Q: "Do you post anymore?" A: "No, no, no... yes, yes. A bit, a bit."

First of all, there are no excuses, only explanations. So let me exc... er, explain. This is how the past few weeks have been:
- "Are we ever going to find an apartment in Park Slope that we like?"
- "Oh, yay! We have an apartment!"
- "Oh god, I hate working all weekend. At least I have a week's vacation after this."
- "Are you okay honey?"
- ".... What do you mean you walked to the emergency room?"
- "Okay, we're home... take your pills... and I'll... zzzzzzz....."
- "Oh, Massachusetts is lovely!"
- "Finally home. How relaxing that was. Now why am I so goddamn tired?"

Somewhere in the middle of that (the Massachusetts part) I actually did some sketching. So generally, the idea is that I'm still posting on here, in hopes the few people goodly enough to visit the blog will forgive me for the interruption in service. Your patronage is appreciated.

Not much, but here's what we've got:


I felt very classy having a drink in the Hilton Lounge before boarding a LimoLiner bus for the trip up. And yet somehow I managed to feel disappointed, because I was the only person in the room not wearing a suit. Disclaimer: above sketched while a little disoriented and imbibing alcohol.




What was I doing with this one? You guessed it: I was sitting in the living room of Ms. Smash's lovely childhood home, dividing my attention appropriately between the adventures of her nephew Dr. Ozbert and the adventures of Ed Norton as The Illusionist. So of course, I did studies of the lad, as well as Jessica Biel and... well, um, Paul Giamatti's nose, quite frankly.

Aha, character designs for a possible Zuda submission! Yes, this fellow is supposed to be manacing! So much so, in fact, that I accidentally gave him a mustache very reminiscent of some German fellow. I forgive myself, because I very politely penciled in my self-reproach right next to him. The bust in the corner, obviously, went a bit more as planned.

My evil friend here is so clever that, at the top of this page, he somehow grew himself a pair of Ben Franklin spectacles. I'm sure John Hodgman would have something to say about the success of Mr. Franklin's pandering - it got me. He's taking shape as a bit of an older man now (the glasses help, no?). And here, by the end of the page, we have the beginnings of our intrepid hero, who is emphatically not a Daniel Craig look-a-like. Really. I mean, he has dark hair, unlike the new James Blonde. Are you blind, or just suffering an unhealthy, homoerotic fixation on Daniel Craig? I'm not.



And the two meet. Someone gets bitch-slapped. Why? I hope you'll care enough to find out if/when this becomes a submission. Should that happen, I imagine I'll have to take these pics off my blog; but that would be a good thing, if it meant you could run over to Zuda and see the finished product there!

I won't get ahead of myself. I have some rough thumbnails of the sequence this all fits into, but I'll have to ponder whether those are worth posting here. Either way, keep your eyes peeled, because I'm not dead yet.

"Comic-A-Day" from 2 March - as promised

Toldja.

The idea here is to keep myself drawing one-page comics at least once a day. In reality, it's not going to be quite so punctual, as this weekend of showing up to work rather than sleeping in has proven already. I'll push myself to keep it as close as possible, though. Just consider the title "Comic-A-Day" a stated goal... or a quaint misnomer.

Below was sketched 2 March, with some finishing touches today during lunch, when I decided to climb on the roof of the building so none of the hundred-odd people in the facility this weekend would bug me. And damn it, two of them were up there eating! What the hell?



Goal here of course is not to produce perfect, tight pencils; I just want to produce legible, presentable roughs where I've focused on layout and visual narrative. That's where I'm really looking for anyone with some thoughts to direct their comments:
- Are the layout and individual panels easy to "read" visually?
- Do you understand clearly what's going on here? Who, what, when, where, and how?
- Is there anything that interrupts the normal (western) reading order of left-to-right, top-to-bottom?

Granted, these are just practice, so not all of the "stories" are going to be thrilling. Hopefully the more I do this, the better I'll get at picking and laying out snapshots of my day that work best in this format. To paraphrase someone's post on the Zuda Comics message board, I hope to begin "thinking in panels." (Sorry - whoever posted that, I'd love to credit you. You gave me this idea. Unfortunately, I have no damn clue where in the pages and pages of topics you made the suggestion.)

In the future, I may begin choosing some of these sketches to practice digital or traditional inking. For now, it's all blood and guts!