I’ve mentioned before that I was working on a story to be included in the upcoming Image anthology COMIC BOOK TATTOO: Stories inspired by The Songs of Tori Amos.

I was illustrating a script by Jim Bricker, inspired by the song GOD.

Well, I finished up the art and colours yesterday and sent them off to the editor for inclusion in the book. It was my first attempt at colouring a full story, so I’ll be nervously awaiting the book coming back from the printer to see how my effort turns out.

We were asked to not show any art until the press junket had started. I think showing a panel or two should be okay at this point.

The story itself is a conversation piece, which I’ve done a lot of in WAHOO MORRIS, so to challenge myself I decided to try and draw in a new style. I was going for a vaguely Tintin-ish cartoony realism style. I’m a little too close to the job still, so I’m not sure how successful I was. Plus, as I said before, the whole job of colouring a story was new to me. So the story really was one big experiment!

Colouring is a skill I would like to develop, though. I’ll definitely jump at the chance to do another colour story when the opportunity comes along.

Contrary to what the NYCC website says, I am NOT attending the show.

I attended the show last year and found it to be a bit of a waste of time for my purposes. It was much too much of a mainstream show and too expensive to justify displaying at again.

I was contacted about two months ago by the con organizers saying I was on their list for Artist Alley, and I was tossing around the idea of going while I still thought I might get the Marvel gig, but I never received an invoice and forgot about it. That is until I got an update last week showing my name in the AA listings.

I have since contacted the con and let them know I’m not coming. But, it’s too late to get my name out of the programs. So if you are looking for me there, please be kind to the artist who has taken my slot!

Since making the decision to get back into doing comics two years ago, it had always been my intention to start pursuing mainstream work once WAHOO MORRIS was back on track. While many opportunities have come up in that time that have kept WAHOO MORRIS from getting to where I want it to be, I started working on some mainstream samples back in September (those samples are still in the unfinished stages because of the increased workload I’ve been under lately, but that’s another story!).

But, back in late October, in anticipation of having those new samples to show, I emailed a link to my existing portfolio to every editor I could find an address for, and got a number of positive responses. So when Mark Paniccia at Marvel Comics emailed me in late February, asking me to do some sample sketches for their new MARY JANE series, I was pleasantly surprised but I didn’t put two and two together.

See, on January 31st, the cut-off date for email entries for Marvel Comic’s talent search ChesterQuest, I sent CQ a link to my on-line portfolio as well. I’d actually forgotten about it, but about 15 minutes after receiving the email from Mark Paniccia, I received an email from C.B. Cebulski himself letting me know that I had made it into the semi-finals of ChesterQuest. Needless to say, I was thrilled!

So, I ran out and got some reference for Mary Jane, did some sketches and sent them in.

And then I waited. And waited. And waited.

Two days before I was leaving on vacation, the suspense got the better of me and I emailed to ask if they were close to a decision. Unfortunately, the reason I can now talk about this whole experience is that the decision was not in my favour. They chose to go with one of the other artists under consideration. You win some, you lose some.

I will admit that I was second guessing myself from the moment I sent the sketches in that I shouldn’t have drawn the characters so “on model” of the original artist’s style, and instead drawn them more in my style. Who knows… I’ll be very interested to see what the art looks like when the book comes out.

Obviously I’m disappointed that I didn’t land the job. I think it would have been a fun gig, but, there will be other opportunities. I’m still pretty excited that I made it as far as I did. I believe there were something like 1200 entries world wide, so it’s pretty encouraging that I made it into the top 30 and was being seriously considered for an assignment.

Anyway, I’ve been bursting at the seams since February 25th wanting to tell the world the news!

Lastly, a big “Thank you!” goes out to C.B. Cebulski, Mark Paniccia, and Marvel Comics for the opportunity!

So, I’ve been a little quiet this past month and a bit.

A lot has been going on, though most of it I haven’t been able to talk about. Some of it I still can’t talk about, but I’ll try to give a quick overview of the month.

To start with, on the Monday following wrapping up The Mighty Motor-Sapiens, I was contacted by an editor at Marvel about doing some sample sketches to try out for a potential job. It took me a few days to research the job and do the sketches and get them in.

Then I came down with the flu.

That kind of knocked me on my ass for two weeks, and I was a little distracted in anticipation of finding out about the Marvel job among a few other things I still can’t talk about. I still hadn’t got back up to full speed before my Significant Other announced she wanted to go on a last minute beach vacation to get away from the deluge of snow we’ve had this year. I spent a couple days while recovering from the flu, up on the roof shovelling off the 5 feet of accumulated snow, so I wasn’t too hard to convince into going down south for a week.

So, We’ve been back for two days now, and I’m recovering from a little stomach bug I picked up in Mexico. I found out the day before we left that I didn’t get the Marvel gig as they decided to go with one of the other artists they were considering for the job (more on that in a later post). But, It looks like I should be able to announce the show I’ll be doing storyboards on soon, as I’m scheduled to start on April 28th.

In the mean time, I’ll be finally finishing up my story for the Tori Amos anthology for Image this week and hopefully getting caught up on Wahoo Morris the following two weeks.

March was supposed to be the month I crammed on Wahoo Morris, getting caught up and several weeks ahead. Sigh… the besy laid plans and all that. Hopefully I can at least get caught up before the deluge of work starts again.

More later!

This is a piece I drew as a potential cover for Wahoo Morris, back before I decided to stop publishing singles and go with a direct to trade paperback publishing model.

I was a little frustrated with a Work For Hire project I was working on, and got some bad news about another job I was waiting on, so i decided to to sit down and ink this to clear my head. It took about 2 hours in one sitting.

I might end up using it as spot art in the next Wahoo Morris book.