Back into the Sun!

Wow...sometimes time flies by so fast. I spent all of 2010 either travelling or preparing to travel, or cleaning my yard, or preparing to clean my yard. I went into 2011 with the same plan - but it all went haywire fast - and now I have to start everything over from scratch.

I started a new career - got my Real Estate licence - and did a few sketches to go with my web sites.

I'm looking at AZ again with fresh eyes. I've been here 14 years and did almost everything I planned to do before 2011. Now I'm putting together a new set of goals and plans and finding new excitement in being here in the Valley of the Sun!!! I hope to check in more often!

Oh, yeah, if you or someone you know is looking for a home here, give me a hollar, I can help you out!!

2010 - The Year I Am Laid-Back!

...yeah....been months since I collected my works and decided to post! I kinda decided to just sit back and reflect during most of 2010 --- I just pushed away from the table a bit and decided to look back at what I've done and look around at where I am at --- and just sort of breathe it in. Often I have pursued goals or chased some sort of dream I had that I felt was too distant to happen -- and yet, most have been achieved.

This time around, for 2010 I decided to let FATE and DESTINY do the steering. Reckless? Maybe...I'm not asleep at the wheel of my life, just at a point where I'm ready to lighted the grip on the wheel and see what interesting thing pops up that wasn't on my road map.

New Gals for the Fall Line

I did two (2) sketches in one (1) week --gasp! My ticker's gonna give out if I keep this up.... Actually, it's not so much sketches done as sketches actually completed, ink, colored, scanned in and posted!!!

Gooooooo JOE!!!!

Okay, I had lots of GI JOEs as a kid, I watched the animation in the 90's and loved the outrageous silly cardboard caricatures of it all. I will go see the new movie for chuckles~!!
So to celebrate, here's a re-post:

GIJOE Testifies -- Amazing how our foreign policy is based on a ludicrous cartoon from the 80's!!

DIE-jest...The Conclusion!

Yeah, okay, I've been lost in WoW for the last three months, so blogs, cartoons, work, life, and greasy snacks have been on hold!!! But now, here is the mind-dumbing final pages of DIE-jest...


Page 13 - I hate it when your read a story and the characters constantly come up with excuses NOT to do the very thing they set out to do at the start. So having seen such a wacky device and how it works, what would YOU want to see next? RIGHT! Put it on the lunatic's head!

Page 14 - heehehe!!! The revelation is entirely tuned to the audience of readers at the animation club -- people who already knew this was the truth! I didn't have to make anything up, so it's absolutely hilarious!

Page 15 - The story ends in the first panel, the rest is pap. I didn't have a good joke to finish it, which is a real bummer. Can't win 'em all, I guess.

DIE-jest continues...Rich-kun Returns!

Page 10 - Well.....big jokes take longer to set up, so sometimes ya gotta do a little exposition.... or find a way to buy time while you think something up!!! But this is what I love about stream-of-conciousness writing, the wackiest stuff comes up!

Page 11 - I like this page because now the madman has stolen the show. The hunters are now the hunted! I picked the Yamato shirt for Rich-kun because it was one of the first animes I watched and this mind-thingy was going into unexplored space. Note the WARNING before it's turned on. I love it in a story when a warning is 100% correct, but no one listens....

Page 12 - If there is any theme that universal in all the comics I draw, it's that of subjective reality or how the world perspective of different characters is so dramatically different -- leading to conflict of course. But isn't that the basis of any story? In this page, it simply take a literal form.

DIE-jest continues some more....

Page 7 - A rather weak page, I think....I just ran out of excuses for not showing Rich-kun any more.

Page 8 - Ah, yes...back in the groove...this is where I start the real madness! What's great is that having established the madness....I CAN DO ANYTHING!!!

Page 9 - This is a great page that's representative of all my comics/stories in pretty much every form. The characters confront a conflict, and just freak out!

Galactic Adventures: The Galaga War

My favorite video game of all time is Galaga. I love blasting those bugs!!! I'm no champion, I just love the game. Way back in the day, when the game was still new, I drew a comic about it. Here it is!

Silk Sale

I put this up for my first post at Art Jumble. Guess that says it all...

Chat Her Bot

You can have a simulated chat with the gals or just look at them squirm around a bit.




Have a fun chat with Cammy, Mizzy, and Lilly!!!

DIE-jest continues....

Page 4 - it's just a dumb joke. I am a cartoonist. Even when I draw comics, all the pages are a just a set-up for some stupid joke or pun. I will build an entire story around an event just so that ONE character can say ONE line. It doesn't have to be at the end. It does't have to relate to the rest of the story. I just want an excuse to utter something silly!


Page 5 - The Rant Because most of what my characters go through are senseless or disfunctional situations, at some point, someone's gotta crack. And it all comes out in a rant!


Page 6 - Filler Ok, sometimes you gotta spend time transitioning scenes or doing set-up. At least every character gets a silly phrase GULP! WAH! GYAH!

Catharsis via Comics

I enjoy a good story, but for me, drawing comics has always been cathartic. In my stories, I tend to have characters navigate a series of disfunctional set-ups...be they mechanical, social, or political. My characters spend most of their time getting past things that simply DO NOT WORK as they should. In the midst of these disfunctional structures I flush out all kinds of mental flotsam....so the result, I believe, is probably at least 50% incomprehensible. In fact, people often tell me I say the most nonsensical things all the time. I agree 100%. But this is how my mind works.

In 1988 I made a proclamation to my friends: "I am a 'toon!" Meaning, I navigate the world almost the way silly cartoon characters encounters things that don't make sense, come out of nowhere and seem just plain impossible. I see the world this way, and I make cartoons that reflect that view.

This story, "DIE-jest" ran in an animation newletter, one page a month. It was a reactionary story because people had asked me why I hadn't drawn some comics in a while. So I did some exploration via the cartoon world. It was great, I really had a good time drawing it up and just being totally wacky.

Every other line in here is a pun or an in-joke. Half the visual props relate to something real or in the comics/animation world. The three main characters represent Wants-Needs, Skepticism, and Incomprehension. Don't get caught up in that....really, the strip is just for fun, but yes, there are deeper meanings to half the events in the story. Pages 1,2,3 of 15.

Page 1 - FIN Yeah, I had only planned on doing the one page.


Page 2 - No backgrounds Yeah, I suck at backgrounds, so I don't draw 'em. Why should I? They ruin the jokes.


Page 3 - Notes to myself This is the first page with the sideline comments. Egad!

New Year - Old Stuff

Once again at the start of the year I look at my old work and tell myself I'm gonna blow off the dust and post some of it. Here are a couple from the 80s:

My contribution for the ACME Comics tale "Crisis on Infinite New Universes Crisis" --



& The very last work I did on Galactic Adventures - I had plotted the finale and fate of all the characters, unfortunately, I never finished drawing the pages. Terrible! Yes, the cover is completely misleading, it doesn't end that way at all - no war, no deaths, no exploding ships even!

Election Withdrawls....

Hmmm.....I didn't touch drawing tools much over the last month. Been glued to the TV/Web reading the pundits and blogs on the election mudfest. I'm still "in the zone" about it all, but slowly getting back to normal routines. Back in July, I asked political cartoonist Daryl Cagle to draw a cartoon of Obama for me. I told him I wanted change...and this is what I got...Cool!

Been doing mostly dumb photo collages for the Survivor BBs, but I did ONE SKETCH.

Just Survivin'

Now that the fall shows have started, my productivity is a write-off for the rest of the year. I'm back on the Survivor BBs trading quips and strategy, and trying to do a show-related sketch each week. That will probably last about a month......I've got a lot of video game catching up to do, too!

Recap: San Diego Comic Con 2008

I hadn't been on a vacation since August 07, so I was ever so happy to attend Comic Con this year! Comic Con is like Disneyland for geeks -- I didn't want to even think about work or doing any kind of project. I just wanted to wander around for 3 days and gawk at comics, costumes, chicks, celebs, and cinema. I did just that, and had a fantastic time! Yeah, I stood in line a lot, but the overall experience was just fun, fun, and more fun.



I ducked out of the convention melee on Saturday morning to do a racing yacht cruise, so truly it was a magnificent vacation. When I got back to the exibition hall on Saturday night, it had turned into a battle of commercial EXCESS!!! Seems any major company with a few bucks on hand went out and hired some models/actors and put them in costumes to show the company's wares. Then the TV/cinema folk trotted out their stars hike up DVD sales. Heh---it was disgustingly crass commercialism, and I loved it. I wandered around and followed the big crowds then they made noise.

Here are some pics of my jolly trip. Like Paris said, "Comic Con is hot."

Spicy Space Sketches

Since March, I've been tossing some pages into the Spicy Space Tales comic blog. It's a good thing since it actually makes me work a bit and when I start a page I have a real deadline to finish it, so I don't overreach and I have to decide quickly what stays and what goes. Usually I find I have much too little space and far too much dialogue....but I feel it's necessary to inject some ulterior motives into the goings on.





When I see the other contributions, my mind explodes into lots of different plot threads! Somehow I find a number of ways to link it all together into a stream of sequential progress. But each new page cuts off my options and by the time I contribute again, my original ideas are not longer a fit.

Anyhow, here are some of the concept sketches I've done over the months. Who knows when these ideas will be used....???