Back from Baltimore

This was our first time attending the Baltimore ComicCon and as far as conventions this was the most comic-oriented one I think I've ever been to. By that I mean that most are "pop-culture" conventions with celebrity gust stars and isles and isles of toys and merchandise. Baltimore only had comic-related guests and just a handful of booths that were selling anything but comics. Those who know me know how much I love collecting toys, but I have to say this was pretty refreshing.

Of course the main reason I went was to meet one of my personal heroes, Mike Mignola. Though I consider myself a comic geek, I am far less of one than most people who are into this sort of thing. The only comics I read and have read for years are Hellboy and B.P.R.D., its spin off series. I could launch into why that is, but that's a whole other topic.

I really can't say enough about how nice Mike was, as well as Guy Davis and John Arcudi, the team behind B.P.R.D. For such a relatively small convention it was absolutely packed. For that reason Mignola said that he probably wouldn't be making a return appearance, so I was REALLY glad we went this year. He basically said that he liked being able to talk to people as opposed to just being an autograph machine, which is why he usually attends smaller functions. To me this event seemed especially small, but I guess that shows why he would never go someplace like the convention in Chicago, where heavy hitters like him usually have lines with waits upwards of two hours...here there was never more than say 10 or 12 people in line for him at a time.

The sketch up there is now one of my most prized possessions...I asked Guy Davis, B.P.R.D. artist and creature extraordinare, to do his take on Ernie, the character you may have seen a few places around my site. He did free sketches for just about everybody who asked which is amazingly gracious. I love to meet the guys that actually appreciate their fans rather than using conventions as opportunities to shamelessly coerce a few more bucks from them.

Johnny Boy "entertains" a Marshall dorm lounge "full" of students

Last night Michael Chadwyk McClure hosted a showing of Johnny Boy in his dorm lounge. Chad plays Detective Dennison in the movie, the character with the famous death scene that I won't ruin here.

The Brainwrap crew were invited as guest speakers, and all made it but Seth (who was home with a tooth-ache, what a wuss.) For the most part I think the students that showed up were there for the free pizza which Chad graciously provided, but either way a good time was had. Chad also set up a little promotional contest which I was pretty impressed with. Those who attended the Johnny Boy premiere back in April may have stopped by our press table and seen the free stuff we were handing out, including a Johnny Boy Cubee (paper toy that you cut out and construct yourself.) Chadwyk made a few of them and hid them around his dorm building, then put up wanted posters offering a free copy of the movie to those who found the little guys. Apparently the search actually got pretty heated at one point, which I found delightful. I commend you on a job well done, Chad.

He told me, though, that he had trouble finding a copy of the JB Cubee, which lead me to realize that I never actually put one up on the site or really made it available in anyway...somebody actually came to my humble web portal looking for something I made and I didn't have it up. That will be corrected soon.

Updates

I've been working through a list of things to accomplish now that I have a little more free time, and I can now check website update off the list.

I've added quite a few things, so this list is just as much for me as it is visitors:

Main Page
* Added links to Carrie's site, Brainwrap, Johnny Boy, Splitreason and Cubeecraft.

Art Page
* Split the "Work" section into three categories, "General" "Splitreason" and "Brainwrap." I had so much work for those two companies that it just seemed to make sense.
* Added one commission piece under Work-General
* Added three shirts under Work-Splitreason
* Added the cast illustration, DVD ad, DVD jacket, and Brainwrap logo to Work-Brainwrap
* Added "Weeding" cartoon to Personal-Flash
* Added Billy Bob piece to Personal-Illustration-Pieces

Voices Page
* Created new section for Cubees
* Created new section for Johnny Boy trailer and show times

Contact Page
*Updated my resumé

Hooray!

Note: I just found out that you can't use the greater-than or less-than symbols in these posts because Blogger thinks you're writing some sort of incomplete HTML tags and flips out. Thanks, Blogger, you're smarter than I am.

Pumpin' em out like crazy

Being unemployed lets me make lots of shirts.



Vote!
http://www.splitreason.com/design/design_48d7de063acec/0

I like this one a lot, might be my favorite after the Back to the Future one.

One-day shoot.

Last night the Brainwrap crew and collaborators began and wrapped filming on an entry for the Two-Minute Horror Movie competition. All told the filiming and prep-work took around 6 hours. A previous entry of ours in this competition was the Lycanthropy music video which is an easter egg on the Johnny Boy DVD. Can you find it? (I didn't hide it all that well.)

We were all able to witness an amazing makeup job by Dave Humphries and Carrie Kirk who are always our go-to make up people.

The brave and paitent Anthony Javorsky is the green guy with the eye. Anthony is typically called upon for our monster roles because he is actually man-shaped unlike us puny, weak creative types. Only at the end of the night as fake blood pooled in the seat of his pants did he ask "Can I be done?" through a set of plastic teeth.

Ian's house grew very hot as the body heat of nine individuals filled it continuously. A small price to pay for a night of laughs, mayhem, and gawking neighbors.

VOTE OR DIE

In this particular election you can, and are encouraged to, vote for both candidates positively. The only winner is me.

This one is a commission based on Resident Evil:



http://www.splitreason.com/design/design_48c814b73a910/2

This one is my idea, based on Punch-Out:



http://www.splitreason.com/design/design_48c93373f30be/0

Both options are better than voting for whats-his face or ol' guy with that chick.

Meeting of the Brains

I feel like this post would be more at home on some sort of Brainwrap blog, but what the heck, I guess in a way this IS the only Brainwrap Blog...

The Brainwrap crew had its first meeting last night since most of the Johnny Boy dealings died down. Now we've all had time to forget just how grueluing the filmmaking process is so we're all ready jump back into the game, fists clenched and wallets vulnerable. We're still not ready to call our journey with Johnny Boy a done deal, but it has "plateaued," as I believe Ian put it. We (and by we I mean Ian) are still investigating ways to sell the DVD locally and nationally.

Our most recent project was to film a concert for local musician and friend Bud Carroll. We enlisted the help of several friends who also happen to be excellent cameramen, and Mikey V coreographed all 6 cameras as well as edited the whole thing together. It's possible that my job will be to produce the DVD in addition to shooting the most unusable footage out of the group. An interesting thing about this endevor was that a union guy working the show was litteraly about to throw us out/beat us up for wanting to film. Unions have crazy rules about being paid for work that other people do, which didn't bother me nearly as much as how amazingly rude and quick to anger the guy was.

It looks like our first foray back into creative films will be a very last minute entry into the Two-Minutue Horror Movie Festival. If we don't make the deadline this year it looks like we'll just shelve it until next year, at which point all of this will be forgotten and it will seem brand new!

Beyond that there are a few more ideas kicking around...all staring Seth.

Comissioned Poster

This is a recent commission where I was asked to take an existing poster and put my own spin on it, or really just redraw it "in my style." This isn't the final version as they requested to have the text taken off.

It was printed at around 4 feet tall if I'm remembering correctly, and I'm hopefully going to take a trip to photograph it hanging above their couch so I can post it on the site. It will be part of one of my "add everything I've done in that last few months" updates.

On a side note, I did a little research on the Yonder Mountain String Band and all of their posters are really well designed.

MY CUBEES ON [ADULT SWIM]

I've been chasing this for a few days with an old VCR and no luck. Finally this morning it fell right into my lap.

Adult Swim has created a bump (possibly a series of bumps? Not sure yet) about Cubeecraft.com featuring the ones that I designed based on Adult Swim shows.

Watch it here! http://www.bumpworthy.com/bumps/1052

Glen elated!

Chris thanked me on his blog for making the AS ones so I feel like I should thank some people too:

Chris for posting the Cubees
Randall for giving me the heads up
Mike for giving up sleep to aid me in trying to record it
Bumpworthy for posting the video
Adult Swim for being awesome

Edit: A YouTube version which may be easier to watch than the above version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHoeiOKli0k

I AM 8-BIT 2008

This is old news now, but Joystiq is the only place where I've found a decent, comprehensive gallery of the work on display at this years I AM 8-BIT show so I thought I'd post it. My favorite piece that was photographed is this Elevator Action poster. I would love to have a print of this, but sadly it is not one the very few pieces they've decided to reproduce.

When reviewing the photos you'll see that for some reason the show included girls lounging about in their underwear playing video games. I REALLY need to make it out there sometime to see this thing. In the meantime they need to get off their butts and release another volume of the art book that accompanied the first show.

http://www.joystiq.com/photos/i-am-8-bit-2008/

Simpsons Toys! I want them!

Kidrobot is putting out a new line of blind boxed (of course) mini Simpsons figures which I want to own all of. I never did get around to getting the Adult Swim ones that I really wanted, so if these become available locally like the AS line surprisingly did, I'll pick up a few.

Looking at the lineup I think I'd be hard pressed to end up with one I didn't want. They did manage to make two extremely odd choices though in Funzo and Lucius Sweet. They couldn't have used, I don't know, maybe Moe or Skinner?