PopGun vol. 1 reviewed by The Onion A.V. Club!

http://www.avclub.com/content/node/72771

"Anthology fans will find a lot more variety and accessibility in Image's mammoth "mix-tape" Popgun Volume One, which reads like a 450-page answer to Villard's lovely Flight collections. The contents run from extended stories like Derek Hunter's 15-page Powerpuff Girls-esque goofy-girl-hero comic Gamma Rae to one-page posters and smirking faux-ads like Danny Hellman's sly, smirking ant-farm solicitation. While there are some kid-friendly stories, the tone runs generally darker, with ninja battles, noir murder mysteries, ghosts, vampires, monsters, zombies, and robot-on-robot violence cropping up amid the odd, alternative superheroes. Virtually all the work is colorful, entertaining, and immediate, with a strong sense of experimentation and play throughout; it's hard, in this rich an environment, for any one work to stand out. But Andy Kuhn's "Mexican Wrestler Funnies," in which two wrestlers trade Monty Python-esque barbs like "It is I who will make love to your corpse, with a Waring blender… set to puree!" is pretty hilarious, and Adrian Dominguez and Matthew Weldon's anime-influenced teen-hero story "Ellie Saves The World" is particularly gorgeous. But then, the wide variety of tones and visual styles guarantees something for just about everyone… A-"

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Today was a good day

...and I only got up 1.5 hours ago!

Got some awesome news from CB this morning. More to come as it develops, but it'll make a lot of people happy. A LOT of people.

Oh yeah, I'm also lettering "The Piper" and "Snow White Rose Red" for Zenescope Entertainment's Grimm Fairy Tales this month. Kinda curious to see if this will lead to more work at Zen. The first five penciled pages for "The Piper" are TIGHT!

Also, I'm one email away from closing on a job that will reunite me with the talented Thomas Boatwright on a 48 page one-shot.

And then I got an email from Atomic Robo/Killer of Demons colorist Ronda Pattison asking me if I'm interested in lettering for one of her clients. I told her yes, so we'll see what happens there.

I'm also expecting to hear more good news over the course of the day and next week.

Good things come to those who wait, and I've been toughing it out. At this very moment, life is great.

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Font creation is a tedious task

Who would have thought this could take so long?

So I wrote out this alphabet for "TV Dinner Assassin" with a 1.1mm fountain pen, scanned it at 1200dpi, and cleaned it up in Photoshop, saving as Bitmap. Sounds straight forward enough, right? The letters looked pretty clean to me.

Well, when I Live Traced them in Illustrator with the Lettering setting, all those stupid letters turned otu to be really complex. I'm talking 150 anchor points per letter minimum, and curves that are all over the place, recreating the aliasing effects and every little bit of unclean curve in vector graphics. Swell.

So now I have to resize and adjust two upper case alphabets for this one font and it's taking forever. After finishing with A - D (8 characters total), I called it a day.

That shit's boring, yo!

Well, I have to get through it so lettering can start on the first issue. I'll do two versions of the font: One with all those imperfections intact, yet all serifs properly adjusted, and one based on this final version where I simplify the curves and get the anchor points down to the bare minimum. Should be interesting to compare and contrast.

I've got to talk to JP and sit down each day to work on a few of those characters till it's done. Hopefully it gets faster soon.

One thing's for certain: I need to buy a graphics tablet so that I can draw out alphabets directly in Photoshop (or maybe even Illustrator. We'll see). That way, the scan won't produce shitty aliasing because of paper roughness.

NYCC is on like Donkey Kong!

I just booked my flight for a trip to the New York Comic Convention in April. For about two weeks now, my credit card wouldn't work with the company I was trying to book the flight with, so trying another company, it worked -- and I got a cheaper offer!

For some reason, Delta must have dropped the prices by 150 Euros in the last two days, and in addition to that, http://www.mcflight.de apparently bought in bulk and could offer it cheaper.

CB and I will be rooming with Matt Dembicki, Mikie Woods, and another dude who's name I forgot. We already booked the room at the New Yorker last week, which is 3 blocks from the convention center.

I'll be staying with friends for a few days and then at the hotel with the gang during the show. All for roughly 500 Euros. It shall be glorious!

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I Was A TV Dinner Assassin

James Patrick fed me pages for issue 1 of "The TV Dinner Assassinations" yesterday and I resized them and cleaned them up. Noel Tuazon has not lost his spark since Elk's Run, let me tell you. His brush work is gorgeous.

I added a new category in my portfolio under PRE-PRESS/DESIGN for FONT CREATION. Check it out. You'll see how fucking clever I am in naming fonts!

This year, I'm gonna start adding exact dates on when I start/finish stuff on the portfolio. That shit's getting way out of hand with just the start/end year, especially with books that are put on hold or take a few weeks/months to finish in the first place. I mean, where to place them, right? After everything that was finished before, or when I started them? Now it doesn't really matter anymore except that I'll probably get the urge to restructure a few things once in a while. Kinda like book shelves.

Anyway, it doesn't make sense to try and remember dates for the rest. I might be able to narrow down months, but we'll see if I get bored enough to let the OCD take over.

The Year of Wonderment Has Begun!

Happy New Year, y'all! Hope everybody arrived safe and sound on the other side and that you had a good time yesterday. I certainly did, but am already back to work.

Joining CB in using the term Year of Wonderment, I've got to say the year's off to a good start.

Today I signed a contract to letter James Patrick's "The TV Dinner Assassinations." I've already begun creating a dialogue font for the book and will continue working on it in 2 to 3 days after finishing a bit of lettering that is due this week. This will be my first font, and if things work out, you'll see a nice little serif font that'll start my road to lettering Zen this year. My quest to bring handlettering sensibilities to digital lettering continues!

I also did a quick logo design today for something that can hopefully be announced within the next few weeks.

Right now, I'm finishing "No Enemy, But Peace" which I'm ashamed to say is way, way overdue. Other deadlines, some family issues, x-mas, and then a heavy cold knocked me way off course on this and it's time to put it to bed.

Once that is done, I've got to focus on Mark Smith's and Paul Maybury "Aqua Leung" a little this night so that Steven Finch has more pages to letter and we get that Image Comics OGN back on schedule as well.

Tomorrow, I'm lettering Starship Troopers 6 and the day after will work on Kong: King of Skull Island 3 and finish The Ritual 1.

After that, it's TV Dinner Assassination time.

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