Insert 'Terminator' music here

There comes this point where finishing my project teeters on the edge of obsession. Case in point: page 24. I skipped working out today so I could get a little extra time in my day. And when this happens, I swear some of my higher level brain functions shut down. I couldn't cook dinner tonight. Fortunately, I could drive to Arby's.

I just finished. There's some stuff on this page I like a lot, like Abby's sultry look on the panel posted here. It's good to know that tapping into the Speed Force didn't take away my ability to do something nice. Although, it did take a lot of pieces of tracing paper to get the artwork right, both today and yesterday. For a while, I was afraid that I'd left my meager drawing talents at the Hotel Pennsylvania on 34th Street.

Anyway, page 24 is done, done, DONE! I've still got some ads and collateral stuff to do, so it'll still be tight to get everything done for my Friday deadline, but I should be able to hit it.

Thom Zahler is a freakin' drawing machine, baby!

The Gang's All Here

I've had an unspoken rule in Love and Capes that I wouldn't introduce more than one new superhero per issue. It helped me keep the focus on the story and characters, and not the spectacle, and gave each hero a nice, personal introduction.

And then I plotted issue #4.

For a bunch of reasons, the whole Liberty League, and a couple other characters, needed to appear. So I decided that if I was going to break that rule, I was going to go Broadway. The image today is from the full-page splash as the heroes burst forward to save the day. So I'm breaking another rule, of sorts, by posting the final image in a sequence, but I'm showing it without any dialogue, as not to spoil anything.

For those of you keeping track, the image features Major Might, Windstar, Amazonia, Arachnerd, Darkblade, Doctor Karma, Golden Torch, and Blurstreak. Golden Torch was mentioned in the very first issue of Love and Capes, but has never been seen. I'd based the League on the original Justice League, and so had the team at seven members (also mentioned in dialogue in #1) so not everyone here is a member. The super speedster Blurstreak is the only member of the team not mentioned.

Missing, though, is Mermantis, spoken about but not seen in #3. Why? Someone needed to stay on the satellite, and besides, it's all hot and dry in Texas where this scene takes place. Why would the king of Atlantis hang out there.

Thom Zahler has one last day to draw one last page. Then he's got two days to do production on the rest of the book. I think he's going to be able to do it.

Blast From the Best

I'm officially in the obsession stage of Love and Capes. Really, it's almost all I can think about. I'm having to force myself to work on client stuff instead of LNC. I'm just so into it right now, I just want it done.

In this panel, we get to meet Windstar. We won't see too much of him, but he's kind of important to me. You see, when I was much younger and writing my own comic stories, there were two characters who rose above the rest. Raider, and Windstar. While Raider was an action-adventure-spy story, Windstar was a superhero book. It had a lot in common with what Mark Waid would later do on The Flash. It was a lighter take on superheroes. Not comedy, but definitely more day-in-the-life kind of stuff. Windstar's main power was flight, but it was actually a control of gravity that took on more prominence in later stories.

When I decided to jump into self-publishing, I picked Raider over Windstar, as I wanted something that would be different than most of what was on the stands. Windstar, regardless of all the originality I felt the project had (and has) was a much more straightforward superhero story, and there are tons of those out there. I wanted something a little more uncommon, so Raider hit the page, and Windstar remained behind.

So, in this sequence, we get to meet much of the Liberty League, and a couple other of characters, too. Most of them recess to the background, but they're there, and they all have their own stories that I hope to tell. Windstar may not appear in another Love and Capes, as I don't have him as a member of the League itself, but as long as I was throwing in a super hero crowd scene, I wanted my first superhero creation to drop by to see my current creation.

Well, that's not completely accurate, as my first was a straight-up Superman rip-off called Superkid, that was unapologetically me. His secret identity was Thom Zahler and everything. Eventually the realization that DC would sue me relentlessly caused me to give up The Kid. But Windstar was my first character I hoped would eventually see print. And now he finally has.

Thom Zahler has seven days remaining to draw three pages.

Anyone Remember KC Munchkin?

I love working on Love and Capes, but I also love that part where I'm close to the end. It's always nice when the page numbers start with the number two. So, here's page twenty! Mark's on his iPhone playing video games while on monitor duty at the Liberty League satellite. I didn't really want to create an entire fake video game, but I managed to find some screen shots from some old Odyssey 2 video games, and used those as the basis for Mark's game.

My family had the Odyssey 2 when I was a kid. The game system had great box covers, and uniformly pretty lame games. They used sprite graphics instead of original artwork, so Pick Axe Pete looked like your Football player looked like your Basketball player. The game system was outdistanced and out performed by the competing Atari and Intellivision games, but I've still got a soft spot in my heart for it. I thought that look would be perfect for the panel, as it's a simpler look, so it read as more cartoony. The game Mark's playing is based on Invaders from Hyperspace

There's a later panel in this sequence where you can see images on the monitor bank. I used some websites I designed (the Thom Zahler site and the Baltimore Bee site) as well as one of my favorite places for life hack information (43 Folders) to fill the screens.

Page twenty also starts the last sequence of this issue. Yay!

Thom Zahler has eight days left to draw four pages.

No Boom Today, Boom Tomorrow

I mentioned earlier that I did two different covers for the great state of Texas. I don't have a PDF of the second one yet with text and headline, but here's the image that was used on the cover. Houston apparently has some old abandoned buildings downtown that they're thinking about blowing up. So this cover for the Houston Press ran with the headline "This Blows!" This one was a bit of a challenge, as my art director wanted a cartoony look, but the building I needed to draw didn't lend itself to much caricature. But I think I managed to make it work. I do particularly like the colors on this one.

He Had a Bad Day

We're getting closer. Five pages left. I can see the finish line.

Not much to say about this page or panel, except that I get into why Mark's been taking so many of the Arachnerd bits so personally this issue. As the Crusader, Mark's always a little jealous of the success of other superheroes, but he's been a little more petulant this issue. There's actually some motivation behind it.

Oh, and since I don't think I've mentioned it before, I'll be at the New York Comic-Con this coming weekend. I'll be working behind the Toon Tumblers booth for the most part, at Booth 577. I'll have all three issues of Love and Capes for sale. I might also be in the line for Stephen Colbert. I've got a crazy idea about getting him to appear in LNC#5. Haven't decided how to do it or pull it off yet, but I've got five more days to figure things out.

Thom Zahler has nine days remaining to draw five pages.

Kiss, Kiss, Beam, Beam

I described my musical theory of pacing Love and Capes somewhere before. I always try to throw in a couple of more serious or sweet beats to change up all the jokes. Page eighteen is one of those, as Abby finally auditions for the play, and Mark finds the rewards of being supportive. I think Mark and Abby kiss more in this issue more than they have since the first one. In thinking about it, I'm not even sure they kiss at all in #3. Hmmmm. That's interesting. At least, I find it so.

I also finished my last draft of Bob Ingersoll and my Star Trek: The Next Generation story. It's now in Bob's hands to save and send off. We may get together to hammer some final things out, but we're just about done now. Yay!

Ohio's answer to Derek Wildstar, Thom Zahler, has twelve days left to draw six pages.

Big Texas Love

The State of Texas seems to really like me, and I really like it a lot right back. One of my best friends and his family live there, and I try to go out a couple times a year to see them. I've also worked for a few companies out there, including the Fort Worth Weekly and Houston Press. Oddly, both of them decided they needed some Thom Zahler eye candy on their covers the same week. No problemo, I'm enough of a style chameleon that I can do two covers and have them not look too similar. And besides, Texas is a big state and there's a lot of space between them.

The Ft. Worth Weekly cover is for a story about Texas Governor Rick Perry, who seems to have flipped his lid lately. I make no actual political comment here. I really don't know everything he's doing, and I would have drawn Perry as Superman if they'd wanted. As long as their check clears.

My Art Director there was on vacation when the editor decided she needed this cover, so she called him and asked "Who do I get?" Without missing a beat, I'm told, he said "Get Thom Zahler." In my head, he spoke in the same urgent tones as when someone says "Get me Jack Bauer" on "24."

If you click and look at the larger image, you'll see a little bit of an Easter Egg for people who watch the same shows as me, too. I'll post the Houston Press image when I get the final cover back from them.

Nothing Says Valentine's Day Like Love and Capes

I managed to squeeze out a pre-Valentine's Day page of Love and Capes last night/early this morning. One of the things they don't tell you in art school is that you'll eventually learn everything that's on late night TV, because you'll be up to watch it. Last night, Conan was interviewing Eva Longorria as I was finishing off coloring this page, and then I scripted and lettered it this morning.

One of the weirdnesses of the quarterly comic schedule is that I have to write the solicitations for my books long before I actually write the book itself. With #4, I didn't really have the plot squared away, so I mentioned the Crusader/Arachnerd bit that I had set up in #3 and knew would be a big part, and wanted call out a storyline for Abby. I figured that Amazonia is a perpetual figure in the books, one that's far more popular than I thought, so I'd say "And Amazonia causes problems for Abby."

Then I hit page sixteen and she hadn't appeared. She definitely appears near the end, but I needed a scene that was heavy with the Abby/Amazonia conflict to set that one up. So that's how I came up with this bit, as Abby is practicing for her audition.

Amazonia is hard to write (much like Mark's Mom in #2) as I never write her actually doing anything against Abby. She says things that can be interpreted as mean, but she never says things that are overtly so. That level of wordplay, though, takes some effort. Hopefully I pulled it off four a fourth issue.

Thom Zahler and the crew of the Argo have fourteen days left to draw seven pages.

33.3% Left!

You were worried, weren't you? Things got quiet here and you said "Where, oh where, is the new page of Love and Capes?" Well, here it is. This panel shows my devil-may-care attittde as I bite one of the hands that's feeding me and make a Star Trek joke.

The weekend was actually trés busy as I spent some time with my girlfriend, celebrated a friend's birthday, including a trip to IKEA (she's a party animal), dropped my Dad at the airport, celebrated my cousin's and my aunt's birthdays, and got together with some friends. There was barely time to get to Church and make a couple (okay, three) trips to Starbucks.

Things stay busy this week too. There are lots of clients to take care of, and there is, of course, Valentine's Day. Having not had a Valentine in three years, I have done all of nothing to prepare for tomorrow. Nothing. Why, I could forget it altogether. Either that, or my Valentine reads my blog and I'm not going to reveal anything here. One of the two.

Thom Zahler and the crew of the Argo have fifteen days left to draw eight pages.