less storytelling is (which is probably the book’s best feature), you have to work to put the plot together (which is like coating your comic in broad audience repellent), and you have to not be turned off by genre material. There aren’t a lot of people who possess all three of those qualities (the first reason alone eliminates almost everyone on the face of the earth). (And just so there’s no misconception- it's not that I think these qualities are going to be over most people’s heads, as if my book is too sophisticated for them to understand, it’s just that I’m not sure that most people are going to be into what I’m selling.) I am satisfied with the product though, what I can still see of it. There’s some nice sequences and some okay drawing. On the other hand, some of the drawing is VERY rough (Hello page 33, panel four- WOOF), and some of the sequences could have been orchestrated a little more clearly. But for a first time book, doing what I was trying to do, I don’t think it’s terrible.

UPDATE: 11/10/2008: The magnificent Sean Kleefeld of Kleefeld on Comics linked to this blog entry and shared some of his thoughts about what I said. Check it out here.

On the topic of selling out

2008-11-02T16:43:00.007-05:00

I've been meaning to write a little bit about my experiences with selling internet advertising space on my various websites. Here's the bottom line; for someone like me, a small comic book self-publisher with a small amount of web traffic, it's totally useless. Most people will probably be satisfied at this point, but if you're inclined to know more, keep reading and I'll go into a little more detail.
So, yeah, it seems obvious now, but before I tried it I really didn't know whether or not I'd be able to make money selling ad space on my various websites. I tried the services Google AdSense and Project Wonderful. I sold space on DeadManHoliday.com (my self-published comic book that gets a few hits a day from various reviews and stuff), TheXHeroes.com (an abandoned webcomic of mine that barely gets any hits), ColinPanetta.com (my personal website that gets very little traffic) and my Blogspot blog Hot Wax Mealworms (which gets just under five hundred hits a month, mostly due to people Googling cryptids and ending up at my Cryptid Portrait Series). The money creeped in cent by cent, week after week, at about the same rate from both services. You can't withdraw funds from Google Adsense until you make a hundred bucks, but you can withdraw from Project Wonderful once you've made only ten. After five or six months I found I had made only about six bucks from each, and decided to remove all of the ads from my websites. I kept the Adsense box on my blog, figuring that in not too long I'd hit ten bucks and could at least claim that. I checked it today and I'm up to $9.20, after almost eight months of ad time on the blog. Once it hits $10 I'll likely withdraw the funds and close the account.
If I had to recommend one service over another, I'd tell people to go with Project Wonderful. Google AdSense's pay-per-click policy is nice in theory, but it doesn't reimburse you for getting people's ads in front on your viewer's faces which, while not as valuable as a website hit, is still valuable. I also liked the type of ads that Project Wonderful placed on my page a lot more than Google Adsense. Project Wonderful's ads were almost exclusively for other independent comic books. Google AdSense would only give me badly Photoshopped, lowest common denominator ads for internet surveys and bad TV shows. These reasons, in addition to the aforementioned $100 vs $10 withdrawal rates, are why I suspect you see more Project Wonderful ads on indie comics sites than Google AdSense.

Javiland interview and a sketch

2008-10-29T21:09:00.008-04:00

Here's a recent warm-up sketch I did of Thad Planck, protagonist of Dead Man Holiday.

A little while back I participated in this roundtable phone discussion on comic book printing with a bunch of other comics creators for the Javiland podcast. Javiland is run by Javier Hernandez, creator of one of my favorite comics El Muerto (which has a new issue out, available for order here). The highlight was when the conversation turned to digital comics publishing, and Ted Seko (who has yet to dip his toes in the webcomics pool) kept asking questions about it with all the wide eyed enthusiasm of a kid holding out his bag on Halloween night. "You know, guys... I think this web publishing thing could be for real!" It was adorable. Thanks for having me on Javi!

Dead Man Holiday reciept drawings

2008-10-24T18:55:00.019-04:00

I included an original drawing with many of the orders for Dead Man Holiday # -3. Brandon Dawley posted one a while back as a part of his blog on Dead Man Holiday. Above and below are some of the ones I managed to take a picture of, or that had their pictures take prior to mailing.
It was a fun exercise, but it was way too time consuming and I don't know if I'll be able to do it next time or be able to continue doing it. It was really good for me to be forced to come up with compositions quickly, one after another, and to have to draw quickly. I had been thinking a lot about Brian Hurtt, artist on the excellent comic The Damned. He's always posting drawings that he did at conventions. I've never drawn anything that quickly, and wanted to see what would happen if I drew something super fast. The above drawings are not nearly as elaborate as anything anyone would pay money for at a convention, but I wanted to prove to myself that it would be possible for me to just whip something out as quickly as possible. I focused mostly on composition of the figure; creating and incorperating background shapes and elements didn't occur to me.
The text was all stuff that came to me in a dream, or to someone else in a dream, or was just something that I thought sounded like did.

Warm up sketch

2008-10-17T17:13:00.002-04:00

Just a nice little warm up sketch I did the other day while settling in to draw Dead Man Holiday pages.

MixnMojo.com illustration #1: Day of the Tentacle

2008-10-14T10:59:00.008-04:00

I'm a dedicated reader of the excellent website MixnMojo.com. They report on old LucasArts games, and current games made by the same people who have moved on to other companies. Besides Space Quest, these are pretty much the only video games I really care about. They recently started a series of retrospectives on the old LucasArts games (you can find them on this page, among other things). The articles each have a piece of of original art produced for them. Upon seeing this I dropped the editors a line and let them know that I'd love to help out. Luckily, they dug my stuff and I got a few assignments.
My first was Day of the Tentacle, one of the most well regarded adventure games ever produced by LucasArts. The game is very much supposed to emulate the feel of a saturday morning cartoon, so I took the opportunity to take another crack at rendering in a livlier, cartoonier style than I normally do (like I had previously done with my Space Waffles strips). I think these drawings have a little more life to them than the Space Waffles strips did, but they're also less of a departure from my normal style. Again, I looked at a lot of John K drawings when I drew this, but I don't think it especially shows. Here's an image of the game's protagonist Bernard, whose pose I ripped off of this old drawing I did of Captain DeathRay.

The images featured on this blog are just the black and white lineart. You'll have to check out the article to see how I laid out and colored them (and if you check out their front page before they post another article, you can see an alternate version that I did). The main reason that I wanted to do these drawings is because I've done so much experimentation with my illustration over the last couple years, but haven't produced many finished pieces that would look really good in a portfolio, or that I could use to convince someone that I could do good spot illustration for their magazine or whatever. I was excited to see how slick I could make this picture, and I'm pretty happy with the result. I worked long and hard to find all of the right decisions for this (although more thorough planning probably could have shortened that time a bit). One of these decisions was to crop out most of the drawings themselves! You'll notice that you can only see the figures from about the chest up in the final piece, but I drew their full bodies. This is where planning could have helped make my workload lighter. The background of the illustration is done with the pixel technique that I developed on my Space Quest drawings. I initially tried to color the figures in the foreground in this way, but I found that it looked too sloppy and made the image hard to read.
So, what other games will I be doing? You'll have to wait and see, but I'll tell you that I definately lucked out and got two more of my favorites. For this assignment I stayed relatively on model from the way the characters were presented in the original game. This will not so much be the case with my remaining two pieces.

SUBMIT to The X-Heroes' "Gallery of Villainy!"

2008-10-10T18:34:00.007-04:00

Bug-Ass by Alex Bishop

Hey everybody,

Xxero of The X-Heroes here. Since we defeated all of the supervillains in the world a few years back, we need to ask you (yes YOU) to make us some new ones. Here's the deal: you draw us a supervillain, we capture him and put him in the "Gallery of Villainy" when we re-launch our website in conjunction with the War of the Independents. Check out last year's Gallery of Villainy. Pretty weak, right? This year, we want you guys to draw us an ARMY of supervillains to fight. An entire GAGGLE of the toughest, craziest mother-jammers the world has ever seen! We’ll post everything we get, and link to your website to boot! So get to it people; give us your worst!

At the top and bottom of this letter are some of the newest villains we’ve received for this year's batch. What a bunch of sissies! They wouldn’t even last ten minutes in the ring with us. I hope you (yes YOU, loyal reader) can do better!

Email all entries to info@thexheroes.com

I love you,
Xxero

Nado by Chris Cimino

Cryptid Portrait Series#A1: Catcoon... ?

2008-10-06T19:35:00.005-04:00

Okay, here's something a little different for the ol' Cryptid Portrait Series. Usually, I post my reinterpreted drawings of other people's drawings recounting their first-hand accounts of real-life monster sightings. Today, I'm cutting out the middle man and posting straight-up first-hand account drawings of real-life monsters!
These drawings are by myself and some friends, of a weird animal that we actually saw run out in front of our car late at night on Bay Shore Drive in Sarasota at the end of last April (about). Here's my girlfriend's drawing of it:
I was driving and my girlfriend and a friend of hers were passengers. A large animal leisurely walked out in front of the car, and I had to swerve to avoid it. Although I was preoccupied with trying to not run over the creature, I got a pretty good look at it. Interestingly, after the event we all had our own stories. Some things matched up, and others didn't. Here's our friend's drawing of it:
I knocked the contrast way up, because it brought out that ghost-cat in the middle (actually just an erased initial drawing, and her only depiction of it with eyes).
Here's some things that were agreed upon: Our friend and I thought we saw a large animal about thigh-high high, but my girlfriend says that it was probably a normal cat of larger than usual size. Our friend thought that it was a cat as well (however large), and even drew stripes on it in her version. We all agreed that it seemed to be looking right at us, the headlights seemed to catch it's eyes (the circles in my and my girlfriend's drawings are supposed to represent the headlights), and that it had a small dead animal hanging from it's mouth. To me it looked like a large, lanky Schnauzer. I also felt like it had a very smooth, liquid stride, which I tried to depict in it's limbs in my drawing:
I'm really fascinated by the differences in our memories, and wonder what caused these divergences. There seems to be some correlation between my girlfriend and I's drawings in the shape of it's snout, but her drawing attributes more of the shape to the dead animal in it's mouth, and mine has larger whiskers to explain the large snout.
The enigmatic Alex Bishop, an internet cryptid expert if there ever was one, said that our descriptions seemed to refer the a "Catcoon". If it's something that other people have claimed to see, I can't seem to find it on Google. Uh, except for this quote from UrbanDictionary.com, that is:

It is said that when a man dressed as a raccoon makes love to a cat, Catcoon is born

It is said the rattle of Catcoon's maracas is a death rattle. I did not intend to die today

...but I that probably wasn't it.

Hab-i-tude.org

2008-09-28T15:19:00.009-04:00

The above image is a screenshot from a website I just completed, Hab-i-tude.org. This website, in addition to my work on the forthcoming video game Chron X, have caused me to virtually teach myself an entire course in Flash over the last few months. The site was a bit problematic to put together because it deals almost exclusively in bitmap images, which Flash is not optimal for. But I didn't see any other way to make it animated, so I went for it. I think it turned out well- it looks good, makes sense and is fun to use. I just got another job of this nature, and everything I've learned in the past few weeks should serve to make it a much less arduous experience. I remembered a surprising amount about Flash from college (I haven't really touched it since then), but I had a lot of research to do on frame jumping, importing bitmaps with transparencies into Flash (use PNGs) and I even recieved a quick hand from Flash master and old college pal Alex Shilin to work out a bug.
I really enjoy the "object as website" idea that we came up with for the site, and although I've seen it done in other places, I don't know if I've seen it done so directly.

I really enjoyed putting Hab-i-tude.org together, especially collaborating with the organization on the look and function of the site (a situation that's also been happening with Chron X). I've been a pretty solitary person in the past when it comes to producing art, but in the last few years have come to realize that collaboration can be nice too. It takes a lot of pressure off of yourself as the sole idea bearer, and can brings exciting ideas to your work that you would never would have provided for yourself. I'm currently working on making some short collaborative comic stories happen (the be worked on between Dead Man Holiday #-1 and 0) and am greatly looking forward to the results.

Promoting Dead Man Holiday on social networking sites

2008-09-17T13:06:00.010-04:00

This is the first ever color Dead Man Holiday art. The style in which it's drawn is the result of my experimentation in the Cryptid Portrait Series. I like it, I think it has a cool retro movie poster design feel to it, but not in a kitchy or nostalgic way. I wanted to share it here, and as it's currently the profile picture on DMH's Facebook page, I'm also going to talk about that.

Okay, so, I've been using social networking sites (MySpace and Facebook only) to market my comic books for a few years now. I really hate MySpace's "shotgun" method of self-promotion. Which is to say, to advertise on MySpace you basically have to fire as much and as broadly as you can and hope you hit something. I requires a lot of time to request a million friendships and post a million ads on people comments sections, and I'm not convinced it does a lot of good. I may give it another spin now that downloads of Dead Man Holiday #-3 have cooled off, just to see if it makes a spike, but I'd be surprised if it did. (Here's Dead Man Holiday's MySpace page.) I just can't imagine that I could stand out from the hundreds of other people all hawking their stuff on there simultaneously, regardless of the quality of my work.
I like Facebook a lot better. You don't get your stuff in front of as many eyes, but it's a lot more focused. The people who are on the fan list of Dead Man Holiday's Facebook Product Page (and please consider becoming one of them!) are there because they're actually interested in the book, and I can send them updates without cluttering their inbox or otherwise obscuring correspondences from their actual, human friends. So, is this more focused (and limited) method effective? No, not for me. Not yet. There are only two people that aren't personal friends of mine on DMH's fans list. I imagine they found it by searching for the term "comic book" in Facebook's Product Pages. I included the words "comic book" in the title of DMH's Product Page for just this very reason. I've found some new comics that way myself, including Erik Northfell's Camera Obscura (with whom I'll be collaborating soon). You can also promote your Facebook Product Page with an ad. I haven't investigated this at all, but I assume it costs money.

I'm planning on putting a more prominent link to the Facebook page on the front of DeadManHoliday.com, and as traffic to that site grows, so (hopefully) will the fan list. Having fans on Facebook is almost as good as having a big mailing list. And having a big mailing list is probably the best possible way you can keep people informed about your work and maintain a returning fanbase.

Here's the preliminary sketch I did for the above image:

Dead Man Holiday press roundup

2008-09-01T12:04:00.006-04:00

I've been remiss in posting some recent online press for Dead Man Holiday. I'm going to post it all as a group now to catch up.

First of all, I got a little review in Tom Spurgeon's The Comics Reporter. It's a part of this entry "Empying The Big Basket 05" (Dead Man Holiday is the second from the bottom). Without geeking out too much, Spurgeon is the comics reviewer that I (and many other people) respect the most, so it's a total thrill that he liked the book so much. He has his critisisms (and seeing what they would be is the real reason I was looking forward to what he had to say), but on the whole he really seemed to enjoy the book. Which is really satifying for me. Read some of the other reviews, he's a pretty brutally honest reviewer.

Next up is Dead Man Holiday # -3 contributor (and world class trash talking wise-ass) Brandon Dawley. He wrote a really nice piece about our long history together and says some super awesome things about DMH. It also features an exclusive illustration by yours truly, drawn on Brandon's Paypal reciept. Dig it, kids!

And finally, I did an episode of the Random Pirate Comics Show with Jonah Gregory. Jonah is the co-creator, writer and publisher of Here There Be Robots, one of my absolute favorite comic books. If hearing the creator of Dead Man Holiday and the writer of Here There Be Robots talk about video games and comics for an hour or so sounds good to you, then you should definitely give it a listen. Basically, I'm talking to Alex Bishop here. We intended for the show to be a Space Quest retrospective, but we jump all over the map about a lot of different stuff. I had a really great time talking to Jonah, and would like to thank him for having me on! I can't wait to come back.

Dead Man Holiday fan art!

2008-08-27T20:27:00.006-04:00

This is cool; I just received a package from Mr. Zach Taylor. One of the things in it? The second ever piece of Dead Man Holiday fan art! I love this stuff. Mike Allred's Madman comics always featured a lot of really great alternative interpritations of the character in the back of each issue, and there's few things more thrilling for a storyteller then to see someone else give their take on your idea. There are two pinups of Thad Planck in Dead Man Holiday # -3 (exclusive to the print version!), and I'm going to maintain that tradition in future issues. Anyway, here's Zach's sketch:

Dig those big glassy eyes! The package in question contained a bunch of Zach's excellent comics. I ordered them after stumbling into a copy of his first Moon Man issue and after reading it, and I can't wait to dig through the rest of them. He's got a little Bob Burden in him, but is by and large a completely unique talent.
"But Colin?" the author's hypothetical audience asks him "If this is the second ever piece of DMH fan art, what was the first?" Well, you non-existent flecks of imagination, the first ever piece of Dead Man Holiday fan art was provided by Alex Bishop, my co-host on Unusual Specimens, the hard-hitting nature documentary blog we do. I totally love Alex's version of the skeleton ghost. It's got a great Scooby-Doo vibe to it, which is something that I had in mind for this character at the beginning.
This little guy also pops up from time to time when Dead Man Holiday receives internet attention.

So keep the fan art coming people! I'm talking to you CHRIS FILLHART!

Digital vs. Print

2008-08-24T23:37:00.012-04:00

This post is a reworked email that I recently sent to Ryan Slotnick, jazz pianist of the highest order, currently pounding the black and whites as a member of Evil Giraffes on Mars. I'm including it here because I've been meaning to expand on this subject for a while, to help explain my decision to release Dead Man Holiday simultaneously as a free download and as a traditional print book that costs money.

"Your comments on digital vs physical are something that I've been thinking a lot about lately, because of Dead Man Holiday. The fact of the matter is that in 10 to 20 years, kids are going to balk at the idea of a physical newspaper, the same way that we think 8 Tracks are funny. It's going to happen. Already, things have changed a lot. No one feels bad about illegally downloading "Marvel Comics Company-wide summer crossover" #7 or the new Josh Grobin CD, and why wouldn't they rather read the news online than in a messy, cumbersome newspaper? More people are going to read the free download version of Dead Man Holiday, and more people are going to listen to Evil Giraffes on Mars on MySpace, than are going to purchase the physical copies of either. We need to start taking that into account when we release our material. That said, I think there's always going to be a small market for the physical copies of our stuff. Both fortunately and unfortunately, our work isn't of the type that I see getting so big that it stops being personal for people (I'm not putting us down- I think you and I both care more about making the work that we want rather than making it accessible, and I think we're both pretty stubborn when it comes to compromise). So some people are always going to want to own a copy of DMH or EGoM, because they're going to have personal feelings attached to our stuff that they wouldn't for our bigger, more faceless counterparts. They'll want to have our stuff on a shelf in their place. They'll like showing it to people when they come over. People seem to like their music, movie and book shelves to be like a map of their personality, like a Facebook profile. I think this is why DVDs blew up so big a few years ago. And people want to look like individuals, so no one wants the same old stuff on their shelf (or the same old pins on their messenger bag, etc). My CD collection is tucked away in a neglected corner of my house, except for my EGoM, Los Doggies, Mr Quintron, Mr Entertainment and the Pookie Smackers, etc CDs which are displayed prominently in my office. That's the stuff I get to actually tell people about when they see it, because they've never heard of it before. But now we have Facebook and our physical shelves are no longer the standard display spot for our personality maps. So, no one's buying the big stuff at all anymore and physical copies of the smaller stuff is for fetishists, at best.

Over the coming years guys like you and I are going to figure out how to completely repurpose our stuff for the internet. Your website is your album cover now, which really isn't that bad if you think about it. Less people see it, but it's a whole lot more efficient. Less paper and plastic in the world, and the people that would have gotten something out of it before will still see it. I see physical copies of our stuff becoming more like vinyl records are now; they still make them for certain music that certain people will still buy in that format, but it's a small market. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if print runs of vinyl were bigger than print runs of CDs in 20 years.

The one aspect of all of all of this that has me wondering the most is how money's going to work in this system. There's this PDF bookstore called Wowio, that recently changed it's business model for the worse, but used to be (what I consider to be) a best case scenario for distributing art online. The PDFs were free to download, contained a couple of tasteful ads at the beginning and end of the book (nowhere in the middle) and the creator was well paid for each download. I think this method is brilliant because it gets the work into as many people's hands as possible, maximizing the possibility of getting it in in front of someone who wants to buy a physical (ad free) copy. But even if they don't, you still get paid. You can think of the free version as a preview for the ad-less, printed version. I've heard that some people were making $40K a year off of this website. Once someone with some fucking brains starts something like that up again, we'll get this internet thing back on track.

Okay, gotta go. More later.
Colin"

So, my decision to release Dead Man Holiday for free download and pay for print edition is an attempt to replicate what used to be the Wowio business model. Although, after being rejected by Wowio I went with Drive Thru Comics, who give me no reimbursement for offering my comic for free download. So, I'm replicating the model, except for the part where I get paid.

Dead Man Holiday infiltrates IndiePulp.com!

2008-08-22T02:43:00.004-04:00

There's a special ad for Dead Man Holiday up at IndiePulp.com. It features exclusive artwork only available there, so check it out. Big thanks to them for the space.

I should also mention that Johnny Saturn, a damn fine and weird superhero comic, has had a Dead Man Holiday ad in rotation on their site for a while now. Thanks guys!

Gen Con 2008

2008-08-17T17:43:00.013-04:00

So, besides the release of my comic Dead Man Holiday # -3, the big reason for the slowdown of artistic content on this blog is because I've been redesigning the world's first online collectible trading card game, Chron X for Darkened Sky Studios. The game is nearing completion, and I'll have a lot more to say about it once it's released. In the meantime though, I thought I'd post some pictures from Gen Con in Indianapolis, a big gaming convention where we set up a booth to promote the upcoming release.

First, here's some shots of the amazing hotel we stayed in. It was connected to the convention center that Gen Con was held in, and many events took place right in the hotel. The Hyatt, I believe:
Yep. Just in case you're in the can and realize that you want to call down to the front desk for a bacon cheeseburger, there's a phone right by the toilet.

Here's some establishing shots of the Exhibitor's Hall at Gen Con:
I don't know what it is, but it sure is happy to be playing DDR! Here's a shot of James from Zygote Games, makers of incredibly cool looking science-based card games. I bought my tapeworm-phobic girlfriend a copy of their "Parasites Unleashed! A totally true, totally gross card game." The poster for which he is standing next to. Check it out, those workms are coming out of a FROG'S HEAD. Ugh:
A bunch of people, mostly kids, were building a city of amazing card structures. At the end of the convention, people were welcomed to throw money at the city to destroy it, and the proceeds went to charity. Just in case you don't notice, this girl is standing on top of a chair to reach the top of this tower:
Here's some pictures of the awesome booth that we made for Chron X. Here's the backdrop that I designed:
And a computer screen monolith made by a cool dude named "The Mullet":
And here's the whole shebang:
Here's Darkened Sky Studios' Colin Davis telling a minotuar about Chron X:
Here's Darkened Sky Studios' Matt Holden doing some mid-show programing. In the background is Peter Mayhew, who played Chewbacca in all the Star Wars movies. He's the tallest blurry blob in the background. Trust me:
Here's old school Chron X player Klaw, Vanna White-ing the cool Chron X coin composite poster that Colin made. Klaw's so excited about the new game, that he flew to Gen Con just to hang out at our booth:
Here's Colin and Matt being interviewed by gamezombie.tv:
And now, the picture you've all been waiting for, me with some Stormtroopers:
Boba Fett is not standing on his knees, it's actually a small child. For real.

All in all, I had a great time talking to people about the game and hanging out with Darkened Sky and company all week. I would like to give them a heartfelt thanks for bringing me out there and letting me work with them on the game. I'm really having a blast, and can't wait to show it off.

Dead Man Holiday atomizes Ain't It Cool News!

2008-08-06T21:10:00.010-04:00

"I’m not sure what it is I’m seeing, but I’m fascinated nevertheless."

Dead Man Holiday got reviewed on Ain't It Cool News today, which is indeed pretty cool because I check that site each and every day. Check it out here, about three fourths of the way down. I keep waiting for one of the Talkbackers at the bottom to blast my book, but it hasn't happened yet...

This review continues the trend of people saying that they were genuinely creeped-out by the skeleton scene, which is funny because I wanted to make it scary, but immediately after drawing it stepped back and took a look at it and said "Well, I guess we're doing a comedy here."

Dead Man Holiday guillotines Gnourg.com!

2008-08-05T17:43:00.006-04:00

"And, thankfully, despite the look of the cover, the book seems to have nothing to do with zombies."

Zack Taylor, comics artist extraordinaire and fellow FACA'er, wrote a fun little review of Dead Man Holiday # -3. Go forth and read it!
Zach's got a fun style that seems to be reminiscent of early animation. The title of his comic "M. Search: Gentlemen Searcher" made me laugh for several minutes when I read it, so I would probably do well to pick up some of his books soon.

Dead Man Holiday keelhauls Kleefeld on Comics!

2008-07-28T21:57:00.007-04:00

Sean Kleefeld of the great Kleefeld on Comics (oddly enough) wrote an incredibly thoughtful and spot-on review of Dead Man Holiday # -3, that I can't recommend enough to Dead Man Holiday fans. Read it here. Sean is the first person who's not a friend of mine to give serious feedback about the book, and I couldn't have picked a better person to do it. I've read Sean's blog more than a few times, as a result of his frequently being featured on The Comics Reporter and Journalista. He's always talking about really interesting, lesser-known comics, making really excellent points about the comics industry or, on a really good day, posting a bunch of pictures of Captain Marvel punching people.
The Comics Journal's Journalista even picked up Sean's review as an item, and ran an excerpt from the book along with it. Very, very cool. Check it out here, it's about halfway down.

Cryptid Portrait Series #8: The Monkey-Cat Man

2008-07-28T01:52:00.008-04:00

This installment in the Cryptid Portrait Series is actually reader submitted. Faithful Hot Wax Mealworms reader Lily sent me an account of an encounter her friends had with "The Monkey-Cat Man", included below in it's entirety:

"It happened in the south of France, in the vicinity of Montpellier, maybe 8 years ago. Two friends of mine, Joan and Timothée, were in a vineyard at the summer's end. The sun was going down. Tim had the feeling something was starring at them and look at a tree in front of them. He saw the shadow of a creature on a branch. Black, hairy, pretty small (1 meter high), with spiky ears on the top of the head, pretty short legs, long harms and fine bright eyes. It jumped of the branch, when Tim say to Jo there was something bizzarre in the tree. It had the same way of moving as a monkey and disappear almost imediately. The guys were super scared so they ran away. Later, they discussed about this strange story and remember there was also a weird sound, like a kid's toy music, kind of..."

So, I apologize to Lily for the delay in getting this drawn, but I hope it was worth the wait for her. I'm pretty fond of him myself, which I was pretty surprised at; drawing this thing was like trying to unlock my front door with a roller skate key. I just couldn't do it for the longest time. I sketched a million designs, and wasn't happy with any of them. Finally, I just attacked it. And when I was done I took a look at this drawing and said "Hey... not bad!" I thought about why I had such a hard time drawing this, and I realized that it was because I was having to design so much of it myself, as there wasn't a whole lot in the way of specific physical description in Lily's story. Since this creature was coming out of my own head, it wasn't creepy to me in the same way that previous cryptids have been. I thought back and realized that the cryptids that I really enjoyed drawing were the ones that were more directly lifted from eyewitness drawings. So, in the future, that'll be my focus for this series; reinterpritations of eyewitness cryptid drawings.
I inked it with very large brush, thinking of Doug TenNapel the whole time. I was also thinking about Cat Eyed Boy, a really cool looking Manga that was all over the place while I was drawing this, but I don't think it really shows in the final product. Weirdly, it came out looking a bit like a Dr. Suess character. I can't say he's too big of an influence, so I'm chalking it up to the cat face. I would also like to note that the look of this series as a whole is very much inspired by Sam Hiti (although it is obviously not meant to resemble his work).
Below, please enjoy one of the many sketches I did while conceptualizing this piece. Not too long ago, I wouldn't even have know how to do something fast and sloppy like this. Now, I'm enjoying this type of thing quit a bit.

Colin Panetta slays ComicMonsters.com!

2008-07-22T12:35:00.012-04:00

There's a fun little interview with me about Dead Man Holiday over at ComicMonsters.com. Click here to read it.

Ka-Blam'ed!

2008-07-19T18:49:00.002-04:00

After my strenuous and demoralizing exploration of comic book printing, I decided to print my first comic, Dead Man Holiday at the online print-on-demand printer Ka-Blam. (Quick refresher: Print-on-demand is a method of printing comic books, or any type of book, that has a higher per unit cost but enables you to run smaller print runs than offset.) There are two major print-on-demand comic book printers, Ka-Blam and ComiXpress. I decided to go with Ka-Blam over ComiXPress because I ordered a book that I didn't even draw from ComiXPress once, and it was an absolute nightmare- and every person I've heard from who has also dealt with them has had an almost identical experience.

Ka-Blam has a clear and easy to understand page on their site explaining exactly how to format your files to send to them. I did this and submitted them, ordering only one copy for proofing purposes. When I got the copy, I was really happy with the print quality. They seem a little more fragile and flimsy than offset printed comics, but the difference in negligible. I noticed that the cover had been printed too far to the right, and some of the crop lines on the paper I drew the image on were showing. I posted on their customer service forum asking about this, and you can see the resulting exchange here. (Take special note of the section at the end, where I commend the staff on their open customer service policy- this will become funny later on.) First of all, their customer service, while leaps and bounds better than ComiXPress, is slow at best and it often takes them days to respond to any question. But, long story short, one of the employees (without offering much explanation) said that he had fixed the problem and sent me a corrected copy of the book as proof.
So, I placed my order for 75 copies of the book, for delivery on June 19th (the release date of Dead Man Holiday # -3 was June 25th). When that date finally arrived, I received an email notifying me that the books were being shipped... to the residence that I had just moved out of. I made a panicked post on their message board (which you can see here), hoping there was a way I could still get the comics before the 25th. As you can see, I was responded to in a pretty negative manner by that same Ka-Blam employee. I imagine that my panicked tone, and the other poster in my thread, had something to do with the employee's attitude. They basically told me that I was wrong, offered a half-baked solution and offered no apology for the miscommunication. I responded in kind (I can get pretty angry and defensive), and was never answered. I did notice, however, that a different employee started communicating with me after that point.
Once I finally got my comics weeks later they weren't packed well (whether this is due to re-packaging because of the shipping mix up or if they always pack their books this way I don't know), and many of the corners were bent and virtually all of the covers still sported the same error that had previously been "fixed". (I don't think Ka-Blam has a really good handle on the way their covers are printed- I've seen other people with similar problems on their forum.) Sigh.

I still really like Ka-Blam. Why? As I state in my first series of posts on their forum, I really appreciate a company with an open customer service policy. It's a brave thing to do showing everyone your mistakes when most companies choose to just cover them up, and that honesty goes a long way- my domain host, DreamHost, is much the same way and I love them. But, that doesn't soothe me too much when it takes Ka-Blam days to answer ANY of my emails, especially when I'm having a shipping emergency. Why is their customer service so horrible? I get the impression that they're severely understaffed, in an effort to keep prices down. (Which is good, because their high unit cost already makes getting books to retail pretty much impossible for anyone that prints with them.) Again, I appreciate that, but it doesn't do me any good when my order is fucked up. So, in the end, I can't really recommend Ka-Blam to other people because of my experience with them. However, I don't think most orders go as badly as this (not that this was totally horrible) and I'll be keeping my business with them and looking forward to a fresh start with my next order.
The best advice I can give to someone printing with KaBlam is to give them a WAY bigger crop area on your cover than they ask for- they don't really have this figured out.

The latest in designer Unusual Specimens

2008-07-14T22:12:00.005-04:00

It's been so busy around here with all the Dead Man Holiday hooplah that I haven't had time to hip everyone to Alex and I's newest line of Unusual Specimens. If you're craving the very best in weird, strange and downright ugly rare animals, look no further. Unusual Specimens has just what you need to satiate your hunger, only a mere sampling of which is peeking out at you from above. This installment wraps up our trip to the rich, lush forests of Levandria. Enjoy, freaks:

UnusualSpecimens.blogspot.com

Colin Panetta conquers Planet Comic Book Radio!

2008-07-11T03:03:00.012-04:00

Is that really how you spell "conquer"? Seems weird. Anyway, fellow small press comic book self publisher Javier Hernandez (El Muerto, Demolition Dove) interviewed me for his podcast Planet Comic Book Radio. I really like PCBR- it's the only Podcast I've found that interviews truly indie comic book creators (as opposed to just really popular but non-superhero comic creators). We talk a lot about my work, which Javier says some very nice things about, and a lot about small press comic book self publishing. (Whodathunkit?) It turns out I don't sound nearly as stiff or boring as I thought I was, so give it a listen wont you? And hey- tell 'em Colin sent ya.

Big thanks to Javier for having me on.

On a side note, I STILL don't have the books in from Ka-Blam. Thanks for waiting patiently everyone. I'll send them out as soon as I get them. In the meantime you can still pre-order at the store, Alex Bishop.
Also, Hot Wax Mealworms will start to feature actual artistic content again, when this all cools down.