Bramble Vine Comics

I know this doesn't have anything to do with cartooning, but I just had to vent. The other night I found the movie White Christmas playing on TV, ABC Family channel. It's a great classic movie from the 50's that still holds up really well today, I think. My four year old son was entranced with the film and he liked the singing, so I let him stay up a little late to finish watching it.

It's been a while since I've watched TV without my DVR so I was surprised by what watching live TV is like these days. It is criminal what these TV networks are doing to completely ruin the experience if watching anything on them! There were so many incessant commercials during White Christmas I could hardly bare it. At one point they actually interrupted a musical number for an ad. In the middle of a song they went to commercial! Then the constant irritating animated icons at the bottom of the screen kept popping up and distracted us from the movie. Commercials DURING the shows now. Ugh! I wanted to the throw the damn thing out the window.

I read often about these TV execs complaining about their thinning audience with new competition for people's attention with cable, on demand shows, video games, the internet, and whatever else, but based on what I saw it's their own damn fault for making the experience so horrible and annoying. Who can stand to watch regular TV anymore?

The day after this happened I went out to the video store and bought a bunch of DVDs for my son, all the Christmas specials I grew up loving. I got Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, the Peanuts Christmas special and few others. I just couldn't stand thinking that my son's first exposure to these classics would be a similar kind of terrible experience we suffered through on TV.

Well, there you go. TV sucks.

Labels: book, cartoon, cartoonist, comic, sketch, sketchbook

The guys over at HalfPixel.com have been recording a truly great podcast called Webcomics Weekly. Brad Guigar, Dave Kellett, Scott Kurtz and Kristofer Straub do a huge service to aspiring cartoonists everywhere by talking about tips, techniques and lessons learned in the cartooning biz. I've found the show immensely useful and have a learned a lot. It's like a free college course in cartooning.

On one of their recent shows Scott and Dave joked around about the fictional comic strip they keep referring to in their examples and named it 'No Shoes for Tuesday' about a cat that tries to get shoes. They mentioned it almost off-hand, but I thought it would be funny to actually give the comic strip a shot and made this. I posted it to the Webcomic Weekly online forums and other cartoonists have since joined in and started posting their own takes on the idea. You can see them in the forum thread. It's a funny little exercise and I'm enjoying seeing other people's ideas about it.

Labels: book, cartoon, cartoonist, comic, sketch, sketchbook

Now that all my technical issues are out of the way I'm able to get my work scanned in again. I have a few comics pages I'm working on, but I thought I'd throw up a sketchbook page for now. You can see me going a little nuts with the hatching, which I just love to do. These are just some random character faces.

Labels: book, cartoon, cartoonist, comic, sketch, sketchbook

The latest place you can pick up some copies of my books is Titan Comics in Dallas, TX. They are located off Northwest Highway, just north of Love Field airport. You can also look for this awesome van parked in their shopping center. I should get my card painted like that!

Labels: book, cartoon, cartoonist, comic, sketch, sketchbook

A friend of mine has really saved my butt. He found a great discounted deal on a new version of PS. It should be arriving in the mail soon. Huzzah!

So, in the mean time I'm still working on my new project, The Wushu Brothers. I should be able to start posting pages from that soon. It looks like everything is getting back on track.

Labels: book, cartoon, cartoonist, comic, sketch, sketchbook