Centennial Post
With this update I pass an important milestone as I've reached my 100th post. Until this very moment I hadn't really stopped to consider the significance of that. I'm wordy by nature, and my writing tends to be verbose. I'm given to rambling like a halfway-senile moth; I don't have much of a direction in the first place, and I still manage to forget where I'm going. The end result, of course, is that I've written a lot. Your average college kid will dispense five-hundred words about not wanting to write a thousand word essasy. Over the lifetime of this blog I've written that much at intervals that have varied from once a week, to over a year between posts, to at least a couple of times a week since WonderCon in March. If everything were to be aggregated together I've written a novel and then some. That's an achievement.
What's more, is I've stumbled on a formula that works for getting my creative impulses out into the world. Jim Lee says that forty percent of creating art is the audacity to put yourself out into the world; to broadcast your madness, if you will. In this space thave I've carved out for sharing the sometimes kooky inner workings of my id I've found a rhythm, a kind of heartbeat, a pulse that sustains a piece of myself that I can't show in any other way. Certainly not in my day-to-day working life.
As I write this it occurs to me...I'm proud of what I do here.
Now that I've made something I can be proud of the task is to avoid becoming complacent. It's great to put up my drawings, and musings, and comics, but it should evolve and expand. What's next? I don't know. Hopefully something I can continue to be proud of.
Sketch Dump: Some Recent Goodies
I don't have a proper Geek Speak Comic ready to post yet. The pencils are done, I just have to do the finishing work. I'm going to go back to Sketchbook Pro and continue working on learning how to do my finishing work in a digital format, but in the meantime I thought it would be good to show that my drawing hand has not been idle. I've grasped my pencil and stroked it up and down...the page...you dirty people...
Here are some of the things I've been working on.
The first of the illustrations is Ms. Marvel from Marvel's Avengers and her own title, Captain Marvel. I like her story. She can fly, she's super-strong (strong enough to go toe-to-toe with the Hulk for more than second or two), she's nearly invulnerable, and she can throw energy blasts. In many way she's Marvel's answer to Superman. What's great about her is that she's just as formidable in her civilian identity. She's a colonel in the United States Air Force, a fighter pilot, and was chief of security in a restricted military base when an explosion fused her DNA with that of an undercover Kree soldier. Ms Marvel/Captain Marvel is a tough, smart super-heroine who can be really interesting the hands of a good creative team.
The cartoon is something silly I was doing as a warm up before doing the pencil work on the newest Geek Speak. I'm not sure where the idea came from. It was something on the lines of "what kind of shenanigans would go on in a high school full of classic movie monsters...go."
The final drawing is one I really like. It carries the noir sensibility of this drawing from an earlier post. I'm not an authority on noir fiction or film by any means. I've only seen a few noir films, mostly thanks to my good friend Lendell Prime and a series of movie nights he hosted a few years ago. Of those I have seen my favorite noir film is L.A. Confidential. There's a style and a sensibility to noir that speaks to me in a way that few other genres do, which is probably why I like the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher. Urban fantasy is a tasty fusion of both the noir setting and sensibility, with the spectacle of sword and sorcery.
Comic Con
I do want to continue relating the story of my experiences at ComicCon, but I don't want to bury it under the rest of a post. At a minimum it gives me something to write for tomorrow.
