as many of you know, i was away two weeks ago visiting my pal and comics legend, nick cardy. the plan was for us to get a chance to hang around a bit (since we had both opted to skip the convention circuit this year...) and for me to be able to (finally!) get nick on film telling some of his wonderful; stories about his life in comics and his time in the war (WWII, that is.) it also gave me a chance to play mr.fixit around his house a bit and help him organize some of his artwork and stuff.
while i was there we also played host to renee witterstaetter and michael golden who came by to help nick put together a lot of his unpublished artwork from over the years that renee intends to compile in a definitive book (or two!) on nick and his life as an artist. renee will also be producing a dvd (or two!) of nick using the very rough footage i took (her production editor better be a miracle worker!) as well as segment i filmed of nick giving a course in cover design (using many of his classic aquaman and teen titans covers!) and an over-his-shoulder, inside the artist's studio segment as nick masterfully illustrates a (gorgeous!) sketch of wonder woman.
(which i will show it to you next week 'cause...uh...he gave it to me.)
anyway, here are a couple of the pics i took, mostly of michael and renee looking on as nick "discovers" some wonderful treasures in his old portfolios.
i've posted many of nick's classic and dynamic covers here time and time again, so i won't repeat myself here--but here is a recent article that my pal (and baltimore comiccon coordinator and traffic manager extraordinaire) brad tree sent along to me last week.
check this out...
oh, and here's a pic that renee took of michael, nick, and me.
(that dazed look on my face is 'cause i'm realizing that i'm hanging out with two of my absolute heroes!)
a couple months ago, shortly after i lost jake, i was in a... harsh mood, i guess you could say. craig might tell you that i'm still there, but i hope it's getting better...
anyway, he sent me a pin-up from a guy he met at the boston show (...i think...right, craig?) that i was just in no place to really absorb and appreciate. craig said that we would use it as a pin-up in the upcoming series and i said, cool, 'tever, and filed it away, not really giving it a second look.
in the meantime, i've become friends with eric henson on facebook and was blown away by a kinda try-out page that he drew of our kids, the perhapanauts! i told him so and he told me that there was a second page--a splash--and i begged him to show me!
and now i'm showin' you!
wicked awesome, right?!
needless to say, eric and i are trying to find a way to get him on a perhapanauts back-up story!
probably in the same issue we feature his spectacular pin-up!
and for those of you who don't think that i've already dropped enough names with renee, michael, and nick...
sharon and i took terry out to dinner for his birthday the other night and i was thrilled that i could give him something that he didn't already have! (terry has everything--especially every toy you could think of! except...) a mcfarlane quick draw mcgraw/el kabong figure! at least, he thought he didn't have one...it could be in there, somewhere...
but, of course, terry always comes bearing some gifts of some sort for me--dvds of various seasons of various sitcoms from the fifties, duplicate JLU action figures that came in some shady ebay deal, same with old archie comics, pep comics, betty and veronicas. this time he handed me the latest issue of toyfare asking if i'd seen that somebody up there likes us! what a great thrill to be mentioned in their pages--but also to share a page with the likes of fringe, batman, she-ra, and william shatner! are we pop culture, or what?!
"Despite a highly erratic publishing schedule, The Perhapanauts is a dynamic comic book about mystery monsters joining forces for good. The Perhapanauts Vol.0 finally collects all the original hard-to-find miniseries into one cryptid compendium! imagecomics.com"
and that's it for me!
i got so much to do before i leave.
smell ya later!