Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Oh man! Too much work!!!

Hey all. Sorry for the long delay in updates. I've been back at work in the crazy sign industry, as well as doing some more Marvel cards, tattoo designs, and Karate instructing like crazy!!! This last month has been insane! But fear not, I'm still around and still plugging away on stuff. I'm hoping to get a few of the things I've been working on loaded up here soon, but for now you'll have to make do with my words. My scanner is on the fritz and until I can get it working properly I'm out of luck with loading images for now. But bare with me, as I have some cool stuff I've been doing!

For now though, I'll update you all on the Seattle Comic-con I attended last month with my comic pals Chris Peterson and Nick Johnson. We left Thursday afternoon for Seattle for what would be a memorable road trip! The trip started out a bit sketchy, as we ran into a freak storm on our way out of town. Chris had just picked up his new car, and we were at risk of smashing it up thanks to the ridiculous amounts of slushy snow and crazy truck drivers on the Trans- Canada! But after a couple of nail biting hours we managed to get out of the snow and into clear roads and weather. The rest of the trip was a blast, with all of us taking turns telling stories and making fun of each other. It was a very fun road trip! We arrived in Seattle early Friday morning, thanks to Chris's unbelievable driving stamina. After catching a few hours sleep we ventured out into the downtown core to find the convention center and grab some food. We later traveled down to the pier area and took in some sites, got a picture of the Space Needle, and threw rocks into the bay! So fun!

The next day we headed out for the show! After stopping at one of the 20 or so Starbuck's in the area (that's no exaggeration either) we found ourselves at the Convention Center and got totally lost right off the bat. But thanks to a nice Convention Crew guy, we found our way. There was a really big line-up first thing, and that actually made me really stoked for the show. I figured if several hundred people were already lined up to get in that the show had to be good. And it delivered!

The show itself was amazing, plain and simple! I was very happy to see a huge amount of comic stars all congregated in the Washington State Convention Center! And they weren't segregated from everyone else as they were mixed in among the other folks in artist alley. Not only was it great for the fans to have such easy access to everyone, it was also great for the creators to have to opportunity to mingle and engage everyone as well. There was a fantastic line up of creators at the show, and many of them had lines that never let up! I was super stoked to meet and get a kick ass sketch from 2 of my favorite artists, Skottie Young and Dustin Nguyen! Skottie drew me up an awesome Pixie sketch from New X-men, and Dustin drew my pseudo alter-ego Grifter! And both of them had awesome sketch books available as well that I snatched up, and I must say they were fantastic purchases. Both guys were very friendly and a real treat to meet. I also got the chance to finally meet another chap I rather dig, and thats Mr. Scott Pilgrim creator Bryan Lee O'Malley. He was super cool, signed some books for me, did a cool little sketch of Scott in one of them, and was really cool to talk to.

I made some other really good purchases and got to meet some fellow Canadian creators down there, Trevor Frick and Camilla D'Errico. Both of them are really nice people and super talented, and it was cool to meet and talk with them! The Seattle show won me over big time and I'm definitely looking forward to next years show. Chris, Nick and myself had a blast on the trip and are thinking of setting up a booth next year to show off our stuff. The Seattle crowd is very comic friendly and showed a lot of support for indy books, so I think we'll do really well down there. 2009 here we come!

That's it for now, and I'll do what I can to get some images scanned in for my next post. Until then, take care all!