Magnus... THE ROBOT FIGHTER!!!

Okay, so there was this older comic book character named Magnus. He was very high concept back for that time in that while other superheroes fought all sorts of different variations of evil, Magnus had a specialty. Yes, in theory he could fight tyrants, thugs, and mad scientists but he did not. No, instead Magnus focussed the core of his fighting activity towards the asswhooping of robots. Why robots? Who cares, Magnus was around to fight them and them almost exclusively. That's why I did this drawing showing Magnus doing just that.

Here's the pencils


Here's the inks


Here's the thing all done


I don't feel like labeling the whole thing but I'll just give a wordbank of characters and you can place the names where you may.

Terminator, Iron Giant, Robocop, Astro Boy, Rosie, Maria, A femmebot, Optimus Prime, that kid from A.I. whatever his name is, the Bad Robot, Bender, R2D2, C3P0, A.W.E.S.O.M.O., Alpha, and the robot from Lost in Space. I know its not a complete list of all robots and you may be wondering, "What about robots like Data, Gort, and Wall-E?" Well my answer to you is this: I don't want Magnus to fight them. Because he would crush them. And I don't want that. Thanks for looking.

The X-Men

Here's an X Men drawing I did. This one I've been wanting to do for awhile because growing up I loved the X Men. Of course I didn't read the comics, but the cartoon, that was the shit. I remember drawing on the back of papers from kindergarten my own stories with the X Men that said things like, "They all think beast is dead but Magneto knows he is not but they all think he is."

It's brilliant, I know.

All the characters seemed so awesome back then but looking back now the costumes seem a bit well... "dated". Basically, I cut out any pouches, crazy shoulder pads, and random straps around legs and arms and I think they look really iconic. But that might just be because I loved the show so damn much.

Hey look, I drew Batman and Robin. Unusual..

I think I've drawn Batman and Robin pretty much more than any comic book characters ever. That's just because they are awesome. When I'm bored, and I scribble stuff, most likely my doodles are of them two. It's just like... an uncontrollable urge. Some people can't help but hit people over the head unconscious, drag them home, carve them up into pieces dipping parts that would identify them into a vat of acid and eat their flesh but I draw Batman and Robin instead. Anyhow, here is the latest picture of them. This is an homage or swipe or whatever you'd personally like to call it of an iconic Carmine Infantino drawing


And here is mine.

The pencils:


The inks:

The flats:

And finally the finished one with lots of airbrushing and effects to hopefully distract people from the fact that its not all that well drawn.


Thanks for looking.

The Defenders

Here's another collaboration I did with the San Joaquin Graphic Arts League (yes, that's what we call ourselves, impressive huh?) This time around we decided to do The Defenders because it was another super hero team that consists of four reasonably popular superheroes. Technically, it was my pick and that was all the logic I put behind it. Next time up we'll be doing either Jem and the Holograms or the characters from Wizard of Oz fighting flying monkeys. It should be awesome. Anyhow, here are the individual drawings that I received from Frank Stone who was kickass enough to ink all of the drawings for us.



Okay, so this is my Silver Surfer...



This is Mike Dimayuga's Doctor Strange... To see more of Mike's work go here



This is Frank Stone's Namor the Submariner... To see more of Frank's work go here



And last but most popular, this is Betsy Luntao's Hulk. To see more work of Betsy's work go here

I would also like to note that Frank named all of these files DefJam_charactername which I think was pretty hip of him. I certainly didn't think of it ever the process of working on this jam picture until it was pointed out to me by him in his file naming.

After some coloring and cutting and pasting and frankly, sorcery, I was able to come out with this here...




I was going for like a cool mid nineties alternative feel with the unsaturated colors and the squished font. I think it worked. And it conjures up the idea of bananas I think because it's so damn yellow. That's still pretty edgy and stuff, I think. Bananas, I mean.

Thanks for looking.

A Casual Stroll Through the Lunatic Asylum

So here's a picture I did on Halloween almost entirely to have something to do on Halloween.



Something fun, I mean.



It's festive though, right? They're all scary and stuff.

Avengers Assemble! If you feel like it... No hurry....

So it's been awhile since I posted anything and I should post more not less. That's just how things should work. Anyhow, here's a drawing of the Avengers I did awhile ago. I thought it came out pretty good. Because I made an effort to remember, here are the steps I took to put this one together.

The pencils...



The inks...


aaand I'm done.

It's Supergirl

I have no idea what it is, and it's certainly not some kind of perversion, but some of my best pictures are when I draw Supergirl. Why? Not quite sure but here are two older drawings I've done of her that I particularly like...




Granted those are older so they actually are not that good in comparison to things I do now but I still think they are pretty decent in comparison to the stuff I was doing then. You know what I'm saying? Of course you do. I just think its impossible not to draw Supergirl pleasantly. That's just her factory setting, you have to work to make her look pissed off or slutty but a real sweet looking Supergirl? That's just fun to do in between scowling Batman and enraged Wolverines.

Anyhow, My buddy Frank Stone who is a phenomenal artist was saying I should bring him something to ink so I thought about it and figured If there was one thing I wanted to draw back when I was sketching for something to bring him, it was Supergirl and so...



That's exactly what I did. I'll note it was a long time between the Supergirl holding a puppy drawing up there so I felt I could do the whole "somebody holding an small animal" thing again without any guilt. Also I sort of forgot about it till just right now. So I handed that off to Frank at the aforementioned artwalk and he sent me this email the next day.



Now, I dunno about you, but I thought that was awesome. Probably the best inks over any of my drawings primarily because they were not done by me. Huge thanks to Frank again, and again you can see more of his work over here... So later on that night I was able to get this done.



Look at that, the picture from start to finish. That's pretty rare with me to do that kind of breakdown. Might do it again sooner because it looks kinda cool all laid out like that.

Just another Artwalk...

So my club, the San Joaquin Graphics Art League (or some such variation of those words)missed out on last month's art walk and we thought we should go ahead and make it out to this month's. When we arrived we were a bit apprehensive as there were no other artists in the plaza and we were not exactly sure if the art walk was actually being held that day but after talking to one of the people working there they assured us that it was so we unloaded all of our stuff. Unlike the previous attempts at setting up at art walk, there were no designated spaces on the plaza which was a relief. Not that we don't appreciate being able to participate in art walk, but the month before last they had placed us outside of the movie theater courtyard and down the street in front of an abandoned building. So not the most traffic heavy of areas. That day we were told we could set up in the plaza granted there was nobody else in the spot we wanted and i believe nobody else showed up that month either so that made it easy.

The weather was nice. There was no loud band for most of the day until there was one, a Christian worship group that was somewhat confused as to what direction they should go in. They had no drummer so they resorted to playing around drumbeats generated by the keyboardists super fancy Casio number but even then they stretched that poor little instrument to the breaking points crossing genres from stereotypical hokey Christian worship band singing tunes about Jesus being awesome, Carlos Santana covers, and at one point playing the backing music for a Christian rapper who brought the audience of literally four or five vanned in fans to the brink of spiritual reawakening. I was given an invitation to an event that boasted "The Promise of Miracle Healing is for you too!" I some how doubt it. It's not that I think the people that believe in Miracle Healing are ridiculous, I heard testimonies from the band that all of them had been miraculously healed of their crippling drug addictions with the wonders of Miracle Healing. Oh wait, I actually kind of do.

But the point is, I made a drawing that day. See?



I love drawing Batman. I love drawing Robin. Together? Psh, can't get enough of it. Especially all fast and unrefined like this. It is to me, what crippling drug addictions were to all those people that are being Healed Miraculously.

What's this? Oh look, another collaboration...

So here's a collaboration I did with my friend Frank Stone who's work you can see here http://fredmast.deviantart.com/ Now this was done almost over a year ago if not more but I came across these drawings not too long ago and remembered that I was supposed to put them together and color them up so I did just that. I think it should be apparent if you've seen any of my other art on this blog that I drew the very crude looking Question drawing...



and Frank being the classy refined guy that he is drew the Blue Beetle...


We are supposed to be doing another one of these pretty soon with two of out other friends and you can believe when that's done I'll post it up here with a little more expediency this time no doubt. We'll be doing the Fantastic Four this time.

And Then I Got a Tablet...

Alright, so here's the thing. Back when I first started coloring images on my computer using gimp, I never thought I would progress to the point where I would even fathom investing in a tablet because it was essentially just a hobby. It would feel like buying a grand piano because I felt like playing around on a keyboard every now and then. And I have no desire to do that either. But a tablet just seemed like such a professional refined tool that I would have never really imagined employing one back in the days when I didn't know that by saving a file with a .psd extension I could save multiple layers. It was just above my head back when I did this, my first attempt at digital coloring.

Ugh, I'm sort of embarrassed to post that here but I guess it shows how far I have come if I used to think that was pretty good, right?

Anyhow, more to the point, here is a picture I did of my friend Brandon's design for the Carrie Kelly incarnation of Robin which can be seen here...

You'll notice this probably isn't one of my better drawings but the thing about this one is that it's completely done on the tablet which led me to a couple conclusions about my using a tablet to do art. 1) I can do it for the most part and it'll look pretty decent. 2) It's time consuming as all hell. Now that might not be the case for everyone but I've found that when given the option I will work very close in on the image and what I get is a few good spots of the drawing that probably don't pull together very well in the end. But more importantly I've come to the conclusion that I have some awesome friends because I didn't take any great financial risk in acquiring this tablet, but it was given to me because they were already using tablets and this one was passed down to me. Awesome, right? I thought so.

Justice League Of America

So here's some coloring I did for my good friend Craig Cermak. He was going up to Chicago Con or whatever the hell that particular convention is called this last week and asked me to color a pin up he did of the big seven. Anyhow, this is the result.

I thought it looked pretty good. I think I'm starting to get a little better at coloring but some parts still annoy me, I wont bother saying which parts because really, who cares all that much? Probably not you and certainly not me by now.

To see more of Craig's art check out his deviantart page here...

Some Recent Drawings

Let's talk about... Student of the Week.

In the fifth grade I had a teacher named Mrs. Alexander. I can remember my teachers names all way back till about fourth grade by this point and I'm not sure how far back other people can remember but considering I'm about 21 and I don't blank back a good... ten years now, I'd say I'm doing pretty good.

But I was talking about Mrs. Alexander.

I'm talking about her because like most primary school teachers, she had an activity that was meant to boost her pupils' self esteem by choosing one amongst them to become student of the week.

Ah, student of the week. It was a hell of a title because it implied that whoever was chosen was the most special of them in the entire class room, nay the school, NAY THE WORLD! Could you imagine how special that student would be? It wouldn't matter how inferior you may have viewed yourself in the mirror or how other students would treat you on the playground or at lunch or during group time. That shit was unimportant! Being student of the week transcended that trivial grade school nonsense that would make other kids feel bad about themselves. It was magnificent!

A young Ramon Villalobos would hide his anticipation for weeks and then months until it was his turn to take his rightful place in front of the Recess lines. He would daydream while other students got to keep a journal of the dirty stuffed mascot (Bernie) that the student of the week would take in his or her charge about the far more magnificent journal entries he would transcribe.

There would be no mind-numbingly mundane adventures of a family trip to grandma's house or an afternoon at the park watching siblings play baseball in the the inconsequential town little leagues. That was kid stuff! A young Ramon Villalobos thought tirelessly about the things he saw on TV and transpose himself into the blatant Blair Witch Project rip off specials about aliens and come up with a fantastical adventure that would blow the entire fifth grade class away. It would come time for them to write special compliments about him and draw pictures for him and the other students would pontificate about how cool he was, how funny he was, and of course, how good of a friend he was. Sure, when it was time to write compliments for his classmates, there was always a feeling of awkwardness as he always got the sneaking suspicion that the other kids in class didn't like him or trust him. He would scribble something and try to relate his compliment to the story they had shared in front of class. He'd write, "That sounded fun. You're[sic] story was good. You are a good student of the week. I hope you have a good week last week." Like the unintelligible little liar the public school system had brought him up to be and hope whoever was on the receiving end of the compliment didn't notice his insincerity too much. That they didn't realize that the story sounded boring, that it was awful, that he or she was in fact a HORRIBLE student of the week, and that he could give a crap what kind of week they had. He'd squirm as they would receive a bound book of compliments that following Monday of class and it was time to choose a new student of the week.

How Mrs. Alexander appointed a student of the week always seemed to mystify me. It was seemingly random but such an important decision could not have been handled with such indifference. She would have been toying with fate to choose a name out of the hat. No, there was a method of her madness that always evaded me. Until, of course, I was chosen. At that point I understood that with two months left of school, she had ran out of truly special students and was scraping at the bottom of the barrel before she could end the charade and rack her brain for other ways to fill an elementary school week that could keep the students busy while she sat in a corner wondering why she had a doctorate in Mathematics. I remember finally being chosen after my equally uninteresting friends and even after Anthony, one of the bigger class misfits. My only saving grace was that I was not chosen after Heather, easily the biggest reject in the fifth grade. No, two months away from the cut off point was good enough for me.

Unfortunately, the stuffed animal adventure was not in the cards for me and I had to hope my own natural charisma would shine through in my less than exciting retelling of my week spent with Bernie. To this day, I forget exactly what happened with me and that damned sack of disease ridden cotton but I do know that whatever it was that happen, I didn't sell it to the best of my abilities. I was dead on my feet, floundering as a sea of fifth graders stared at me bored, heads tipping back and I tried to pass the time allotted for student of the week.

And I did.

The real tragedy of my tenure as student of the week was still to come though. I knew that I should expect my book of compliments to be filled with thoughtless gestures, obligatory kudos that came with being the student of the week but I didn't earn through being a legitimately interesting person. But that's not really what happened. Yes there were a few dollar store sentiments (the same I scribbled out on a weekly basis) in the stack of recycled line paper, but to my surprise a number of students commented about what a great artist I was. How fantastic I could draw. How they wished they had my talent.

But I didn't buy it.

I probably never will.

Let's Talk About... Star Trek

So I saw Star Trek today and usually I'm not one to go all, "Let me share my feelings about this movie I like so much." But what can I say? I'm compelled. And, a little tired and lacking the proper restraint to just turn off my computer and go to sleep.

The movie starts off to a pretty great start. There is an Enterprise looking ship named the Kelvin investigating a weird lightning storm disturbance that they can't explain and onboard is none other than George Kirk. Who? Well that's Captain Kirk's dad who seems to be every bit bad ass as Kirk without any of the charisma but who the hell is Captain Kirk without charisma? (coughRikercough) Nobody that's who. Despite my having no real feelings for this dude who takes helm of this vessel after the first captain is all "Oh no, this Romulan dude with a face tattoo just stabbed the shit out of me," the scene that follows of his pregnant wife evacuating the ship whilst giving birth to her son and talking to George as he stays aboard to fight as his ship gets epically owned by those aforementioned tattooed Romulans is pretty damn moving. It could have been the over the top score or the flashy colors that were quite frankly, blowing my mind, but I thought it worked tremendously well and I got a little choked up as little James Tiberius Kirk was being named and his father knew he was right about to die.

From there, we get some shots of little Kirk stealing his step dad's car and rocking out to Beastie Boys and a scene where little Spock beats up a bunch of dickish little Vulcans for talking about his mom. You'd think its the 90s but it's not. Then of course, they age to right where they should be so the movie can get on with it. I'll be a little more ambiguous about the plot from here because that's entering some mighty dangerous spoiler territory and in the interest of those of you who want to watch this movie based on what I have to say about it (ha!)

What I will say though, is that walking into this movie, I had a pretty fair amount of faith in Zachary Quinto as Spock but I knew my enjoying this movie would be totally dependent on what I thought of Chris Pine as Captain Kirk. If he sucked this movie would suck and if he rocked this movie will rock and I am pretty happy to say his performance much more closely resembles the latter option. Yeah, I'm sold. Chris Pine fucking ruled in this movie. Without doing a lame Shatner impersonation, Pine walks a very fine line between confidant and asshole and manages to be likable whilst getting his ass handed to him in nearly every fight of the movie and being a dick poor little Spock. It was the small things like the way he tilted his head and gave really breif pauses and subtle but odd emphasis to certain words that made him acceptable as Captain Kirk as the real thing is off doing the Raw Nerve and is not... you know... a spry twenty year old that is going to jump around shit like he's Batman the way Chris Pine does.

Which brings me to another thing I liked about this movie. Star Trek has been done a thousand times by now but I must confess, only The Original Series and Next Generation did I feel were worth my time. I felt like beyond that, they just tried too hard to be fresh and new and when I saw ads that said this isn't your grandpas star trek and star trek isn't JUST for nerds any more I got a bit uneasy in the stomach. Roger Ebert's big criticism of the movie seemed to stem from the fact that where the Original Series offered a lot of interesting moral dillemas, social commentary, and philisophical view points expressed in the form of oddly painted humanoid aliens, the new movie has shit blowing up. And that's a valid point but I don't think this movie was without its "ideas." Like the first Planet of the Apes, this Star Trek film seems to have a pretty strong question about free will and becoming who you are supposed to be. Sure, that's been done to death, but how many times has it been done with lasers and people with pointy ears? Don't answer that. Ebert seems to have been liking a lot of movies where the characters spell out the points of the movies in these big budget movies that are supposed to appeal to geeks. He loved The Dark Knight where they speak like characters in a Greek tragedy and pretty bluntly express their motivation which I can overlook because I get they aren't doing it for me. He similarly loved Watchmen for spelling out in plain speech all of its big ideas that were in the comic book but I'm not sure always needed to be said in a live action movie. Then again, a lot of the Watchmen stuff went right over a lot of people's heads anyways so maybe it wasn't so plain... Nevertheless, Star Trek brings more ambiguity to these ideas and I applaud them for giving the audience a tad bit more respect than to talk down to them like seven year olds the way I felt when Joker would break into a "we are so totally alike, Batman" monologue.

The point is, this movie adds a lot of the action and the shit exploding that the other series never really were able to have because of technology or budget issues or lack of vision or whatever. They just never had it and because the movies were a little drier than say, Star Wars, I think a lot of people rightfully couldn't get into it.

There are a lot of mythos to Star Trek that I think makes people more hesitant to watch movies called Star Trek but J.J. Abrahams and crew seem to wrap everything up in a shiny package and still maintain a lot of the elements that those damn Trekkies will love. I'm not the biggest fan relative to those crazed lunatics that get parodied all the time, but in the short time I've been into Star Trek, I've gotten pretty damn well acquainted with it and this movie does not let that part of me down.

So anyhow, Instead of trying to write a coherent review (not my strong point) Instead, I'll make a list of things that were awesome about it.

- Simon Pegg as Scotty. I was going into this with the totally biased standpoint that this would be the highlight of the movie to me because I love Scotty and I love Simon Pegg so... its just put two and two together, isn't it? He was just the same drunken, crazed, lunatic genius bastard that I expected to and wanted to see.
- Kirk destroying that Kobayashi Maru test, I didn't see that coming and it had the audience laughing like crazy.
- Spock Prime's first spoken line in the movie. Holy crap, I got a little teary eyed... but that might have been just because I had other things going on in my head.
- Checkov tweaking out and a bunch of people saying his name so it sounded like "jackoff"
- Sulu being a bad ass. Very rarely does fencing come in handy. I think when you have a super bad ass folding sword, and you are fighting on a platform that is shooting a giant lazer underneath you it just adds a little more drama to the occasion.
- Captain Kirk getting a proper heroes quest. Because every iconic character needs his very own hero quest Joseph Campbell style.
- That big freaking Romulan ship. Correct me if I'm wrong but didn't the Romulan's with their cloaking devices used to be a little more subtle than creating massive black holes that their massive jacked up space ship that was constantly turtle-poking around in. Nice touch, doing a direct 180.
- McCoy. That is all.
- Not a Klingon in sight. Don't get me wrong, I love Klingons. They are such violent assholes, how can you not love them? It's just... they are so the stereotypical Star Trek bad guy. Romulan's are a little more off the map and won't turn off the people who probably associate Klingons too much with the overly geeky Trek image.
- Spock beating the living crap out of Kirk. He was just mad because he got so dissed by Kirk. There is a reoccurring trend where if you talk about Spock's mom, he has to go street justice on your ass from now on.
- Winona Ryder not getting beamed properly. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!! What the hell you creepy little Russian!? I thought "You can do dis!"
- That obligatory Red Shirt Casualty. He was sooo dispensable.
- San Francisco getting jacked up. They just can't stay away from Cali, these space dudes.
- The smug satisfaction that this movie looks technically more impressive than ANY Star Wars movie by far and Star Wars has very little breathing room to make a legitimate rebuttal. OWNED.


So anyways, yeah. That's what I thought of the new Trek movie after like a little thinking and no sleep. Totally deserved its positive Tomatometer rating. I'll leave you with this.

Marvel Boy and Oubliette

Brave and the Bold

Weekly drawing thing I am doing that got a little carried away this week. Generally I do sketches but for some reason I finished this one out.

Robin the Boy Wonder

Another month another comicbloc contest for me to waste inordinate ammounts of time on. I managed to sneak a win last month with my star sapphire picture that I despised but I didn't pick that months' challenge, so I had little say in the matter. I did win this months so of course with Battle of the Cowl coming out and all the former boy wonders going all crazy and shit. I have been using nonphoto blue pencils so you'd think this work is cleaner right? Wrong. The awesome nonphoto blue prisma I was using is out of stock where i bought them before which meant i am using these shitty ones that don't erase. Ah well.



Now just add water and throw them all together...

It's a Miserable World.

Walked through Delta college and noticed a lot of people sitting idly by. From my experiences there are a lot of lazy students at this school that would rather socialize than go to classes, makes for a horrible environment. I saw a group of black students shouting at each other. Saw a group of white students shouting at a mentally handicapped man. Saw a different mentally handicapped man shouting at no one at all. Pretty horrible environment for learning. Still probably not why about half of the students drop out.

At Delta, there is a child care service where people can leave children during the day while they go do any number of things. I do not judge, some people just need children taken care of to work, so be it if they work the system to facilitate this. Good for them. Saw a mother picking up her daughter and the teacher told her mother that she will miss the daughter when she graduates to kindygarten [sic]. It's not the first time I've heard kindergarten called this and recalled my experiences of learning absolutely nothing in kindergarten because while I am not a Spanish speaker, because of my ethnicity I was placed in a Spanish speaking class. It was probably there I developed antisocial behavior. The word "kindygarten" annoys me. It's too cutesy for my taste and I wish I didn't listen to other people's conversations.
I saw a woman pushing a stroller with a lit cigarette in her hand over the baby as it cried. I chuckled. Maybe it will get cancer before ever having an opportunity to enter kindygarten. The woman and the man with her looked deviant. The woman wore a pinstriped black business suit and the man black slacks and a red shirt with a black tie. This would have been fine had the man not had a shaved head with flame tattoos on his temple with a long black goatee that made him look something like Anton LaVay. Woman walked into Sears and the man stayed outside with the baby who no doubt appreciate not suffering any longer the side effects of second hand smoke. Good for the baby.

Let's talk about... Wondercon

So how was Wondercon 09, my first ever convention of all time, ever? Well, it was pretty damn wonderful. I mean, the day started off great and everything went according to the plan, which is rare. But Adam and I planned to leave my house at 6:45 to get to my uncle's house at 7:45 to get to the con at 9:00 where we would meet up with our hosts from Tao Toys which we conveniently saw as soon as we stepped foot out of the parking lot and things seemed to be going a little TOO smoothly.

That's when it seemed like our spirits pretty much fell to shit.

Instead of having like... a table and perhaps a chair to sit on and the poster we paid 9 whole bucks to have printed out hanging up behind us, we had nothing. The booth that Tony and the gang set up was pretty well set up to suit their needs at the convention and I was pretty damn impressed by their effeciency in comparison to some other booths at the show yet for our goal of setting up our fresh off the printers run of 100 comics and maybe like a place for me to do free sketches, it was pretty dismal. Not that I blame them at all, mind you.

This isn't a bitch fest and I am extraordinarily grateful for Tony, Nick, Hollis, and ESPECIALLY Logan for helping us out as much as they could and getting us into the show for free. It's just, when you spend a coulple hours crammed in a corner with a thin table that had legs that couldn't properly fold out into a stable 90 degree angle hoping it doesn't tilt over and all your comics will be crushed by something while conventioneers pass by you knocking into your feet as you try to do free sketches for all the people that have no idea why you are sitting partially in the isle shilling comic books in the vendor's area when the artist alley is probably a more appropriate location... well let's just say you get to feeling a little glum. A lot glum at times.

Luckily, there were litterally DOZENS of awesome people who did come up to the table to purchase a copy of Psychotronik Comics Presents #1 from Adam and myself. That made me happy and reaching into the pouch of my sweater and feeling the wad of one dollar bills from sales pretty much alleviated what could have otherwise been a pretty shitty state of mind. That was the problem, you see? There were simply too many people, who cared far too much about the comic I was presenting for me to feel too horribly upset about the convention. No matter how much I would have liked to be a pissy little asshole in San Francisco today, it was pretty much impossible.

Also, while there some really awesome stuff happened. The team of Adam and Logan were all over the Moscone center shoving PCP into the hands of a few highly respected comic book artists and writers undubitably trashed the book once we weren't looking. Who are these creators? Oh, do the names Erik Larsen, Brian Azzarello, and MIKE FUCKING MIGNOLA ring a bell? They should. Because they rock. Mignola was even gracious enough to sign my copy of Gotham by Gaslight and a badass Legends of The Dark Knight issue he did. Azzarello signed the inside of my Doctor 13 trade (which ranked among the top 5 trades in my collection even before it was signed). Unfortunately, Jim Lee wasn't there Saturday so I couldn't get my hardcover of All Star Batman and Robin signed and I had totally forgot Ryan Sook was going to be there, I really wanted to get something signed from him too and my friend Mike showed me an awesome sketchbook he was selling, I would have probably splurged and bought one for myself had I known... Bastard me.

Anyways, that's the jist of it. This is so late because I'm a lazy bastard.

Here's a sketch that didn't get given away at the con.

Frank and Elenore

So as some of you know, and given that probably no one but like a few people who work on the comic with me, I do a comic book called "Frank and Elenore In..." for Pyschotronik Comics with one of my best friends and the super talented Adam Messinger. It's pretty awesome if I do say so myself and its a lot of fun...

Anyways, the point of this blog is that, that comic is part of an anthology ingeniously called Psychotronik Comics Presents and in that we have rotating covers where every issue one of the artists does the cover for his story. Well number two is mine so I thought I'd share that cover.

After being far too classy and original the first time around, Brandon, the editor in chief type indivdual asked me to do another one. Of course I bitched about it and tried to avoid more work but he insisted I didn't capture the tone of my own comic and asked me to reconsider.

I did.

So this is the result of my humongous cave in. An overworked mess.

Which became a colored overworked mess.


Brandon is gonna dress it for me but is holding out for new art from the other contributors. I await seeing that because it will mean we are inches closer to publishing number two of this thing. I'm hoping i can have it distressed a little so it looks like an older looking comic the way they have been doing on the varients for Death Defying Devil... other things too, I'm sure but I just can't think of any others, those just are at the top of my head. The point is make it look like an old comic.

Soo... yeah.

SUBMIT

The following is my artistic statement for a sculpture class. My "art" will all fit this general theme. I am going to share it with you.

SUBMIT.

From birth, people in modern society are taught to believe that individuality is the ultimate goal of self growth. To be special. To be unique. To be loved.

Ironic that, considering the social equation that is supposed to produce a product of idiosyncratic behaviors is the same that creates the rampant conformity that spreads through civilization like the poisonous venom coursing through the veins of a snakebite victim.

But why is that so bad? If this contradiction should be resolved, why not eliminate the indiviuality that is throwing the balance of things asunder?

Submit.

Submit to the current sociopolitical landscape.

Submit to the bitter reality that there is no control, people are just groups of atomic firestorms going through the motions set into effect by the big bang.

Submit to beautifully uniformed chaos.

Submit to the vacuum of truly original human thought and submit to the concept of a universal subconscious that controls us all.

No one is special. No one is unique. No one is loved.

There is no real meaning of art. There is no real meaning of god.

There is no Jesus Christ. No Ward Cleaver. No Superman.

Submit.

Everything is going to be okay. Nothing could be any other way.

Submit.

Submit.

SUBMIT.

The Seven Soldiers of Victory

This is another contest I entered just for the fun of entering contests and it's a pin up of the original seven soldiers of victory. The theme was golden age and I think the group represents everything awesome about the golden age of comics. You got the big time pulp hero in Crimson Avenger,

you got the western stories with Vigilante,


the fantasy with Shining Knight,

you've got the superheroes with a child being put into extreme danger... and tights in Star Spangled Boy and Stripsey,then of course the same thing but with bows and arrows in Green Arrow and Speedy. Because archery is badass!

Hmm, if the blue turned just a bit ago, that is totally not intentional. Sometimes I just can't control the font that appears on my screen. Hope that isn't a link to nowhere...

Anyways, so I put these all together with some magic and no computer work whatsoever and this is the end product.
Feel free to click it and see its true size. I think it will show in full size anyways, its done so in the past.

Anyways, hope all of you (YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE) like it and stuff.