well, I’m holding my breath collectively with a co-conspirator this morning. We’ve officially jumped into the deep end now with a proposal and there is no going back. I have such a good feeling though, which may amount to absolutely NOTHING in the end, but I am just amazingly proud of the work we accomplished in roughly 24 hours. It’s a complete, polished, professional looking project.

In other comic news, I have 3 pages left to color today in the studio here, and then I need to start inking like a madman the rest of the week here so I can get into colors on my next book by Friday or Saturday. whew…. I’m going to try and maintain my levels of sanity over the course of the next 4 months, but having 4 books going at a time here for the next 4 months is going to be challenging.

yesterday was a crappy day motivationally, until after dinner. Today, I'm completely jazzed. Been working away at wrapping colors on a book due next Wednesday, I'll likely be done a few days earlier at my current pace. Been inking pages here as well this week, and been burning some midnight oil to fit in some super secret project that DJ and I are pitching, I mean working on as well. ahem... needless to say, this project is pretty fun to be working on, and hopefully one day in the near future, we'll be able to start sharing a whole new universe of stuff with people. We're both pretty jazzed about the possibilities, and if I'm being totally honest....it's pretty top notch stuff. So today I have 2 more pages to get to from the Big Badz mini, if not 3, then I have a page to ink, and 2 more pages of pure AWESOME to start coloring, and a new website to start setting up too and doing graphics for. I'm glad that I'm energized enough today to tackle this stuff.

As Gerard so wisely pointed out yesterday to me, all I needed was to have my tummy start rumbling for honey and I would be sure to find my way again, just like Pooh bear. Sorry, you have to have had little kids in the house at one point to understand the Winnie the Pooh references I guess :D

lots to do this weekend, and if I manage things properly I might even be able to help the wife paint the lower level of the house too. Although I took a good day and a half off here this past week moving furniture around to accommodate our new TV in the upstairs family room, and putting together a big ass bookcase for the wife too. While I'm not 16 anymore, it's nice having a younger brother that lifts weights and IS almost 16 to help out :D Otherwise 300 lbs of bookcase would have surely put me in the emergency room just looking at it in the box. K, covers to color today, and a book to jump into yet as well. Sadly, I'm going to likely have to be sending out a notice to all the publishers I've worked with in the last year or two on covers, with the news of me having to raise my cover rates. It's not obnoxious by any means, but I also am going to start offering a pretty good rate I think on digitally painted covers as well. We'll have to see if that means my cover work dries up, or if it means that people will actually start paying more. I'm going to be optimistic and say that I think it's going to be the latter here.  Also, I'm trying to find time to write a review on my Cintiq 20WSX that I got about a month and a half ago now.  The short is that is amazing!

Working hard today here in the studio. However I’ve also really been thinking a lot about my future creative endeavors here. There are a lot of ideas I’ve been kicking around here in the last month or so, on my own and with others. I think I need to find time to meditate and just really lose myself in thoughts for a while in the next few weeks. All of these thoughts are eventually leading me back to the social responsibility that all artists should be striving for and what I can do creatively to achieve that higher ground of creativity, where meaning and importance is the underpinning of any creative endeavor I undertake. What can I bring to the table in any given project? How can I develop a unique creative voice in every aspect of my work, while maintaining integrity, quality and productivity?

Is social commentary, or spiritual commentary for that matter even, something that has been lost in mass commercial art? Or are those things just being written off as marketing and cheap advertising now? In this age of instant information and gratification, does anyone really want to REALLY THINK for themselves anymore? I keep thinking that people by and large don’t WANT to think anymore, they want to be TOLD what to think. Or failing that, I think the internet and it’s instant ways of interaction has changed the WAY people think so that now everyone thinks that it is THEIR opinion that matters. That being able to be anonymous and have a website or a blog gives them some sort of assumed authority to speak their mind, even when what they have to say is completely wrong or completely misinformed. I think that you can see a noticeable change in society in the last 10 years if you look at the way people interact with one another in real life. There is far more rudeness, far more people who think they are better than everyone else, who think THEY are right and everyone else is wrong. Is this tied to the fact that as the internet has morphed into this unfathomable monstrosity that it is today over that period of time? Or is that it has allowed anyone with an internet connection and the free time required to become whatever they want online and say whatever comes to mind, however wrong, misguided or assholish it might be? I don’t know, but I have a suspicion that I could say that I think this is exactly the case. However wouldn’t I then be just another *** posting my opinion about people I don’t even know online?

So I’m going back to pondering these things and where I want to go creatively in the future while I work today.

SO…I got in last night around 2:30 in the morning here. Wide awake, and not the slightest bit tired. Took a long, HOT shower for the first time in like 4 days, and was able to relax enough to get to bed by 3:30 or so. Didn’t wake up until noon today, which sort of put a crimp on me getting to work at 8am, but I’ve unpacked my bags, got things put in their places here, answered my emails, picked up my son from school, and am going to get most of my thoughts out here so I can get to work. 5 more pages to finish by tomorrow night, but I’m thinking of going all out juggernaut in a bit and wrapping them all up today then just sleeping in tomorrow again. Thursday- The flight out was great, after having to drive over and park in the overflow lot at the airport, wait on the shuttle to get me to my terminal, get through security and just BARELY catching my flight it seemed like. Gioy De Marco from Platinum picked me up at the airport, and got me over to where they were filming the Comic Book Challenge 2008 commercial in good time (and she’s NOT quite as maniacal a driver as everyone was telling me either) Or I’m JUST as crazy a driver and just didn’t notice it :D ) So once we were on location, the MIGHTY Dave Collins got me a sandwich while picking up some props (cuz man, was I starving by then) and the guys filming the commercial got down to bizness. Those guys did such a great job, it was really cool watching them work, the director Dave was awesome. And I sympathized with him, cuz he had a headache that kept getting worse throughout the night just like I did. I got to play this crossing guard, who dressed up as a crazy character called Crossing Justice, cape and all. I had fun with that once I got to wear the cape, doing all kinds of crazy Batman and vampire type stuff with the cape. It was a good time. The funniest thing was, that while I was standing out there in the street with the stop sign and big construction worker gloves on, people thought I was ACTUALLY directing traffic (in the middle of a 4 way stop intersection) it was kind of funny. Until the cop car pulled up, did a U-turn in the middle of the intersection and parked across the street. I went to tell Dave, “dude, if I get arrested, guess who’s bailing me out of jail!?” :D Turns out he was just visiting another house of some buddies or something. The UPS truck DID get kind of close to me as it raced by, and there was this whacked out lady driving around in an Expedition that regardless of the fact that I was standing with stop sign in the middle of the street, there was camera equipment set up all over, and I was directing her to just swerve slightly AROUND me into the next lane, looked like she had no intent of moving her car over and would be perfectly happy to just run me the hell over with her big gas guzzling BEAST of an SUV. She did end up going around at the last second, but that was funny. I mean, I had a CAPE on for crying out loud. What? She thought she could run over Crossing Justice? That vehicle would have BUCKLED and crumpled like aluminum foil if it had tried to run me over (at least that’s how I was seeing it in my mind) We then went back to the Platinum offices, met some more people up there and got to see them hard at work at 8 pm in their offices. I mean, half the office was still there at 8 at night, really busting ass on things, and making magic. It was so cool to see how passionate they all are, and to see how much they all LOVE their jobs. That’s how I am, and I really respect the hell out of people that work that hard at something because they love what they’re doing. A funny moment we had was when DJ and I went into their big board room, and sat at the head of their tables, and were just watching the film crew set everything up and watching everyone interact in the lobby together. DJ and I were in there, just talking comics, talking about plans we’ve got in motion, and just thinking it was a real cool place to have meetings (toys, video games, movie posters, statues all over the place) So we’re sitting there talking, probably looking like we were deep in conversation and Scott Rosenberg walks in with his pal Gareb Shamus (the dude who owns Wizard) Scott introduced us again, I’m pretty sure that I met Gareb last year in LA, and it was funny to hear him say that was actually the first time he had BEEN in the offices since WAY BACK when he was in there with Scott before they signed their lease. Those guys are really cool, because you can tell they’re just average guys like everyone else that LOVE what they do. So hopefully Scott didn’t think DJ and I were plotting a coup or anything :D Friday- A fun day to start the show really. Got to see everyone in action at the Platinum booth, moving their product. What a difference a year makes too. Last year at this time, they really had only 3 or 4 titles out, this year, there are tables worth of product, the HBN hard cover trades, singles from the original 4 issue mini-series of HBN, and the first 2 issues of the ongoing book, the GUNPLAY preview edition (which went over AMAZINGLY well with the crowd), The Weapon mini-series by Scott Koblish, Fred Van Lente, and Paul Mounts (probably my FAVORITE thing they’ve done outside of HBN in the last year) and just lots of cool energy flowing around the place. The guys at Mac Hollywood had some Wacom Cintiq’s set up there for us to play around on and demonstrate things, and I got to do some really cool painting stuff on there. Just quick little 15-20 minutes paintings of stuff like Batman and Spiderman, a quick little environmental concept painting, but it’s cool to have people that know how to use stuff like that just jamming things out as the crowd walks by, it makes the STOP and watch what’s going on, which is what it’s all about at conventions really. DJ and I had a Hero By Night signing at 1 that day, and we did a cool interview with The Weekend Gamer I think as well. Hopefully some of my comments don’t come across as me bashing on other BIG publishers of superheroes, because that’s NOT what I was trying to get at. The interviewer just asked me what I thought was the best thing about HBN (or something like that) and I told her, it’s the fact that he’s not an angst ridden hero with lots of complicated issues, he’s a regular guy that kids and adults can both relate to. I was getting more at the fact that he’s the sort of hero ANYONE can get into. HBN IS the number 1, yeah #1, superhero comic on the internet for a reason. Friday we spent relaxing at the bar of the hotel outside. Chatted about some interesting things, had a really drunk girl come up to the table out of nowhere, sit down and start talking to everyone. It was humorous. Learned a lot about everyone really on a personal level, and getting to interact with people like that and learn what their ambitions are in life, is really probably the COOLEST thing of all. It was great to sit next to Dan the man Forcey for instance, and listen to him talk about things like where he wants to be in 5 years, and get to know people like that on a personal level. Because really, in the end, what we DO for a living is nowhere near as interesting as learning about who we ARE as people. Maybe my wife and I will end up living in the same town as him and his woman in Argentina in 20 years and we’ll wind up meeting in a marketplace or something, laughing about how we both remember talking about stuff like that at a bar in LA 20 years beforehand. The way this Universe works you never know. Saturday- fun day all around. more playing on the Cintiqs. I had a signing with Tone Rodriguez, Nei Ruffino and THE Adam Black at noon for KISS related stuff. I worked on the KISS 4K KISSmas one-shot with Tone and Nei, and Adam is now doing all of the chores on the KISS 4K regular series which is being released completely online (with plans to collect all that content in trade form in the future I believe) That was a fun time, I hadn’t actually ever met Tone before, he seemed REAL cool. I’ve met Nei before in passing really, but talked shop about coloring comics and stuff for a while and she seems like a real cool person. I’ve known Adam for a while now, and I’ve been helping him with his coloring for a few months now. That dude is so talented, that once I think he realizes his potential, he’s going to blow up. At 1pm, right after that KISS signing, DJ and I had an HBN signing. I love seeing the KIDS come up to the booth with their HBN books, or come up to the booth for the first time, pick up an issue of HBN and just watch their eyes light up. I had a conversation with one little boy, must have been a bit younger than my son, maybe 6 or 7 years old. He picked up the first issue of the ongoing series, and was just so EXCITED by that opening fight scene between HBN and Elemento in the volcano with all the lava everywhere. I told him, “isn’t that awesome!? It’s just like at home when you’re hopping across the furniture to see if you can make it from one end of the room to the other so that your feet don’t touch the lava” He looks up at me and says, “YEAH!!!! I love doing that” His dad looks at me and says, he does that kind of thing all the time, that IS really cool. They bought like a whole SET of books and the trade. Not because I was pitching them a sale, or trying to pimp the superhero, but because they can RELATE to what’s IN the book. I used to do the SAME jumping from chair to chair to couch, to sometimes coffee table, when I was that age, pretending the carpet was this big vat of lava or something and if I fell off the chair or didn’t make that last jump, I’d fall into the lava or something. I’m betting that kids DAD did the same thing, and that is what I’m talking about with Hero By Night. It wows the KIDS, and it makes the grown ups who read it FEEL like a kid again, and REMEMBER what it was like when they were kids. It’s just such a cool thing to actually CONNECT with people like that at these shows. Because I know that there are people out there reading the book, or reading the online stories and material that’s put online, and feeling the SAME way. Lots of other great things happened on Saturday, that debut of Gunplay by written byJorge Vega, drawn by Dominic Vivona, and colored by Nei Ruffino, was absolutely HUGE. That book looks absolutely wonderful. Donald Faison from Scrubs, who was a judge for last years CBC, was there to sign books, and they gave all the proceeds to charity, which in my mind was a truly wonderful thing to do, it raised some good money and people seemed really jazzed about it. Talked with Alex Sinclair for a bit, I idolize that guy, but I try and keep it in check so he doesn’t think I’m some sort of stalker. He’s helped me out so much over the last couple of years, both directly and indirectly. :D Talked with Alp Altiner for a while as well, about his upcoming stuff at Top Cow, about matte painting, concept art, and what sort of things I should be working on to get into that sort of work. It was cool to hear him say that I had talent, so I know I’m not a two bit hack ENTIRELY now, and that made me feel really good. DJ and I had a conversation with Marc Robinson who we were familiar with from the digital webbing forums. Marc was a real nice guy, and it’s cool to see him starting to land some nice gigs now as well. He had some Spiderman pages from an upcoming book he’s doing at Marvel there to show off and they were off the HOOK. More importantly though, he’s been there, struggling like everyone, and he’s fought through it all and kept producing work. He’s got some MAD talent, and I really like to see nice people like that succeed. I wish him the absolute BEST. Scott took us to dinner that night, we had a good time talking all things comics and movies, but I also really dig talking about everyday things like family and stuff too. We both have daughters that are in middle school, have cell phones, boyfriends, all that stuff, so it’s cool to relate to people on those levels that you share a lot of things in common with, even when you work in entirely different industries and capacities really. It’s all creative work though in the end. Sunday-traveled. Airport, plane, car, home. Couldn’t get on standby, so caught the later flight after all. Today is catch up, with the family, with email, and with work later most likely once the kids are in bed here. It was a good time, but now I’ve got a LOT of work related catching up to do. I didn’t take any pictures the whole trip for once, so I may have to borrow of few from others as they get them up on the net and I get time. Whew!