Trying To Grab Fate By The Balls, And It Fights Back....America Is Too Fat...Comic Con Becomes An Indurance Test....Back To The Drawing Board.....
Fuck, where to start? Let's try Friday shall we? No, wait. Let's go to Thursday. That's when my luck turned, and our story begins....
So, Thursday. The day before I go to Con. I wake up early to get a head start on the day since I still have quite a bit of things to accomplish before I venture down to San Diego. I start working on one more piece but eventually have to give up and take care of a few other things. The bulk of my portfolio is finished, having stayed up until 3:30 that morning, but I still need to make copies of my work so that I can put them together in a sample packet for the comic companies who are interested in what I've got. No big deal right? Well, actually yeah. You're right. That was relatively easy, except that some of them came out really light and were sort of hard to see everything. But they would have to do. I didn't have much time to waste. After that I went down to several office supply stores to find a simple plastic report style cover that I could put the pages in. Nothing fancy, just something that I wouldn't have to slip inside a plastic sheet or punch holes in my pages. They had 300 different types of bullshit. None of which would work for what I needed.
So after wasting an hour or two on that, I went out to find a new shirt for the upcoming reviews/interviews. A short sleeve, button up, black shirt, with a collar. Pretty simple right? Fuck no. I went through an entire mall and everything had either stupid designs on them or the few I did find were all XXL or XL. So I started looking around for something else to wear and everything was like that. Everything! What the fuck? The smallest shit I can find is a Large. I know the majority of our country is overweight, but for fuck's sake, I need clothes too goddamnit!!!. I don't mean to offend anyone, if you're overweight, that's fine. I don't have a problem with that. I would just like to find something that I can wear too. After that, I gave up and went home.
Later that night, I do finally find some cool little report folders that I can use, so that's a plus. Now what I need to do is make some kind of cover sheet for it. One problem. My computer's not working. So I have to wait for a friend to get back from LA or Irvine or something before I can go use her computer. So she finally gets in and I photoshop my little cover up and scan in about 15 pages or so of my life drawing things and stuff out of my sketch books. Then I come to find out that she doesn't have enough ink in her printer to print all that shit out. Yay! So I try to save it to a cd and I figure I can go have the inbred mutants down at Kinko's print my stuff out. Wrong. Window's encounters a problem and deems my work unworthy of saving to said disc. By this time, it's about 2 in the morning mind you, I'm already operating on 4-5 hours of sleep in what, for me, is a high stress situation, and nothing has really gone right all day. Not only that, I'm supposed to be up in another 4 hours to drive to San Diego. So I figure what I'll do is just email all those files to myself from here and go to Kinko's in the morning and print them out on my way to the Con. So after all that's done, and I get home, it's about 5:30 before I get to bed. I get about 4 hours sleep and head out.
Friday starts off with a shitstorm of sluggishness and a strong hatred for the daylight. I make my way to Kinko's to deal with these idiots and when I download the files to print, they're way too big for some reason. They had no way for me to resize them from there, so I had to drive back to my friend's place to try and fix them. Guess what? The file sizes were fine. Whatever, I hate that place and I hope a flaming car full of rabid jackals careens into their store front. I do however take my chances with the printer here and manage to print out one cover sheet and the rest of my sketchbook shit. I take my cover sheet back to that hell hole and have them copy the rest.
After that hassle, it's now about 1 in the afternoon and we're finally on our way when guess what? We have bad directions and it costs us about an extra 2 hours. We ended up getting to the Con around 4 or so and didn't get in until almost 5. It was a goddamn miracle I didn't get killed in a car accident or something. Days like that are the reason I'm a firm believer in Murphy's Law. Once inside though, I found the Aspen booth, which is one of the companies I want to work for, so I had them review me first. It went pretty well. Basically I got the same critique all weekend. They said I'm putting in so much detail that I can back off it a bit and simplify things a little. So that's cool. I can handle that. It's better than saying I need more detail. But the guys at Aspen said they liked what they saw and even though they didn't have anything for me at the moment, they wanted my contact info and said we'd have to play it by ear. So who knows? We'll see what happens.
Oh yeah, anyone that is in the SG Comic Book group and was at the Con on Friday, I just wanted to let you guys know that I was at the Image booth at 5 and stood around like a fucking stalker for a half an hour. So thanks for showing up. Oh yeah, I did get to meet Rosario Dawson though.
That night I got back into San Bernardino around 9. Oh yeah, that's another thing. I had to drive back and forth from San Bernardino to San Diego everyday since I couldn't afford a $250-$600 a night hotel. Tired as fuck, all I wanted to do was go home and go to sleep. But is that what I did? Fuck no! The pirate came out in me and I went out drinking until 4 in the morning. Bravo. Smartest decision of my life.
Saturday. I woke up face down around 7 am at my friends apartment with my boots still on and to be honest, still a little drunk. I went to pick up another friend and passed out at her place for another couple hours and finally left again. Didn't get to San Diego until 1 that time and spent the next hour driving around looking for a place to park. Called TheDarkness since I was supposed to meet him down there and let him know I was gonna be late. Like I said to him, that place was a lame fuck around. We had to park about 6 blocks away and made one of those cart hauling bike slaves give us a ride to the con. I got there too late to sign up for the DC portfolio review and the Top Cow review, but I did finally get to meet TheDarkness. Dude is freaking big. Hehe. It was really cool to finally meet him, but unfortunately we didn't get to hang out much. We went over to the Dark Horse booth so I could do a portfolio review and then we parted ways. He had been up since 2 am as well and so both of us were kind of dazed and Saturday at the Con is a bit much to handle. The Dark Horse review went pretty good as well and the guy said he was going to take my work back to the studio and give it to the right people, who would then contact me. He and I have mutual friends, so he's kind of doing me a favor this way. We'll see what happens with that one. Oh yeah, at some point in the day I met Ahmet Zappa. Funny guy. After that, I pretty much went home and died.
Sunday. Well first off, I'd like to thank anyone who is still actually reading this gibberish. If you've made it this far, inform me and I'll give you a prize. Well Sunday started off better. I had a full night's sleep and a couple of my friends and I headed back down South. Guess what? We actually got there on time! Holy Shit! Sound the bells! Where's my parade? So I ran to the Top Cow booth, and got my name on the list. Spent the next couple of hours wandering around until my appointment. When the time came I was trying to relax but a combination of nerves, minimal sleep, the monster I had downed that morning, and the fact that I had hardly eaten anything in about 4 days made me a little jittery. My reviewer turned out to be Renae Geerlings, Editor in Chief at Top Cow. She told me the same thing about easing up on so much detail and thickening up some contour lines on certain things. But she seemed to like it, gave me a few tips and asked if I had anything for her to keep and my contact info. She then asked me to make up some more pages of photo ref. backgrounds, cars, and guns. So I have to put those together now so I can get those into her as soon as I can. After that, we just kinda wandered around for a while and finally left.
So that's that. I still don't have a job drawing comics yet, but I've made some prgress and had some pretty positive reviews. So now I have to get those new pages for Top Cow and wait on Dark Horse and see what comes from all that. Sorry this shit was so long, but it was a long fucking weekend. Deal with it. I had to. Late....
Fuck, where to start? Let's try Friday shall we? No, wait. Let's go to Thursday. That's when my luck turned, and our story begins....
So, Thursday. The day before I go to Con. I wake up early to get a head start on the day since I still have quite a bit of things to accomplish before I venture down to San Diego. I start working on one more piece but eventually have to give up and take care of a few other things. The bulk of my portfolio is finished, having stayed up until 3:30 that morning, but I still need to make copies of my work so that I can put them together in a sample packet for the comic companies who are interested in what I've got. No big deal right? Well, actually yeah. You're right. That was relatively easy, except that some of them came out really light and were sort of hard to see everything. But they would have to do. I didn't have much time to waste. After that I went down to several office supply stores to find a simple plastic report style cover that I could put the pages in. Nothing fancy, just something that I wouldn't have to slip inside a plastic sheet or punch holes in my pages. They had 300 different types of bullshit. None of which would work for what I needed.
So after wasting an hour or two on that, I went out to find a new shirt for the upcoming reviews/interviews. A short sleeve, button up, black shirt, with a collar. Pretty simple right? Fuck no. I went through an entire mall and everything had either stupid designs on them or the few I did find were all XXL or XL. So I started looking around for something else to wear and everything was like that. Everything! What the fuck? The smallest shit I can find is a Large. I know the majority of our country is overweight, but for fuck's sake, I need clothes too goddamnit!!!. I don't mean to offend anyone, if you're overweight, that's fine. I don't have a problem with that. I would just like to find something that I can wear too. After that, I gave up and went home.
Later that night, I do finally find some cool little report folders that I can use, so that's a plus. Now what I need to do is make some kind of cover sheet for it. One problem. My computer's not working. So I have to wait for a friend to get back from LA or Irvine or something before I can go use her computer. So she finally gets in and I photoshop my little cover up and scan in about 15 pages or so of my life drawing things and stuff out of my sketch books. Then I come to find out that she doesn't have enough ink in her printer to print all that shit out. Yay! So I try to save it to a cd and I figure I can go have the inbred mutants down at Kinko's print my stuff out. Wrong. Window's encounters a problem and deems my work unworthy of saving to said disc. By this time, it's about 2 in the morning mind you, I'm already operating on 4-5 hours of sleep in what, for me, is a high stress situation, and nothing has really gone right all day. Not only that, I'm supposed to be up in another 4 hours to drive to San Diego. So I figure what I'll do is just email all those files to myself from here and go to Kinko's in the morning and print them out on my way to the Con. So after all that's done, and I get home, it's about 5:30 before I get to bed. I get about 4 hours sleep and head out.
Friday starts off with a shitstorm of sluggishness and a strong hatred for the daylight. I make my way to Kinko's to deal with these idiots and when I download the files to print, they're way too big for some reason. They had no way for me to resize them from there, so I had to drive back to my friend's place to try and fix them. Guess what? The file sizes were fine. Whatever, I hate that place and I hope a flaming car full of rabid jackals careens into their store front. I do however take my chances with the printer here and manage to print out one cover sheet and the rest of my sketchbook shit. I take my cover sheet back to that hell hole and have them copy the rest.
After that hassle, it's now about 1 in the afternoon and we're finally on our way when guess what? We have bad directions and it costs us about an extra 2 hours. We ended up getting to the Con around 4 or so and didn't get in until almost 5. It was a goddamn miracle I didn't get killed in a car accident or something. Days like that are the reason I'm a firm believer in Murphy's Law. Once inside though, I found the Aspen booth, which is one of the companies I want to work for, so I had them review me first. It went pretty well. Basically I got the same critique all weekend. They said I'm putting in so much detail that I can back off it a bit and simplify things a little. So that's cool. I can handle that. It's better than saying I need more detail. But the guys at Aspen said they liked what they saw and even though they didn't have anything for me at the moment, they wanted my contact info and said we'd have to play it by ear. So who knows? We'll see what happens.
Oh yeah, anyone that is in the SG Comic Book group and was at the Con on Friday, I just wanted to let you guys know that I was at the Image booth at 5 and stood around like a fucking stalker for a half an hour. So thanks for showing up. Oh yeah, I did get to meet Rosario Dawson though.
That night I got back into San Bernardino around 9. Oh yeah, that's another thing. I had to drive back and forth from San Bernardino to San Diego everyday since I couldn't afford a $250-$600 a night hotel. Tired as fuck, all I wanted to do was go home and go to sleep. But is that what I did? Fuck no! The pirate came out in me and I went out drinking until 4 in the morning. Bravo. Smartest decision of my life.
Saturday. I woke up face down around 7 am at my friends apartment with my boots still on and to be honest, still a little drunk. I went to pick up another friend and passed out at her place for another couple hours and finally left again. Didn't get to San Diego until 1 that time and spent the next hour driving around looking for a place to park. Called TheDarkness since I was supposed to meet him down there and let him know I was gonna be late. Like I said to him, that place was a lame fuck around. We had to park about 6 blocks away and made one of those cart hauling bike slaves give us a ride to the con. I got there too late to sign up for the DC portfolio review and the Top Cow review, but I did finally get to meet TheDarkness. Dude is freaking big. Hehe. It was really cool to finally meet him, but unfortunately we didn't get to hang out much. We went over to the Dark Horse booth so I could do a portfolio review and then we parted ways. He had been up since 2 am as well and so both of us were kind of dazed and Saturday at the Con is a bit much to handle. The Dark Horse review went pretty good as well and the guy said he was going to take my work back to the studio and give it to the right people, who would then contact me. He and I have mutual friends, so he's kind of doing me a favor this way. We'll see what happens with that one. Oh yeah, at some point in the day I met Ahmet Zappa. Funny guy. After that, I pretty much went home and died.
Sunday. Well first off, I'd like to thank anyone who is still actually reading this gibberish. If you've made it this far, inform me and I'll give you a prize. Well Sunday started off better. I had a full night's sleep and a couple of my friends and I headed back down South. Guess what? We actually got there on time! Holy Shit! Sound the bells! Where's my parade? So I ran to the Top Cow booth, and got my name on the list. Spent the next couple of hours wandering around until my appointment. When the time came I was trying to relax but a combination of nerves, minimal sleep, the monster I had downed that morning, and the fact that I had hardly eaten anything in about 4 days made me a little jittery. My reviewer turned out to be Renae Geerlings, Editor in Chief at Top Cow. She told me the same thing about easing up on so much detail and thickening up some contour lines on certain things. But she seemed to like it, gave me a few tips and asked if I had anything for her to keep and my contact info. She then asked me to make up some more pages of photo ref. backgrounds, cars, and guns. So I have to put those together now so I can get those into her as soon as I can. After that, we just kinda wandered around for a while and finally left.
So that's that. I still don't have a job drawing comics yet, but I've made some prgress and had some pretty positive reviews. So now I have to get those new pages for Top Cow and wait on Dark Horse and see what comes from all that. Sorry this shit was so long, but it was a long fucking weekend. Deal with it. I had to. Late....
VIEW 12 of 12 COMMENTS
They're in London for a gig tomorrow and I'm bummed as I don't get back to London until Saturday I'm sat wearing one of their Last Rites t-shirts
A Sangreal? Sounds interesting, as long as it doesn't involve whiskey of any sort I'm sure I'd like it
Love and kisses
Michelle xx