Greetings!

I haven’t posted too much here recently because I’ve been very busy with other project. I just put various interview videos up on the Cloudscape Comics site and am currently working on a comic strip history of the organization with veteran cartoonist Colin Upton. I’m also working on various graphic novels with talent artists of my acquaintance, including a pirate story with the multi-talented Reetta Linjama.

Reetta and I just completed a short comic strip that’s an advertisement for STUD underwear. The comic can be read here. It was a fun and engaging exercise to boil down STUD’s history and purpose into a single-page strip.

More projects are in the works.

On Saturday was the launch party for 21 Journeys, the latest graphic novel anthology from Cloudscape Comics. Various people, both Cloudscape contributors and interested members of the public, all hung-out at the Ayden Gallery, eating food, drinking alcohol, discussing things, and occasionally buying Cloudscape books. It was a lot of fun and created a great feeling of accomplishment. We’ve finished the book, we’ve finished it, and now we can celebrate.

There was so much energy, so much connection. I’m proud to be a part of it. Now we get ready for the next step….

Greetings, culture lovers.

My various writing projects continue apace. I’m working on numerous scripts for Cloudscape Comics, as well as continuing to develop their website. I wrote an short analysis of British comics that was put up on the Broken Frontier blog.

However, the project right now I’m most engaged in is the Name Game, where I create new characters based class old comic book names and then have artists provide illustrations for the characters. About the one thing I enjoy more than character and world-building is to see talented artists bring those characters to life.

The ever-talented Reetta Linjama and Ksenia Kozhevnikova have both created a lot of great stuff, and I recently recruited Jayleen Weaver, Guru of Gurukitty. My circle ever widens.

Hey, I’m back with another Monster Name Game, where I take a picture and name of a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster and create a totally new monster from it. Because I love a challenge, I’ve decided to go with the flumph, a strange jelly-fish monster who was the only “Lawful Good” creature in the classic Fiend Folio book. The creature has long been derided by D&D fans, both for its strange appearance and for the incongruous alignment. What is so benevolent about these floating jellyfish? Do they rescue maidens? Heal the sick? Always pay their taxes on time? What good deeds do jellyfish perform?

So what direction could I go based on their appearance and their name, which sounds like it’s being spoken by someone with his mouth full of marshmallows? Just to make things extra difficult, how about I keep the “Lawful Good” alignment. Whatever kind of creature my flumph is, it’s benevolent.

Well, what do I think of when I see a bizarre tentacled creature with a peculiar name? Aliens. Now fantasy fiction is not generally big about visitors from another planet, but what about visitors from another universe? Some extraplanar entities who have phased into our reality for some special purpose. What if the flumph is like those benevolent “star-brother” aliens you often get in stories? The ones who show-up to deliver some message of peace to humanity or perhaps to supply use with knowledge that will improve our lot as a species. The flumph look so strange because they are inhabitants of a higher plane of existence, one where our heavy, clumsy bodies would not function. They’re not angels, not servants of a divine power, but simply a more self-aware kind of being than us who has watched us for a long time and sometimes given a helping tentacle. They almost treat us like we were their little siblings to be taught and protected, though they are aware that us mere four-dimensional beings often respond to the strange with fear and hate, so the flumph generally keep their appearance known to only a deserving few.

What’s interesting about them being extra-dimensional beings is that then their strange appearance and goofy name makes sense. Their universe is different from ours, and their views of what’s beautiful are different as well. To each other, the flumph appear handsome and heroic, and their species name is grand and noble. It shows the jarring contrast of the two universes that we have a hard time taking the flumph seriously.

“Do not be afraid, young one. We come in peace. We have much to teach you.”

So in my continuing quest to do many, many things, I have started blogging at Broken Frontier, a comic book news site. Basically, I can write about anything I want as long as it involves comics, and as I have a lot to say about comics, it works out pretty well. So far four of my articles have been posted on the site:

1. Beatrix Potter: Proto-Cartoonist, which discusses whether Beatrix Potter’s stories use the same artistic language as comic books do

2. Snippets of Life, which analyzes Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For

3. The Prankster, which shows how to reinterpret one of the worst villains of all in order to make him cool

4. Superman vs the Tyrant Sun, where I discuss one of my favourite villains of all time, who was created by one of my favourite authors all time.

There’s a few more articles that are currently being processed and some more that are taking form in my brain. It is good to keep busy with various activities, especially when it is in a field you love so much, and one of the lovely things about comics is that there’s so much you can say about them and so many directions to go.