It's Tuesday, so it's time for some tantalizing teasing!

Beanworld, makes it web comic debut tomorrow on MDHP Issue 14 in the first original story published in any format in a decade .

Hey, I'M excited!

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?