Sharkraptors and Space Cadets

Hey, I have a blog! Who knew?!

Yeah, I know. It's been about a year since I last posted anything, and there's a few good reasons for it.

So in the last year, I've gotten into a serious relationship with an amazing woman, and for the last year, I've been doing a lot of commissions and work to get the money saved up and the portfolio built up to find work in Pennsylvania and move there. And the time is upon me. As soon as I land a job, I'm moving there. So I've had a pretty busy year here. I've been drawing a Transformers Shattered Glass fancomic for a client. (Paid work!) And I also did some layouts for last years Botcon comic, and will be doing layouts for this years follow up story. I've been doing a shitload of commissions and generally... Just been busy. I guess I didn't post a lot here, because as far as comics goes... I haven't had much to comment on. The Third Accelerator comic underwent a rewrite (for the better), I've done a good share of writing (nothing finished though), a lot of commissions, and really that's about it. Nothing that's Earth shattering opinion-wise.

Anyway, in recent months, it was advised that I snag myself a Tumblr site, which I did. And I've been posting artwork and stuff there more and more these days. It's basically my main hideout these days. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with the blog here... I'm not going to rid of it, but I'm still gotta figure out what to do with it. In the meantime, I invite you to swing on over to my Sharkraptors and Space Cadets Tumblr and catch up on stuff there.

Blackmail Material

If you're an artist, who's been doing this comic thing for a while, it's guaranteed you've had a period of time in your art where you've experimented with different art styles. Sometimes they turn out nicely and you end up embracing them and it becomes what you're known for. Other times? Yeeeeah, holy crap you want to forget that experimental phase ever existed. This is the story of one of those times. About ten years ago, I was playing around with art styles. (I think sometime before, I've shown off my older artwork, if not... Just take my word for it.) I was heavily influenced by Bruce Timm's art style, and I was trying to play with it and branch out. So during this brief period a little under ten years ago, I tried this... For lack of better words... attempt at a merger of Bruce Timm's style with Peter Chung's style. And it was godawful. Proportions were borked and my attempts to streamline resulted in the style looking so damn amateurish. And well, let's be honest. There's just certain things that just don't mix. (Like steak and ice cream.) At this tie, I was still on my old, old, OLD computer, and I saved things to zipdisks and had hard copies. (I didn't have a CD burner yet. That wouldn't come for at least another year.) So there's a lot of my old artwork I had actually FORGOTTEN about. Thus, I had forgotten I tried this old merger of styles.

Until last week.

Stupid-Awesome: Resident Evil: Retribution

And by 'begins', they mean 'begins at
the end of the movie.'

So a half year later, I've finally caught up with Resident Evil: Retribution. Now, truth be told, I don't really care about the games. Outside of playing the first one back in the 90s, I've never really played them. (And that first one, the Playstation froze on me before I even got anywhere interesting and I got bored.) So when they make changes to the overall story and characters of the games, I'm not exactly broken up about it. I enjoy these movies on their own merit.

I've made no secret that I love stupid movies and Lord knows I love movies that accepts they're stupid movies even more. There's just something so satisfying in a world where too many directors seem to think the stupid crap they produce is gold pressed latinum, that here's a slew of creators that knows what they're creating and does not apologize for it. It's kinda like porn: No one's pissed off that the director of the super-hero porn parody movie is making something stupid, because the audience already knows it's stupid. We get more irritated when it tries to take itself seriously as a form of social commentary or something stupid like that, when all you're wanting is just to watch two or three (or seven) attractive people do each other. The Resident Evil movies are like that for me. They're stupid. Holy Christ, they're stupid, but you know what? I love them. Now part of it is my unrequited love for Milla Jovovich, who I've harbored deep unhealthy feelings for since I saw her near naked years ago in her music video 'Gentleman Who Fell'. But another part is that for some reason, I love her husband, Paul W.S. Anderson's movies. They're stupid and he doesn't try to hide it... He's like a lower-budgeted Micheal Bay. People are often surprised that he keeps making movies, but there's a certain logical dynamic when it comes to making movies. It's all about making money. He keeps his movies under budget so that no matter what, unless it's a truly unwatchable piece of crap, on a Ecks vs. Sever level of horrible, it's going to make a profit. And unless you're a hardcore zombie puritan or just a dude with a stick up yer butt, the Resident Evil movies have never been really outright horrible...

...Until now.

Bringing it back down to Earth...

The rejected second page of the book.

Hey folks, sorry for the long delay here. (Though I'm sure a few of you are used to it already.) I've had a busy month here, with final exams and some artwork to do here. Plus there's a pretty good chance I'll be moving sometime in the near future, out of state away from Michigan. But during this month, I had actually had no time to work on the Third Accelerator... Which when I finally sat down to begin work on it again, I discovered something disheartening: I hated how it looked.

Y'all remember a year ago when I had that artistic ephiphany? You know the one where I realized I had been slacking off on the lineart and I need to make improvements, because I'm better than I've been producing? Well, apparently... I suck at listening to myself. I'm going to give a little back story here, because I think it'll be good for us all. Prior to my years on Shadowgirls, I used to draw in a much more detailed style. It was a far cry from my current cel-style of artwork. I've said before that a big reason why I embraced the cel-style look is because of my love for animation and also because of ease of production, when I was producing Shadowgirls on a regular basis. But, you also might remember that toward the premature end of Shadowgirls, that I was hating my artwork pretty badly. I admit, for a while there, it was just easy to blame the tight turn around time for it all... But recently, I've learned that's not the case.

Young Justice: "Let it go."

Young Justice is over with, and I know a lot of you are upset about it, and for many good reasons. Least of which, it was the last version of a DC Universe a lot of us were even familiar with. It's where Tim Drake was still a Robin, where we had Apache Chief, Samurai and El Dorado (and they were cool), where everyone didn't wear high collars and seams on their costumes and where Stephanie Brown even existed. It was a fun DC show. But was it the greatest DC show that ever existed?

No.

Sorry to say it, but no. It wasn't. The first season built up this really interesting version of the mythos, where we got to know and like these several characters, all with exception of Robin Kid Flash, we never had any real formal previous introduction to in other shows. This was the first animated version of Conner and Miss Martian, not to mention before this show, barely anyone even heard of Artemis, and last but not least, the show pretty much created Aqualad as the son of Black Manta. We got to know these characters and love these characters. And in time, we got introduced to a variety of other members. They brought in a teenaged Zatanna, with an interesting history with her father and Doctor Fate, they made Red Tornado pretty awesome, and we all loved the interesting mixture of Captain Marvel and Billy Batson, and his little secret he kept from the League as well as the team. (Who didn't love that scene where Wonder Woman called him out, saying that he kept it from the team, and Batman chimes in “I knew.” And Wonder Woman's looks at him like “Oh, of course you did.”) And it also fit into a majority of those DC Direct to Video movies too. I mean, this could easily have been in the same universe as most of them. (They used many of the same character models.) Even Captain Atom, a favorite character of mine played a small but important part too. At the end of the first season, I would have placed this up there with the Justice League show.

Then Invasion happened. And it dropped. It was good but it wasn't great. But if you had asked me before Season Two began, before Invasion, I would have said it was. I hate to admit this, but the second season just wasn't that good. Those six or seven characters we got to intimately know and love, were scattered... And worse yet, scattered off camera by events we didn't even get to see. Robin was now Nightwing and we had not just a new Robin, but there was a Robin in between... But we didn't get to see this. Aqualad had turned traitor and joined his father Black Manta, over the death of Tula... That we never got to see. (Turns out he wasn't really a traitor, but was working for Nightwing.) Conner and Megan broke up, and now she was dating Lagoon Boy... And we didn't get to see it. Kid Flash retired for reasons of insecurity or something, and Artemis and him became serious and were living together... And guess what? Oh, and I sure hope you weren't fond of Rocket. She gets shuffled off to obscurity.