I didn’t expect to have it finished quite so soon, but the new store is now open.

I built it using a separate WordPress install, so items are added as posts and are organized by product category. Once the theme had been adapted for the store’s look and functionality, it only took the addition of an item in each major category to test it out. At the moment I still have a lot of items to add, and several years worth of original art to catalogue and price, but everything available in the TooHipGottaGo Graphics.com store is available here.

It’s fully searchable and I think fairly intuitively organized. We’ll see how functional it is when I’ve got several hundred pieces of original artwork added to the database!

Check it out and let me know what you think.

The Mighty Motor Sapiens is a daily web comic featured at Rowdy.com which I have been working on since late June of this year. It’s drawn by Daniel Krall for the first 8 weeks and pencilled by Matt Plog froom week 9 and up.

I’ve been the inker since day 1 and I’m working on Week 17 as we speak.

I should have posted this yesterday, but… this week (Monday November 26) The Mighty Motor Sapiens started running from the beginning again through the magic of tooncasting. Check it out, and if you like it, click through to Rowdy to read ahead!

*EDIT – Feb 17, 2014*  Rowdy.com is no longer online, so The Mighty Motor Sapiens are no longer available on-line.

Observant readers will have noticed a subtle change in the header art a few weeks ago. Namely the Too Hip Gotta Go Graphics company logo being replaced by a cute little cat face design. Those of you who are also readers of Too Hip Gotta Go Graphics dotCom might be in on what that change is all about.

Basically it is about re-branding.

I created the Too Hip company name and logo around ten years ago. I was twenty eight and planning to self-publish Wahoo Morris and thought it was a cool name for a company doing a rock and roll comic book. Now I’m thirty eight (soon to turn thirty nine) with plans that go way beyond reviving and finishing one rock and roll comic. And frankly, I’m a little embarrassed by the name, and have been for a long time.

*Disclaimer* To put it on the record: No, the guy in the logo is not me! It was supposed to be a caricature of some dude who thought he was too cool for words, to go along with the name “Too Hip Gotta Go”. I don’t know how many times I’ve had to explain that the character wasn’t me when someone asked me to go for a smoke at a convention and I had to explain that “No, I didn’t quit, I’ve never smoked. The logo isn’t supposed to be me.” *End of disclaimer*

Back to the topic at hand. I actually wanted to change the company name back in 2002, but when Alex and Jack came on board they talked me out of it. Imagine my embarrassment when the first issue of Growing Up Enchanted came out and someone pointed out the logo of a dude smoking on the cover of a children’s comic! I don’t know if anyone noticed, but GUE issue’s 2 through 4 had a separate logo than the other Too Hip releases with an edited logo with the cigarette removed!

When Sleeping Dragons joined the fold, Wahoo Morris dotCom was getting a little crowded, so I signed up for a new domain and opened Too Hip Gotta Go Graphics dotCom to the world. The “company” idea, though, never really went further than a single booth display at the 2005 San Diego Comic Con. Alex, artist of both Sleeping Dragons and Growing Up Enchanted has moved on to DC Comics drawing The Johnny DC Legion of Superheroes and Teen Titans Go and has plans to take GUE to bigger publisher’s when the opportunity presents itself. Which essentially leaves Too Hip once again a self-publishing company once again. The website has remained rather static over the last two years, with any Wahoo Morris news going up here and at Wahoo Morris dotCom. I can never remember to head over to Too Hip Gotta Go Graphics dotCom to duplicate the posts. The site is a little redundant for my purposes. I’ve only been keeping it going to continue to give Sleeping Dragons and Growing up Enchanted a continued home on the web.

So, I’ve been a little torn on whether to keep the old name or not, but with Alex moving on, it has left the decision solely in my hands once again, and… about a little over a month ago I finally made the decision: Too Hip Gotta Go Graphics is being folded. I’m honestly not sure if I will be self publishing anything outside of Wahoo Morris, as the other properties I have planned are, or will be, shopped to other bigger publishers first. What self-publishing I do, and will do, is mainly done as a vanity project to get attention in the industry, so hiding behind a “company” name is a little counter productive. So, when self-publishing, from now on I will be going under a “company” name that is some variation on my actual name, whether it will be “Craig A. Taillefer Comics & Books” or some other variation I am not decided yet. I have started work on an avatar and logo for my work though, and an updated version is below.

This logo, in a finalised form, will probably grace the spine of the next volume of Wahoo Morris, due out sometime next year.

My actual publishing plans, vis a vis Wahoo Morris and other projects is probably best saved for another post!