Not only did he have the costume, but he played the piano awesome. The whole convention was awesome. Exhausting, but awesome.

Delilah didn’t take home the Eisner, but I wasn’t surprised or disappointed. Samuel L. Jackson presented the award, so when I heard him read out my name and the title of the comic book… well, I’ve decided to accept that moment as a consolation prize. If anyone has a recording of that, please let me know. I need a new answering machine message.

Flight 5 sold extremely well! Apparently at least 400 copies found loving homes before the end of Saturday, and the pace continued on Sunday. A reasonable guess would be that I was at the table for 66% of my time at the con, which means I would have signed at least 250 copies, each of which would have had a little Delilah or Selim drawing in it. That seems pretty surprising to me. Some pages turned out to have themes or something. If you’re a person that has one of those copies, I’d love to see a scan. Or go post them on the Flight forums.

A lot of people got meeted! Some of them I’d never met before, and others I felt like I’d known for a long time on the inter-nets, but had never met in person. Hey - turns out everyone was really awesome. I was surprised to run into a few folks from Vancouver, the most surprising of which happened at the airport. A friend I worked with at a studio five years ago sat across from me while waiting at the gate, which was surreal since he had moved to Japan, and I hadn’t heard from him since, and he had been at SDCC the whole time. WEIRD.

There was a lot of great stuff to pick up, of course. Notably, I grabbed a beautiful print by Vera and a couple t-shirts from Nucleus (more awesome dudes to hang out with!). I also developed a weird fixation on Revoltech figures, and brought home a couple of those. Lots of video game companies were demoing their stuff on the floor, too, and it was exciting to get some good first-hand experience with LittleBigPlanet, Mirror’s Edge, and Battlefield Heroes. This fall will be a very non-productive time!

Another awesome experience was meeting Travis Charest for the second time. The first time had been in Vancouver about fifteen years ago. I had taken a portfolio of really crap, really high-school drawings to get his opinion on, and he was a lot nicer than he could have been. So I took the opportunity to thank him for his kindness. He said, “let me guess - now you’re pencilling X-Men?” and I said, “ahh, no. But here’s my Eisner-nominated comic!” and we laughed together. Hilarity ceased when he asked me to sign the comic. It seems like it took a long time to get the courage to put that pen to paper.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to come by the Flight table and say Hi. It was a lot of fun to meet everyone and chat, and I hope everyone’s enjoying their copies of Flight and/or Constantinople. Also, so many thanks are due to Kazu, Amy, Johanne, and Amy’s Mom for all the crazy work they put into making the con awesome. I felt tired at the end of the day, but I can’t imagine how bushed those hard-working people must have been. I feel spoiled to be able to hang out with you dudes.

I’m heading down to San Diego in about a week’s time because there’s a restaurant in the Gaslamp district that serves one-pound burritos. While there, I may check out the comic-con.

Conveniently, Flight 5 will be coming out, and I may have a story in it. I’m going to hang out with the Flight dudes around the Flight table (it’s booth number 1228). Come by and say hi! Signings are free, kisses are one dollar each. Unless it’s Phil, who charges two.

I’ll also have a couple copies of Treasure of Constantinople there. It’s been nominated for an Eisner award! I think the ceremony’s on Friday night, so come by before then if you’d like to meet Excited Tony, and afterwards if you’d like to meet either Blissfully Happy Tony or Slightly Morose Tony (feel free to wager with your friends).

To liven things up, I think it would be fun to have a Live Reading. I don’t think authors do this very often with comic books, and I can understand why. For those same reasons, I think it would be fun. I haven’t discussed this with the rest of the Flight Crew, but I’ll update here if this becomes a more concrete idea.

I hope to see you there!

ˆ Click for the full-meal-deal

I did a “pinup” for Michel Gagne and issue 9 of his wonderful comic series, Zed. I’m uncomfortable calling it a pinup, since traditionally pinups include gams and/or boobies, and this image includes neither. Nevertheless, it was fun!

Unfortunately, it sounds like Zed’s having some trouble with distribution, and it may be tricky to get ahold of a copy - more info here. It’s worth the trouble, though, especially if you like your action meaty and your effects powerfully rendered. The sense of movement is so strong that you’ll feel like the images are moving on the paper. Enhance this effect by shaking the book up and down, side-to-side, as vigorously as possible.

More Zed:

• Gagne International
  
• The Zed Series

When I redesigned this website, one of the features that I neglected to include was the Tutorials section. This was probably a bad idea, as I’m pretty sure that the majority of the traffic coming into the site was from links to those tutorials. I was asked if they will be re-integrated into the new site design.

Well… no. While the information in the tutorials is solid enough, the organization is not as clean or as useful as I would like it to be. Also, the way I’ve laid out and coded the pages does not easily allow me to rearrange the way the information is presented. It’s all hard-coded HTML and very kludgy, as not only did I not know CSS at the time (ha!), but I barely knew HTML and was really flailing around in Dreamweaver to get it to look right (please, please don’t look at the code). As a bit of a kicker, while all the fundamentals are still valid, I’d like to modify it to reflect upgrades in Photoshop.

Since it needs to be completely reorganized, and doing so is not high on my priority list, it is unlikely that the old tutorials will find their way into the new site any time soon.

But that doesn’t mean I have to take the old ones DOWN. So here they are, but beware — some links will be broken and may mesh weirdly with the rest of this site.

Ye Olde Tutorials

Ah, and for those who don’t know, these tutorials cover:

• Eliminating blue Col-Erase from line drawings
• Understanding print and screen resolutions (DPI)
• Preparing line artwork for colouring
• A really useful method for creating colour schemes that are flexible and easily changeable
• Probably some other fun things.

Much to my great surprise and delight, Delilah Dirk and the Treasure of Constantinople has been nominated for a Will Eisner award, in the “Best Single Issue” category! The full list and other interesting details are located over on the Comic-con website. I owe many thanks to the Eisner Awards judges for including Delilah among some very hot company.

If you haven’t read Constantinople yet, check out the preview here, and the full book is available through Lulu.com.