As my dear wife said this evening, Kinko’s always makes her mad because every time she goes in there, she gets a different answer, different quote, different story about unchanging printing or copying jobs. That’s typically my experience too, but the deviation is at least usually within a range that I’m comfortable with (such as one week it’s $.49 for a color copy, then the next it’s $.89, then the next it’s $.20, etc.).

Well I’ve been taking my Poe comic pages to Kinko’s to get scanned so I can color them, as I only have an 8.5″ x 11″ scanner here at the home office, and these are on 14″ x 17″ bristol board. When I took the first batch in a couple weeks ago, I got three pages scanned for somewhere around $2 total. I finished all the inking tonight, so I took the rest of the pages down to the same Kinko’s. First the lady at the counter starts moving really slowly when I tell her what I need (six pages, scanned at 300dpi, saved as PDFs), and I start getting a major “Crap, I don’t want to do this” vibe from her. She starts asking questions in roughly 30 second increments, like “Do you care what the file names are?” and really mundane stuff like that, making no movements whatsoever to take the pages from me to walk over and scan them. Finally, she asks “Is it okay if these aren’t done until noon tomorrow?”

There is nothing going on in the store at this point. No other customers. No big jobs being processed in the work area. Most importantly, absolutely nothing happening at either of the two big copier / scanners. I ask “Are you not able to just do this right now?” She comes clean and confesses that she doesn’t know how. There’s apparently one lady who knows how to do it, and she’s off today. Some guy was coming in at 10, and he might know, but she definitely doesn’t. She recommends I try the Kinko’s 40 blocks down the road.

Needing these things scanned as soon as possible, I go to the other location. The guy stops playing his video game and comes to the counter. Scanning them will be no big deal, he says. He also compliments the artwork, which was nice of him. As he grabs the stack and walks away, he says “You know these will be $6.99 a page, right?” I was like “Hold on, are you serious?” I told him that I wasn’t paying $7 per page to scan. I explained I normally go to a different location, and they charged something like $.50 per page, but the lady working at the counter didn’t know how to do it.

He scoffed at the idea that she didn’t know how to do it. “It’s just putting it in the copier,” he said. And given that I know that, I wasn’t going to pay $42 for him to hit the scan button six times. He seemed really put off (even though he made it quite clear how little work he would be doing for this $42) and just walked back to his video game without saying anything else.

I am so sick of that place. It has gotten to the point where the inconsistency of the product and the service is so bad that it completely negates any convenience that comes from their extra office hours.

I’m taking a little break before finishing page 7 and thought I’d show a little peek at what my drawing table looks like in action. As I said on facebook when I posted the original photo, my left-handedness requires that I start inking in the lower right and work my way to the upper left.

No matter how bad I am at inking, I don’t know how I could ever let someone else ink my pencils. The rapid deadlines of editorial cartooning have made my process evolve to the point where I really don’t draw in pencil so much as I sketch and roughly lay out what’s happening; almost all of the detail work happens at the inking stage.

I finished the inking on page 6 last night, which was fairly brutal. Lots of different characters, lots of architecture. But then again, page 5 was tough too … lots of exterior architecture. I’m definitely getting better working with the brush, but I’m finding that I love working with the dip pen. I never really understood how to use one before, and how changing the pressure works with splitting the nib and releasing ink. It’s a lot of fun once you get the hang of it. I’ve actually considered switching to a dip pen for my editorial cartoons.

One thing I was just thinking about was my practice of hanging finished pages on the wall. It was something I started doing when I was working on Night Knight because I’d go through and throw down a bunch of black ink with the brush on a few pages at a time, so I’d put them up on the wall to dry and free up space on the drawing table. After maybe the third page, I’d pull the first one back down and do the lettering (which I was doing by hand on that project). My process is a little different on this project — no hand lettering, only inking one page at a time — but having the finished page hanging beside me while I draw is a nice way to keep it close in case I need any references while also keeping it out of the way.

Anyway, I’m planning on finishing page 7 tonight (nine panels — a nightmare to ink, but it’ll be fun) and then 8 and 9 tomorrow. Then I’ll take the batch to Kinko’s, get them scanned (too big for my scanner) and do the coloring and lettering during a marathon session Sunday. Then they’ll go to the printer so that Powerpop Comics Classics #1 will be ready in time for Wizard World Philly.

I can’t say I was disappointed by that conclusion. I wanted Kris to win, but I warmed up to Adam enough by the end of the season (I initially couldn’t stand him) that I wasn’t going to be too upset if he won. He was just likable enough to overcome what I dislike about the screechy vomiting of all of his songs.

Though I was glad Kris won, but I couldn’t help but feel the live audience was kind of stunned by the announcement, and the show kind of felt like the audience never recovered. He hugged and thanked and sang like he needed to at the end, but there was still just kind of this shocked “Wow, Adam didn’t win?” vibe to it all.

I think what really made me at peace with the idea of Adam winning was that KISS performance. For all that Adam has been through to groom him for a lifetime on stage, and being essentially everything that Kris isn’t, you could just see it on his face — that guy was having the time of his life. It’s hard to root against someone who’s loving what they’re doing that much. That’s something I never got from Gokey, who always looked like he was smugly calculating his way through so he could get his album deal. There was nothing sincere at all from that guy, so I found it very very easy to root against him.

The last three years have really seen what I consider a rejection of the judges’ obvious favorites — Melinda Doolittle, David Archuletta and now Gokey and Lambert. I don’t know if the judges have ever gone so in the tank for any contestants like they did with those two, and they were really in the tank for Doolittle and Archuletta. Could there be some kind of voter backlash against the Chosen Ones? Or is it nothing more than the viewers disagreeing with the judges?

One thing that I thought helped Kris was the idea that Gokey and Lambert supporters seemed pretty harshly divided. I’m not sure I can think of anyone I know who liked one and also liked the other. So I wonder if some angry Gokey voters didn’t vote for Kris as anti-Adam votes. Still, I thought Kris was great on Tuesday, and as much as I hate those sappy ballads they have to sing on the last show, I thought he actually made it sound like a really good song, whereas Adam sounded like everyone else always sounds — like a good singer plodding their way through an awkward song.

I’m hoping to get some of page 2 inked before bed, so I’ve taped page 1 to the wall for the ink to dry. I’m still seriously under-practiced for brush inking, as well as working at 10″ x 15″, but overall I’m pleased with how this turned out. I’m going to go back and do another round with an ink wash, then scan the grayscale art and put some flat colors in on top. That’s the plan at this point anyway.

I’m not sure which was the more awesome moment:

1. Seeing judge Kara Dioguardi, dressed up in her “punk rocker” outfit complete with metal studs on her leather jacket, telling Kris Allen he was “trying too hard,” or

2. Hearing Kara tell Danny Gokey, who had just performed Aerosmith’s “Dream On” from their 1973 debut, that he should have gone with some “older” Aerosmith songs like “Cryin'” or “Crazy,” from 1993 and 1994 respectively.

In another world, I am still somehow doing “You are So Beautiful, Beautiful Robot,” and I have myself a new theme song. What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is the peerless girl group Girls Aloud and their new single, “Untouchable.” It’s a beautiful dance-pop song on its own, but it also includes the line “We’re beautiful robots, dancing alone” repeated several times at the end. Enjoy.

My next project is a Poe biography for the first issue of Powerpop Comic Classics. It will run as a backup story to “The Black Cat,” illustrated by S.M. Vidaurri. I was hoping to do this story more traditionally, so to speak, at 10″ x 15″ on Bristol board, inked with brushes and dip pens. I did this portrait today in an effort to get myself back into the habit of brush-and-nib inking (the last time I used that technique was with Night Knight in 2005).

I didn’t make this with the intent of sharing it — again, it was just kind of practice — but I liked how it turned out so I thought I’d go ahead and post it here. As it turns out, the extra time it’ll take to draw at that size and ink in this manner might end up forcing my hand back to the disposable pen method. If that’s the case, I’ll probably look for another excuse to ink this way in the future.

As I sat down and read my Journal Star this morning, I stumbled upon this line from an American Idol winner sidebar to a Ruben Studdard story:

“American Idol” has far from guaranteed superstardom for its winners.

While Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood have sustained success, Taylor Hicks and Jordin Sparks have nearly disappeared from the pop culture radar.

I thought, “What an odd characterization of Jordin’s career.” So I wrote a quick email to Jeff Korbelik.

I have to take exception with the assertion that Jordin Sparks has “nearly disappeared from the pop culture radar” to the degree of Taylor Hicks. Her album went platinum, two of its singles went platinum, and I can think of at least three of her songs that still get regular (if not too much) play on KFRX. Where did that idea that she has disappeared come from?

Jeff disagreed in his reply, saying “She’s been out of the limelight for sometime now,” which led to my latest response:

What is your definition of “sometime” — the past few weeks? She’s had singles charting as recently as February. She won a 2009 People’s Choice Award. She was a 2009 Grammy nominee. She sang the national anthem at the 2009 NFC Championship game and the 2009 NBA All-Star Game. She also sang at the Inaugural Ball.

In case you can’t tell, I was a big Jordin supporter. 😉

Jordin was my early Season Six favorite, and my support even got more intense as the judges couldn’t stop gushing over Melinda Doolittle. So I am quick to defend her awesomeness, as surprised as I am that she needs defending. And now, since I haven’t listened to it in a while, here she is nailing “You’ll Never Walk Alone.”

And here’s one of the most overplayed songs in recent memory. Maybe Korbelik doesn’t know this was Jordin Sparks? (I hope it’s clear I’m teasing. If not, I’m teasing.)