Let's Be Friends Again

Heroes Con was absolutely fantastic this year for the LBFA boys, and I’m sure there’ll be more posts to come, but I wanted to share this particular thing with you today.

The unbeatable Joel Carroll has been an online buddy for years, but we finally got to meet for the first time at Heroes Con this past weekend.

He was good enough to do this brilliant sketch of the Doctor for me.

As you might guess, I absolutely love it.

-CH

The first single from Adam WarRock, aka Eugene, aka Joran van der Sloot has dropped like a glass of water from my hand after something astonishing has happened – something like me listening to this track and saying “OH SHIT”.

Go HERE and give the dude some money for the song. Check out all the other free music while you’re there. And check out the art on the single. Is it familiar? Does it make you feel better inside? Oh yes, you guessed it, it’s done by LBFA’s own Chris Haley! Whaaaat!

Everybody likes to talk about supporting small artists, so try to give a dollar to WarRock if you can. He’ll use it to make more songs, then you give more dollars, and this is what we call “trickle down raponomics”.

Since tomorrow’s comic is going to be a little late, I thought I’d share this with you guys to make it up to you.

I think that line is the thesis statement of All Star Superman.

I’m planning to get it as a tattoo at some point.

LBFA’s All Star Resident Designer, Dylan Todd, and I have made just released another of our collaborative mixtapes.

This is Volume 6 in our PING series.

If you are into music (and when I say music, I mean good music), then you should check it out.

While you’re checking things out, you should also check out this online exhibition of China Mieville inspired art that April and I contributed to for Super Punch.
My thanks also to Zach Whitten who got me up to speed on the subject matter.

As some of you may know, it was my birthday last week, and I was lucky enough to have people in both real and internet life conspire to make it awesome.

Stephen Garza was nice enough to start a campaign on Twitter for people to draw Superman and the Doctor teaming up for me. I thought I’d share some of those efforts with you because they are amazing.

Since it was his idea, it was up to Stephen to get things started with this great star powered sketch.

Lucky for me, Brandon Schaefer is the kind of pal that keeps a camera on him just in case he sees something amazing like this happening.

Brandon is also the kind of pal that makes incredible things like this..

So, yeah, he’s a great pal is the point.

Jordan Witt had just made us some awesome (non-erotic) fan art and still found time away from watching Ben 10 and being a super-secret covert military spy to make this for me. It is my new wallpaper. Replacing my old wallpaper.. which was also by Jordan.

The Doctor was busy for this one by Chris Graves, but that doesn’t make it any less fantastic. I pretty much love everything about this.

And finally, super-friend and designer extraordinaire, Dylan Todd tried to fit almost everything I love into one unbelievable image and the world nearly exploded because of it.

You may think this art is awesome on it’s own, but it’s even more awesomer when you realize it is the cover art for an incredible 30 song birthday mix Dylan made for me that I have decided to share with all of you as well. Click here to download and enjoy.

So yeah, my thanks to these wonderful people and to all of you other wonderful people that sent me birthday wishes and made me feel like it is great to have a birthday.

xo
ch

How about an update on what we’re up to and why the comics have been a little sporadic lately.

Curt’s been on the road a lot lately, and that’s throw a tiny wrench into our regular working procedure, but what’s really thrown things off is we’ve got A LOT of things that we’re working on that we simply cannot talk about yet.

I know, I know, I hate it when people say that too, but it’s totally true! Some of the things will be revealed sooner than later though!

One thing we can tell you is that there will be a new “Comics, Everybody!” up at Comics Alliance next week.
I won’t spoil who it is, but I will tell you it’s a Marvel character I’ve grown very fond of.

Like a fool, I forgot to post this completely awesome Superman and the Doctor that Mathew Digges (aka SequentialMatt) did for my birthday in my previous update. I have been a fan of his stuff ever since Sims showed me the original pencils for Awesome Hospital at HeroesCon two years ago, so I hope that Mr. Digges (Esq.) will accept my most humble of apologies.

And for Pete’s sake, if you drew something for this and I have accidentally missed it PLEASE E-MAIL IT TO ME and I will rectify my mistake. My brain is so full of useless pop culture trivia that I often have a really hard time remembering the regular day-to-day stuff, please do not take my bad memory as a personal slight.

xo
ch

Like Curt said in the last post, we are acutely aware of the scheduling weirdness as of late.

And while we can definitely say that some of it is because of “behind the scenes” cool things we’re working on, a lot of it comes down to there are only so many hours in the day and I have to sleep at least a few hours every night. I wish I didn’t. I wish my powers of limitless enthusiasm could also supply me with limitless energy, but sadly, that’s not how it works.

The next part in our origin epic will be finished just as soon as I can get it finished and hopefully that won’t be too much longer. I think you’re going to like it. I mean, I do, and normally I hate our comics, so that’s saying something.

Until then, why not look at this?

More to come..

Strip’s running a little late, so why not enjoy this preview in the meantime?

Any guesses?

xo
ch

Sure, we all wish we could have an incredible artist do a watercolor of us riding a unicorn, but sadly, wishing is all we can do.

OR IS IT?!

Finally there’s just such an incredible artist out there by the name of Jen Vaughn, and she’s offering just such a service!

Seriously, Jen is a great cartoonist, an awesome librarian, a unicorn enthusiast, a karaoke dynamo, and one of my super-friends. Go check out her Etsy store and get yourself or someone you love (or everyone you love) something amazing for the holidays.

And if you’re too poor to afford anything, please reblog/tweet about this for me.

I thought this was a fun little picture of Spider-Man when I drew it and since I knew you wouldn’t really be able to see it clearly in the finished strip, I decided to save the inks separately so I could maybe do something else with it.

Then I remembered there are a lot of you out there who are more talented at coloring than I am or who perhaps just enjoy coloring things.

All of that is to say if you’d like to have a go at coloring Spidey I am happy to facilitate that, so drop me an email or a comment here with your email address if you’d like the hi-res version to Photoshop up or if you’d just like to print out and have a go at it with your crayons.

Speaking of Spider-Man..

I think I read more Spidey comics over the weekend than I read in all of 2010 combined. Spider-Man is a character I love, but I don’t know if I’ve really actively enjoyed reading his comics regularly since the Todd McFarlane/Erik Larsen days of my youth.

I’m pretty sure I thought this was as cool as comics could possibly get at the time.

I know that for a long time all of the comics I made as a teenager were basically “Revenge of the Sinister Six” but with my characters instead of Spidey and his rogues. “Savage Stick Man” facing off against his arch-enemy “Kabuki” (not that one) and five other terrible teenage ideas, etc. (I promise I’m just as embarrassed writing that as you are reading it.)

I’ve been in and out since “Brand New Day” started, basically only picking up the issues by artists I really liked (Marcos Martin and Joe Quinones, for instance) and not getting too involved in the story of the big status quo change. The issues I read for the most part managed to be pretty enjoyable on top of the great art, but for whatever reason they didn’t really do much for me or more importantly for Spider-Man. They weren’t fun enough for me to just enjoy as “fun” comics (which are fun), and they weren’t substantive enough for me to feel like they’d really been worth my time. The only thing I can think to relate it to is treading water; you’re staying afloat, but it’s no way to live your life.

I’d been hearing really good things about “The Gauntlet” & “Grim Hunt” storylines, so I thought, “Okay, let’s see how this goes”, but after reading them, I’m still not sure what I think.

Usually the opposite is true, but I actually think I might have liked this better if I’d been reading it as it came out instead of all at once. I think having a week or two between issues might have given me more time to ruminate on what had happened in the individual issues more and expend a little more mental energy thinking about what was going to happen. Of course, there’s no way to know now if that would have made a difference one way or another.

How about you guys and gals, any of you reading Spider-Man?