Category: Toons

July 26, 2004 /
  • Gave away what, 60 copies of HONOR? Something like that. Two of them I traded for other ashcans (Yeperynye and The Last Sane Cowgirl), which I totally count as sales. And every copy given away was to somebody whose work I (or Will or Stephen) really respect, which is a worthwhile transaction, in my opinion.
  • Left my hat at Preview Night. Never got it back.
  • Got to meet a lot of cool people from the online.
  • Cool people I met from the online all had a curious need to run off to important, distant engagements within seconds of meeting me. Either I smell bad or I’m Creepy Interweb Fan, or (probably) both.
  • Had a really good time with Monica, Will, Stephen and Maria. And Stephen’s lady Erin, at whose residence we crashed, is maybe the coolest person on the whole planet.
  • Ran out of plane-ticket money and was unable to visit Leonard and Sumana. That was a pretty stupid mistake, and I feel really bad about it. Hopefully, a post-student-loan trip is in the works.
  • Tycho and Gabe were the coolest, most professional people at the whole freaking Con.
  • Speaking of Tycho and Gabe, I had one of the world’s most random encounters: passing by their booth, I recognized Paul Mattingly, a great guy who was in Richmond Children’s Theatre with me a billion years ago and who now works as a Klingon and Second City understudy (!) in Vegas. I literally hadn’t seen him in over a decade. He even has a site, The Famous Paul, though I understand that’s mostly a placeholder for the moment.
  • Getting to California by train was interesting, right enough, and I’m glad we tried it. but the people who work for Amtrak seem unhappy and unhelpful and it’s very bumpy. I think I’ll pretty much be flying from here on out.
  • I thought about taking a whole bunch of stuff to get signed, but eventually decided against it. I had a better idea. Thanks to the unlined pocket Moleskine my family got me for my birthday, I now possess what can only be referred to as

    The Greatest

    SKETCHBOOK

    Ever In The History Of Time

    which basically means I win.

I managed to take a whole roll of film, which is good, considering I frequently manage to wish I had a camera while holding one. Probably more updates after I get that developed, but considering I still haven’t posted the pics from my San Francisco trip in February, one shouldn’t hold one’s breath.

I highly recommend the Brother HL-1435

July 18, 2004 /

There exist exactly 100 copies of HONOR, the first comic book anthology from The Fake Middle Names Collective. They are in a box. I helped make a comic book! Life goal #22 gets a BIG FAT CHECK!

We were supposed to print it this morning and leave by 1, and it’s been kind of a torture test on the printer and humans involved, but it’s done. And now Maria, Monica, Will and I roll for Alton, nine hours late but moving fast.

CALIFORNIA HO!

July 16, 2004 /

In two days we’ll be on our way to Alton, and thence to California; I’ll finally be meeting Stephen and Erin and Kris, and a great host of other humans, not to mention buying a great many new comics. And I’ll get to see Leonard and Sumana again! And it’ll be my first cross-country trip on a train! I EXPLODE WITH AWESOMENESS!

It’s strange to think that we’ve been planning this for almost an entire year; I was investigating possible trip companions and talking about prices with Stephen before the last Comic Con was over. My enthusiasm for the trip has yet to diminish even a whit, despite the fact that I’m desperately behind on… The Secret Project.

Which Will already talked about, so I guess I can too. He, Lisa, Stephen and I are putting together an ashcan comic to sell to or throw at Con attendees–something we’ve also been planning for a long time. It’s only natural that I’m not done yet, and will probably be up all night tonight finishing my section. We investigated printing prices (Kinko’s, et cetera), then ended up buying a totally sweet laser printer and an extra high-capacity cartridge for less than it would have cost to get it done at a shop. We’re going to bind it ourselves and sell it cheap, and I’ll probably put at least my section up on this “web site” once I get back and have time. I’m drawing my part based on Stephen’s script, which is a new and interesting experience for me, and I hope I get it right.

April 7, 2004 /

Barry Smith has proposed May Day as 24-Hour Webcomic Day, and I really want to participate. I have a physical need to draw comics again, and I can’t seem to make the opportunities happen, so maybe this will help. I could finally wrap up the neverending “Fire” arc in Xorph and maybe even start the next one. Also, it’s the weekend before my birthday, which means I get to punish myself for being old, and Maria’s going to be cramming for exams anyway–it’s nice to have company (Solitary Confinement notwithstanding).

What I’d really like is to do it with a couple of other comics people, but I don’t see that happening, since my comics people friends are scattered far and wee. I wonder if AIM supports multiple-voice chat. Or if you can do a comics jam on a train.

(For the record, no, I couldn’t do the real 24 Hour Comics Day even if there were a host store in Louisville; apparently all my finals are on April 26th.)

A Special Legacy of Violence and Pain

April 4, 2004 /

BRENDAN ADKINS OF THE CENTO has been awarded FIRST PLACE for COMIC STRIP OR PANEL

Yeah, remember Short Bus? The comic where I used to rip off Penny Arcade jokes and print them in the newspaper? Apparently it was the best comic strip for colleges with under 5000 students in Kentucky last year. Who knew?

It’s nice to have the validation, except that I know nothing about the competition or stakes in KIPA Division B. I may well have been the only entry. Also, this only drives back into my head the fact that I never draw comics anymore, dammit.

January 28, 2004 /

Hey, I show up in a Google News search! Thanks to those plays we did. I mentioned I was going to help out with some plays a while back, didn’t I? They went well. The audiences were small but nice. I only missed one sound cue in six performances, so I feel okay about that.

We debuted our little improv troupe, too, which also went fairly well. We did have to deal with a horrible performance space and karaoke downstairs (we asked them to, oh, turn it down a bit just from 2300 to 2400 hrs, and they agreed, and then turned it way the hell up), but we did well all the same. Our last show, this past Saturday, was probably our best yet. I was glad that was the one to which most of my friends came. I rode Greg the Terminator to Wal-Mart after drinking twelve tubs of movie butter, and Nicole and Richard were psychic. Evan was so emo it hurt (for that matter, Evan was so emo he got a LiveJournal but won’t tell me his name).

On a completely unrelated topic, I really, really need to draw comics again.

January 11, 2004 /

I took a couple chunks of my last vacation days to continue work on the Wall of Glory project, now significantly bigger than that picture shows–it covers a lot of the east side of my room, and has extended onto the door. The numbers so far are twenty-five Penny Arcades, eighteen Checkerboard Nightmares, thirteen AZWPs, three of my own comics, one each from Random Frog Children and Skinny Pandas, and four Grimbleses (you may remember the Grimbles as the only comic that updates as slowly as I do). Oh, and of course the Ninja Assassin Algorithm, which I can’t reprint for fear of its falling into Russian hands.

It’s a pretty great freaking wall. I’d like to make a project of papering my entire room with my favorite comic strips, but it’s going to be hard enough as it is to take these down if I don’t live here in seven months. Plus, eh, I’m kinda tired now.