I'm back from Charlotte and still have a few of the Charlotte prints left. So, if you'd like one and couldn't get one at the show, you can order one from me directly. But, supplies are limited.
Girls' Night Out
So, I've been asked to draw a bunch of things over the years. Some of them have been, well, a little weird. But when I got this request, to draw Power Girl and Ms. Marvel hanging out, the requester originally mentioned the two heroines at a bar with "Power Girl with a glass of red wine and Ms. Marvel with a beer," I had to remind the buyer that Ms. Marvel was a recovering alcoholic and wouldn't be drinking beer. The requester had forgotten that aspect of her character, and when I mentioned it quickly agreed "Oh yeah, that wouldn't be appropriate at all."
I've drawn a ton of weirdness, but drawing Ms. Marvel with a beer is apparently a line I wouldn't cross. Carol is clearly drinking a Pepsi.
This one was a lot of fun. The little things, like making them sit on bar stools and have it look right, is always a challenge. And I like the body language between the two of them too. Click and see if you like it, too.
My Students Inked By Me
This quarter, I've been teaching a "Heroes and Villains" drawing class at Hawken. We've been discussing types of heroes and villians, power levels, some history, along with a ton of drawing. One of the first things I try to teach is basic shapes and under-drawing. There's a thought when you start drawing that every line has to be perfect. I'm trying to teach structure.
One of the things I do to teach that is to give out some of my much-beloved Col-Erase Blue pencils. I get the students thinking in terms of blue lines and dark regular pencil lines. That way they start seeing the structure, and it gives me a chance to correct some things before they get too far along.
I also try to demonstrate some advanced techniques every once in a while. That's not so much for them to duplicate, but just showing them the larger art technique that's out there. The first time I heard about inking with a brush and understanding it was at art school. I want to introduce them to those methods a little earlier so they know why their drawings don't look like the finished ones they see other places. I know 10-year old me was confounded by trying to copy All-Star Squadron pages, wondering how they drew so small and their lines looked so interesting.
In our second-to-last class, I had them draw a hero or villain, their choice of their own character or an existing one. Then, I took their blue line drawings and inked them. I made as few fixes as I could, but just enough to show them what they're capable of down the road.
Here are three of my students' artwork. They signed their pieces, and I've scrambled their last names if they used it just because, well, it's the internet, you know what I mean. Click on any of them to see them larger.
Another HeroesCon Commission
Anyway, this piece was Crusader and Abby as Titania. I've done more than a few Titania-based commissions, and given that Abby only had powers for eighteen or so pages back in 2009, I think the story must have really struck a chord with people. I'm glad it did, because it's one of my favorite Love and Capes stories.
Relentless Shilling Department
Next weekend, June 3-5, I'll be guided by the dulcet tones of William Daniels, TV's KITT, to Charlotte, North Carolina where I'll be a guest at HeroesCon. I'll be in Artist's Alley, Booth AA-224, selling books and doing sketches. You can, of course, e-mail me and get on my commission list early, and even request a color piece. (I color digitally, so I have to scan them in and do a print to go with the original black and white piece.)
I'm also, as usual, selling t-shirts and sweatshirts only through pre-order. Order here and I'll bring something down for you.
And, if you want want one of my display stands, you can order it here.
Go For the Gold-- Booster Gold
I had to research to get the most recent version of the costume as well as the current Skeets design. I think I like the old one better, but hey, at least he hasn't been turned into a bluetooth headset.
It's Shark Week in the Dallas Metroplex
The best way to get work is to leave town. And the afternoon before I left for Spider-Man Weekend, 
I got an e-mail from the Fort Worth Weekly, one of my favorite clients. They needed a cover talking about shark-like lawyers in the public school system.
Later that night I was telling my Dad about it. "What are you going to do?" he asked. "Well," I said, "I sent them the rough half an hour ago…"
After I got back into town, I had to take it from rough to finished. It's actually a pretty standard turnaround time for newspaper-based work. Besides, I worked at a newspaper for four years in my early days, I'm used to the pace. So I hunkered down and got to work.
The story runs today and you can see the final cover at their site. I'm posting the roughs and inks, and the final without type, too.
A Heroes Con Exclusive
So here's the thing I teased on Twtter last night. I'm going to test out doing extremely limited-edition, locally-focused prints at conventions.
My next show is HeroesCon in Charlotte. So take a gander at this piece of Love and Capes art featuring Charlotte and, well, Charlotte.
If this goes well, I'll do a series of these this year. So there'll be Miami, San Diego, Toronto, Columbus, Detroit and more. Each one will honor the host city of the convention. This one, for instance, is playing off the statue of Queen Charlotte at the Charlotte airport.
The prints will be 12x18 and, like I mentioned, these will be extremely limited. I'm going to make only 26 prints, each signed and numbered. I'll sell numbers 1-25 at my table for $20.00 each. The 26th will be marked as "number zero" and will donated, along with the original art, to the art auction. So not only will I have local prints, but new auction items for the shows I'm attending.
Big thanks to Jesse Jackson, who put the germ of the idea in my head, and Jeni, @zatannamomma on Twitter, who told me about the statue.
Display Stands for Sale
Last year, I figured out a way to make a display stand for showing off my books at comic conventions using foam core. The idea was I wanted something light, cheap, and if needed, disposable. Shipping costs for shows are an issue, and with baggage fees and everything, something that doesn't add much weight and can be abandoned seemed like a needed combination. And, when folded, it'll fit in a standard large suitcase.
I posted the plans (which may have had a couple of minor errors in the measurements originally, but they've been fixed) online for everyone to use.
But, some people have asked what I'd charge to just go ahead and make them. I resisted for a while, trying to figure out if there was a way to make the template quickly and effectively. I think I've come up with it, so now I'm making them available for purchase. If you want one, I'll make you one for $70.00 and bring it down. I'll be glad to bring them to any show I'll be at, and if you want it shipped, we can figure that out, too.
So, if you're going to HeroesCon and want one of these, let me know and I'll make one and bring it down. Orders close Wednesday, June 1.
And, if you want to build one yourself, the plans are still online, too.
Turning Off the Dark
This year, I decided to celebrate my birthday Broadway-style. Literally.
My plan was simple: Go up to New York, suit up, grab a great dinner, see Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, and then grab a drink at McGee's, the bar that inspired MacLaren's on How I Met Your Mother. My friends Jill and Dee signed on for the adventure and, Friday at stupid o'clock in the morning, we headed out to New York City. And we flawlessly executed the whole thing. Well, our navigation may have been off finding a store or two on Saturday before we headed home, but the important part, the birthday part: flawless.
The odds were stacked in favor of awesomeness, too. I was with two of my best friends in one of the best cities in the world. And I love Broadway. Even bad Broadway. (Not only did I see Dance of the Vampires, but I found demo tracks of the songs online. Yeah, I'm that big a Broadway guy.) That said, I had a great time.
Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark is an interesting beast, and if I'm going to talk about it, there will be spoilers ahead. You have been warned.
The show has been heavily revised since its initial, accident-filled previews. And the revised version I saw is still technically in previews, so there are things I'm sure they're going to improve, like the dancing in the big military super-soldier number. In that scene, the evil Viper Corporation (no doubt a front for Hydra) is trying to buy Osborne's research to create super-soldiers. This is presented as a bad thing, which is kind of interesting since in the Marvel Universe, we know those kind of projects actually work out pretty well. Regardless, the dancing could have been crisper.
Overall, though, it reminds me a lot of one of those production shows you see at an amusement park. Like the Beauty and the Beast show at Disney World/Hollywood Studios, or, more on point, the Spider-Man musical that was at Universal Studios for a while. Now, it was a well-staged theme park musical and one I enjoyed immensely, but it still had that feel.
The more I think about it, the more I think that's unavoidable. Musicals rarely achive that continuity of tight storytelling. Scenes and songs serve to illuminate plot points, often creating an overview of a story less that a complete story. Add to that the disadvantage of knowing the source material the way I and comic book fans do. When Uncle Ben is killed in a carjacking, gone is Peter's failure to stop the carjacker earlier. It's like a precis version of the scene. It also serves to save us a Spidey-tracks-down-Ben's-killer-scene. Peter still blames himself for not being there and not saving Ben, though, so we get to the same "With great power comes great responsibility" moment.
But, if I had read Wicked before seeing the musical… okay, that may be a bad example because if I'd read the book I might never have seen the musical. Man was that thing weird. But, my point is not knowing the source material made it possible to enjoy it more, because I wasn't judging what it should have been and instead judged what it was.
The singing and acting is pretty uniformly enjoyable. I'm not sure all the songs work as well anymore as they're in different places. Much of the Arachne stuff has been cut back, wisely so, but for production reasons they can't jettison it entirely. So her scenes still kind of slow the production. Besides, I don't see why anyone would think an ancient godlike being would bother to mess around in the life of Spider-Man. That's just silly. I think. I don't remember.
The sets and staging are wonderful. They've got a comic book flavor without getting too cartoony, and at one point even invoke page-flipping without beating you over the head with it. The sets are all at wonky comic book angles, but I think it works. And some of the city stuff, especially the scene near the end that takes place looking down at a New York City street, is spectacular. (Yeah, I went there. Deal with it. I might say "amazing", too.)
The musical performances are very good, although none of the songs really stuck in my head, except for that one guitar riff which sounds like the theme to Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker more than anything else.
The real star is all the wire work showing Spider-Man swinging through the city. It's a guy wearing a wire harness, but I'll be darned if I didn't sit there watching those with a stupid grin on my face just enjoying the whole thing. And, through clever use of multiple Spider-Man actors, he pops from place to place, even appearing in the mezannine and the balcony. The showcase piece is Spider-Man on one harness track fighting a flying Green Goblin on a second, and even landing on him. Just to not tangle up all those wires is pretty awesome.
There was one misfire where Spidey didn't land cleanly. The result being a pause in the show as the chorus actors had to vamp while Spider-Man reset. In some ways, that made it a perfect night. We got to see a decent show and still had a technical difficulty.
The effects caused a kind of congnitive dissonance with me, though. I was so glad to see the recent Spider-Man movies and have his trademark moves really look great. We'd come a long way since the days of Nicholas Hammond. But, to do this show, the effects have to regress to that level, with spider webbing being replaced with streamers that burst out of a cartridge like those bottle poppers at New Year's Eve.So, you're kind of left going "That's cheesy, the movie did it better… oh, wait."
I have to call out the performance of the Green Goblin, too. He was really great.The role swings from manic scientist to crazy Joker-like levels of insanity. He's got to be silly and menacing and funny, and he really does it. I'm not sure that's how I would have written the role (which is the curse of the comic fan at a production of a comic) but he executed everything he was asked to do wonderfully.
Will it succeed? I've got a feeling it'll be like Cats. Critics will dislike it, and people will flock to it. I don't know if it'll turn a profit, or even break even, but it'll be fun to see it try.