Leo Geo 2 Update

Hello, faithful arbiters of science!  I'm coming up for air VERY BRIEFLY to let you know how Leo Geo 2 is coming along!  In a word: great!  In 5 words: I am SUPER-DUPER busy!!  These past two weeks have been an inking whirlwind, but I finished this past weekend!  Now I just have miles and miles of coloring ahead of me!

Oh boy, oh boy!  Look at all those pages!  All the engine trails and ancillary effects are on separate pages, but those are done too!  Other than the adventures of Leo and Matt, I've been wrapping up summer workshops at CCS with Alec Longstreth.  It's been a long haul, but the students have been producing such a high caliber of work that it's been spurring me on and lighting that fire in my belly! 

I haven't even recapped you guys on how SD Comic Con was!  ugh!  Not enough hours in the day, am I right!  I'll make it up to you guys!  This is busy season, but it's going to be such a rad book when it's out!

WHAT TIME IS IT!?!

 

Oh my GLOB, you guys, I can finally let this puma out of the sack!  I can let this lion out of the purse!  I can let this catamount out of its backpack!  I was asked, back in April, by the good people at BOOM! studios to design and print a minicomic for Adventure Time!  I am an intense fan of the show, and I was only too pleased to tackle the project!  

I have made a lot of minicomics in my day, but I have never been contracted to make one for someone else.  I can't say how many of these I printed, but rest assured, IT WAS A LOT.  Easily heads and shoulders beyond any print run I have ever dreamed of.  Here's a video that I was asked to make to help explain the minicomic, and the particulars of how it is constructed:

HERE!  PHOTOS!  VIDEOS!!

So, as the video indicated, I will be in attendance at Comic Con THIS WEEK to help spread the minicomic gospel.  What I'm most excited about, hands down, is being able to interact with people who aren't used to seeing this kind of work.  I'm not an idiot; I realize that the majority of people have never seen a minicomic, let alone one with unconventional construction.  I am equal parts excited and terrified of Comic Con, so stop on by to let me know everything will be OK.

Here's my signing schedule!

Thursday
1:30-2:30 Signing at BOOM! table 2743

Friday
11:00-12:00 Signing at BOOM! table 2743
3:00-4:00 Signing at MacKids table 1220 (for Leo Geo!)

Saturday
1:30-2:30 Signing at BOOM! table 2743

Hard at Work

Summer workshops have started up at the Center for Cartoon Studies, and they're going really well!  Alec Longstreth and I are teaching the lion's share of them, with a couple of A-MAZE-ING guest lecturers coming in!  Last week was the Children's Book Workshop!  It was a blast!  Local author DB Johnson gave a great talk about his career and his Photoshop wizardry.  Drawing superpower and all-around great guy Scott C gave a great talk about his work and how he watercolors.  It actually inspired me to pick up a brush (for the first time in YEARS) and try my hand at watercoloring. 

Well, we're getting into the thick of summer here at CCS and the Fizzmont Institute.  The second printing of Leo Geo is due stateside any day now, and I'm hard at work on Leo Geo 2. 

My secret minicomic project is finally DONE and in the mail, so HOPEFULLY, I'll be able to talk about it this week!!  I can't wait to share it with you guys.  In the meantime, I have a nice steady stream of good news to sate your palette.  I was recently lucky enough to go to the Stern Pinball factory in Melrose Park, Il.  You can read the full post on the Stern Blog HERE, but needless to say, it BLEW MY MIND.

17.Bf5 exf5 18.Rxe7 Bxe7 19.c4 1–0

I'm just going to come out and say it...I've been obsessed with human vs. computer chess lately!  I watched the documentary Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine which documents the events leading up to the 1997 chess match between then world champion Garry Kasparov and the then state of the art IBM super computer Deep Blue.  First off, I'm obsessed with super computers.  I think there is a really interesting lineage that you can trace from super computer to super computer.  It's one of our most tangible links to science fiction!  Hal 9000 here we come!

The way that these chess tournaments are handled reminds me, in some fashion, of the Turing tests that are held every year.  In the Turing tests, computers and humans interact anonymously with judges who have to figure out which is the computer and which is the human.  It's pretty cool.

Well, that's all I have for now.  I've been finishing up my secret minicomic project that I hope to be able to talk about sooooooon.

Mid-Wersternly Bound...

...or, "Two Birds with One Stone".  I'm off to Chicago in a couple hours for the CAKE comics convention.  Not only am I prepared to have a whiz-bang of a time with my half-table-mate Colleen Frakes, and old pals Beth Hetland, Josh Kramer, Pranas Naujokaitis, Jeremy Sorese etc etc etc, but I am ALSO going to be participating in the age old tradition of overnight road trips.  Part of me is terrified of a 16-hour drive, and the other part of me is pumped.  There's also the part of me that is a masochist and actually brought work to do during the car ride.

So, for those in the Chicago or nearby areas, why not saunter your beautiful hide down to the CAKE comics convention and hang out with some real cartooning rock stars.

CAKE! - June 16 & 17

Columbia College's Ludington Building
1104 S Wabash, Chicago, Illinois
Saturday & Sunday 11am - 6pm
Free and Open to the Public!

Whoa!  It doesn't get much better than that!  To sweeten the deal, though, I'm going back to my roots...

As you might remember from THIS blog post, Leo Geo used to come in a kraft quart liquor bag.  Keeping the comic in a bag was one of my favorite parts of the presentation.  It invited the reader to open it on their own term and explore into the book.

Well, after some finagling, I've found that the new hardcover Leo Geo ALSO fits into a kraft quart liquor bag.  So I've done a special bag for Leo Geo's picked up at CAKE.  Take a peep:

 Wahoo!  Halftone printing!  See you at CAKE!!

When the well runs dry...

WHOA, that title looks way more depressing than it is supposed to be!  What it is referring to is something I brought up a week ago; the first printing of Leo Geo is gone, kaput, sold out.  I'm not sure as to how big the first print run was, but I'm still pretty pumped.  As we speak, the second printing is being drawn out of the inter-dimensional space between the science fact dimension and the science fiction dimension (to editor: that's where books come from, right?).  In the meantime, I've been working hard on Leo Geo 2 as well as some Leo Geo sketches!

 

I'm going to come clean and say that I have no idea where this came from.  I mean, I'm pretty tapped into what goes on here at the institute, but even I have no idea why you'd put a perfectly good burger and fries in a radioactive container...UNLESS, this was something that the boys down at the Nutrition Augmentation Program put together to make a GIANT version of burger and fries.  Okay, that makes sense.  I can totally get behind a giant b&f.

By any other name...

Hello my science minions!  I recently took a trip to my hometown of Essex Junction, Vermont for Memorial Day weekend and the Memorial Day parade!  Parades are awesome, there's no getting around it!  I'm trying to get the Fizzmont Institute Coalition for Floats, Goats, and Moats to work parades into their jurisdiction (currently the "floats" are of the root beer variety!)  While I was in town I stopped in at my old library, the Brownell Library, and was endeared to find a copy of my book in the collection.  I was surprised with how it was filed under, and since then have been collecting the different call signs that Leo Geo is listed under.

JGN CHAD, J.                             J GRAPHIC GN FIC C
JGN CHA                                    J741.5973 C3446L 2012
J 741.5 CHA                                J CHAD
JNF 741.5 CHA                          JGR CHA
JF Chad                                       xz

I'm just nerding out about all the different ways people are classifying the book!  My favorite is the one with all the numbers that looks like some sort of secret code!