Conning of Wonder a Story in Pictures II

Conning More Wonder from Photos

It's now officially more than a month since the end of WonderCon and I'm still posting about it. While not exactly timely I hope it is at least a little enjoyable. The second and third days of WonderCon yielded many more opportunities to catch photos of people in gorgeously elaborate costumes, or just gorgeous people in costume...you'll see what I mean. I was also able to attend a few interesting panels, and more than a couple that were a complete waste of time. Overall I had an amazing weekend and walked away with a few one of a kind mementos. Here are some more of my photos.

Anyone who follows Doctor Who has "their doctor" for me and Mildly Sensational it's the fourth doctor. He's the one we remember from being kids and our parents let us watch Doctor Who for the first time. In both cases the show scared the dickens out of us with all of its monsters and crazy over the top action. These guys clearly like the ninth Doctor played by Chris Eccleston. That or they like leather jackets and buzz cuts. The best part of their cosplay was the Dalek. It was built around a dolly so they could wheel it around with them. 

If not the best Star Wars themed costume I saw that weekend, it was certainly the most badass. I heard some of my fellow geeks call this guy "dark Mandalorian" and he was getting a lot of attention from fanboys with cameras, though probably not as much as...

...this lady's hammer. Seriously. Look at the size of that thing. How does she lift it with such tiny arms? I bet swinging that thing causes her some serious back pain. She attracted a lot of attention for...obvious reasons. I know she wanted to move freely around the con because shortly after this picture was taken she told the clot that had formed around her, "I would like to keep moving now." I didn't see her after this so I can only assume that she must have gone back to her car or hotel room at some point to change into something less...conspicuous. Ok. I have to get this out of my system, "BEHOLD! IT IS THE LADY OF THE STORM HERSELF! THE MIGHTY THORINA THUNDERBOOBS!" There I said it. Moving on. 

Easily one of my favorite costumes of the weekend, if not my absolute favorite. This young lady's Astrid from How to Train Your Dragon was absolutely spot on, and it was fun getting this picture of her holding the axe out toward the camera. The pose and the attitude were perfect. I don't know if she was there for the masquerade or not. If so I hope she did pretty well.

He claws outward, grasping at relevancy. Saturday really did have some great costumes. His is the only Spawn costume I've seen out of three conventions, and it was pretty much flawless. The only way I can think of to make it more accurate would have been for him to pull of the mask and reveal that he's actually Michael Jai White.  

I spotted these three getting their photos taken by a couple of guys with gear that looked they were at the con as professional photographers for another blog or news site. I managed to sneak in and get a couple of pictures. After asking Astrid to hold her axe out toward the camera I had a lot of fun getting similar "action poses" from other cosplayers. It's fun to get pictures of their costumes, sure, but I think the effect is better if you can get them doing something active. 

No convention would be complete without t least one Wolverine. It seems like he's in just about every other title from the M branch of the big two, so I'm honestly a little surprised there weren't more. As good as this costume was there was one other guy there who was built like Thor, but was sporting the claws and weird haircut of everyone's favorite human blender with rage issues. His was the best Wolverine costume of the day, but this guy was a close second.

Gifts
Saturday was the day I set aside to do shopping for friends and family. When I knew that WonderCon was coming up I reached out to some dear friends living in Boulder and asked if there was anything they wanted. They gave me a few ideas and I headed to the Con looking for the perfect gifts for my Colorado brother-from-another-mother and his family. In my search I stumbled across a booth that was selling a number of comic books with blank cardstock covers. These are becoming more popular as collectibles because they allow you to take them to a favorite artist and get them personalized with one-of-a-kind cover art. I picked up four. Three to go back to Colorado and one for myself. For my friends in Colorado I picked up Uncanny X-Men, Avengers, and Superman Unchained. For myself I picked up The Shadow. Below are the finished covers and links to the artist's websites.

Uncanny X-Men by Josh Figueroa

Avengers cover by Brianna Garcia 

A breath taking cover for Superman Unchained by Ruben Martinez

And a little something for me: The Shadow, cover by the only artist I know outside of WonderCon, the terrific Anthony Diecidue

Conning of Wonder a Story in Pictures

Conning of Wonder in Photos

When it's almost a month past the event it's probably too late to tell a Con Story that will mean anything. For the record, it's not for a lack of wanting to post, or a lack of something to say. Even when I don't have something specific to write about I can always fill the space with paragraphs of gibberish like "Flerpy werpy derpy floop!" There are nights I get home from work when it feels like that's about all the mental juice I have, anyway. I digress. A picture is worth a thousand words so I thought I would share a few thousand words worth of photos from my weekend at Wonder Con.

Anaheim's convention center has a couple of really nice courtyard areas with fountains and palm trees. At one point in the afternoon I went out on one of the balconies to get some air and to call the family. While I did my best to decipher what my daughter was trying to tell me in the secret language of three-year-olds I took this picture looking out over the courtyard. It looks like there are a lot of people hanging out, waiting in line at the food trucks, and running between panels at the convention. This is not a lot of people. Take all the people pictured here and increase the density of the crowd by about fifty percent and you'll just about get to how crowded it gets at Comic Con.

Easily one of the best things about Wonder Con in Anaheim is the number of people in costume. Every one of my friends who attended this year commented on the number of cosplayers and the quality of the work put into their costumes. I saw these two as I was walking back in from having some lunch. Hers was the best Poison Ivy I saw the entire weekend. He was a pretty decent take on a male Harley Quinn. The best thing about this moment happened when I walked away. A couple of little boys, who could not have been older than seven or eight, were there wearing a Robin and a Spider-Man costume. Both little boys ran up to these two and asked to have their picture taken with them. Poison and Harley both lit up and posed for a series of pictures with the tiny superheroes. From where I was standing on the outside I couldn't tell who was enjoying it more.

I took this picture on Friday, then ran into him again on Sunday and had the chance to talk with him. It turns out he's in the service, and everything he's wearing and carrying here is the genuine article, including the rifle. It was rendered inoperable for the purposes of the convention. It's funny in a way that in a gathering of people dressed as their favorite fantasy heroes there is a real one walking around almost unnoticed.

Comic book conventions are hardly limited to comic books. The experience just would not be the same without the occasional TIE pilot waving a fist at you. I'm sure he's judging me from behind that mask.

Doctor Who is nearly as big a deal at the convention as Star Wars. She was dressed as "Sexy" the mind and soul of the TARDIS in the body of a woman from an episode of Doctor Who that was written by Neil Gaiman. 

It might look like there are only a couple of reasons why I took a photo of this costume, and there are. I recognized her as the bartender from "Poker Night at the Inventory 2," an indie game from Telltale Games, and if you know the game she nailed the costume.

These two were wearing what I think are the best costumes I saw all weekend. They are not any characters in particular, and the best description I can come up with to give them is "Steampunk Space Gunslingers." All of the pieces were either purchased or hand made.

There are more pictures from that weekend, but they'll have to wait until this tired ass dad has had some sleep.

The Conning of Wonder 2014

Anaheim WonderCon, 2014

The weekend of the 18th through the 20th was an amazing, colorful, and inspirational time at the annual WonderCon comic book convention in Anaheim, California. there is a lot I would like to talk about, but for the sake of sanity and not dragging things out too long I'm going to try to condense things into two blog posts. In this post I'll talk about the highs and the few lows of each day, and I'll follow that up with a post featuring some of the photos of cosplayers I took during the convention.

That's what I meant to do, anyway. Oh well. I'll try to condense things a little more when I talk about Saturday and Sunday.

Leading up to WonderCon
In the days and weeks leading up to WonderCon I grew increasingly excited. When I attended in 2013, WonderCon changed my life. It was that WonderCon where, for the first time in as long as I can remember, I felt as though I were somewhere I belonged. I didn't have to pretend to be someone else to get approval, or behave in a certain way so that I could get a paycheck, I could just be. This year was about trying to recapture that feeling.

Friday, April 18th
One major difference between this year and last is I didn't have a six month old infant in the house and all the demands that go along with a baby. One of the joys of being the parent when one or more of your kids is still a baby is playing "sleep roulette." You never know when one of the young ones is going to wake up needing to be fed, or changed, or just because he decided it was play time. At 3:00 in the morning on the Friday of WonderCon my son decided it was a great time for that latter. He woke up and we did our usual thing. He got fed, and changed, and then I spent the next half hour trying to get him to go to sleep again. He was having none of it. He just grinned and sucked his fist in response to my bouncing, and pacing, and shushing. After half an hour of that I gave up and put him down on his play mat to squirm, and roll, and gnaw on things to his little heart's content. It wasn't until 4:30 that he finally started making the noises I associate with reaching "I'm tired now dammit!" and I was able to put him to bed. My night's sleep was completely shot. As a result instead of waking up early so I could be on the road no later than 7:30 or 8:00, I woke up at 8:00. As a thank you to my wife for letting me abandon her with the kids for three days (though I would be home in the evenings) I made breakfast that morning, so I didn't ultimately get on the road to Anaheim until after 9:00. If you ever been to a convention you know this basically means you're dooming yourself to waiting in an everlasting line just to get in the door.

The drive to Anaheim was mercifully easy. Part of that had to be that it was Friday at a time when most people are already at work for the day. Part of it had to be that it was also Good Friday. Once I arrived, the real fun started. The convention center had everyone arranged into four queues to get into the parking structure. The lines moved one car at a time as the car at the front paid at the booth and were allowed to go forward. That was the first line I had to get through. I flirted outrageously with the nice old lady in the parking attendant booth, paid for parking, and found a spot, but didn't pay much attention to where it was...which becomes important not much later.

After parking I made my way outside. Sure enough, the line to get in was the length of the convention center, wrapped down the block, and doubled back on itself. The line was for everyone. Professional guests like me and paid ticket holders alike. So I settled in for the "hurry up and wait" phase of my day. Keep in mind that in the absence of sleep everything I'm doing is fueled by coffee and determination. In this case I was lucky enough to be in line with people who were open to talking and joking and generally keeping things light while we waited. One of the people in line with me was a young woman (am I really old enough to use that without irony? shit.) named Tiffany who has her own business making Disney-themed custom merchandise. Her wares are available on the web through this site: http://whosits.bigcartel.com/ She was a paid attendee. It may be just my opinion, but I think it possible that she has a better case for attending on a complimentary professional pass than some old geek who draws a silly little comic strip.

The line eventually moved inside and I split off from my fellow queue compatriots. I was there as a professional after all! Certainly the registration process would pay deference to my elevated status and move me and my fellow comics professionals through with an appropriate level of urgency. No. Professional registrations were divided into five or six queues based on last name, and mine happened to be the longest of the five or six queues for professional registration. Such is the price of having a last name near the beginning of the alphabet. If my last name were Zacharias I'd have been in and done in five minutes. As it was my Queue Compatriots passed me going in the other direction, their newly acquired passes dangling from lanyards around their necks.

Slow thought it might have been moving I did eventually make my way to the head of the professional line ending with the last name of "Cruz," and picked up both my passes and my two guest passes. From there I was directed into a third line where professionals and their guests were told to wait for entrance to the convention. I was in that line for maybe fifteen minutes before they let us onto the convention floor, a full fifteen minutes ahead of the regular attendees, whom I shall lovingly refer to as "rabble" (no, I won't, I just wanted to say "rabble").

When I began I had every noble intention of exercising some spending discipline. I was going to save my ducats, dammit! My money would not change hands until Sunday when the deals would be plentiful and the vendors desperate to unload stock so they wouldn't have to carry it back to the truck. No. Inside of the first half an hour I'd already spent $50, a third of my budget for the day. In the process, however, I did get to meet the very cool Justin White, AJ Herrera, and Andrea LaBartunek who were holding down the fort at the Forbidden Panel booth. I picked up three issues of their title Zombie Kill Squad and a great print of an
illustration of Maleficent. It came up that I have my little comic strip, and they asked to see it. I'll definitely be following up on that.

From there I made my way over to the area that, to me, is the whole reason for the convention in the first place. I'm speaking, of course, of that haven of talented dreamers and ambitious go-getters. I'm speaking of Artist's Alley. Maybe it's because WonderCon is smaller than Comic Con overall, but Artist's Alley at WonderCon felt like it was bigger, with more artists than the big summer convention. The less expensive booth fees for WonderCon probably have something to do with that.

My first stop was at the booth of Brianna Garcia, where I picked up a print of one of my favorite pieces of her work. It's kind of a silly thing with Rapunzel and Spider-Man, but it will go great in my daughter's room, and it's something she will appreciate more as she gets older. Brianna, for her part, was getting off to a rough start to the Con. She had lost her voice the day before (Thursday) and couldn't talk. I made some lame crack about communicating with semaphore as I waved my arms over my head. She was gracious enough not to charge extra for humoring the lousy joke.

After embarrassing myself, but picking up a great piece of original art, it was about time for the first panel of the convention, a discussion featuring cartoon luminary Sergio Aragones where he would be talking about some upcoming projects. Before going to my panel I thought it prudent to drop my purchases off in the car.

Remember when I said I hadn't slept and the only things keeping me vertical were coffee and willpower? It's amazing what fatigue will do to your judgement. I spent the next hour wandering the bowels of the parking garage looking for my car. Such was the extent of my fatigue induced lack of judgement I did two laps past the same parked cars, then went outside, came back in a different entrance (albeit closer to the one I had used on my arrival) and proceeded to make at least two more laps around what was clearly the wrong parking level. I did eventually work out that my car was probably parked on a different level. After reaching that critical epiphany I found my car within about ten minutes, but had lost an hour and completely missed the Sergio Aragones panel. Evidently suffering more from sleep deprivation than I first thought I rested in the car for about an hour then fueled up with another cup of coffee.

On re-entering the con I noticed the first table inside the door belonged to the very gifted Brian Kessinger. Walking your Octopus: A Guidebook to the Domesticated Cephalopod. The book is published by Baby Tattoo books and available from Amazon. As it turns out Brian is a super nice guy, and it was fun talking to him since we both work for Disney and having that in common was a built-in ice-breaker.
Brian created a character, Victoria, and her pet octopus, Otto in a series of illustrations which then led to publishing a book,

Not too long after that I ended up catching the end of a panel discussion of The Fifth Beatle, a graphic
novel by Vivek Tiwary with illustrations by Andrew Robinson and Kyle Baker. I didn't have any real interest in this panel, I just sat in on the end so I could get a good seat for Jim Lee's panel which was to follow immediately thereafter. My mistake. Turns out Vivek Tiwary is a really interesting guy, with a really interesting story to tell about making the book and now going on to making the movie, and he is very well spoken. It would have been worthwhile to be there for the whole panel, even for someone who, like me, is not the biggest fan of The Beatles.

That panel wrapped up, leaving me wanting to run out and pick up this little graphic novel about the man who put The Beatles on the map. Which led to the panel that had brought me down from Burbank in the first place: Drawing with Jim Lee. If you're a fan of comics, and you've never seen a Jim Lee panel, put it on your bucket list. He's awesome. He is very much about demystifying the process of sequential art. In most of these panels he talks about the artistic process and illustrating the characters he's working on at DC (among his other responsibilities), which usually means drawing Batman, or a Batman villain, or another character in the Batman books. This time he decided to make the panel about the storytelling process, revealed through working on pages from an upcoming issue of Batman. As the audience watched he had the writer, Scott Snyder, email him the script. He then invited aspiring artists from the audience to join him on stage where he read them the script and asked them to draw rough panels. He then talked about their layouts as he "inked" their pages with a sharpie. When that was done, he revealed the page he had done for the same script, and it was remarkable how similar his page was to elements from each of the three rough layouts put forward by the aspiring artists.

After his panels, at least at WonderCon, Jim Lee does something that others at his level do very rarely. Instead of exiting through a back door or a side entrance, he goes out through the main exit with the fans. Inevitably this leads to a clot of people forming around him and shoving all sorts of paraphernalia at him to sign. He signs everything, graciously takes pictures with his fans, and has a smile on his face the whole time. Jim Lee is a class act.

After taking this terrible selfie with Jim Lee I realized I was completely out of gas. Coffee and determination were no longer enough to sustain me, so it was time to go home. I needed what little reserves of energy remained for engaging "daddy-mode" on getting home.

As I drove home, reflecting on the day, it occurred to me that something in my chest, or the general vicinity thereof, had unclenched. I was happy, and at peace. All that I can attribute that feeling to, is a sense of rightness with how I'd spent my day. There can be no question: being surrounded by that culture, living and breathing the enthusiasm for sequential story telling is something that drives me. For one glorious day, I fit. I found where I belong.

Geek Speaking of Spy Stuff, Like, for Sure

Geek Speak: Like, Totally Spying or Whatever 

The overreach of NSA surveillance has been in the media spotlight long enough now that most of the shine has worn away and the national appetite for controversy and drama is naturally turning back to TMZ and whatever the Kardashians are doing this week. Even so, there are some things in the story about the NSA surveillance system pulling in all of our phone calls and text messages. What are they really getting? Probably about a billion text messages a day that contain the letter "k" and nothing else. They might get the occasional "sext" message, which would be good for about five minutes of levity, and probably a welcome break from the mind melting boredom of sifting through all the meaningless bullshit people send each other on a daily basis. I'm sure somewhere in there are the gossip messages pulling the curtain back on the high-school dating scene with all of its sophistication and depth.

Little Bombs and Birthday Chefs

Work-a-Doodle

Every so often something surprises me when it tumbles out of my head and onto a blank page, such was the case with the drawing below. I'd initially drawn this little guy running around with his wick on fire as a kind of warm-up doodle; something to get the creative juices flowing so I could work on one of my more "serious" (yeah, right) efforts. It was fun and it was kind of cute. Then I drew this while taking a lunch break from work. It's like I'm channeling my inner Hans Christian Anderson. Honestly, I wonder what that might say about me.

Extreme Chef: 33 - Birthday Candles: 0
My brother's birthday was last week and I decided to do something a little different to commemorate it. For the last few months he's been working as a cook at an upscale hotel in Denver. By all accounts he's been doing a bang-up job, too. I didn't have anything to send him, so I thought I would try my hand at a special comic strip.

It's already been said, but happy birthday, Chris. Keep doing what you're doing and I'll keep telling everyone how awesome you are.

Geek Speaking of Stockholm with a Side of Happy Music

Geek Speak: Stockholm Syndrome

I blame Die Hard for the overuse, and often misuse, of "Stockholm Syndrome" in the popular lexicon. Even so, that's what it sometimes feels like when my daughter insists on watching My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic for the umpteenth time. All told, I think Mildly Sensational and I have seen the three seasons available on Netflix a dozen times. Even as I write this, my daughter is in the living room with her mother working on making it a baker's dozen. 

To be fair the show actually its merits. The animation is consistently of very high quality, the voice acting is solid, even brilliant on occasion; and many of the songs are difficult to get out of your head once you've heard them. I'm particularly, and consistently impressed with the woman who gives voice to the characters of Pinkie Pie and Fluttershy. She makes the character voices so distinct you'd never assume they were voiced by the same person. She even gives them noticeably different singing voices, a feat that becomes especially amazing when both characters are singing together, and you still can't tell it's the same person. 

With that said. I really wish the girl child would find something else to watch, within reason. Caillou is a dick. For all of its merits the show's central message about friendship, while important, is delivered with all the subtlety of a bedazzled wrecking ball. 

Sounds like she's starting over with season one, episode one...again. Imagine me sighing as my shoulders sag.

"Friendship is magic," and my eyes well up with anguished tears, "friendship is magic." 

Random Thoughts

In the quest to find some music that would help to lull my infant son to sleep I pulled up some Pomplamoose on Spotify. He didn't care for it, which meant I had to change his white noise to something more...white. For the little bit that we were able to listen I discovered something about Pomplamoose. Their music makes me happy. It's a small but significant victory, discovering there is some music out there that can just make you...happy. 

Geek Speaking of Dragons and the Existential Conundrum

Geek Speak: One Should Not Meddle in the Affairs of Dragons

Usually that sentence would conclude with, "for you are crunchy and good with ketchup." In this case the usual doesn't apply as one dragon eats semi-precious and precious stones and the other is exclusively a fish eater; a piscivore, if you will. 

In our household we watch a lot...let me rephrase that a shitload of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and Dragons: Riders/Defenders of Berk (it's one or the other and depends on the season of the show). "Ponies" is probably something that just goes with having a daughter who is right in the target demographic. The latter is the result of showing her the first How to Train Your Dragon movie (the sequel is due later this year) in the hopes that she would latch onto something, anything, for the love of God anything that wasn't My Little Pony. This will probably become a recurring theme in my one-off jokes, especially as my son starts to get older and finds shows of his own to watch until it makes his parents' eyes bleed. 

Dragon characters are featured In both "Ponies" and "Dragons," as they're referred to by our adorable little tyrant. It occurred to me, and not for the first time, that not all dragons are made equal. Some are meant to be adorable comic relief which can then be turned into lucrative merchandise, and some fly into battle annihilating enemies with well placed plasma blasts...and can then be turned into lucrative merchandise. 

Which reminds me, I was at Target today and forgot to pick up a miniature plastic "Toothless" for my desk at work. 

From there it was a natural jump to asking the question, "what would happen if 'Spike' from 'Ponies' encountered 'Toothless' from 'Dragons?'" I think of this as the dragon equivalent of Toothless saying, "kids these days."

If I were to take this one step further they would both be obliterated by fire from above and we'd pull back to see Smaug on his mountain proclaiming, "I am fire! I am death!"

Two Basic Choices

No matter what happens in our lives how we react can be distilled down to a choice of two things; we can cry or we can laugh. I know which one I would rather do.  

The context of the situation helps to determine which way our emotions take us. You would laugh at a funeral, for instance. Unless the funeral is for a clown, then yuck it up, especially if they bury that clown in a tiny car. 

Except in those times when the situation truly calls for tears, it helps to find something funny. This isn't as hard as it might seem. Life is always trying to make us laugh, we just have to be open to seeing the joke. 

I'll give you an example. Last week was a tough one for me and my family. I'm still going through the growing pains of adjusting to a new job and a much increased level of responsibility that comes with a more senior position. On top of that everyone in my family has been sick. This means I didn't get much sleep and my schedule at work was pooched because I had to be able to run home to care for my family. That's fine, I want to be there for them, but by the end of the week I was feeling beat and numb from fatigue and sleep deprivation. 

One afternoon late in the week I left the office to run an envelope to a nearby mailbox. On the way back I had to wait for a stoplight to change and I glanced over at the vehicles and drivers who were being likewise patient. That's when I saw her, and she was glorious. One of the lunch commuters waiting for the light to change was a very overweight woman who had to be at least in her mid-seventies. She was wearing a black track suit with hot pink accents. Her ride was a Harley Davidson and she was wearing one of those motorcycle helmets made to look like it might have been issued to German soldiers in World War II. The overall effect was a giant black and pink bowling ball of death (I am fire!  I am death!). Then the light changed and everyone moved on, but in that moment life gave me something to laugh about. 

Being a parent with very young children has helped to shape my...call it a working hypothesis that life is constantly trying to make us laugh. Babies cry because they need things, not just because they're sad or hurt. While crying might be the sound we come into the world making, think about this; long before they say their first words, the first expression babies learn to make is a smile and the first sound that babies learn to make on their own is laughter. 

Find the funny as much as you can, because it makes everything that much more bearable when the time comes for tears. 

Geek Speaking of Coffee for Cartoon Heroes

Geek Speak: Now That is COFFEE!

This strip isn't based on real-life experiences, yet, but it's probably just a matter of time. It's no secret that I have a deep and committed affinity for coffee. Coffee is something of a ritual in the morning. First I start twenty ounces of water heating in the microwave for five minutes, so that it's not boiling but still hot enough to brew. While the water is heating I measure and grind the beans. After the beans have been ground I add five slightly rounded scoops of fresh ground coffee to the bottom of my coffee press. By this time the water is hot so I pour it over the grounds in the bottom of the press, slowly so it evenly saturates all of the grounds. Then I put the lid on the press and set a timer for five minutes to let the grounds steep in the hot water. After five minutes I press down and the coffee is ready. It goes into a cup, no cream or sugar, just straight black nirvana. First I inhale the aroma, then I take a sip, then I sing "coffee" in a reasonable approximation of rich baritone. 

My not-quite-three-year-old daughter has started singing "coffee" back at me.

As young as she is she's picked up on my appreciation of all things coffee, and has started playing "coffee service" with a dining set she got for Christmas. She'll tip the pitcher over her little cups and hand them out saying "mommy coffee" then "daddy coffee." 

It's going to be a long time before she can drink any herself, but I take some pride in the knowledge that in at least this one small way I'm raising my daughter right. 

Heroes Taking Initiative

I discovered this group at Comic-Con this year, and have been meaning to write about them ever since. It's not the purpose of the blog to advocate for anything, per se, but when I find people doing worthy work I feel like it's worth sharing. The Hero Initiative is a 501 (c) (3) organization providing support to veteran comic book creators in the form of financial assistance and services. 

Many artists in the comic book industry may be recognizable names, and their work might be treasured, but many of them also worked for a paycheck from the publisher. Much like any job they were given assignments and deadlines, they had regular working hours and the occasional overtime, and they took home a paycheck. While many veteran artists and creators have fans, in most cases it's not the kind of celebrity that comes with fabulous wealth. In many cases appearing at conventions, while a fun part of the job, is still just that, part of the job. Like anyone else, when the job ends, so does the paycheck. 

When the money goes away, hard times follow. Comic book illustrators and other artists are especially vulnerable to this as many of them work on a freelance basis. Unfortunately life doesn't wait for you to find work to throw up obstacles in the form of health problems, overdue bills, or just buying food. This is the reason the Hero Initiative exists. 

The Hero Initiative is "the first-ever federally chartered not-for-profit corporation dedicated strictly to helping comic book creators in need." To date they have allocated over $500k in financial aid and services to comic book creators in need. In addition to financial assistance the Hero Initiative also provides services in the form of financial advisers and assistance with finding a path back to paying work. 

From a fan perspective they also do some really cool promotional work. One such promotion was the "JLA 100 Project." When Justice League America reached its fiftieth issue D.C. published the book with a limited run of "blank covers." The Hero Initiative picked up 100 of these and commissioned artists to illustrate the covers. There's a lot of amazing work, and you can see all of them here. The commissioned books are then auctioned off and the proceeds go to the Hero Initiative to provide assistance for struggling comic book veterans. Very cool, highly collectible, and for a great cause. Everyone wins. 

It's more difficult for me to describe the work this group does than it is for the artists who've received their assistance, so I'll leave it with this: Hero Initiative's Success Stories.

As soon as I can work out how it's done I'll be placing a permanent link to the Hero Initiative on my blog. Take a moment to check out their website. They do great work for a community that created the characters and stories we all enjoy.

Mugging for a Gonzo Sketch Dump

Mugging for Gonzo

Where I am working now it is apparently a kind of tradition for managers to buy a company-branded mug for their new hires. In most cases the new employee doesn't get a say as to which mug they end up with. My manager, in her infinite graciousness, let me pick one for myself. When I selected a "Gonzo" from "The Muppets" she and my co-worker exchanged a look and said, "I knew that was the one he was going to get." I really wonder what that says about me.

Gonzo was always my favorite of the characters on The Muppet Show. He was always doing something interesting and crazy. Gonzo was always swinging on a trapeze, or riding a motorcycle through a burning hoop, or firing himself from a canon, and he was always surrounded by chickens...oh...the chickens. Gonzo was always doing something and it was usually something exciting. 

I liked the other muppets just fine, but they never really appealed to me in the same way. Kermit is the one designed to be everyone's favorite, the one you're supposed to like. I like Kermit just fine, but he's so gosh-darned straight-laced and likable that he bores me a little. Ms. Piggy, well, I just never warmed to her. I don't hate the character, but she just never grew on me. Maybe I just find her shrill. Fozzy is funny but kind of pathetic. It goes on like that. I just never felt like the other muppets had the same pizazz. 

Sketch Dump: The Final SADA Installment

As my time at SADA Systems wound to a close I found myself with extra time, and with a little bit of a "devil may care" attitude. It's understandable. In the last couple of weeks I basically had one foot out the door at all times. I took advantage of the extra time to do some extra doodling. Here is some of what I came up with while I was counting down the days to when I could punch out for the last time.

Venting

This is such a bad pun, even for me, that I am absolutely sure it was drawn to break a creative log-jam. Kind of like the cartooning equivalent of writer's block. I had a brand new notebook, and I'd already accepted the offer from what would become my new job, so the last thing I was going to do was use a notebook to take notes.

Banana Split

This may have been a little inappropriate, but it's hardly the most risque thing I've ever doodled at my desk. I liked the over-the-shoulder pose, but thought it would be fun to put a mischievous twist on it. 

I Make My Own Friends

In this case I don't have anything really funny or glib to say. It doesn't happen very much, but every so often I draw something sweet, or sentimental. In this case I think I wanted a sense of nostalgia for the simple joys of growing up, but also a kind of melancholy loneliness. The child is building the snowman alone. 

"Dur Sync"

That was depressing, I think it's time for another stupid pun.

Microsoft "Directory Sync" called "DirSync" for short is a tool that synchronizes data between an on-premise Active Directory system and a number of hosted systems. What it's used for aside, this is what goes through my head every time someone calls it "DirSync."

Said the Bugbear to the Beholder-Kin

This is where I fly my geek flag and make a reference to two classic monsters from Dungeons and Dragons. For those who may not know the game or its assorted ghouls and goblins (both of which are actual monsters with their own unique stats) a bugbear is related to goblins and orcs, but they tend to be bigger, tougher, and more savage. Beholders are, usually, giant floating eyeballs with teeth. Some have smaller eyes on stalks that protrude from their bodies, and each eye has its own excruciatingly painful way to kill an adventurer. 

In all likelihood that's the last thing the bugbear said before the beholder vaporized half his body with his eye-beam, then devoured the other half. 

Geek Speaking of Doctor Dolittle's Whovian Collection

Geek Speak: Home at Last

I remember watching Doctor Dolittle as a kid in the same vague, conceptual way that you know you were once a two-year-old tearing around the house and driving your parents bananas. When I talk about remembering Doctor Dolittle I am, of course, referring to the original film starring Rex Harrison as the titular physician. My sibs and I must have watched that movie a dozen times, but I can recall only a few vague things. It seems like I thought Doctor Dolittle dressed funny. There was a scene at some point in the movie where Dolittle is making funny noises through a megaphone that he's floated on the surface of the ocean, and for some reason I remember him talking to a giant snail. 

It doesn't surprise me all that much that I don't remember much of the film. I was very young and my attention span was about what you would expect for that age group. What surprises me is that my brother and sister and I were able to sit through the movie even once, much less repeat viewings. Just to refresh my memory before posting this I pulled it up in Netflix and happened to glance at the running time. The original Rex Harrison film is two-and-a-half hours of an Englishman in goofy turn of the century clothes running around making burping sounds at trained animals. That's in the same general ballpark as the running time of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Admittedly there's more activity in Doctor Dolittle and the musical numbers are better. I still wonder how my parents managed to get me to sit through 146 minutes of movie. They must have drugged my juice.

We're going to be leaving Ted and Francis for a while after this. I have a few one-off strips I want to do, then it's back to some of our recurring characters.

Knock, Knock; Whovian's There?

When my son was born he was a few weeks early so he was required to spend some time in the neo-natal intensive care unit, NICU ("nick-you") for short. That it would cost us more as a result was something my wife and I knew without being told. What we didn't realize was five days in the NICU would effectively double the cost of our son's birth. The delivery itself was paid for by the time we left the hospital. The NICU stay, however, is another thing.

Around the same time I changed jobs, and there was a period of being between jobs where I didn't have any income. Money was tight. Between the holidays and no income we barely squeaked through the month of December and made rent for January. The hospital bill slipped as a result, and we received a letter from collections.

I'm not proud of it, but it happened, and it was something that needed to be addressed before our account went to an agency and caused our credit to be righteously screwed. To ensure that didn't happen I called the hospital's billing department and was put through to a lady to discuss our account.

The funny thing about being a fan of science fiction, and naming a child after a character in the long running British series Doctor Who is that you have a built in ice-breaker with other fans of the series. It's been long enough now since that phone call that I couldn't tell you how the subject came up, but while we were discussion my past-due account we also started talking about my son's name and where it had come from.

I asked the nice lady on the other end of the phone if she was familiar with Doctor Who.

"Oh, my yes," she said, and though I couldn't see her face I could almost hear her beaming, "I love that show. I've watched ever since it was in black and white."

I explained that my son is named for one of the characters and the actor who played him.

"Oh that's lovely," she said in a tone of matronly indulgence, "that show has been on for a long time hasn't it?"

Of course I agreed and said it had been on for fifty years. She joked, as people from her generation will, about how that dates her, and I laughed with her.

Eventually we conducted the business that had been the reason for my call. We managed to pull my account back from the brink of falling into collections, made arrangements to pay on a monthly cycle, and we parted on friendly acquaintance through a shared appreciation of a (if I'm honest) somewhat goofy British Sci-Fi drama.

When I spoke with Mildly Sensational afterward there was silence on the other end of the phone.

"How," she said and I could all but hear her hands being thrown in the air out of exasperation, "HOW do you do it?"

I really don't know. If it means getting exactly what I need at a critical moment, I'm not going to question it. 

Geek Speaking of Heroic Random Trek

Geek Speak - Heroic Poser

I don't know if I'm in love with these names, but I'm officially going with Ted and Francis for these characters. They were going to need names eventually, but I couldn't settle on one that A.) I liked, and B.) didn't sound like I was lifting it from another (perhaps better) comic. With no better options presenting themselves I have arrived at Ted for the guy who talks to animals and Francis for Captain Dum Dum. To be honest I do think Francis is a funny name for a superhero.

The process of completing the finishing work on these strips using Sketchbook Pro seems to be getting easier, though it does still take more time than if I were to do it by hand. On this strip I think it helped to do the finishing work using a brush with settings I had customized. Tweaks to the brush settings produced the cleanest lines I've made in Sketchbook Pro yet.

From the moment I created these characters I knew they were going to be roommates. The struggle was to find a reason for them to stay together. Every time I imagined Ted talking about his crazy superhero roommate, who also happens to be dumber than a bag of hammers, the only response that made any sense was, "Why don't you move?" If they're brothers it solves the "Why does Ted stay?" problem and it raises the stakes in the relationship. Me likey high stakes. They make for good comedy.

Star Trekking
A few times before our son was born my wife and I left our daughter in the capable hands of friends who volunteered to watch her, and went out on a date night. We didn't really deviate from dinner and a movie for our date night activities, but getting time together without the offspring is such a rare opportunity we weren't going to let a lack of originality be an obstacle to our enjoyment.

Our first dinner and a movie date was to see Star Trek: Into Darkness, which I covered in an earlier post.
It may come as a shock, but I really like Star Trek. I can barely remember a time that I didn't enjoy taking an hour or two to sit down and watch some episodes of Star Trek, Star Trek: the Next Generation, or one of the many movies (though some are better than others). I've even enjoyed several of the Star Trek novels. Every time [insert your favorite captain here] gives the order to go to warp speed and the action cuts away to an exterior shot of the Enterprise as its powerful engines send the ship hurtling off into the stars I get a small thrill.

My lifelong love of all things Trek can be easily traced back to my grandfather on my dad's side, a man I grew up calling Grandpa. He had an incredibly active and inventive mind and was constantly tinkering with things. His life was amazing. He was born in the early 1900s, moved with his family to Alaska long before it was made a state, became an airplane mechanic and pilot with is brother and flew charter passengers into South America, he was in the Alaskan Guard (not the mainland U.S. army) in World War II, and the list goes on from there.

Here's the thing, I was born in the late 70s, and he was already, admittedly, an old man by then. We were products of radically different worlds. He was one of the greatest generation, and I am marginally Generation X. His is the generation of flight, the space race, and many of humanity's landmark achievements. Mine is the generation of video games and MTV. Any chance of us finding something in common was pretty remote.

Then he introduced me to Star Trek, and we found it.

We would talk for hours about all things Trek. The movies, the shows, the latest episode of Star Trek, the Next Generation. He would tape episodes of the original series off of the TV and give them to me on VHS (these were the days before DVD, never mind DVR). I would watch them over, and over, and we would talk about them. He had a bookshelf full of Star Trek novels, and I read many of them.

We were Trekkers. Across a rift of years that constituted not one, but two generations the bridge of the starship Enterprise brought us together. I can't watch any Star Trek now without thinking of him, and how much I miss being able to share it with him. It's a bittersweet thing, but it's very special to me. 

Random Dumping of Dragon Coffee

Random Thoughts

Grapefruit is yummy...that is all.

We have to keep two boxes of Trader Joe's version of Cheerios™ in the house at all times...my daughter is a cereal killer.

Sketch Dump, some stuff I've Been Drawing

There have not been a lot of updates to the "Geek Speak" chronicles as I go through the spastic gyrations of trying to settle into both a new baby routine and a new job...at the same time. It should never be said that I ever did anything fucking halfway. 

Anyhoo. 

My pencil has not been sitting idle (I know how that sounds, moving on...perverts). I've been drawing quite a bit. Especially in the waning days of my time at SADA Systems, Inc. I can finally give a name to the company where I spent the last almost eight years, as I no longer work for them I don't really fear much in the way of reprisal. As the days wound down to my final departure there was less and less for me to do as my job duties were picked up by others, so I found a lot of extra time for drawing. Though, I won't be posting any of those here today. I am a tease.

I give you two of my recent drawings. 

Here I give you the Terrible Terror, one of the dragons that can be found in the forests and hills of the island of Berk. My daughter has fallen ponytails-over-tiny-pink-crocs in love with Dreamworks Dragons: Riders of Berk, and its follow up series, Defenders of Berk. The shows are pretty much what they sound like; a television spin-off of How to Train Your Dragon. My wife and I both really enjoy the show, but not nearly with the all consuming passion of an enraptured not-quite-three-year-old. To earn some cool daddy points (and because I really do like the show) I decided I should start trying to learn to draw the various dragons presented in the story. 

It's not really a secret that I love coffee. I can take that something of a step further and say it might ruin me if I were ever forced to give up sipping that sweet nectar of the morning. I've given up smoking, and that was tough but went ok. I still drink, but I've long since given it up as a daily ritual, and I think I could stop drinking entirely and it would be ok after a short period of sucking. 

The same cannot be said of coffee. I tried to go cold turkey once. I turned into something like Mr. Hyde meets Officespace. When I realized I was being an irritable jerk I broke down and poured myself a cup of Arabica Bliss. I found a pair of rose colored glasses in the bottom of that brew and my day turned right around. 

For all that I love coffee I am something of a caffeine lightweight. I can only drink coffee within a narrow range of potency. I need something between a medium and dark roast. Too light, and I shuffle around like the undead. Too strong and the results are...entertaining, if not pretty. 

If anyone is interested, the best way I've found to get coffee that is just right for me is to combine Trader's Joe's house brand coffee "Joe: Medium Roast" with their house brand dark roast "Joe's Dark." I use equal portions of whole beans and shake them in a container to make sure they're well distributed. Then I grind them together myself (until I burned out my coffee grinder, but my birthday is coming up (hint hint)) and make coffee as usual. 

The result is a brew that's stronger and more flavorful than a medium roast, but not as bitter as a dark roast. It's a nice balance in terms of its caffeine content. It gets me going better than a medium roast, but doesn't make me shaky, queasy, and weird like a dark roast. 

I think I should put this one on a t-shirt. 

Random Geek Speaking of Hobos Moving Up

Random Thought
One of the lessons I've learned as the father a brand new baby boy is this: when changing a boy's diaper don't bend too far over the changing table, and for the love of God keep your mouth closed. I didn't have to learn this the hard way, fortunately. All I needed was to see my son demonstrate his "golden fountain" technique a couple of times.

Geek Speak: Hooch for Hobos

It's been a while since I've posted, so I understand if this strip doesn't make a lot of sense as the context has gotten a little stale. To refresh everyone's memory, or for those coming to this for the first time, here are the several strips leading up to the one I posted today:

• A Boy and Some Old Lady's Dog
• Communication
• Wuffles!
• There are Worse Things...
• The Power of Booze
• Another One Rides the Bus
• Medicinal Uses
• Step Aside
• Heroics...?
• The Horror of Noms.

Wow. I've been milking this gag for a while. Not much longer, though. There are two more in this series, then I'll take a little break from the regular characters and post some one off jokes before starting up a new mini-arc.

The Delay in posting strips was the result of a number of things, the most significant of which was the birth of my son. I talk about that in another post so I won't go into it too much more, here. In addition to the birth of my son I also left my job of more than seven years for a new position, which I talk about in more detail below. Throw the holidays on top of the rest of it, and it's actually amazing that I managed to complete the finishing work on today's comic strip.

With so much happening in the last few months I'm hoping 2014 is a year of relative peace and stability. I've had enough life altering changes for a while, though I'll probably explore that a little more in another post.

Moving On...Moving Up?
On Friday the 13th of December I left my position as a project manager with the company for which I had worked for more than seven years. My departure marks the end of what is far and away the longest single stretch of time I've spent with any one company.

There is an odd, even portentous symmetry to my departure. When I started at my last job my first day was June 6th, 2006 (6/06/06). My last day at the same job was December 13th, 2013 (12/13/13). Perhaps a numerologist could tell me what, if any, significance this has to my current job prospects. Short of consulting one I'm going to interpret it as I'm leaving at a time that is right for me.

In my new position I will be working for a Fortune 500 company as a project coordinator with other project managers. The new company is very recognizable, but (for obvious reasons) that is about as specific as I can be here.

The first couple of weeks have been slow, which is understandable. Christmas and New Year's are a weird time to start a new job anywhere. Right now I have a new email address, a Microsoft Lync ID, a network password, and a computer. All that's missing now is someone to install the Windows image on the laptop I've been issued and I'll be off to the races.

Two weeks in the change is still both terrifying and exciting. Though for the first time in longer than I care to discuss I'm actually looking forward to going to work in the morning.

Geek Speaking the Horror of Noms

Geek Speak: Walk with the Animals, Talk with the Animals...

The problem with being able to understand the "speech" of animals is that you might not want to know what they have to say. Cats in particular. Cats are vicious bastards.

In any big city it's impossible to go anywhere without encountering some manner of local urban fauna. It could be anything from the much maligned city pigeon (in the event of the apocalypse remember; pigeons are made of meat), to the universal flea-bitten street cat, to even wilder critters such as coyote, raccoon, and snakes. For someone in our hero's position this makes the simple act of getting a cart full of alcohol home with so he can get obliterated like running the gauntlet on an episode of "Wild Kingdom: Los Angeles."

There were some interesting challenges in drawing this strip. We see the action at different "angles," from very wide, to very close, to looking up at the "hero" in a moment of horror. I'm starting to understand why Bill Watterson allegedly lamented backgrounds in comic strips as a dying art. It's difficult to draw backgrounds that enrich the world of the comic and add a feeling of authenticity. Most likely I'm going to need to take some time and go out into my community and draw some store fronts.

Down Time
This post has been a long time coming, and future posts may also be delayed. The reason is I'm adjusting to being responsible for not one, but two small people-pupae. My wife and I welcomed our second child on September 18th at 8:30 at night. He was born at 5 pounds, 13 ounces, 20 inches long...and two-and-a-half weeks pre-term.

He was born by emergency c-section after a friend rushed my wife to the hospital. I met them there after receiving a text message no one, but expectant fathers in particular, should ever have to read from someone for whom they care deeply. It was simple, and chilling, "Come home now. Bleeding lots. Hospital."

Mildly Sensational...needs a new handle. My wife is incredible, and there's nothing mild about that. Six weeks on I'm still awed by her courage and resolve in the face of something so deeply and personally frightening. She barely let on that she was scared through the entire event. Her strength gave me the resolve I needed to hang by her side and contribute in whatever small way I could.

The rest of that day is a blur. I can only hope that I actually performed as a husband and father as well as my extraordinarily hazy recollections would seem to indicate. It didn't hit me until much later how close I came to losing both my wife and our son; how close my world came to ending. I won't dwell on that. In the end our son is healthy and amazing, and mildly sensational is healing up nicely.

I'm left with the problem of finding a way to thank our very good friend Phoenix for all her help at what is, without question, one of the most critical moments of our lives. When we needed someone to step in and save the day, she was there. She put aside whatever else she needed to do that day, whatever else she was dealing with, and pushed through some personal boundaries to  be there for us when we needed someone the most. Words don't convey thanks in adequate measure for such selflessness.

Our son was early enough that he didn't get to come home right away, and ended up spending some time in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). That is a scary experience. You're forced to place a tiny, extremely fragile new life in the hands of others, and stand helplessly by while they buzz around your baby in a smooth dance of professional detachment.

Since coming home we have been thrust hardcore into full-time baby-management mode. By full time I mean "around-the-clock." Our experience with our son could not be more different from the early days with our daughter. She always slept easily and deeply, and rarely fussed in her sleep. She fed easily without the need for a lot of coaxing. There was never a need for both of us to be up every time she needed to be fed, changed, or anything else. Preemies are...different...more demanding.

There is a space beyond simple fatigue that you reach after weeks of sleep deprivation. It's a place where you can operate at a functional level even when your head is buzzing from lack of sleep. I think it's a place only parents, and military personnel training for, or already in combat, ever come to know. Every fiber of your being is screaming for sleep, but there's stuff that has to be done, so you push those thoughts of bed and comfort from your mind and you wash bottles for the third time that day.

For all that we're not sleeping, and for all that the last few weeks have been a trial, I think it was worth it. I look into my son's eyes as he drinks in the world around him and begins to understand it, and I lose myself. Time flies by and it's just me with my baby boy in my arms.

Geek Speaking while Dungeoning the Dragons of Madness

Geek Speak: Next in the Mines of Madness

If this one looks a little rougher than my usual finished work, there's a good reason for that; it's not done. This is a much larger and more ambitious page than I usually attempt, and there is a lot of stuff going on that I want to try to get right. I'm not going to try to get it "just right." That could drive a person crazy. I'm aiming for "just right enough." 

I played Dungeons and Dragons over the holiday weekend. Tea Leaf had downloaded a module to play test the upcoming new edition of the Dungeons and Dragons core rules. I shit you not the cartoon above was what happened in the first five minutes of the game. Character death is a hazard everyone who plays these games has to deal with. Some people treat it like now big deal, others get really attached to their characters and can become...irritated...when their characters are killed. I'd like to say that I just roll with it. Alas, I fall somewhere in the middle of that spectrum.

It was my character that was swallowed by a reject from "Dune" while taking a shit in the first ten minutes of actual game play. I've never lost a character that quickly.

It was hilarious. 

Background: Droppin' some context

For years I have played tabletop role playing games (RPGs if you're cool) with friends. The games have ranged in style and genre from dark and brooding science fiction, to tense and frightening supernatural western, to frivolous sword and sorcery. Some games take themselves too seriously by half, some not at all, but either way it goes somewhat beyond being an enjoyable hobby. It's a kind of constructive escapism. Problem solving with friends and playing out heroic fantasies in a way that lets the player decompress from the stress and strife of the world they occupy every day.

One of the biggest downsides to tabletop role playing games is they do take some time to play out. For the most part the adventures aren't like board games that can be played out in an evening. Very often the stories are complex with multiple threads that need to be resolved by the players, which means that playing out the entire story, usually called a campaign, can take weeks, months, even years. It all depends on how often the players can get together, and how much they stay on story and don't get either mired down in role-playing their characters or sidetracked into doing something unrelated to the major quest.

The ongoing nature of these games means that I don't get much opportunity to play anymore. My family needs me around to do various daddy things, like play "horsey." I don't mind. I want to be there for my daughter, and for my son when he arrives. My only real complaint is the bridle chaffes and my daughter throws a fit if she doesn't get to wear the spurs. 

Therefore it was pretty special when Mildly Sensational agreed to let me get in some game time over Labor Day weekend. I must have asked my wife a hundred times if she was absolutely sure that it was ok for me to go and spend a day gaming with our friends, instead of spending the weekend with her and our daughter, and that was only in the morning the day of the game. It's possible she let me go because she was tired of my asking if she was really, really, extra sure it was ok, and reminding her that it's ok to call if she needs me I can really just leave and come home. 

Confident that I had the blessing of my other half to go and get my geek on I got a ride with my friend ZeroPoint, and together we ventured forth on a harrowing trek of nearly five minutes to join Tea Leaf, his wife Celluloid Girl, and our friends Lendell Prime and Redbeard McFancyPants. I'm not disparaging that last person at all. He has the most amazing denim pants I have ever seen. Americans really don't appreciate how versatile denim can be.

Anyway, after a brief rundown of the rules we'd be using (this is a play test of the beta release of fifth edition, after all) we dove into the fray using pre-generated characters. The first five minutes were great, then my character was swallowed by a giant purple worm. Things pretty much got hilarious from there. That was not the last of my characters to die in the course of playing the game, nor were my characters the only ones. I want to elaborate more, but some of that will be content for upcoming comics like the one above. 

For the first time in I don't know how many years I was able to get my geek on for an entire day, and well into the night. It really felt good to delve into being a character in a fantasy setting for a day, and spend that time pretending to be someone other than me. Escapism is a funny thing. There's no getting away from who you are every day. Sooner or later you have to return to being the person you see in the mirror every day. Sometimes, just sometimes it's getting away and being someone else for a little while that can make being  yourself bearable.