Making Comics

The main point of this post is just to have an excuse to put up the gif down below, but first I'm gonna write a bunch of words to explain it.

My primary creative obsession the past few weeks has been creating a series of comics for my friends in Loaded Gun Theory to help them promote their new show. Basically, they just gave me a copy of the script and let me pick out any snippets of it that I thought would work as a stand-alone teaser in comic form. Wanna check 'em out? Here's some links:

A Chat Over Chess

A Taut Line

Tea With Martha

The Creator

The process for these things started off with me creating a loose storyboard to figure out what pictures I was going to need. I can't draw for shit, so all the pictures in my comics start with photos. Since I was working with a script and actors in this case, I basically just put the actors in a spot and had them run through their lines while I snapped pictures of them from different angles. In some cases, I ended up getting kind of snap happy and ended up with assloads of pictures from a given scene, which when put together look something like this:

All that just to get this tense little exchange:

Those two dudes are my friends Bill and Ian in the roles of Geoffrey and Tiernan. My favorite pic from that whole session, which you can see tucked into the gif up there if you look closely, is this one:

Almost as if he's breaking character, looking over at the director, and saying:

Simply glorious. 

Post-Apocalyptic Chess

My friendosauruses in Loaded Gun Theory wrote a new play, Our Apocalyptic Dream, which is going up in just a couple of weeks. They asked me to take a few scenes and comicify them as I am wont to do. This is the first one, featuring my friends Bill and Ian, having a friendly chat over chess.

What I Hear In My Head Every Time I Look At This Picture

We took los boyos to the Sherwood Forest Faire a while back...kind of a Renaissance Fair kind of thing. All I'm saying is, if you ever have the chance to enroll your kids in sword-fighting classes taught by a guy named Oskar Hasselhoff, by all means, sign them up. 

Public Transit

This is about as deep as it gets around here until I finish the first draft of my book. Which, ya know, I'm okay with. We have so many Legos floating around this place.

Also, I almost misspelled "Kryptonite." My wife caught the typo for me. "Some nerd you are!" she declared. Some nerd indeed.

I Like Most Pixar Films, But There Is One Glaring Exception

This Is What Happens When The Boys Get Star Wars Toys For Christmas And I Get Star Trek Figures For My Birthday

Interview With A Werewolf

A Spot Of Encouragement

We recently moved our bookcases from upstairs down to the office where we situated them on the wall behind my desk. The day after making this move, I was sitting at my desk, diligently working away on one masterpiece or another when I heard the call of nature. I swiveled around in my chair to stand and was met with quite a start. You see, I had grown used to meeting a blank wall when I turned, but instead, I came face to face with this:

That black and white face looming over those poor frightened paperbacks is Neil Gaiman, one of my favorite authors and famous English people, seen here peering out at the world from the back cover of his wonderful novel, American Gods. Well, that particular copy is mine because I paid for it, but he wrote it, so I guess it's really more his. That serious expression he's wearing caught me rather off-guard.

"Oh," I laughed, "hi Neil." And then he really surprised me.

Er? This is not the kind of interaction I'm used to having with a book, I thought.

"Oh!" I said. "Uh, I was just, uh, going to the bathroom."

"Yeah," I said. "Is that okay?"

"Well no, but I--"

"Okay, I get it. You've written a lot of books. I just need to pee, okay?"

"I just need to pee, Neil. I've been sitting here for over an hour."

"Oh that's enough out of you."

I got up and went to the bathroom, grumbling under my breath the whole time. I checked my email on my phone where he couldn't see me, got a cup of coffee, and looked in on the boys. When I sat back down at my desk, I had every intention of ignoring him, but I could feel those unblinking two-dimensional eyeballs of his looking at me. At least it's not Stephen King. 

Unable to concentrate, I turned back to Neil.

"I do, actually. Thanks for asking."

And so I did.