Friday, August 16, 2013

Post-Convention thoughts...


Well folks, its been a crazy week. In what should have been a week of me coming down from the high of having a nice vacation (one I was sorely overdue), I returned home and hit the pavement face first with a nice bout of depression. There was family drama, some old friend betrayals, various minor worries about finances and check delays. And natch, everyone that owes me money either never responds to emails or simply just disappears. Um, I got bills to pay here! Guess I better work on my business practices.

On the positive side, those who listen to the IDIOTHEAD MORNING SHOW’s latest episode will know  I took the deep plunge and parted ways with my day job. Thus I am now a full time stay at home dad and artist. So there’s a whole wave of new and unique stresses and worries that come along with that. I gotta make my work into money for my family. Before it was always considered a bonus to what I did. Now I have to evaluate my “worth” and make it stick. I am considering all options at this point. I am going to be reprinting my long out of print comics (Anna Pocalypse and Pleasant Life). I will be making up a new table set up for next year to capitalize on the prints and print cards to keep that end of things rolling strong. And commissions/freelance work will need to get evaluated as well. I had considered doing a price increase and I think I will very soon. I have to revamp the online store here a bit and update things.

So that’s all on my mind. Luckily this week to help combat the stress and everything else, I got to spend some time with the wife. Its been refreshing to reconnect and enjoy our 10th year Wedding anniversary. Both our schedules have been hectic the last month due to her new job and my various pressures. But starting tonight I am getting back to work. I am working on new samples to send out to various companies to look for freelance gigs. I gotta color and letter some new Star Slam strips as well. Any day now too I should have my Star Wars return AP cards for sale, as soon as I get them back from Topps. So that will help finances too.

Lastly, this week I have been putting together my big celebratory artbook collecting my best pieces and never before seen stuff from the last 20 years of me doing this. This should be available by Christmas, to celebrate twenty years of working in comics. I got about 15 pages left to put together and then the cover. I will be putting out a contest here on the site to help me name it, as well as ordering info. I am hoping to have this completed by Sept/October time and have it up for pre-order. Then have it shipping by November/December. We’ll see. But more on that later. Just know that its being worked on. It will have a lot of sketches, process stuff, pics of my favorite pages from all my comic work, history, bio pics, inside info on all my projects I’ve ever done up to this point and more. A real celebration of 20 years of hard work!

Anyway, things are getting better. We’re on the mend and hopefully get back to where I should have been after Wizard World, before everything slamming my emotions at once derailed me.

Thanks for checking back!

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