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.

ˆ Click to enlargenate.

The first one was a lot of fun, so I thought I’d make another. Same size as the first one, also just plain ol’ graphite on paper.

Hmm… looking at this website, so far there’s a lot of black and white going on. Going to have to try adding some colour one of these days…

Started out as a quick lunchtime sketch, then turned into something amusing to finish, and about six panels from finishing I realized it’s such a soft-sell gag, and really dependent on some inside knowledge. But man, how irritating is that - the way the monsters respawn everytime you shut the door? Stupid game.

ˆClick for embiggening!

A fun image I drew up as a birthday present for the baby boy of a friend of mine. It’s pencil on paper, about 20 inches by 9 1/2 inches. I would like to do more of these!

Hey! A detail view!

More and more artists are posting their work on the inter-net, and many of them are using Blogger or services like it. Loads of artists are representing themselves with long, vertical sheets of their work and postings. And then the links and “about” sections are off to the left or right. So if you browse a lot of these pages, you get used to interpreting the way the information is presented, and that’s why I thought I might conform my own website to this format. My website design skills are nothing special, so I don’t need to try to astound a visitor with a new and groundbreaking interface. I might as well make the content as easy as possible to approach without throwing up any interface barriers in the way. So with the blog format, the arrangement of the information should be familiar and easy to digest.

Theoretically, if I use the Categories and Tags properly, that should also make it easy for dudes to get at theoretical posts that theoretically would contain the theoretical content they’re looking for.

But ALSO it will make it so much easier for me to update my website. With the last site, it was so cripplingly imposing to edit anything that I never actually did.  It involved firing up Dreamweaver, cutting up pictures in Photoshop, and then wrangling links to make sure nothing was broken. It was a huge pain in the ass.

This new site uses Wordpress to power all this bloggy-ness, and hopefully that will enable me to post in a more timely fashion. Fortunately, it also allows complete customization, so I’ve been able to modify the look so that it’s not so generic as, say, Blogger pages are.

The downside to that is that it involved learning CSS and enough PHP to assemble Wordpress’ features. Fortunately, they have books on this sort of thing, so that helped. Also extremely helpful, though, were Luc Latulippe and John Martz, both of whom are awesome people (you may recognize some design features from their websites). Additionally, I added Cabel’s “FancyZoom” feature, and so thanks are due to him, too. I also referenced some other Wordpress themes - see the “About” page for more information.