Armageddon Expo 2008

My fiancée and I headed to the Convention the day before it started and we were so tired and busy that we didn't have time to do that much but we did get some photos of the Wildstorm crew and I did manage to pick up some great comics.

Some of the Wildstorm crew. JJ Kirby and Beth Sotelo.

Another shot of the Wildstorm table.

More Wildstorm artists. The table was fairly long and the artists were sketching all day, poor guys.

Jim Lee busy doing Con sketches. The guy is machine, he must have done around 100 sketches on Sunday alone. While I was there I managed to get a portfolio review and gave this picture to Jim to thank him for his time:

Convention time for me

It's that time again, Convention season! It's been Con season for awhile in the states but a lot of the Australian Conventions tend to happen closer to the end of the year. In a few weeks time I'll be attending Armageddon Expo in Melbourne: http://armageddonexpo.com
If anyone else is planning to go feel free to hit me up before hand and we might possibly meet up there! I won't have a stall or anything but I will be walking around with my portfolio because the wonderful Jim Lee has agreed to give me a portfolio review sometime over the weekend. (I'm so nervous!) It'll be my first one since there aren't too many good local comic Conventions, as it is my fiancée and I are flying in from inter-state just so we can go.

Now I'm off to save the day!

an artist's working process

A great article has been posted here: http://comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=18411
on Comic Book Resources about Simone Bianchi's working process as an artist, more specifically with his work on Astonishing X-Men.

I personally love having clean pencil lines (not just to make life easier on the inker!) but because I love the look of them. I've always considered myself a very 'clean' artist. While I was attending Art School my friends always made jokes that I could never do a messy picture and they were always pushing me to leave smudges and rough areas on my charcoal drawings. I know that that style isn't for everyone but I like producing clean lines.
As for my drawing process, if I'm drawing a complicated pin up or a comic page I tend to go through 2 roughs before I move to my final polished piece. For pin-ups I tend to do small stick-figure like people in a variety of poses so I can ascertain which one I'd like to use in the finished work and which one more appropriately works for the mood or theme of the picture. For comic pages I do the same thing by drawing tiny thumbnail panels on the script I am working from. I start picturing the scenes in my mind and laying out the panels and where the figures should be / what they should be doing accordingly.
After this initial thumbnail sketch stage I may then switch to a full A4 page and start piecing my panels together. I'll draw in figures roughly and come up with what I usual use as my final composition. After this I'll draw in all my panel lines nicely on my final piece of comic paper. I don't usually start drawing straight into the comic panels themselves. What I will then do is take different sheets of paper and copy each panel shape and onto them and draw each panel roughly on that. By doing this I can use my light box to draw my final line work onto my final sheet of comic paper nicely and it gives me a final opportunity to move figures around and slightly change the composition of the page if I want to. Here's a photo of a pin up I'm currently working on showing my rough line work next to a work in progress of my final piece:

I'm really not overly careful with my rough sketch as you can see.

Also, I know I say this all the time but I do promise to update more often.

Comic Foundy, a pop culture magazine for men and women

If you haven't heard of it yet, I highly recommend a fairly new popular culture magazine called Comic Foundry. Comic Foundry is a popular culture magazine that prides itself on being more about the lifestyle aspect of comics and not just reviews and comic news. This is also a magazine for the fan and the creator of many different types of comics, from manga to web comics.

I must admit what drew me to the magazine in the first place was the very top line of text on the cover for issue #2:

This is the only issue that this tag line appears on and they're obviously making fun of the tremendous mistake that Wizard magazine made earlier in the year by adding this tag line to the cover of their magazines:


I must say that seeing Comic Foundry's cover was a breath of fresh air and I immediately picked up the magazine and took it to the register, by promoting themselves as a popular culture magazine for everyone and not just an all-boys club they'd already picked up one customer that's for sure! (See that Wizard, you could learn something from these people.)
Now onto the details of the content of the magazine itself. In issue #2 there were interviews with creators such as Brian Bendis, Matt Fraction, Molly Crabapple and Grant Morrison. Although a fairly small magazine they really haven't suffered from any losses of big-name creators interviewed for their magazine, it's really great to see. The magazine is also filled with a large number of reviews with a lot of manga featured and there is also a hilarious All-Star Batman and Robin drinking game which is sure to have you smashed after a single page.

While reading I found a few spelling mistakes and some of the layouts did seem a little busy but for a second issue in full-colour I really think that Comic Foundry has done amazingly well. It's great to see people like the editors Tim Leong and Laura Hudson see what's missing in the popular culture magazine scene and decide that they're going to put something out there themselves to fill that gap. I adore action and these two have done really well in my opinion. I think these days to find a magazine that's more driven by content than sales is quite rare (especially with the Internet these days when most comic news can be obtained online) and I hope that the magazine can stay on this path. By not trying to market themselves to a very specific audience and not drawing any lines of exclusion in the sand I feel that their fan base can only grow as the magazine becomes more well known.

Over-all the magazine is a great read and for only $5.98 or the whole year for $20 I'll certainly be following this magazine! I wish Comic Foundry the best of luck in the future.

Sexual Harassment @ SD Comic Con

As an avid comic geek and woman I am very sad to be reading things like this:
[link]

Tonnes of reports of sexual harrassment directed at female Con-goers from their male counter parts. Here are some excerpts:

'Overheard at San Diego Comic-Con while I was having lunch on the balcony of the Convention Center on Sunday July 27: a bunch of guys looking at the digital photos on the camera of another, while he narrated: "These were the Ghostbusters girls. That one, I grabbed her ass, 'cause I wanted to see what her reaction was." This was only one example of several instances of harassment, stalking or assault that I saw at San Diego this time.'

'One of my friends was working at a con booth selling books. She was stalked by a man who came to her booth several times, pestering her to get together for a date that night. One of her co-workers chased him off the final time.'

So, according to published con policy, there is no tolerance for smoking, drawn weapons, personal pages or selling bootleg videos on the floor, and these rules are written down in black and white in the con booklet. There is not a word in the written rules about harassment or the like. I would like to see something like "Comic-Con has zero tolerance for harassment or violence against any of our attendees or exhibitors. Please report instances to a security guard or the Con Office in room XXX."'

I think the fact that there is no policy regarding harassment in the Comic Con handbook and not really anyone you can go and report such occurrences to is very disheartening.
One would also think that in this age where female fans and creators are in such an abundance that we would no longer be treated like eye-candy or singled out for abused based solely on our gender.
I have not been to a Comic Convention before but have been to many Fantasy, Sci-Fi and Anime Cons and have myself been the victim of many forms of harassment from the opposite sex. I can remember at one Con I was at last year I was doing sketch commissions at a booth when suddenly the guy I was drawing the picture for launched himself across the table and kissed me. I still to this day have no idea what instigated this and at the time felt shocked and uncomfortable. Thankfully Rowan (my partner) was standing behind me at the time so gave the guy a casual 'back off, what the hell do you think you're doing?' but if he hadn't have been there I don't know how I would have handled the situation. The bottom line is that female fans shouldn't feel the need to have big male protectors there to save them from acts of sexual harassment or any form of harassment for that matter.

So who's to blame, Comic Con for not having black and white rules against this sort of behaviour of the perpetrators instigating these acts? Either way I think both sides are to blame, even if Comic Con doesn't have specific rules about harassment it's not good enough that if such a thing occurs that the victim has no-one to report it to.
So needless to say this female geek is not impressed.

Free Comic Book Day and other things

Another May 3rd has gone and another Free Comic Book Day.
May 3rd always makes me quite sad because I've never personally had the pleasure of attending a free comic book day. There are no shops in my state that support the event and only one shop in my state carries comics any way.
I hope everyone had a wonderful free comic book day, it looks like there were some amazing titles on offer this year.

Last Wednesday I did however have the pleasure of meeting Neil Gaiman while he was down for a reading and book signing. It's an experience I'll never forget and I hope he had a lovely visit, I'm sure he was feeling better after a good night's sleep. (The poor man had been up for 48 hours the night before.)

Neil was kind enough to sign my copy of Stardust and draw a little doodle in it for me.

Last but not least some art work!

I drew this quick picture of Poison Ivy awhile back but hadn't gotten around to colouring it yet. But now I have! Poison Ivy has always been one of my favourite comic villains and I adore drawing her.

I promise to update more often, thank you all for reading.

behind the times, that NYCC panel description

I'm a few days behind the times so I missed all the hoo-ha about that New York Comic-Con panel description, for those of you who missed it here it is:

“Girls Who Kick Ass: How do the ladies creating comics do it? They’re constantly blowing us away with the most outrageous and provocative titles. Jenna Jameson (Shadow Hunter), Colleen Doran (Distant Soil, Reign of the Zodiac), Amanda Connor (Birds of Prey, Painkiller Jane, Lois Lane ), Louise Simonson (New Mutants, X-Factor, Superman) and special guests reveal why they know what Fan-Boys want.”

You might see why I'm shaking my head in between banging it against a wall and causing a rather bloody mess all over the place.
Yet again someone's lack of brain cells is equating making good comics with giving fan boys what they want i.e. boobs, ass and no identifiable story in between either of these two things. News flash, you don't need to make titlating comic to sell comics.
What-ever my gender is I'm going to buy a comic that's good. If it has tits an ass I don't care if it's good. If it has huge dongs all over the place I don't care if it's good. If it has none of the above aforementioned privates I'll still love it if it's good.

So what defines 'good?' Well here are just a few of the things I look for when defining if the comic is good:
- Interesting story. Without a story to me your comic is worth nothing to me, what's to keep me reading without it? Even the best comics can be structured around an amazingly simple idea, you just need to have an open mind and not be caught up with 'what sells' or 'what fanboys want.' That doesn't matter. What's more important, being proud of something you've produced that you've poured your heart and soul into or selling your work just because it had a bit of t&a? Trust me if you create a good comic it is going to sell, you might not sell thousands but the people buying your comic will be people who really treasure it for what it is.

- Decent characters. I use the word 'decent' very haphazardly. Any character can be made decent or interesting if they're written well. Hell even a character who's a naked porn star (Sorry Jemma, this isn't a joke at your expense I'm just making a point.) can be made interesting if written well. I'm reminded of the t.v. series created by Pam Anderson and Stan Lee, 'Stripperella.' (I can hear you groaning from here!) To me it was interesting enough to keep me watching, sure when it boils down to it it was a story about a dumb blonde stripper who moonlights as a super heroine but it made to qualms that it was anything else. It knew it weaknesses and made them damn funny, constantly making jokes about the main character's profession as a super hero and as a stripper and making a statement about the super hero genre as a whole. I also feel that Adam Warren's 'Empowered' does the same thing in much the same way.

- Art. As with everything what one considers as good changes from person to person. It's what makes us all different and is responsible for so many different comics being out there today. When I talk about good art for a comic I'm thinking about pacing, how the art suits the story and the characters, emotions, style, panel layouts, all that junk.

I seem to be getting a little off-track but I hope my point is starting to become clear. There are many things that make a comic good that don't have to include 'giving the fan boys what they want.' Why can't we have comics that are so good that they're 'giving fans what they want?'
Why does this always come down to gender? Does having different private parts automatically mean that we like different things?


I guess this when issues like this arise I'm constantly reminded of Eddie Berganza's plea made early last year to get female readers picking up Supergirl again. (You can read a great take on this here.)
Berganza's main selling point for Supergirl to the female readership was that no longer should women be angry that Supergirl was a badly written, stereotypical blonde idiot sexy symbol in a superhero costume because he had written a character in the story to be exactly the same but he was male! Instant equal rights for all! This stupidity of this argument makes me realise why maybe there aren't as many women or people in general reading comics when some of the most well-known titles are being written by people who honestly think that writing in another un-interesting sex object into a story is going to make it better.
I'm sorry Eddie but two wrongs do not make a right and as far as I'm aware people want to read comics that are good. So how does this relate to the NYCC panel description? Well I guess the point I'm trying to write quite long-windedly is that obviously people like Eddie Berganza and who-ever write that NYCC panel description are so out of touch with comic fans in general and what makes a good comic that anything that is good must be a saucy work 'giving the fanboys what they want' and that a story with a multitude of badly written characters must be picked up by 'women' because we don't count as real comic fans because we're not not boys and of course women only write comics for boys and not 'people.'