I was hoping to average 12 pages per week on this comic; I’m currently averaging less than 6. I have 11 done.

The early deadline is October 1. It’s still possible, because I have a pretty clear schedule between now and then, and honestly I’m kind of looking forward to the challenge.

I have pages 12-14 penciled and inked and a little less than 50 hours left…

I’m on hold to change my check card PIN and the hold music is “Secret” by Madonna.

Well, I’m 3 pages in. I got the first page done fairly quickly, as much as an experiment in how I was going to do it as anything else. But then that paralyzing perfectionism set in, and my questions over how to do page 3 kept me from finishing page 2. Knowing that I couldn’t keep fine-tuning all of page 2’s panels, I sat down and inked 2 and penciled and inked 3 in one sitting.

I’m getting the process of coloring down pretty well by this point. I colored page 3 much more quickly than I did page 2 — part of which was the complexity of page 2, but I’m getting comfortable enough with the process that getting past the fumbling around stage helps a lot too. It’s now almost noon, and I’m going to try to get 3 more pages done today.

Apologies for anyone who makes an attempt to visit this site and notices how neglected it is. I now have motivation to change that.

A new comic book publisher (probably shouldn’t go into anymore detail than that at this point) has offered me the opportunity to illustrate the first issue of one of its titles. I’ve always thought it’d be fun to draw comic books, with varying levels of interest over the years, but I don’t know if I really ever thought I’d do it.

Today I did something I’d imagined many times since I first thought about this line of work — I sat down with my script, read through it, made notes and started roughing out the page layouts. It seems kind of cheesy, but I had daydreamed about that moment many times whenever the thought of doing this as a job entered my head. The most consistent variation on the dream was that I’d walk down to the nearby Homy Inn and go through the new script over a few pints. That still might end up happening if this job works out, but today I took my first few trips through the story over lunch at Burger King and many free refills of Diet Coke.

I’m really excited about the story. When I got the script, I panicked and wondered what the work would be like if I thought it stunk. The bloom would be off that rose, and suddenly the dream would be pulled down into ugly reality. But I loved the story, and it’s going to be a lot of fun to draw. It was an exciting challenge to encode the writer’s words in multi-panel format, and tomorrow I’m going to spend some time doing some character designs before sending the roughs off to my editor.

So anyway, I hope to update this site on the progress to whatever extent I can. I think the best part of all of this goes back to a Christmas gift Sara gave me in 2005, also known as “The greatest Christmas present ever.” I had read an interview with Madman creator Michael Allred in which Allred talked about a spinner rack he had in his home. He had filled this spinner rack with a bunch of comics that had been influential to him in his artistic development. Once his first comic was published, he put that in the rack too. As he had more work published, that went in the rack as well. Eventually he noticed that he had filled the rack with his own comics and realized that he was living his dream.

Sara remembered that story, and surprised me at Christmas in ‘05 with a spinner rack that she had tracked down after many hours and phone calls. It was one huge supportive gesture out of many she’s made over the years as I’ve tried to make this whole “artist” thing work. So I’m going to be able to put a comic that I illustrated in that spinner rack, and I can’t say how excited I am to do that.