Yes, I’m on Facebook

It is a digital world, and I'm just a string of digitized electrons in it.

Yep, that's right folks, I’m on Facebook and I’m telling you all this now because if you are on Facebook, I’ve just added my blog to the apps on my page. Now I just need three or four more people to follow my blog over on Facebook, and I’ll get listed on the Blog Page.

So, what are you waiting for?

Wülf Girlz: Resurrection

OK, perhaps that is a bit more dramatic than required. My Wülf Girlz haven’t really gone away, as much as have metamorphed. The last time we all saw them, they appeared in the Guild Work Production comicbook, Psychosis!, as illustrated by the incomparable Matt Ryan. Well, Matt is the heart and soul of MattsMineStudio, that produces the most excellent line of Free Lunch Comics. So, as you can probably expect, Matt is wicked-busy these days producing some of the finest Indie comics to come out of New England, so he really hasn’t had much time to devote to the Girlz.

And well, I really want to continue their adventures. Still, as much as I wanted to wait for Matt, I really couldn’t, so (with his understanding) I have engaged the services of the very talented Rick Lundeen, who as you all recall, illustrated my Gustave Whitehead story which appeared in the recently-published Iconic graphic album from CAG.

So, Rick has finished his first installment of Wülf Girlz (and agreed to do more), so I’m currently writing a new Wülf Girlz script for him, but the really big news is that I just finished my very first Wülf Girlz prose story. Yep. That’s right, prose (some 6,500 words long, I might add).

Needless to say, I’m really very excited about it and I can’t wait to tell you more about it (including where and when it will be released). Suffice it to say, that it (along with the first illustrated story by Rick, and perhaps even the second) will all be out sometime this year under the Atlas Unleashed banner.

Here is a sneak peak at Rick’s take on the Girlz...

Stay tuned.

Button, Button; whose got the Button?

So, as I mentioned, Over the past weekend I was at the MoCCA show and had a great time. Even to the point where I helped my client move more product than he had been able to move at each of the last three shows where he had displayed. To be sure I credit a couple of different factors helping in that area; first, it was the type of show (geared more towards the small press publishers), and second, it was us actively interacting and engaging the potential client. (If we sat back in our chairs and talked among ourselves behind the table, folks just walked by with their cash in their pockets, if we stood, and chatted the audience up, we tended to separate them from their cash, and sell our product. Funny how that works, eh?)

Any way, one of the very cool folks we met were the extremely nice folks at Twin Comics. Well, not only do they produce some cool comics, but they have an online web comic entitled Night Owls that is currently being hosted over at Zuda. Well, we got to know them quite well, especially when we learned that they were making little buttons for a buck and drawing anything you wanted on the button.

What most of us opted for, was a B&W picture or ourselves (except Mark Lear who — for some inexplicable reason — chose to have them draw my face. Anyway. this proved to be the coolest bit of collectible at the con, and I think I sent about 20 people over to their table to buy a button. Needless to say, when I got home the first night I showed my button off to my daughter, whose immediate response was “Why didn’t you get one for me, daddy.” The following day I went back to the Twin Comics booth and purchased two more buttons; one for my daughter, and one for my niece (who was visiting us at the time).

I think that they did an outstanding job on the buttons, and everyone who purchased one over the weekend clearly enjoyed theirs as well. So if you ever see Twin Comics at a con, go over to them, flash a buck, and ask for your face on a button, and tell ‘em that I sent you over.

In the mean time, you can follow their blog if you so choose.

Two Days of Mocca

So, this past weekend I spent a couple of days at the annual MoCCA comicbook convention MoCCA is the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art in NYC. If you have never been it is far different from virtually every other comic book show in that the stars of this show are not Spider-Man, Superman, and the other heroes from the big three (four, five?), but are the small, independent comicbook publishers (like Atlas Unleashed). Yep, this show is the Sundance Film Festival to NYCC’s Oscar extravaganza.

Unlike at many shows that spotlight mainstream comics, where I can walk around all day long and never reach for my wallet, I felt that while I was at this show I found quite a number of books that I wanted to acquire — and yes, I put my hand in my pocket to pull out cash quite a few times.

Among the item that I purchased were Craig Yoe’s Secret Identity. A book that talks about some lost treasures drawn by Joe Schuster. I blogged about this a while back, but this was the first chance I had the opportunity to actually get my hands on a copy of the book. Craig very generously autographed the book to me (after I paid him for the privilege of owning it). I’ll talk more about the book after I’ve had the chance to read it, but I think it was a terrific find by Craig, and I’m glad that he wrote about it.

I also picked up a copy of Jobnik, which is the story about Miriam Libicki, an American Jewish girl from a religious home who — one summer against everyone's better judgment — moved to Israel and enlisted in the Israeli Army. Jobnik is her illustrated account of that journey. I had met Miriam a year ago at last year’s MoCCA and picked up a copy of her comic. I’m glad that she has issued the first six issues as a trade paperback, and I also scored a copy of issue #7 as well.

All-in-all, this was a very good show, and I had a great time and managed to conduct some business as well, not only for myself, but for my client as well. Now, after spending the weekend as a rock star, I get to come back home and finish writing my entries for The Official Index to the Marvel Comics Universe.

Talk to you all later.

The Outer Space Men

A few months back, I (digitally) crossed paths with Eric Hayes. Eric is a very talented writer who took a set of very silly yet endearing toys from our collective youths (The Outer Space Men) and turned them into a gripping, well-written, and wonderfully illustrated graphic novel* that took these great toys and translated them into a well-thought out, well-executed, and thoroughly readable tale full of action, philosophy, and intrigue.

Yep, all based on a toy from the ‘70s.

Now I know that you are all used to reading repackaged serialized adventures that have been padded out to fill five or six issues so that they fill out a “full length” story. This is so not that. This is a real graphic novel that is nearly 150 pages long full glossy cover and interiors, measuring a standard comicbook-sized 6.5 x 10.25". This is a very fine package, and impressive in its own right, plus the art is clean, vibrant, and better than most of what I see these days passing for professional art. This book is über slick!

Hayes takes the concept of these handful of children’s toys and brilliantly transforms them into a viable Sci-Fi concept worth of Golden-era pulps. This story is so clearly well-though out by someone who is interested in not only delivering a super fine product, but an intelligent story as well. Hayes most excellently weaves real science, history, and and politics into this story as he crafts a very believable epic adventure that engages the reader on multiple levels.

I’m not sure how he was able to acquire the rights to translates these characters from the dim, dusty corridors of my ill-spent youth, into the full color reading pleasures of my here-and-now, but I’m ever so grateful that he did. This is a great story, and certainly is capable of spring-boarding the characters and concepts into another graphic novel, an on-going series, or (dare we say it), the next big-blockbuster action-packed, summer film.

I seriously wish Eric all the luck in the world. It is for certain that he has a heaping helpful of it already. Credit where credit is due Dept. The art chores on the graphic novel were handled by Rudolf Montemayor and Marc Borstel.

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*Graphic Novel: for those of you in the audience who don’t understand (and probably aren’t reading this blog anyway) that’s a long-form, complete-in-one-package, single story with a beginning, middle and end, told with words and pictures, not a series of short, thematically similar, tales loosely strung together with a hastily-conceived, framing device. Oh, and don’t worry Eric, this comment has nothing to do with you, or you most-excellent book, ask me off-line and I’ll be happy to explain.

Yes, June Belongs to Belkis!

We already met my good buddy,
Ravi Wilki who pals around with the guys at The Filament Factory is (as you can see) is an extremely talented artist, and previously contributed to James Rodriguez’s, NovaStar Studios Fantasy Art Calendar.

Sure, sure, we are now halfway into the year, but this is still a smoking-hot calendar, James, Ravi, and the rest of the folk who contributed to the calendar are wicked-talented, rising-star artist, and, well, Belkis is always worth looking at, even in two dimensions.

As for my pal Ravi, he is so talented, that I would certainly love to work with him, perhaps on something relating to zombies.

The Filament Factory is a cadre of extremely talented NYC artists and writers (who throw wicked-cool parties), put up with me, and will be exhibiting this weekend at the MoCCA comicbook show in NYC.

I too will be there with Atlas Unleashed. Stop by and visit us if you can, it promises to be a rockin’ good time!

Friendly Spam

I have friends, both personal and professional, and — don‘t get me wrong — I (generally speaking) like them, and (as many of them are in comics) they all have comicbook projects that they are trying to promote. As a comicbook creator myself, I too have comicbook projects that I want to promote. The problem I’m having these days is that a number of my comicbook friends are involved in a comicbook-related “American Idol”-style contest that involves voting and levels of “winning.”

Every day friends get to vote for their project to advance them onto the next round. The only problem is that many of these folks are competing against each other in this same contest, and all of them are sending out multiple emails to multiple email accounts, and connectivity links, resulting in what can only be described as an unrelenting torrent of “friendly” spam.

Now, as much as I want to help these folks out in their upcoming projects and dreams of glory, I really can’t be bothered to spend all of my time working on their stuff when I have my own stuff to do. The result is that while I certainly don’t mind advising them (if I can), and purchasing their books when they come out, I really can’t be spending all of my days reading their repeated solicitations to vote for them, nor am I interested in constantly trudging back to the site to vote.

In case you haven’t gotten the message yet. I’m really starting to find the constant emails and solicitations from the same folks irritating and I’m seriously considering blocking them. No offense, but it really is getting tiring. I’m sure that if were happening to you, you’d agree.

You folks know who you are (you might not even be reading this blog, but you know who you are). This is just a friendly warning.