So, first off, I’m sorry I didn’t let anyone know I was heading to S.P.A.C.E. I wasn’t exhibiting, though, just attending. I decided to network with some other artists and passed out a mini comic I made (which I will post here eventually). Secondly, Fred isn’t a bad driver, but on the way to Columbus there were times when I got nervous. I get pretty nervous when someone isn’t driving perfectly. Yeah, I’m neurotic.

At any rate, S.P.A.C.E was a blast. I got a ton of comics and traded some of my minis with them. There were some really great people at that convention, and I’m not just saying that because I told them about my website. Definitely looking forward to next year.

Hello, everyone. I finally got my own website, which I am very excited about. Now I am one step closer to being a professional.

As time goes on, I’ll be editing this website to give it more character (adding color, more pages, etc.), so if for some reason nothing works, let me know and I’ll try and fix it. If anyone has any tips, then leave a comment.

I’ll try and keep updating my Livejournal, mostly with some of my other comics.

Other than that, enjoy!

So, I found some of my older comics when I was back home for the weekend. I haven’t posted them online partially due to the fact that I am busy, but mostly due to embarrassment. There reaches a certain point when my older works no longer receive the “Wow, look how much I’ve improved” comment. Instead, looking at some of these comics now, I tend to say to myself “Holy crap, these are terrible. Where’s the fire pit?”

(Un)fortunately, I have not burned them. Some of the earliest ones are lost, probably a favor from my slightly older self who saw these and decided that the future must never see these. But many of them have survived. There were different styles that I used in my scribbles, so these will come in installments.

Ah, yes. My old superhero comic. About me as a superhero. Book deals, here I come. I don’t quite remember when this was made, but I’m hoping that I was pretty young when I made this.

As a young child with a short attention span and poor motor skills, I came up with the clever idea of just drawing the stars instead of drawing black all around them. I remember at one point, I did try to draw black around the stars, but the stars eventually got lost since I made them too small. For good measure, I threw in Saturn and none of the other planets. It’s not that I didn’t know about the other planets – in first grade, I knew all nine planets (before Pluto was demoted) – but I think it’s because I was just kind of lazy. Then there’s SuperJeff, with his bright yellow body as a beacon of justice, as he fights crime and supervillains with his blue cape, red hat, and some red/orange thing behind him that I think may be a comet.

So my one page comic book is about SuperJeff showing off his powers. Being yellow isn’t one of them. He asks the reader if you want to see his powers. It doesn’t appear like your response matters, since he’s going to show them anyway. First off, he can see through walls. And not just any walls – he can see through panel walls! He can see through the panel wall and see his future self in some weird X-Ray vision where the colors are all mixed up. He can also fly. Just because he is standing doesn’t mean he can’t fly, and he makes a point of it by flying through space.

So lets see: he can see through panel walls into a future with mixed up colors, he can fly through a bunch of crayon dots. What hasn’t he covered? Strength. He can pick up cars. He goes off and picks up a poorly-drawn car. The car doesn’t appear too happy about it, as it exclaims “Hea! Stop it.” And that’s the end. You know all about his powers. Your life is slightly better now that you know about his powers.

I distinctly remember that I had more comics like these, and they were somewhat longer and of better quality. I was unable to find them. But I remember that I created a Justice League for SuperJeff and his other pals. For some reason, I was afraid of copyright, so I cleverly changed the name to “Superguys” instead of the Saturday morning cartoon “Superfriends,” which was a favorite of mine back then. But then I screwed myself over and included Plankton from the show “Spongebob Squarepants” as one of the villains. The copyright police burst in, beat me up, took my lunch money, then burned my comics in the street. That’s where the other comics went. They were burned by the copyright police.

Anyway, that’s enough embarrassment for now. Part II should be up tomorrow, since I’ve got some free time.

When I got into junior high, I started another comic called Hoops. ”Oh, it’s a basketball comic,” you may say. It is not. It has little to do with basketball. It is called Hoops because the main character has a basketball for a head. Since his body is a stick figure, the only way I figured to differentiate my characters was to assign them different objects as their heads.

I am such a genius. I am, like, a super genius. This is comedy gold here. Charles Schulz and Bill Watterson ain’t got nothing on me!

I would have such illusions of grandeur as a child. And as a teenager. In fact, I still hold onto those illusions of becoming famous. I’m a little more down to earth, but there are days where I’m like “Yeah! I’m going to be the best comic book artist ever! My name will go down in history books! I’ll have all sorts of merchandise and live in a mansion!” Seriously, I considered making my own Hoops video game.

I did actually try to submit a bunch of these strips to my local newspaper when I was about 13. Honest to God, I made several photocopies of these notebook funnies and submitted them to the paper. I think my parents were kind of like “Well, sweetie, the paper…uh, they only accept the bigger comics like Garfield and Peanuts. Nothing really local.” Looking back, that might of been a way of saying “Your drawings suck, and you really shouldn’t submit these to anything.”

Surprisingly, the editor did reply back to my submission, even though he had every right not to. I no longer have the letter he sent me (it may have been an e-mail so he didn’t have to waste the paper), but if I remember he wasn’t mean about it. I don’t know, I was blissfully happy in my own world of comics while the world of junior high was beating the hell out of me.

Ho, ho, I am funny! Look how funny I am. This is one of the earlier ones, before I started doing things professionally with a black Papermate pen. I was very particular about that black pen. Nothing else would work. I had to use that particular cheap ballpoint pen.

Before I quit Hoops (or at least this phase of Hoops), I decided to ramp it up a little and draw clothes on them. Man, was that difficult. I mean, I can’t put different kinds of inanimate objects on the heads of clothing. So the clothing just ended up looking the same. If you’ll look at the second line from the bottom at those characters all in black, they are supposed to be different characters. Those are not different versions of the same character, they are each different. Their names are Al, Cal, and Bone. And if you put them together, they sound like Al Capone. I thought that was clever mostly because I am bad with names. If I every have children, they are going to hate me years later for giving them crappy names like “Bill” or “Joe” or “Kid 1.” Maybe I’ll make hats out of basketballs and stuff, force them to wear it, and call them by their respective hat.

Another thing I should mention that you might have missed earlier is that the whole pizza and the slice of pizza are two totally different people. I do not think they are even related.

Looking back at these, there are some images that look eerily like a dick. The guy holding the skateboard is one example. Another example is the last character drawn, Joystick. Then there’s the short series about a guy after his sausage. I don’t really want to discuss this further, but I know for a fact that I wasn’t good enough to make any purposeful subtext. It’s kind of disturbing and a little messed up. Still, I think some kid has drawn a dick or a dick-like thing sometime in their life.

Thing is, I have about three or four notebooks filled with these comics. I was a comics-producing machine. It was fueled mainly by some of my friends who laughed at my work. I can only think of a few people who didn’t think it was funny.

Since I have so many, I think I’m going to post a couple of these every Monday. It will be “Bad Comics Mondays” on my journal comic! See Jeff before he became decent at drawing!

There is a Part III, but that’s not going to be for a while longer. I’m getting busier and busier and oh I have so much work to do I can barely put this blog together (I find those comics really embarrassing so it’s going to take a little more effort to show them). But they will be posted eventually.

Before I show the next stage in my artwork, I want to give you some more background info. I’m guessing you want this to be humorous, so I will try and keep it that way.

I have talked a lot about the end of Hoops. What happened was that I showed some of my friends these comics and they didn’t like them. Why? Because it was my sophomore year in high school and I was still drawing the same crude little stick figures with the inanimate objects for heads. Enough was enough. They set me straight and said that the art was horrid.

Of course it’s terrible - it’s stick figures. But the main reason they brought it up was because I had recently added clothing to my characters in an attempt to make them better looking. You can see an example below of this new style. My friends looked at my tubes of clothing over these stick figures, then at me, then at the clothes that you don’t have to be a fashion designer to tell that these look terrible, then at me.

Then there was an awkward silence.

And at that moment, they drew out their Art Police clubs and beat me mercilessly.

Shortly after that, I gave up on Hoops. I finally capped my cheap Papermate pen, closed my notebook, and moved on. The crude little stick figures, with their antics of stealing other people’s saugages and blowing each other up with low-yield nuclear weaponry, were finally put down.

Or so I thought…

I just figured out how to get an avatar on my comments. If you go to gravatar.com, you can upload any image you like and it will work not just for this site, but for all of your comments on any site. There’s an cropping tool when you upload images, so you don’t need to upload square images.

So, I’ve created an MS Paint Adventures inspired comic on its forums. If you’re unfamiliar with MS Paint Adventures, it’s another webcomic that gets most of its content from reader suggestions. I’ve been wanting to do something like this for a while, and was happy to find that the forums had a section for people to make their own adventures. This should be fun. If you have any suggestions for this adventure, you can find the adventure here.

Just because the media has focused its attention on the dead celebrities doesn’t mean that the situation in Iran has gone away.

Marjane Satrapi, author of the autobiographical comic Persepolis, is asking people to sign an open letter to Mr. Ban Ki-Moon, Secretary General of the United Nations. Basically, the letter is asking for the United Nations to expel Iran’s government from the world community and close down its embassies in protest against the Islamic Republic’s violations of human rights. It also asks that the hundreds of pictures and videos be used as evidence in a trial against the Islamic Republic by the International Court of Law.

I have signed it myself, and I’m asking you to sign it. I don’t know if this will do any good, but it’s better than being silent.

I know I haven’t updated in like a month, but things have been busy. We all know how it is – summer rolls around, and instead of being really productive, you do a whole bunch of other cool things and your new website begins to gather dust and spam comments.

In case you haven’t looked, I have been working on Fencing Club for the past week. Unfortnately, things are getting busy again so I can’t work on that either. But if you haven’t been following it lately, then you should check it out, there are a lot of new pages up.

So, like all the other comic artists out there, I too am taking up the challenge of doing a twenty-four page comic from start to finish in twenty-four hours. Everything must be completed within that period; idea, script, sketches, penciling, inking, and even putting the book together. Let’s see how this goes.