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.

Victim of Resizings...

Well, I had some pretty big pipe dreams of entering this project rooftop Batman 2.0 challenge thing that's going to go down soon and I spent a lot of time working on a high resolution image of Dick Grayson as Batman with a cheesy Japanese hero/batmobile/batman beyond mash up of ideas that probably didn't work out as well as I would have hoped they did... Anyways, I uploaded the bastard on photobucked and say how silly it looked shrunk down so I went into Gimp which is what I use to color and work on it at 427 pixels wide which isn't very big... then I save OVER the psd file! Argh, huge headache and now all that high res work I did is essentially ruined with only a rougher draft left as a relic of the image that I had going. I am going to use that one to show anyone reading this blog here and now:


Course you click on it and see it at its full size.

Anyways, so here was the one I ended up emailing to the fine folks over there at project rooftop.


So there you have it. It's not very different from the first one and its not like extremely tiny but the angle is different the background is lighter and there are just some minor differences that I was getting really caught up over that became my undoing in the end when I couldn't go back to the pre-image scale version.

I probably won't even be in the little mentioned ones because the more I look at this, the more I see everything that's wrong with it.