Last weekend I was in Lubbock, Texas for the Lubbock Arts Festival, inside which was the Lubbock Comics Expo. I was invited out to the show along with my friend and fellow cartoonist Grant Sutherland by Will Terrell.Will very graciously gave us a table at the show. We had a blast meeting the art fest attendees, selling books and doing sketches for people, but the real highlight of the trip was getting to tour and hang out in Robot Cowboy Studios, Will's digs where he creates.
Will has an awesome workspace in his studio and he sublets the space to other illustrators and cartoonists. We got to wonder around seeing drawing desks, drawing tablets, sketches and notes and work in progress and it was just great. It reminded me of when I was in art school. I would be very productive in an environment like that. It was inspirational. I just wanted to get back home and keep making more comics!
Speaking of which, I have some irons in the fire. Now that my book of gag cartoons is complete and printed I've been planning out what's coming next. First off, I'm working on a new full color comic book. While working on my single panel cartoons I tried to scale back the "cartoony" in my work, tried to stay low key and more subtle. Now I'm eager to unleash. I've been trying to push the cartoonyness in my sketchbook lately and I have some ideas that I plan to collect into a Mad Magazine style, pot luck collection of silly over the top comic pages. I've already got the first five page story penciled, so I'm well on my way with that. Will I have it done in time for SPX? Hmm, not sure yet, it's possible. But, I'm excited about it.
Second, while in Lubbock I did a couple sketch cards by request of some superheroes in my super cartoony style that went over really well. I noticed at this show and at several others recently that prints seem to be a big seller. I have no prints. I'm going to try and put out a series of these over the top caricatures of various comic book heroes with general reputations of being rather grim and do some full color prints. I'm also planning on coloring some of my recent cartoon panels and doing prints of those as well. It'll be something totally new for me and I'll premier them at the Dallas Comic Con next month and see how it goes.
Lastly, my buddy Grant sat next to me at the Lubbock show and we got to talking about how often little kids show up in front of our tables. Now, none of my work is really bad for kids, but it isn't targeted at them either. Grant is in the same boat. We got to talking about this and made some plans to callaborate on a book specifically for kids. There isn't enough content at comics shows for the next generation of readers and we started bouncing around some ideas. After the prints are colored and ready for sale and my next comic is complete we're going to work together on a new book that will be kid friendly in a super cartoony, Nickelodeon magazine sort of way and I'm very excited about that as well.
More and more I find that my time spent at comics shows, rubbing elbows with other creators and bouncing ideas off of them, really inspires me to get back to my drawing board and keep slinging ink!
More on these projects soon...
