too long for facebook

Gonna be at Anime North this weekend doing a whole bunch of stuff! ANIME HELL is Friday night at 10 in the Plaza Ballroom in the Doubletree with OZONE COMMANDOS and BAD AMERICAN DUBBING to follow until about 2am. I'm on a classic anime presentation Sunday at 2 in the same room. Saturday I don't have any panels but Neil Nadelman is doing Totally Lame Anime in the International Ballroom starting at 9pm, I think.

In between all that stuff I'll be over in the Sheraton, making sure the workshops go as planned. ANIME NORTH! Be there or be plaid!!

post Howie Post post

I haven't had a lot of time to scan things, but they're reporting that Howie Post died. You don't know the name, but you've seen his work if you ever read a Harvey comic, which you probably have at one time or another. Since according to the world of comic book nerds Harvey Comics don't exist, they don't mention this, but not only did he work on and possibly create Hot Stuff, but he also had a long and fruitful run on Playful Little Audrey in which the character's Little Lulu roots were allowed to grow unchecked until they grew up under the sidewalk and through municipal water conduits until they became something new and strange. Post's work was always a little meatier than the typical Harvey stuff, his inks were a little stronger and the action was always a little cartoonier with lots of hollering and stuff breaking. He was one of the few Harvey cartoonists to get away with signing his own work, at least for a little while.

There's a new Zero Fighter up as of last night. I've been doing this strip for more than a year now. Actually I started physically inking the finished pages around January of 2009, by May I had enough of a backlog to start posting them on Mister Kitty, and since then I've managed to get a page up every week, more or less, with weeks off for vacations and such (and of course the basic idea dates back to 2002 or 2001, and isn't amazingly original in the first place.) I'm actually pretty pleased that I've been able to keep current. I have never worked on a weekly schedule before, or any kind of a deadline, really; back in the old Animanga days we'd have to have something in every couple of months, which usually led to a furious weekend of writing and drawing and a quick trip to the Kinko's and the post office. With Zero Fighter I have to have a finished strip ready to upload sometime Sunday evening, every Sunday evening. Some of my work isn't as polished or as good as it could be, but I'm meeting that deadline, and to me that's as important, if not more important, than being "perfect".

What I'm learning about myself is quite interesting. About ten years ago when we were working on the strips for JUKU I can remember thinking that there wasn't any reason I couldn't be a professional comic book artist, I'm good enough, I have the skills, I just need time to sit down and draw, sure, whatever. Ten years later I am amazed at my lack of fundamental drawing skills on just about every level. And it's not that I don't have any skills, it's just that the more I learn, the more I learn how much MORE THERE IS TO LEARN.

And that's a good thing. If I was working at the same point all the time, never struggling or having to work through something I hadn't figured out yet, I'd be amazingly bored with it and I would not be drawing. I have to have that struggle to keep it interesting for me. I don't know if this results in anything readable or interesting for anybody else, but hopefully it does.

Also, we saw IRON MAN 2. Enjoyable, but about 20 minutes too long, and the whole manic Tony Stark schtick gets real old about halfway through. It's called Ritalin, Tony, you could probably afford some.