Archive for June, 2010
15 items.
Tonight, Matt Stout and I recorded another fun Light Box – Illuminating Webcomics Podcast. It should be up a little later on this week for all of you who have e-mailed or Twittered me about the podcast. We just got a little busy last week and had to postpone it until tonight. We had to record tonight as I have another baseball game Thursday night.
Oh… I also keep forgetting to mention this as well… every Wednesday, I do another comic strip for Community MX called “CMX Suite”. The strip appears every Wednesday morning on Community MX’s home page. Why don’t you give it a look today?
That’s all for now. Hope you guys are having a good one today.
-Chris
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This is going to be a very short blog tonight. It’s Sunday evening (LATE Sunday evening) and I just finished playing a nine inning baseball game in 100 degree Northern Virginia humidity. Needless to say, I’m pretty work out by all the things I have been doing for the last couple of weeks. There’s a ton of work on my plate right now…
In some cases, this really has been a tale of two different summers. Last summer, I had my unemployment status hanging over my head like a huge Charlie Brown rain cloud, yet, when ever I went to the park, I had no problems getting base hits all season long. In 24 games (including playoffs), I struck out 3 times and darn near averaged 2 hits a game. This year, now that I AM employed, in less than 10 games so far, I have three hits and one strike out. I’m hotting the ball but not decent enough to find grass or the open spot in the infield.
But really, the funny thing is, I’m pressing big time. I’m trying to duplicate the same things I did last year but I can’t. Last year, baseball was almost the last thing on my mind. Hitting was the last thing on my mind. And yet I hot like wildfire. This year, I SHOULD be completely relaxed but for whatever reason, I’m anxious and nervous and pressing way too hard.
That’s the funny thing about baseball. I’m often accused of way too often of saying how much baseball is like life – but when you go through a tough spot like I’m going through right now, it really is. For example, how many of us try to consciously make really successful and funny strips only to get frustrated when our expectations aren’t being met like we think they should? How many of us go back to the drawing board and try even harder – only to be welcomed when that same kind of frustration double-fold?
But then one night, we simply start drawing or writing without any kind of expectations, and suddenly, you realize you’ve just written the funniest strip you’ve ever done. While not thinking about it, you were able to tap into your subconscious and let it do its work.
I’ve often said dating can be like that too… you never seem to FIND love or a relationship when YOU want it the most, or when you make a conscious effort to force the issue. You always seem desperate, weird, creepy and so on and so on. That’s because you’re not acting relaxed and confident. You’re over-thinking your approach… what line to say… where and when to say it and it always comes off as being flat, insincere or overly thought out.
But then you’re out one night, minding your own business and thinking of anything BUT a relationship when you bump into someone. You strike up an easy going conversation and then, before you know it, the people working at Starbucks are kicking both of you out of their store ‘cuz they wanna go home for the evening.
Can you name some other things in your life where pressing led to really bad results?
Boy, this wasn’t supposed to be very long. Don’t know what happened there – but it’s also proof what happens when you let your mind wonder and not think about things too much.
-Chris
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Sadly, today marks the end of the Rob Anderson & Grace/ Animal Control / Panda Dog Press story arc in Capes & Babes. Hopefully, you find this to be the funniest one of all. And I say that for a very special reason… this was originally going to be the ONLY strip I did the featured Rob. I had the idea of giving him two black eyes and everyone thinking he was wearing some kind of Panda Dog costume or something. And then I realized I needed other strips in order to get to this point.
In a way, it’s sometimes like working on a single strip… you might have the punchline but then you have to figure out how to start and then get to the punchline. This story arc ended up being a lot of fun and I want to especially thank Rob abd Grace for getting kick out of it and having some fun with it too – you never know how people are going to react when you put them in your strip but Rob and Grace couldn’t been bigger sports about the whole thing.
And if I didn’t mention it before… GO CHECK OUT ROB’S BOOK AND WEB SITE AT WWW.PANDADOGPRESS.COMalready, will ya??? You’re gonna love it!
A little bit about the Lightbox Podcast for a moment…
I just wanted to reassure everyone who might be inclined to ask, Matt and I are still doing the Lightbox Podcast. We’ve been a little off schedule as of late because a few of life’s little curve balls were thrown our way. Matt just recently attended a wedding in his home state of Georgia and returned home to find spotty internet coverage in his area. Me? I have a HUGE freelance project that just came my way and, if all goes well. upon completion of said project, I will be purchasing an iPad – that’s my goal anyway.
Our other goal is to continue to record the Lightbox podcast. It’s still a lot of fun and all of the feedback we get from you guys makes it worth. With the summer here though, my schedule usually gets incredibly hectic (thanks to two kids of my own). So if we don’t come out with a Lightbox podcast as frequently as we have in the past, don;t worry or panic. Whenever we miss a week, we usually make up for it the following week by doing an extra special and much longer podcast. If we’re not about to recod something this weekend, we’ll make sure next week’s podcast will be a little longer & we’ll try to do something extra to make up for missing this week’s recording.
Thanks everyone!
-Chris
Every now and then, an artist needs to take a risk and do something he or she has never tried before… they need to do so to challenge themselves and to see if they can push a little farther than they’ve ever tried to go before. It’s sort of like lifting weights… every now and then, you have to put a couple of extra plates on that benchpress just to see of you can really lift the extra weight.
Well, today’s strip is such a thing for me. I haven’t attempted to draw a “comic book page” in a REALLY long time. Now, this isn’t a comic book page but it’s the most complicated Capes & babes strip I’ve drawn yet. Truth of the matter is, I could have easily cut this strip in to two parts and stretched the current “Rob & Grace / Animal Control” story arc out a little longer but I wanted to end their particular arc on Friday and I have the perfect joke to end this arc. That meant, in order to properly tell this particular joke, I needed more panels in order to get to all the elements I wanted AND get to that final panel.
How’d I do?
Oh, and if I didn’t mention it already, you guys REALLY need to check out Rob’s Panda Dog Press website where you can find more information about “Animal Control” and all of his other stuff that he’s got going on. I think you’ll like it. A lot!
So as I mentioned last week on my Facebook & Twitter pages (and even here I think) my Mac G3 iBook finally crashed or completely gave up on me. That’s significant because I was scanning all of my strips with my Mustek A3 USB scanner using my iBook’s OS 9 software. As much of a workhorse as the Mustek scanner is, the only negative thing about it is it never came with OSX drives – and that’s still the case today. I had heard there were a bunch of convoluted ways to get this particular Mustek scanner to recognize and talk to OS X but I could never get those methods to work for me.
As an extreme emergency, I had to pull out my even OLDER PowerPC G3 which was in the garage, re-hook my heavy, cumbersome monitor (that I still had as well) and use THAT for the Mustek scanner. This was an extremely difficult, time consuming and slow process. It was manageable but it was a major pain in the butt. The whole set-up also took an enormous amount of real estate in my already tiny, congested studio of my house. This set up was fine for a week or so but I knew it couldn;t go on much longer than that. So I went looking for something that might be cost effective and suitable to me needs.
Enter the Brother MFC-6490CW Printer, scanner and fax all-in-one device. Office Depot was having a sale on that very same device. The Mustek scanner originally cost me around $150 if I recall – and that’s not including shipping and handling. But right there on the shelf at Office Depot sat a device that was able to scan documents at 11×17″, could color print documents at that same 11×17″ and was Mac OS X compatible all for the low cost of $200. So now it sits in the place where the old Mustek scanner used to sit and it’s connected to my much more up-to-date iMac. This weekend, I’ve finally had the chance to give it a nice little test drive. I haven’t used it a lot this far but from what I have done with it so far, I must say, I’ve been impressed with it so far. What do you think of it so far?
I ask because today’s strip is the first strip I have scanned using the Brother. You tell me… can you tell a difference? I can finally scan in 600 dpi bitmap mode – if I want to. The scanner works a lot faster, scans quieter and generally makes things look a lot better. There’s less corrections to make, there’s less fiddling around with the adjustment settings in Photoshop post scan…
Again, I haven’t given this thing the full “highway, crank it up real fast and see how this thing handles” test drive yet. I’ve only managed to take it for a few spins around the block – but everything I’ve seen so far seems to suggest I’m really going to like this guy for quite a while.
-Chris
I knew sometime during Heroes Con that I wanted to do a strip featuring Rob and his “Animal Control” strip. As this idea kept going ’round and ’round in my head, THIS is what eventually came out of it. Well, not exactly JUST this strip. There is going to be at least one more “Animal Control”-related strip so if you know, see or randomly bumb in to Rob Anderson, let him know he has now become “Flickterized” in Capes & babes today!
-Chris
Shelton Drum, from Heroes Aren’t Hard to Find, people. Or, at least that’s supposed to be Shelton in the first two panels. Usually, when I work on caricatures, I like to have as big of a close-up picture of the person I’m caricaturing but believe it or not, Shelton was a tough guy to find a really good picture for caricaturing – so I did the best I could. Hopefully, you guys will still recognize Shelton. 
Also, on a side note, when it comes to graphic design and illustration, why are there only TWO different settings – Busy and Bored out of my mind? With “Busy”, you have too many projects or too short of a deadline or, even worse, too many projects and an unbelievable deadline.
On the other hand, there’s “Bored out of your mind” where you wonder if you’re EVER going to get another paying job designing or illustrating. There’s never any middle ground.
Guess which one I’m currently experiencing?
-Chris
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It’s 11:00pm – I just got back a little while ago from my Men’s 25 and over Baseball game in which I played an entire 9 innings at shortstop – something I hadn’t done since I was coaching high school baseball five years ago and played that position when the JV team challenged the varsity kids. I played short for the JV kids to give them a bit of a chance back then.
I played short tonight because we were short a few guys. And my 43 year old body is feeling every one of those nine innings. So, I’m going to cut this blog short. I hope you enjoy today’s strip and the upcoming Heroes Con themed strips too!
-Chris
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Folks, I saved my best Heroes Con 2010 convention sketch for last. This is the GRAND FINALE and I hope you enjoy it and get as great of a kick out of it as Little John did. This is the last convention sketch of the week and next week, I’ll go back to making Roy’s life miserable in some way, shape or form.
In the mean time, I wanted to tell you little bit about this particular piece. This was actually started a couple of weeks before Heroes Con. I had it sketched out but things kept getting in the way and preventing my from doing much more then pencils. So I took it down to Heroes Con with the intention of finishing it there. That wasn’t hard but it was a stop-and-go process throughout the con.
Here is a picture of Little John and his wife with the final piece on Sunday:
Little John, his wife and his commission. Click the image for a larger version.
Little John “discovered” Capes & Babes at last year’s Heroes Con and he’s been a very vocal and enthusiastic supporter on Facebook, Twitter & just about any where else you might find him. So, when he asked for this commission request, I REALLY wanted to go the extra mile for him – hence the advance preparation.
How great of a guy is Little John? Well, I had finished the commission sometime late Friday but Little John liked it so much, he wanted me to keep it in my portfolio book and have it displayed throughout the entire con so that I might be able to pick up other business because of it – and I truly believe I did. I actually had a waiting list for commissions this year & I think this piece was a big part of the reason why.
I eventually remembered that had Heroes Con fallen on its regular Father’s Day Weekend, it would have been Little John’s birthday – so, before he had a chance to finally pick the sketch up on Sunday, I inked over some of the stars and added a “Happy Birthday” message to LJ in a silver Sharpie pen.
So, Little John, once again… HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!
-Chris
I actually did the above illustration for Free Comic Book Day but the commission sketch I wanted to post here didn’t photograph all that well – although I did add it to my Heroes Con 2010 photo album though. If you follow me on Facebook, you can check out the photo album here.
Originally, the sketch I did at Heroes Con was of a blank Avengers comic with Captain America and Captain Britain fighting over their favorite TV shows. Captain Britain, of course, wants to only watch Dr. Who while good ol’ Cap wasnt to watch Star Trek: The Next Generation. That was the only other sci-fi show I thought could be an American equivalent to Dr. Who.
Anyway, please enjoy today’s Heroes Con sketch. Tomorrow will be the last one and it’s a DOOZY! I really think you’re going to love it. I know the guy who picked it up did!
-Chris
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