Mix Tape

Before we had iPods and CD players in our cars, I made mix tapes.  I would spend hours putting together the perfect mix tape.  Planning the perfect songs, timing the songs so the song doesn’t cut off at the end of side A, making sure the songs were in a good sequence…it was something I took very seriously.

Then I got an iPod and those days were over.

I haven’t made a mix tape in ten years and I kind of miss them.  I know I can make a good playlist through iTunes…but it’s not the same.  I still have an enormous box of mix tapes that I have no idea what to do with.  Throwing them away doesn’t feel right.

Putting together the upcoming book feels like making a mix tape.

I am pretty close to sending Uptown Girl-Little Adventures to the printers.  Just waiting on the covers and the proofreading to be done and we should be set.  Since LA is a collection of short stories ranging from 1 page to over 50, I had to put together the book in a certain order.  I didn’t want to put it together in chronological order from when I finished the story, so I put it in an order that had a good flow to it.

For example, there are two long stories in the book, and I knew for sure I didn’t want them to be close to each other in the book.  So I put one early on in the book, the other near the end.  I had about a dozen one page stories that I put in throughout the book, usually after a story that was greater than four pages.  I also wanted to make sure there wasn’t a long run or Rocketman heavy stories for example.  If I had a Rocketman heavy comic that went on for several pages, I would follow it up with a shorter comic where he wasn’t in it, or played a large role.

I realize that I put more thought into this than I probably needed, but there you go.  Hopefully this rambling post will make more sense when LA comes out in May.

In other news, two Uptown Girl stories are appearing in anthologies.

‘My Silent Fear’ appears in ‘Fear’, an anthology published by Chainsaw Comics.  You can get a copy here:

Chainsaw Comics Presents: Fear

“The Fall of the World’s Own Optimist” is eventually going to appear in ‘Cifiscape volume 2′.  Watch this site for all the late breaking news:

http://cifiscape.onyxneon.com/

Workingman’s Blues

WORK.

That’s kind of the theme for me this year.  I don’t really make new years resolutions, but I like to look ahead for the year and think about what I want to accomplish…and…uh…yeah.  That’s not like a resolution at all.

Anyway, I decided that I want to WORK this year.  I mean, I am always working, always drawing, always doing…stuff.  But I guess I want to work smarter and be more productive this year.  I want to tackle some of the projects that I’ve half finished, like the children’s book I need to print and send to publishers, continue working on the Retros and crank up the artwork in ‘Long Forgotten Fairy Tale’ and make it the best book I can.

The above picture gives an idea of what my desk looks like these days.

Speaking of ‘Long Forgotten Fairytale’, I think it might not come out until 2014.  There still will be a couple books before then (Little Adventures in May 2012, and Greatest Hits in 2013) but I am about 55 pages into LFFT and the first act is only about halfway there.  I also think this book will be closer to 300 pages, whereas ‘Big City Secrets’ was about 260 pages, and ‘LA’ is about 202 pages.  I don’t want to rush this book.  Writing this book is a challenge.  The book takes place in…well, somewhere else, but I needed a reason Uptown Girl and her friends to be where the book takes place.  So the set up is almost a book in it’s own right, and there’s a lot of stuff I can add to the set up because I keep thinking of scenes to add or funny stuff to throw in.  But at a certain point I just need to move ahead.  LFFT is also two different stories being told in two different styles and voices so I keep shifting back and forth between them.

So…yeah.  Kind of a boring post, but rest assured I am working, I am working more and smarter than I did a month ago, so bear with me since thse postings might be a little light on content for a while.  When I was working on ‘Little Adventures’ I could post a new comic quite often, as the book was one page gags or short stories.  Now that LFFT is getting into the real meat of the story, I am not going to be posting as much from it.

Work For Hire

I don’t do a lot of freelance art these days.  Not for a few years, anyway.  I used to, I used to do a lot of it but when I started Uptown Girl I put all my time and energy into the comic.  Once in a while a freelance project rolls my way and it’s a nice break from what I usually do and gives me a chance to play around with something new.

Doing art for other people is kind of a tricky thing.  Usually I am working with someone who has no idea what they are talking about and they give me vague descriptions of what they want.  Usually along the lines of “well, I want a drawing of someone young, but not too young, someone sort of trendy but not too cool, maybe something kind of ironic but not a parody…I don’t know, I’ll know it when I see it.”  But going overboard on a description is also a challenge, like “Make it a drawing of a girl 26 years old, with barrettes in her hair, with hair that is normally straight but it was recently curled.  She should be very fashionable but not overly so.  I am thinking small hoops for earrings, and although you can’t see, she must have a toe ring.”  Yikes.  And God forbid you don’t give her hoop earrings.  I always try to show someone my past work so they know what they are getting from me.  I draw pretty simple, and to be honest, small hoop earrings are likely not going to stand out as much as you think they will.

But normally working with someone else works out well.  To be honest, I like working with descriptions and boundaries.  If someone says “draw whatever you want”, then I am almost paralyzed and have no idea where to start.  But in a perfect world, all my freelance projects would work the way this current one is.

I am working on a project focusing on stereotypes in website designers.  My point of contact for this project sent me character designs and ideas for the drawings and the descriptions for the characters give me enough guidance and enough freedom so I can not only create what she has in mind, but also lets me have a little fun.

She sent over 4 character designs.  The first one had a description of an evil business man with a budget ray gun that zaps color and life from its target.

And here’s what I did:

The second one I took on and a description of a hipster girl in a black turtleneck, and I drew this:

I thought I nailed it, but any freelancer will tell you that constructive feedback is much appreciated.  After sending over this drawing, she wrote back with a few suggestions and I drew this:

I think the first design is better, but the task is to please the client and not myself.  I was happy for the descriptive suggestions as opposed to “Mmmm, no.  Do it again but make it different.,”

The third character I drew had a description of a zombie in geeky clothing.  Since the design called for ‘geek clothing’ I threw ‘Firefly’ onto the shirt.  Looking back, I realized I totally should have done a ‘Doctor Who’ t-shirt.

And the final designs were calling for a typical boy/girl next door armed with a sketchbook, pencil and colorwheel.  I drew these last and I really wanted to play up the whole “boy/girl next door” idea so I tried to show a little style to them, but I think only the girl really worked in this drawing, in terms of giving it an old-timey, retro design feel.

Anyway, the project isn’t quite finished but I like what I’ve done.  I also got to play around in Photoshop a bit and although I still am not very good with coloring, I am pretty happy with the finished look on these drawings.

Don’t Look Back

In case you’ve haven’t checked your Facebook account lately, it’s a brand new year.  It’s 2012, the year everything ends.  Personally, I thought the world was going to end in 2005 but thanks to the Matrix, disaster was averted.

I am not one for looking back, but 2011 was a good year.  I was very happy for ‘Big City Secrets’ to finally come out which is the Uptown Girl story I’ve been envisioning for almost ten years.  I am excited for this new year, when ‘Little Adventures’ will come out.  I will also be spending most of the year on ‘Long Forgotten Fairytale’, on which I’ve just finished the 50th page of.

I’ll be taking an unexpected break on the book as I work on a freelance project and finish the final steps of ‘Little Adventures’, such as proof reading it and drawing the back cover.  I hope to resume ‘LFF’ in mid-January.

I thought it’d be fun to show the inside title page of ‘Little Adventures’.  Please remember this is not the cover, but the title page inside the book.

So…uh…yeah.  It’s not representative of anything that happens in the book.  And if you think this is pretty weird, well, the actual cover is even more out there.

Christmastime is Here

So, like Halloween, I wanted to put up a new comic strip on Christmas as a gift to Uptown Girl’s fans.  On Halloween, I did a sort of funny topical strip about costumes so I figured it’d be pretty easy to come up with a pretty short comic strip.

And I did.  It was…okay, not great.  The other night I scribbled out two ideas.  I penciled both out but I didn’t ink the Christmas one.  When it came time to ink it, I preferred the non-Christmas one over the holiday one.

So, here it is:

So…uh, yeah.  If you really wanted to know what the actual Christmas strip was, it went like this:

Rocketman: Here, I bought you a hip hop CD for Christmas.

Uptown Girl: Oh, thanks.

Rocketman: I forgot to wRAP it.

….so, yeah.

Merry Christmas.

The First Four Years

Yesterday my daughter, Sophie, turned 4.

Four years!  Seems like only yesterday Amy told me she was pregnant and I drank a couple many glasses of wine.

Being a parent is a challenge and it is a lot of fun.  Being a geek dad is also a fun experience.  It’s kinda cool to hear Sophie yell for me to come watch a commercial for the new Optimus Prime toy.  She knows most of the major superheroes and video game characters.  She knows who Uptown Girl is.  Good thing too, since she’ll take over the series when I die.  I get a kick out of  jumping on the couch “like Mario, daddy!” much to my wife’s chagrin.

Having many…things that Sophie knows I like helps her get to know me more.  I’m not just the guy who goes to work and tells her to finish her toast, I’m the guy who will watch ‘Spongebob’ with her.  Liking things, geeky or not, helps Sophie have an idea as to who I am and what I like.  She loves surprising me by bringing me a Batman comic from my shelf, it helps her in the context of learning what my favorite things are, what I love and what I like to do.

It’s tempting to post endless stories about her, add a million Facebook statuses about her because she’s very funny and I am constantly amazed at what she does and says.  But I also know easy how that can turn into overkill so I try to limit Sophie stuff unless it’s just awesome or ties into something that I would normally talk about on this blog, namely comics and drawing.

This week’s post is a little of both.  It shows a conversation she and I had a couple weeks ago.  It’s also a chance to play around with a different style.

Enjoy.  And Happy Birthday, Sophie.

My three year old daughter, Sophie, draws.  She draws a lot and I am always excited to see what she creates since she sees the world in her own way and then recreates it on paper.  It’s fun to see her draw the cat and get the proportions all wrong, but remember to draw the exact number of toes the cat has.  And I am sure she sees the drawing and it looks EXACTLY like the cat.

Last week she made a puppet.  It’s not really a puppet, it’s a popsicle stick with googly eyes glued to it, but she tells me it’s a puppet.

And here it is:

Okay, so she’s not Jim Henson, and maybe it’s because she’s my daughter, but I think this is pretty darn good.  She told me it’s a monster puppet and was very proud of it.

I put the puppet on my desk and I look it at it quite a lot and wonder what she thinks it looks like.  I see a popsicle stick with googly eyes and some black squiggly lines for hair, but she seems a monster.

So I drew what I think she sees:

Cruel to the Sensitive Kind

So I wrote a comic strip.  And then I thought about it for a long time if it fit within Uptown Girl’s world.  See, Uptown Girl’s world has some pretty structured boundaries.  Aliens?  No.  Ghosts?  Yes.  Time Travel?  Maybe.  Talking Animals?  No.

But in the end I decided it was a funny enough strip to draw.  And here it is:

In my head, this was a Rocketman strip with him talking to his shaving cream and not wanting to shave his goatee off.  I figured this would work well within Rocketman’s skewed world, as he has spoke to other non-human things in the past, particularly Boris the Spider, the arachnid that lives in his apartment.  I said talking animals were a ‘no’, not talking bugs.

But I decided that this would be funnier as a Ruby strip.  I figured if a bottle of shaving cream spoke to Rocketman, he’d try to show everyone.  Uptown Girl would chalk it up to working too much before she started therapy.  Ruby would just take it in stride.

Once you open the door to talking inanimate objects, it’s tough to put it away.  Which is why I have never really broken down the fourth wall.  But something like this will be easy to resist the constant joke.  Some of my favorite ‘Peanuts’ strips involved the Kite Eating Tree, who often had a cheshire grin to him.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this strip.  I think it’s the last page I am going to add to ‘Little Adventures’ which is now 200 pages.  ‘Little Adventures’ will be out in spring 2012.

Please Stand By

So last week I posted two pretty groan inducing comics.  Written in the spur of the moment, inspired, if you will.  It felt good to bang those comics out so I could get them out of my system and get back to the gloomy, dark world of the third graphic novel.

But I guess I wasn’t done.  So here is one more comic that I am sure is worthy of an Eisner:

And I colored it!  BADLY.

Hopefully next week we can return from all this nonsense.

Out Of Nowhere

I heard last night that ‘Slaughterhouse 5′ by the late, great Kurt Vonnegut took 25 years to write.  25 years!  It’s not my favorite Vonnegut book but there you have it.  Sometimes things take forever to write.  Sometimes they take no time at all and they come from almost out of nowhere, like the two cartoons below.
The first one was written in my head from the time it took to settle into a parking space to the time it took to shut off my car.  It was like a light switch going off, inspired by a news story on NPR.

It’s not ‘Slaughterhouse 5′ by any means, but it is better than ‘The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo’.  OOH BURN!

This other one was inspired by my wife who just started attending cosmetology school.

So there you have it.  Two kinda lame comics that took about 7 seconds to write…but do a pretty decent job of capturing the spirit of Uptown Girl.