Congratulations Sky McCloud!

Congrats to wunderkind Sky McCloud for her recognition as an incredibly skilled public presenter and speaker. I guess it was at Comic-Con 06, right before the McCloud clan set out on their ambitious 50 state tour, that I got my first inkling of her presentation abilities.

I'd missed their panel but later that night, in their hotel room, a very proud Ivy insisted that Sky show me her presentation. Folks, I said it then and I will say it again, I was totally blown away by what followed. I even went home and told Cory (who lives and dies by her presentations in her business) that Sky really had an incredible grasp of the potential lurking inside the PowerPoint software.

At the time, I'd never even attempted to do anything in PP--I had "people" who did that sort of thing. Since then, I've changed careers, left the "people" behind and taught myself PP. The more I work in it, the more I appreciate that original presentation of Sky's.

Good going!



Today would have been Jack Kirby's 91st birthday.


The blogs are filled with all sorts of Kirby artwork that inspired and thrilled all the various blogger authors. I loved and was influenced by Jack's artwork as anyone else, but I am so under the gun with so many looming deadlines, that I decided to just get up out of my seat, turn around and put up the first piece of Kirby-ness that I could get my hands on. Here it is! Happy birthday Jack wherever your spirit may be soaring today!

Another Tantalizing Teaser Tuesday

From the Dark Horse Holiday Color Special

I'll have the official information
regarding this comic book in a few days/
In the mean time here is an electronic "blue pencil" layout.

Tuesday's Tantalizing Teaser

The above panels are breakdown sketches from page 2 of the Dark Horse "Beanworld Color Holiday Special." I'll talk more about this color comic book in the near future. For today, let it suffice to say that it's 20 pages of all new story starring the Pod'l'pool Cuties. The tale mostly features the Boom'r Band and Beanish (and Dreamishness behind the scenes), but Mr Spook, Professor Garbanzo, The Chow Sol'jer Army and the Hoi Polloi Ring Herd all make their way onto center stage at some point.

The scrawled dialogue in "blue pencil" might be hard to decipher so here is a translation:
Boom'r: We stumbledunkled into a somethingness we can't quite riff into twined idealios."
Beanish: What sort of fact did you discover that doesn't make sense?

Also on another note:

Congratulations to Toni and Lucia Velardo for growing the world's longest spaghetti bean in the UK. I'd never even heard of this particular type of legume before but I love the name and the fact that it seemed to grow at almost 2 inches a day. And Mr. Velardo's attribution of his bean’s prodigious growth to "warmth and a lot of luck" is pretty much what works for me too.

Xibalba found?

According to a piece on Reuters' website, some archaeologists believe that they have unearthed at least one of the ritaul entrances to Xibalba, one of the least appealing places one could possibly want to stumble upon in mythologies of the New World.

Xibalba roughly translates into "Place of Fear" or "Place of Phantoms." A real fun place dedicated to "sickness, starvation, fear, destitution, pain, and ultimately death." To arrive at this destination one has to travel through rivers filled with really cheery stuff like scorpions, blood, and pus. If, and when, you finally threaded your way past confusing crossroads, disguised benches that might roast you if you made the error of resting upon it, the shrieking bats, living razors, fires and hail, if you actually made it that far--guess what?

You won a ticket to a ball game! And what a ball game it was featuring a deadly razored ball. The Mesoamericans loved their ball courts and their ritual ball games and Xibalba seemed to feature one of the deadliest sporting destinations in the local mythology!

Beanworld's Der Stinkle was, in part anyway, inspired by Xibalba and the other Mesoamerican underworlds.

I've been thinking about Der Stinkle a lot lately. Nice slice of synchronicity to stumble across this news piece, don't'cha think?

Can it be? Is it possible? Is this the return of Tuesday's Tantalizing Teaser?

This is a panel from the upcoming MySpace Dark Horse Presents eight page story. It'll go up next month.

There has been alot of discussion about the use of color in Beanworld, a project that was born and raised in black and white. Plus, there has been the anxiety that new color stuff might be as over rendered as the Asylum story oh so many years ago.

Well, fear not!

First of all I'm doing the coloring myself. And I'm following a rule of thumb that is quite simple: Color nothing in any fashion that is more rendered than something in the Sunday funnies.
No coloring that is any more complicated then Doonesbury or Mutts. Simple, striking colors with the occasional fade here and there.

Plus, for you artistes out there...I'm keeping my color palette so simple that I'm rarely even mixing three colors together. Most of my colors are solids (100 M/100 Y-Proffy's shoes) or single tints (50/C-Boom'r Beans) or a combination of a solid color and a tint (100Y/50 C-Bean green).

Very antiquated sort of thinking but I really want the color stories to have that same sort of old-fashioned-but-new-fangled-look that almost all of my work seems to exude.

JahFurry Jamboree Line Up

Jen Bernstein, Scoop Wasserstein, David Lloyd, Josh Bernstein (Royal Flush Magazine), Jahfurry, Larry Marder, A Bear, Star St. Germain, Jeff Ayers (Forbidden Planet), Maryanne

Previously an uncaptioned photo in my SD08 Fickr set, this whacky dinner of oddfellas took place right after my panel at ComicCon on Friday night. It was a rolling thunder of an evening as various folks shuffled in and out of the orbit of Jeff "JahFurry" Newelt. Jeff is a presence in comics that is almost impossible to explain. He's a connector. I only met him last fall at SPX but since then I've learned that he has an impeccable instinct for who might be interested whom else. I've met a whole bunch of amazing people because of Jeff.

I really enjoyed the company at this dinner. I spent most of the time talking to David Lloyd, who I hadn't run into since the old Eclipse days and with Star St. Germain. Afterwards, I had an incredible chat with Scoop who is a Harvard graduate now working in the Roget Corman studio. He is going to have a very interesting career track--you can count on that!

Afterwards, we all shambled slowly over to the Hyatt where JahFurry re-introduced me to Molly Crabapple who's Dr Sketchy worldwide mission is well worth knowing about and investigating further!

Calbee Barbecued Flavoured Grill-A-Corn

Out of all the peculiar and wonderful snack foods I munched on during my frequent trips to Hong Kong when I was in the toy business, without a doubt my favorite was a Japanese product called Calbee Barbecued Flavoured Grill-A-Corn.

The package caught my eye with its corn and steak kabobs on the front. You can see it in the link. I guess it's a bit ironic that the Calbee company site imposes the package over a basic bean shape.

They are sorta like Cheetos but different. Really good stuff. The graphics above were on the back of the bag. I can guess what they might mean. I liked the way they looked and so I snipped 'em and taped 'em to the wall in my studio space in my place in Phoenix. They just turned up and they are back on display in my studio again.

Also, in honor of the Olympics, on Flickr I've posted a small gallery of humorous photos from my travels tp Hong Kong and China.

SD08 Photo Gallery

I didn't take that many photos at the Con this year. But here is a link to the ones I did take.

I went right from the Con...

....to Chicago to visit with my father who is in failing health. It was a great visit.
I'm back at home for now and digging in to complete the Beanworld Holiday Special on time.

Tomorrow, I'll post my pictures and general observations from SD08. In the meantime, the drawing above is one that I did at the CBLDF Drink & Draw Party and I liked it too much to let it go. There is a real humdinger of a story percolating about these critters that seem to be related somehow to Mr Teach'm.