Holloween Pumpkin

It's Halloween! Definitely my favorite holiday of the year. Being considered the "artist in the family" I'm under pressure to come through on the pumpkin carving front. I've been carving my own pumpkins for over ten years now. This year I decided to go with a classic jack-o-lantern design. Here you can see my initial sketch and the actual pumpkin I ended up with. My wife really came through and picked up a great, wide pumpkin which was perfect for the sinister, wide grin.

Hermit Hill | Vol. 2 | 10/30/08

Jack of All Blades.

I'm a recent transplant to Texas. I live in Dallas now and I've been here for almost three years. The things I see here continue to surprise me. Today's comic comes out of something I saw driving to work a few weeks back. I was in my car and stopped at a traffic light. This large, beat-up, green pickup truck pulls up next to me with two teenagers inside it. Hanging on the back window, where usually, around here anyway, I'd see a shotgun or several there was a large broadsword hanging there instead. It was huge and the handle was elaborate. You'd need at least two hands to lift the thing. As they pulled away once the light turned green I saw a big "JESUS" sticker on the back bumper. The series of life events that brought a massive sword to be hanging the window of a beat-up old pickup somewhere in Texas kept me fascinated for the rest of my commute.

Webcomics take note, blog dedicated to cartooning backgrounds

I've noticed that a lot of webcomics out there seem to have a hard time with backgrounds. I know I struggle with them every panel I draw. Well, I came across a great site, Animation Backgrounds. It's a blog dedicated to the lush background paintings in animated film and TV shows. There's a useful archive there taken from a lot of classics. They are currently running a lot of Halloween related backgrounds. It's an awesome resource for studying an often overlooked aspect to cartooning.

Hammer Sound on Zuda Comics

I have some personal friends competing in this month's Zuda Comics competition and I wanted to encourage my readers to check out their awesome, stylized entry, Hammer Sound. They need some votes to push them to the top (they are currently third). Please check it out and then sign up on Zuda and vote for Hammer Sound. Add them to your favorites list and leave a comment. All that activity adds up to push the rank. Go Hammer Sound!

David Heatley's new book and comic preview

David Heatley's first book, My Brain is Hanging Upside Down, is out now and available through Amazon.com. If you check out the Amazon link you'll see a great preview comic story by David. It's a sort of autobiographical/fictional story of his selves at three different ages talking to each other about his book being on Amazon.com. How very meta!

Hermit Hill | Vol. 2 | 10/28/08

Walter in Rhyme.

Layout madness

If you've been to my site in the last 12 hours or so you may have experienced some craziness with the page layout. I've been working on getting the comic and the blog better integrated and it took some trial and error to put it together properly so that all the browsers I have access to can show the site the same way. I think I have it corrected now.

Hermit Hill | Vol. 2 | 10/23/08

Fresh Cut Flowers.

Hermit Hill | Vol. 2 | 10/21/08

Waiting for Trouble. A tiny glimpse into Walter's internal life.

This is the first comic in volume 2 of Hermit Hill. I've been getting the files for the pages in volume 1 ready for print. I just need to come up with a cover now.

Hermit Hill | Vol. 1 | 10/16/08

Demon Search. Ah, Wushu. This character has been bouncing around in my work for almost two years now. I have several pages of him in my sketchbook, a birthday comic I did for my brother and several pages of a comic book featuring just him and his brother that I never finished. I could never quite figure out the best way to use him, but I love drawing him with all his dramatic over posing. So, welcome Wushu, to Hermit Hill.

This is page 24 in volume 1, meaning volume 1 is now complete. I've started preparing the files for print and I look forward to getting the first Hermit Hill comic book out to the world. Stay tuned, more details on this to come soon ...

Mad poster in my cube

In this month's Mad magazine they included this great pullout poster that parodies Obama's "Hope" poster. I put it up in my cubicle at work, over my desk. Awesome.

Sneak peak at Thursdsay's comic

Here is an early look at Thursday's Hermit Hill comic. The inks are done, I just need to scan it in and finish it up.

The end of volume 1

Today's comic marks the end of volume 1 of Hermit Hill. My plan is to make a comic book available for every 24 pages of comics. I'll be getting them ready for print and sent off to the printers over the next week and make them available for sale through the site soon.

Of course, I'll also continue working on volume 2!

Hermit Hill | Vol. 1 | 10/14/08

What happened? The world may never know. It struck me as funny that a guy could end up wearing a coconut bra, palm skirt and bunny ears and someone else wouldn't be the least bit interested as to why. I do like how that first panel turned out. I may turn that into a t-shirt in the near future.

Hermit Hill | Vol. 1 | 10/09/08

Smokin' Guilt. For some reason I just find quiet rage funny. I just do.

RSS Feed Changes and Blog Page Updates

Hey everyone, I'm making some updates and changes to the blog portion of my web site. I'm tired of having it load into an IFRAME and worrying about linking so the links break the frame, having the blog grow larger than the frame and all manner of technical annoyances related to loading a blog into a frame. This also includes a change in the RSS feed address, so if you're a subscriber you will have to update your reader. The new details are here:

New RSS Feed: http://www.hermithillcomic.com/atom.xml

New Blog location : http://www.hermithillcomic.com/blog.html
(or just click on the menu bar)

I'm working to add a widget RSS feed reader to the front page, under the latest comic so there's still a blog presence there, but the one I have now isn't working exactly right. I'll be working on that today to get it cleaned up and working better, but the new RSS feed and blog page are up and operational.

Scott Adams details his comic strip creation process

Scott Adams, the cartoonist behind the daily comic strip Dilbert, has a post in his blog that details his process of creating the Dilbert strips:

Scott Adams' Tools of the Trade

He also links to a video that shows him making one. Very interesting stuff. He does everything on the computer now using a tablet.

Scott slips in a small comment that is a little disturbing. He mentioned how he used to send the original, hand drawn artwork for his strip to the syndicate, but had to stop this once the post office people realized who he was and his originals began to disappear in transit. Huh? The post office was stealing original cartoon artwork? Damn, that is low.

Preview of next week's comic

Here's a preview of next Tuesday's Hermit Hill comic. You can see the non-photo blue sketches I do in the panels before I ink the page. I'll scan this into my computer and add the panel borders, text and text balloons with PhotoShop.

Hermit Hill | Vol. 1 | 10/07/08

Hang Time. The sequence on the middle row of panels is what I had in my head when I started drawing this comic. The slow decent onto Walter's hill seemed kinda cool.

Why I'm not going back to Baltimore Comic Con, SPX is better

Last weekend, after packing up my table in Artist Allery at the Baltimore Comic Con to head back to Dallas, I came to the decision that I had made a mistake. I had chosen Baltimore Comic Con over SPX (Small Press Expo) this year and I really should have stuck with SPX. Since the two conventions came just a week apart in the same city this year I had to choose. I couldn't justify taking almost two weeks off of work to attend both cons and because I had gone to SPX last year I decided to give BCC a shot.

I chose ... poorly.

Don't get me wrong, I still had a lot of fun at BCC. I met a lot of people and sold a ton of pins and sketches. The crowds at BCC were overwhelming and everyone I spoke to about it while at the con who had exhibited there last year agreed that there were far more people attending than last year. But, us indie folk in the Artist Alley, which ringed the convention floor, all saw mediocre sales. I could see it in people's eyes as they walked past my table, they were searching for things they knew. They wanted something familiar, something that matched the superhero logo on their t-shirts. The majority of people at the BCC were not interested in new unknowns like myself. Webcomics were not on their radar screens, they wanted a deal on a new copy of Watchmen and the latest Batman action figure.

SPX 2007 was such a different experience for me. The folks that went to SPX were hunting for new comics and cartoons. They wanted to feel like they were discovering something, they wanted fresh, weird and experimental. Webcomics were high on their agenda of things to check out. There may have been fewer attendees, but I sold a lot more books and got a lot of encouraging comments there. The crowd that goes to SPX are far more likely to open their wallets on something that they haven't seen before.

So, lesson learned. I'm sticking to the small press cons from here on out. I'll be at SPX '09 and giving Baltimore Comic Con '09 a miss. I've also got my sights set on STAPLE, APE, SPACE and MOCCA. All those cons seem to attract people much more interested in finding us indie cartoonists and tossing a few bucks our way. That's got to be the way to go.

Hermit Hill | Vol. 1 | 10/02/08

Bushy Beards, Pointy Hats! Gnorm the Gnome may not look like your typical lawn gnome, but he's still kinda cute ... right? I think I need to give him some kind of pants though, the floppy loin cloth is starting to unnerve me.