HOME FOR NOW, BUT WITH ONE FOOT OUT THE DOOR...

So hopefully by now, everyone's grasped my "every other week" scheduling of my Live Sketch Show. This one happens to be my "off" week, which is ideal, because I'm going to be out of town for the bulk of it. I'm teaching a comic workshop tomorrow, then drawing caricatures for a big corporate event that will run for three consecutive nights. I'll be heading home after the gig late Thursday night, and will probably spend Friday trying to catch up with commissions, development on a new comic I'm doing for Ape Entertainment, and a submission for a kinda big project that Ape is considering me for, but that I can't talk about yet. Then come Saturday, I have yet another caricaturing gig--closer to home this time, thankfully. So this will be a whirlwind weekend, which was already begun with the Summit City Comic Con in Fort Wayne, Indiana this past weekend. Really nice con, really well run, and put on by extremely nice people. Here's a pic from my table in artist alley:

That's my pal and "Gapo the Clown" creator Tony Miello to my left. Tony has really played a huge role in getting me to attend most of the cons I've hit in the past year, and the effect it's had on my career is certainly indebted to his help. As usual, Tony is all smiles and enthusiasm, while I look burnt out yet slightly amused despite my exhaustion.

I do want to give notice to the arrival of Father's Day this past week. I wasn't able to do much, since my dad lives up in northern Michigan and I'm way down here at the other end of the mitten. But I managed to send him a card before the day came, and we had a really nice phone call on the day of. One of my favorite childhood memories of my dad was sharing his appreciation of Stephen King with him. My dad got me into many of King's stories, with IT being our personal  favorite. He'd spend the night before reading a chapter from the book, then go into gory descriptions the following day (the clown eating the guy's heart through his armpit was especially striking the way my dad told it). When the TV mini-series of IT came out, we both eagerly anticipated it, enjoyed the first episode, and later lamented the cheesy "giant" rubber spider at the end, which could never be as cool as Tim Curry in a clown suit. But we had that experience together, and it forever shaped my appreciation of horror stories and of my dad.

So that's it for this week.  I'll close this out with two recent commissions from my $10 commission drive that I occasionally do on Deviantart.com. In these samples, I was commissioned to draw the DC Comics character Black Canary (top) and Marvel Comics character Ms. Marvel (bottom), two of my favorites. Hope you dig 'em.

See you kids next time!

--Jay