Not Sick

I spent two days with some horrible bug in my system. Thursday, after walking around Berwyn with Lisa, I was suddenly so tired that I couldn't eat breakfast. I collapsed in bed and spent most of the day sleeping. Just crushing two glucosamine tablets for my beagle basset's dinner left me sweating and gasping for breath.

Friday I felt better, and Lisa was off so she could take care of me. Still, I slept most of the day and watched Heroes on Netflix Online as research for a cover I'm drawing. It sucked having no energy, drive or creativity. It's like I couldn't be me for two days.

Woke up Saturday and feel much better. Healthy enough to feel righteous angerI'm going to point out a grave injustice that doesn't involve the chimp in chief. Someone has stolen musical gear from the most literate band in Seattle. I'm offering a reward: if BlöödHag confirms you were instrumental in getting their instruments back, you get to pick any unsold page from my webstore as a reward!:

Stolen from trunk of car in Ballard driveway:

Black Gibson 'the hawk' 5 string nighthawk gtr like one in pic but with Alternative tentacles sticker on body in case with lots of stickers
Yellow Ampeg 5 string SG style gtr in case like in photo (i'm not in moto)
Sunn concert lead guitar amp with black tape on front
Tascam digital mixing board
Ibanez Tube King dist pedal
Boss Digital delay with sharpie on knobs
Boss tuner hella dirty

I am a gigging musician I need this gear... any information would be crucial!
Please call 206-548-7775

To the a$$hole who stole the gear:
I will kill you you pony tailed white dude for f%@&ing up my neighborhood! Punk,we know what you look like! You are lucky it wasn't me who was chasing you last night douche bag.

Happy Birthday, Gaffney!

Hey Mike, welcome to the ranks of the old men. Let's get together and complain about young people today.

Grrrr. Young people. Today. Grrr.

Gene

Early Gene Ha work for sale

Through a convoluted tale involving friendship, gifts, a car sale and car accident, mysterious disappearances and contacts, Tom Fleming at Fanfare SE Inc. of Kalamazoo, MI, has become the new custodian of much of my early work. This means you can buy some stuff that has NEVER been up for sale before now. You can see the pages on his website and in his eBay store when he has stuff for auction.

This was a stroke of luck for me. I'd given the stuff away before I had a good scanner, so it's fortunate to have it all in one place I can drive to.

I dropped by Fanfare this Saturday and spent six hours scanning everything he had left. Tom's a good guy and has a great reputation. Thanks to all the good folks working the shop too. They were all more than generous!

I'm hoping to put out an artbook someday, so scanning my old work is part of the process. I'm spending a few more hours today scanning my old pages. When comics companies first began the transition to digital imaging, the scan quality was pretty horrible. This is the only way to show good quality scans of some of these pages.

Lastly, if anyone out there knows where Bruce Benman is, let me know! I'm worried about the guy.

Call for submissions

Hmm. Hard at work on Top 10. Zander has written a scene in a police precinct women's room, and unlike Alan he hasn't included any restroom graffiti. That's just irresponsible.

So consider this an open call for graffiti suggestions! If you have any ideas, especially clever comics reference scrawls, send them to me.

Ideally, they shouldn't be copyright violations. 'Batman likes the leather' is bad. 'Bruce likes the leather' is fine.

Unlike men's room, women sometimes use stall walls to solicit serious relationship advice. Funny is best of all, such as silly poems.

Obviously, all submissions used will become the copyrighted property of DC Comics. So I'm not expecting Alan Moore to send in any ideas.

Someone's gotta take a stand against motherhood

From the Washington Post, via Shakespeare's Sister:

On Wednesday afternoon, the House had just voted, 412 to 0, to pass H. Res. 1113, "Celebrating the role of mothers in the United States and supporting the goals and ideals of Mother's Day," when Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.), rose in protest.

"Mr. Speaker, I move to reconsider the vote," he announced.

Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.), who has two young daughters, moved to table Tiahrt's request, setting up a revote. This time, 178 Republicans cast their votes against mothers.

It has long been the custom to compare a popular piece of legislation to motherhood and apple pie. Evidently, that is no longer the standard. Worse, Republicans are now confronted with a John Kerry-esque predicament: They actually voted for motherhood before they voted against it.[my emphasis]

Republicans, unhappy with the Democratic majority, have been using such procedural tactics as this all week to bring the House to a standstill, but the assault on mothers may have gone too far. House Minority Leader John Boehner, asked yesterday to explain why he and 177 of his colleagues switched their votes, answered: "Oh, we just wanted to make sure that everyone was on record in support of Mother's Day."

By voting against it?

....

"The majority has taken, once again, their go-it-alone policy," Boehner lamented yesterday. "It's time for Democrats and Republicans to work together." To induce this working together, Boehner decided to stop the House from working at all.

House Republicans are doing everything they can to prevent Democrats from passing any legislation.

I was curious if the bill included anything pernicious to the GOP (praise for single moms, evolution, or voting for women) but it's about as harmless as you'd imagine. It was submitted by a Nebraska Republican, Jeffrey Fortenberry. He voted against it the second time.

While I'm here, happy Mother's Day to my mom and to Lisa's mom! Unlike some people, I do think you made great sacrifices for the future of the nation, and for us.

And happy birthday to Adam Schlagman, who is too young and creative. I'm giving him just 20 years to solve that problem.

Calgary

I had a great time in Calgary, I've got some non-work time while I wait for the Hoosier state to finish counting votes, so it's time to do some high intensity bloggin'!

It was a good medium sized convention. It draws in some excellent comics talent, like Bruce Timm, Stuart Immonen, writers Mark Waid and Greg Rucka, or the artists on either side of my con table, Whilce Portacio and Marko Djurdjevic.

Marko, in the foreground
Lisa in the midground
big crowd around Whilce in the back!

Eisner award winner, Russ Manning nominee Steve Rolston, in from Vancouver.

I should be bringing you some fine quality scans of my Calgary con sketches. I did bring my cheapo scanner there, but I forgot my USB cable. Ah well. I used my camera. You'll see some odd shadows and such.

Paid sketches of Gambit and Arsenal for two of the clerks from the Redd Skull Comics shop booth. Every time I needed reference for a sketch, they were the go to guys. Thanks, Teague and Andrew!











A Joker sketch, of course. When I asked for a theme, the buyer said "crazy".

















I made this for a guy who collected female faerie sketches. The Brian Froud faeries were pretty well covered in his collection, so I went for a Tolkien/fantasy adventure elf. I suspect this image will show up on some DnD character sheets soon!











Here's the one I'm most proud of. I did a previous sketch for Steven Gettis's literary portrait website, but I never sent him the original art. He's been asking for another for years. After showing up in his home town I finally did it: The Little Prince, a book that really struck me when I was six years old. By chance, this happened to be one of his wife's favorite books!

As usual, I got script and drawn sketches for Mike and Lowell. I'll hold off posting those until Mike can see his sketchbook in person.

I didn't get to wander the hall much. Bill Willingham did. He got in line and got a signed photo from Tricia Helfer, the tall blonde cylon from Battlestar Galactica. He asked her to write "Any time you're in LA feel free to crash on my couch," but she didn't go for it. Cylons. No sense of humor.

Again, never believe anything Bill says about me and penguins.

After the con was over, con organizer Kandrix Foong took a crew of creators and volunteers to dinner and then to Banff.

Dinner with Bruce Timm, Jim Zubkavich, and a lot of Asians!

The guys from Jim's Udon Studios were pretty damn talented. I honestly had never heard of them before, which shows you how badly I need to get out. Wonderful stuff.

I'd also never heard of Banff. I'm a provincial little American. It's really lovely out there. Real Gene quote: "I was just about to say, those mountains look bigger than the Rockies!"

The Portacios

I've met Whilce before, but never had a good long conversation with him till this trip. There's a heckuva lot of stuff I didn't know about him. I didn't know that he'd moved back to the Philipines for a while and taught comics illustration. Among his graduates is Leinil Yu. He Whilce also pioneered Photoshop comics coloring with Alex Sinclair at Wildstorm.

Here are some pictures of Ed the Sock (Steven Kerzner) and Red (Liana Kerzner) showing what makes Canada great! Patriotism and public shagging with puppet fetishism. And here is a Wikipedia photo of Liana dressed as Power Girl! For those who aren't Canadian or don't get the US cable Ripe channel, they're dangerous Canadian TV personalities.

















I adore Canadian television. It can't compete with the US stations for big glossy production values, so they bring the wacky hard core. Like Ed the Sock and Red. Or another great show, Trailer Park Boys.

Just gonna finish up with some random photos from Banff. The votes are counted and I need to ink in the morning!

Fixing things up

Just a little temp post while I republish my site after finding a new web host.