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Holy crap, my life has been rather busy lately (and not in a bad way). I'll just give you a run-down of the last few weeks and a preview of the upcoming month, and then you'll hopefully get the idea.

So I had a bunch of work projects to get out a few weeks back in anticipation of planning season starting. For those of you unfamiliar with the advertising world, planning season is for the clients that budget based on a fiscal year, and begin allocating next year's budgets in fourth quarter (Q4). This means that my job goes into overtime and overdrive, trying to plan for several clients at the same time. Meetings, sending out requests for proposals (RFPs), putting together a strategy and a plan, presenting the recommendation to the client, revising the plan based on feedback, and then negotiating and executing the plan are all involved. It can take as little as a month per client - or as much time as several months. Then you spend the rest of the year updating and changing things in the plan, among other common media activities.

On top of this, I've been producing a book! The first self-published book for @$$hole! is coming out at the end of September, premiering at Reactor (September 18-20) in Rosemont, Il. It collects the 41 page black and white story of Laura's 21st Birthday. The book is going to be 52 pages and has an original cover, some new artwork, guest strips, an afterword by the creator (that's me), and a forward by Josh Elder (Josh from TokyoPOP).

"Why premiere your book at Reactor, and not something larger like Windy-City?" you ask. Well, through my many con appearances I've met several of the people who put Reactor together, and they have offered me the opportunity to speak at their convention. In fact, they've given me several panels to speak during throughout the weekend. Here's my panel schedule, for all those interested:

FRIDAY:
8 pm - MAIL ORDER NINJA (A reading with Russell Lissau and Josh Elder)

SATURDAY:
1 pm - A special all-guest artist panel
4 pm - Writing for comics (Collaboration with Steve Horton)
5 pm - Sci-fi fantasy: the art of crafting your world

SUNDAY:
11:00 am - @$$hole! webcomic panel

On top of that and all the tasks associated with printing the book, I've also gotten a table at Mid-Ohio Comic Con (October 3-4 in Columbus, OH) with Rival Angels creator Alan Evans. We'll be hanging out with The Dreamer creator Lora Innes, and several other comic creators. Not sure on any speaking schedule while there, but I'm working on it. More to follow.

In between those two conventions, my family typically takes a trip with other families to a state park in Angola, IN, called Pokagon. It's like camping, but with showers and cable TV. We barbecue and sing goofy songs during a bon fire, take nature hikes and play cards (or Scrabble). It's a fun and relaxing weekend. But of course, it means that I need to get a buffer up to make up for the fact that I won't have three weekends in a row to work on comics.

Then there's the 2010 con schedule that I'm starting to put together, to get speaking engagements and table space for the new merch that I need to produce. Depending on the reaction to the @$$hole! book, I plan to make some t-shirts and a poster for 2010, and start pre-production on the official @$$hole! collection.

So as you can imagine, I've been EXTREMELY busy lately. This should hopefully help explain why I haven't been posting every week day, like I normally do (I have a lot of reviews in the pipeline, including a bunch of movies [Up, District 9], comics [Rival Angels, Mice Templar], and video games [Dead Space] and more!).

So thanks for your patience and understanding, and I'm very excited about these projects coming out - as well as a few others that it's a little too early to mention just yet. Stay tuned for more news, reviews, and comics!

Labels: asshole comic, hikari, samurai, sci-fi, temple, the temple of a thousand tears

My Site

VOTE!

Holy crap, my life has been rather busy lately (and not in a bad way). I'll just give you a run-down of the last few weeks and a preview of the upcoming month, and then you'll hopefully get the idea.

So I had a bunch of work projects to get out a few weeks back in anticipation of planning season starting. For those of you unfamiliar with the advertising world, planning season is for the clients that budget based on a fiscal year, and begin allocating next year's budgets in fourth quarter (Q4). This means that my job goes into overtime and overdrive, trying to plan for several clients at the same time. Meetings, sending out requests for proposals (RFPs), putting together a strategy and a plan, presenting the recommendation to the client, revising the plan based on feedback, and then negotiating and executing the plan are all involved. It can take as little as a month per client - or as much time as several months. Then you spend the rest of the year updating and changing things in the plan, among other common media activities.

On top of this, I've been producing a book! The first self-published book for @$$hole! is coming out at the end of September, premiering at Reactor (September 18-20) in Rosemont, Il. It collects the 41 page black and white story of Laura's 21st Birthday. The book is going to be 52 pages and has an original cover, some new artwork, guest strips, an afterword by the creator (that's me), and a forward by Josh Elder (Josh from TokyoPOP).

"Why premiere your book at Reactor, and not something larger like Windy-City?" you ask. Well, through my many con appearances I've met several of the people who put Reactor together, and they have offered me the opportunity to speak at their convention. In fact, they've given me several panels to speak during throughout the weekend. Here's my panel schedule, for all those interested:

FRIDAY:
8 pm - MAIL ORDER NINJA (A reading with Russell Lissau and Josh Elder)

SATURDAY:
1 pm - A special all-guest artist panel
4 pm - Writing for comics (Collaboration with Steve Horton)
5 pm - Sci-fi fantasy: the art of crafting your world

SUNDAY:
11:00 am - @$$hole! webcomic panel

On top of that and all the tasks associated with printing the book, I've also gotten a table at Mid-Ohio Comic Con (October 3-4 in Columbus, OH) with Rival Angels creator Alan Evans. We'll be hanging out with The Dreamer creator Lora Innes, and several other comic creators. Not sure on any speaking schedule while there, but I'm working on it. More to follow.

In between those two conventions, my family typically takes a trip with other families to a state park in Angola, IN, called Pokagon. It's like camping, but with showers and cable TV. We barbecue and sing goofy songs during a bon fire, take nature hikes and play cards (or Scrabble). It's a fun and relaxing weekend. But of course, it means that I need to get a buffer up to make up for the fact that I won't have three weekends in a row to work on comics.

Then there's the 2010 con schedule that I'm starting to put together, to get speaking engagements and table space for the new merch that I need to produce. Depending on the reaction to the @$$hole! book, I plan to make some t-shirts and a poster for 2010, and start pre-production on the official @$$hole! collection.

So as you can imagine, I've been EXTREMELY busy lately. This should hopefully help explain why I haven't been posting every week day, like I normally do (I have a lot of reviews in the pipeline, including a bunch of movies [Up, District 9], comics [Rival Angels, Mice Templar], and video games [Dead Space] and more!).

So thanks for your patience and understanding, and I'm very excited about these projects coming out - as well as a few others that it's a little too early to mention just yet. Stay tuned for more news, reviews, and comics!

Labels: drunk duck, drunk duck awards, reactor, reactor con, samurai, sci-fi, temple, the temple of a thousand tears

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It may have been difficult to see in the artwork, but the script said to show that the car was full of explosives. Hence the boom.

Sophia's assault has begun, and she's managed to effectively make it inside the courtyard of the Holy Order Temple. Armed to the teeth, it looks like her plan is a one-woman suicide mission to get in and kill Cardinal Milikin.

This sequence went through the most revisions of any in this story, mostly because I wanted to introduce a few new elements into the story - but I figure it would raise too many questions about how the swordsman and company got into the Order Temple in the original story (which also underwent a lot of revisions, and was eventually omitted completely). Perhaps a flashback will occur in the Holy Order sequel....

Olivia and I have started talking about the next story, which takes place during and directly after this story. So it should help in the chronology a bit. After that will be the remaining Sophia stories all rolled into one (including the Bushido prequel that I had been talking about a while ago, which has now been baked into the Sophia story), and then we'll finish this bad boy off with the sequel.

Don't fret, though. At the rate we're going currently, this comic is going to be around for at least another year or so.... ;)

Labels: samurai, sci-fi, temple, the temple of a thousand tears

Movie Review: District 9 (2009)
Director: Neill Blomkamp
Cast: Sharlto Copley
Plot: Chances are you've heard of this movie, or even more than likely seen it, so I apologize in advance for the lateness of this review. I had been eagerly awaiting this flick ever since I first saw a trailer for it. I went and found the short film that it was based on. I even re-watched all of the Halo movie footage that the director did as a test to showcase how he would shoot the movie (which has yet to be green-lit). I was so thirsty for this flick that, for some strange reason, I decided to hold off on quenching my need to see it.

What a mistake.

I should've been in a chair for a midnight showing with anyone and everyone who was willing to come with, and we could've basked in it's glory together...and then talked at length about the incredible subtext and messaging that litter this movie. But perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself here....

District 9 is a movie shot somewhat documentary style (for about the first third of the flick) about an alien space craft that arrived on earth 28 years ago over Johannesburg in South Africa. The reason for their arrival is never really explained, but we humans come in and take them off their ship and force them to live in slum-like conditions on the ground. An organization called Multi-National United (MNU) is formed to police the aliens (the slur that they use for them in the movie is "prawns"), and the flick takes place during a relocation / eviction effort to get the aliens further away from people in the city.

Unfortunately you kind of have to have seen the trailer to understand why this is going on (although they very briefly touch on it in the flick), but ultimately the humans want to use the alien technology (specifically, their weapons), but the technology only works with the alien biology.

Enter Wikus Van De Merwe (Copley), the agent put in charge of the eviction. While searching a slum house "owned" by a prawn named Christopher Johnson, he discovers a cylinder that sprays him with a strange liquid, and he starts to get really sick. And it turns out that the liquid in the canister is starting to change his DNA. He's becoming an alien! Of course, this means that the humans want to slice and dice him up and figure out how to replicate it, so they can use the technology. Of course, he escapes and goes to live in District 9 where he runs into Christopher again, and the purpose behind the liquid is revealed. What follows is one of the most intense and awesome third acts that I have seen in ages, chop-full of all the kind of sci-fi action that you would expect from an R-rated foray into the depths of the human condition.

And as a good sci-fi should, the movie is littered with moral subtext commenting on the world we live in today, and the situations going on over in Africa especially. But even if you don't dive that deeply into it, you can still enjoy the awesome that is this movie.

When my brother and I went to go see this movie at the local theater, we accidentally walked into the wrong theater. As the opening credits for "Inglorious Basterds" started, a look of horror and disgust flashed across my face. In case you didn't know, I'm not a fan of Tarentino movies. My brother's face said something more like, "I could watch this," but I was not going to have it. I had been waiting too long to see this movie - telling myself that I was waiting because I feared a negative theatrical experience like I had with Watchmen.

[Remember everyone, the movie theater is not your damn living room]

Thankfully, the crowd was light and we were able to separate ourselves from the bulk of the people. The flick was everything that I thought it would be and more - and it's certainly something that I'm going to buy on DVD, if for no other reason than to check out the special features and commentaries.

If you enjoy good sci-fi, action movies, flicks with people and stuff blowing up all around, or just want to see something done in a very unique way, be sure to watch this movie!

Labels: district 9, movie review, sci-fi

My Site and Drunk Duck

"That's not my name." I love that line from Xen. It's hilarious to me, because it could be that he's dodging whomever's looking for him, or it could just be that no one's pronouncing his name correctly. Or both!

Xen's a fun character, and he'll no doubt be making a return appearance somewhere down the road.

This story is quickly wrapping up. Only about 10-12 more pages left to go, and then we move onto the next story. "What is that story," you ask? Well, I'm not entirely sure just yet. Trying to figure out if I want to tell another prequel, or move on to the final chapter: Holy War.

Temple has a finite ending, and I'm looking forward to telling that story. But I don't know if we're quite there yet. There're a lot of holes to fill between now and then. So I'll pose the question to you: would you prefer to see another prequel or two, or just jump into the ending?

Also, out of curiosity, who's everyone's favorite Temple character?

Labels: comic books, comics, samurai, sci-fi, temple, the temple of a thousand tears, web comics

My Site and Drunk Duck

Perhaps this is the changing point for Sophia that turns her from the badass that we've seen in this story into the sweet wife and mother that we saw in flashbacks in the original story? Perhaps not. There's another Sophia story that I want to tell sometime after this about her meeting with the swordsman.

I'll be honest, I was crying when I wrote this sequence. It was a very emotional thing to write. Sophia is so helpless right now, doing the most that she can - but the car can only move so fast, and her sister is clearly coughing up blood. A lot of blood.

In the script I envisioned Sophia with her eyes closed and her mouth open wide screaming the last line, but unfortunately we weren't able to make those changes in time. Perhaps in a collected edition?

I'm in pre-production right now for the first two @$$hole! collections, which should be available later this year. My goal is to have them done before my speaking engagements in the late summer at a few conventions, and then get more of them printed next year for con season. However, let's take a poll: anyone here who might be interested in a Temple collected edition?

Labels: comics, samurai, sci-fi, temple, the temple of a thousand tears, web comics