...it would probably be Sunny.
A vibrant, promising career in hooliganism, cut short by a sound beating with a hockey stick. Tragic. Tragic.
Oh yeah, PS.
Got some samples in the mail, today.
Okay, but not great. A couple misaligned plates, some offset issues. Called about it, gettin' it taken care of. But I'm about 85%-90% satisfied as-is. Looks... professional. It's kinda eerie, really.
Jesus Christ pants and underwear.
Ali Spagnola painted my American Hairless Terrier, Harvey. And I am about to fall over in a swoon from the cuteness.
Ali was featured back on the art blog Drawn! a while back, because she was offering honest-to-goodness free paintings to anyone who asked for one. So, I took a chance and put my name in the hat. Looks like she dug my idea! She'll be sending this to me in the mail, too. Thanks, Ali!
If you want a free painting from Ali, she's still taking requests! And hey, I'm livin' proof that it's not some kinda weird trick or anything. So go for it.
Back to work with me. Expect more Templar Wednesday.
I'm makin' stuff up again. Sorry.
And I'm starting to think Sunny maybe spent a good proportion of his childhood with a bar of soap crammed in his face. Just a guess.
While inking Templar today, I listened to an episode of the Old Time Radio show Family Theater. Family Theater episodes featured one-shot dramatic plays, and they usually had a moral.
This episode's moral? Fake incompetence to get other people to like you.
No, really. A family with a super-capable, painfully organized housewife moves into a neighborhood, and gracefully rejects welcome wagon style offers of assistance from a matronly neighbor. Said neighbor then instructs the local clubs and businesses to all give Capable Housewife and her family the cold shoulder, until Capable Housewife formulates a cunning plan and pretends she can't make dinner for her own kids. Neighbor swoops in, feels useful, and engineers a promotion for Housewife's husband. The End.
This was aired with complete sincerity sometime in the 1950s. You were supposed to learn something from this.
Family Theater is crazy like that, though. The moral of another one was basically Nobody marries fat poor girls. So stop being fat and poor. A'course, this was the 1950s, so the 160-pound protagonist was considered freakishly massive. The episode ended with her returning to her soul-devouring factory job after turning down a promotion so she could stay in the same department as her secret crush, who runs screaming from her fat poorness after she tries to make him dinner.
Did I mention every episode ends with an order to pray?
Wow.
What did she see in him? Y'kinda had to be there.
Hey, three pages this week! Hooray!
So yeah, there IS a point to introducing these two. They have a purpose, other than being a vehicle for cruelty and sad pug faces! REJOICE, this comic isn't as random and disjointed as you were dreading!
More later!
Mostly because of the racial slurs that aren't really slurs, just bizarre puns.
Lots to do this week.
The books should be coming soon, but I'll be starting in on the ink commissions sooner than that. If you're one of the twenty-odd people ordered a fancy ink drawing from me during the Pre-Order Project, expect an email confirming your choice in subject matter pretty soon. Also, I'll be asking if I can post your commission in my DevArt gallery, if it turns out especially nice. (Feel free to say no.)
Also, I'll be updating the Project's blog with such fascinating details as Templar's official Pantone color, prepping for two-color printing and how to do it completely wrong, and how glad I am that Baby's First Print Run is behind me. It was irritating and riddled with speedbumps, but the payoff: The next book will take half the time to prep and print, if that. I feel significantly less dumb about the whole process. That Confucius quote really is spot on: I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.
Oh hey, and another thing: I won a Glyph award! Good for me, huh? I wasn't there to accept it, though, so they have to mail it to me. This is my first meatspace award, so it comes with something I can actually frame, or possibly put on a shelf. I'm not sure yet. But whatever, I'm in the same company as Kyle Baker and Keith Knight. Not bad.
No Templar this week, on account I gotta get too much ABOUT Templar sorted out.
Not story-wise, don't worry, I haven't written myself into a corner yet. But the business end.
Expect comics next week.
The final, super-final, totally, completely, no-take-backs PDF of print-ready Templar was uploaded to Lebonfon's FTP at about 4:00 AM this morning. Josie, my current contact at the printer, got an email telling her so shortly thereafter.
And now, nothing left to do with the printer except wait for the books.
...
Wow.
Yeah, so, this week will probably be taken up with preparing for the flood of commissions and sketches I have to do. That, and re-doing ironcircus.com, business stuff, stocking up on envelopes and mailing labels, and the like.
So, y'know, it's not really OVER. It's just beginning.
It's no accident that I got my Deviant Art account recently; if I especially like how a commission or sketch comes out, it'll go there (with the permission of the commissioner, of course). It'll be a nice, easy way to pad the gallery.
I love what you guys commissioned, by the way. Awesome subject matter. This is gonna be very not-painful.
Abrupt change of subject.
Good OTR: Dragnet, The Whistler, The Black Museum, Ripley's Believe It or Not, Broadway is my Beat, X Minus 1.
Tolerable OTR: Let George Do It, Boston Blackie, Nero Wolfe, Night Beat, I Was A Communist for the FBI.
Suck OTR: The Great Gildersleeve, Magic Island, Candy Matson, Speed Gibson of the International Secret Police, Yours Truly Johnny Dollar, Fibber McGee and Molly.
Worst OTR Ever: Big Town.
Oh God. Please stop airing this. Please. It is cancer. It is vomit. How can one show be so awful? I can't even enjoy it ironically.
Note that I didn't say Eric was a communist. He's not. He just digs pogroms. But he'll probably collapse in an ecstasy of admiration the day someone tells him bout The Great Leap Forward, too.
Oh yeah, and I'm gonna recommend a cartoonist to you guys. I really do not see how anyone could not love him.
John Campbell is on Livejournal as stereotypist, and you should subscribe to that account. He does wonderful, beautiful, incredibly simple comics that manage to be autobiographical without being self-aggrandizing, and charming without becoming cloying. I do a little shimmy for joy in my chair whenever he updates. Serious.
Jeez, I hope not.
Hang a bell around my neck an' put me out to pasture, cuz I just joined the herd.
Mooo.
That dent is the least of his problems.
I really like the guy on the left's zippered executioner's-mask-style hoodie. It's real, I think I saw it on Boing Boing a while back. Problem is, I'm not sure if it was an actual item of clothing you can go out and buy or some sort of artsy high-concept protest against London's citywide network of ubiquitous public surveillance cameras.
I should pay better attention.
And I got the proofs from the printer, guys. I'm in the middle of fixing all the little pissant mistakes you inevitably don't see until the damn thing's in front of you on paper. It's an exciting time. And I'll just be glad when it's all over.
Gimme one more page before y'get too frustrated. I can't stay this cryptic forever.
I timed myself last night, just out of curiosity. With brief breaks interspersed throughout, one page of Templar takes about 15 hours.
2 hours to pencil and letter, 7 hours to ink, 3 hours to scan and clean the inks, 3 hours to tone. I think it used to take me longer, too, but I've gotten a little quicker at this.
I really had no idea it took that long, though. I really surprised myself. Silver lining: Maybe now I can plan ahead a little better. But enough about me, there's more interesting shit going on, these days. Namely, drama.
Matt Boyd, co-creator of the webcomics Mac Hall and Three Panel Soul, is getting hassled by The Man for daring to show in interest in paper target shooting while on the job as a government contractor, days after the massacre at Virgina Tech. He got the boot when co-workers complained about his extracurricular activities, despite the fact that he never threatened anyone and never broke a single law.
Furthermore, when he made an autobio strip and wrote up some commentary about the incident, four detectives showed up at his door and informed him he was making "borderline terroristic threats."
Yeah. I can't believe it, either.
I can't say anything about this mess that R. Stevens and Boing Boing haven't already said more eloquently, so I'll just settle for calling it complete fucking bullshit and leaving things there.
Reactionary hysterics are the pink floral print of the emotional spectrum.
And if y'wanna get technical, he's not named "Sunny" at all. Not really. But that's something for later.
Detail You Don't Care About #1: I need to update the FAQ. I've changed the materials I use to make Templar from India ink and Winsor & Newton watercolor brushes to cheap, student-grade synthetic brushes and carbon black acrylic paint. It's more cost-effective, dries quicker, and the brushes last longer.
Detail You Don't Care About #2: I was listening to the audiobook of Christine while I worked on this one. My first thought was, "Wow, I bet someone out there cares way too much about the depiction of the car in this book. Cuz that's just how it is."
I hit Google just to see, and yeah, I was right. There are also about a million classic car enthusiasts with '58 Plymouth Furys who have had their rides painted red and named them Christine too, which shouldn't surprise anyone.
My second thought was wondering if there was a Stephen King drinking game.
Every time a protagonist considers denying the obvious because it's absolutely impossible, and is totally aware that their desire to deny the obvious is a defense mechanism, take a shot.
Every time a character suddenly recalls a pop song or childish rhyme in a moment of irrational, sickening terror, take a shot.
Kids telling horrible stories of supernatural occurrences adults don't believe? You got it. Shot. Two shots if they don't resolve the occurrences until they're adults.
Horrific supernatural/psychic entity with absurd or totally nonthreatening corporeal form? Child? Clown? Anteater? Shot, shot, shot.
Magical retard? Shot.
Magical car? Shot.
Stars an author? Shot.
...Of course, anyone who's ever written anything has their reoccurring themes. Including myself. And you, probably. I'm just sayin', is all.
More pages later.
