Skip to main content

The Con is On; also, conundrums and neurotic meanderings

Awesome second day at XcapeCON. Sold an inked sketch to Marc Wolfe, so I was pretty stoked. He's a cool guy, pretty down-to-earth; he studied (for a brief period, at least) under Dennis Preston at Lansing Community College, my Humorous Illustration instructor last semester...

Actually, hold on. Let's talk about this for a moment.

Do you realize that I studied under Denny for sixteen weeks without having the foggiest notion what kind of recognition he's had? Or that I'd never heard of Marc Wolfe before I sold a sketch to him?

Come to think of it, though, if you're not much into comics or cartoons (or Lansing, I guess), you probably haven't heard of these guys either. Isn't that strange? Here I've been drawing and generally building toward comic book work for fifteen years (at least), and yet I'm either so isolated or so lazy that I don't know half the people I'm supposed to know.

Or am I supposed to know them as, you know, them? All I know is that these are pretty cool guys. Denny's a great teacher. Marc is pretty laid back. That's about the extent of my experience. It's only in looking at their websites that I realize what kind of talents these people are.

Anyway. Slight diversion there.

The Con was fun, and I made ten bucks; all is right with the world. They even had food down the hall. Awesome.

I have to get going; my class was supposed to meet at Saper Gallery for the Dr. Seuss show. And of course, I forgot. Damn my brain.

Rick Out.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Problem with Reconstructing Deinonychus

So as you may know, I am partly obsessed with dinosaurs. Scratch that - there's a small lobe of my brain devoted to dinosaurs. I love em, God help me. I even have a super-double-plus-top-secret dinosaur comic maybe in the works...but you didn't hear it from me. Anywho... Part of my problem is in the reconstruction of said prehistoric beasties, namely those icons of American dino-obsession, Deinonychus ( Velociraptor  to you Jurassic Park  aficionados...it's not just a Hollywood bastardization, there's a complicated story behind it which I covered in this old post ). Now, we all know what Deinonychus looked like: wolf-size, sleek, toothsome head balanced by a long tail, grasping front claws and of course the eponymous "terrible claw" on its hind foot. The shape is burned into our collective unconscious; you could construct the most fantastic amalgam of different bits and pieces, but as long as you include the sickle-claw, you're golden. The devil, of

Artist Spotlight: Tom Eaton

I wanted to do a quick artist spotlight on Tom Eaton, best known for his work in Boy's Life Magazine. I used to have a subscription to Boy's Life  when I was a kid; unfortunately I didn't keep any of them, as they just weren't...I don't know, not really worth keeping. I just remember it as being 90% toy advertisements, some "how to get along with others" advice, the same camping article reprinted 20 million times, and some half-funny comics. As the years went on, the advertisements got bigger and louder, the articles became less interesting, and the comics section got shorter and shorter. But there was one gem hidden in the midst of the mediocrity: artist Tom Eaton. He wrote and illustrated "The Wacky Adventures of Pedro" ( BL's  burro mascot), "Dink & Duff", and myriad other comics, crossword puzzles, games, and short pieces. He was the magazine's resident cartoonist, and about the only reason I actually read the magazi

The Horrendous Space Kablooie!

Sorry, Bill Watterson, but I just couldn't resist using this one...all hail Calvin and Hobbes! This comic illustrates a point that confronts us when we attempt to speak about the titanic phenomena occurring in the universe every day. We can speak of a supernova exploding "with the force of x  megaton bombs", or a star that "could hold a million of our suns"...but ultimately all this is meaningless. When the standard unit of interstellar measurement, the light year, is about 8.7 x 10¹² miles, human language (and thus, comprehension) just sort of...blanks out. Here's a lovely example: I'm currently watching a JINA-CEE video about novas in parasitic binary star systems . Essentially, a small, dense star (such as a neutron star) will form an orbital relationship with a larger, less-dense giant. The denser of the two will start vacuuming material off its host, adding to its mass; however, because of its size, it compresses the material into its "