A public calendar of cartoonist celebrations.

Peggy
August 28, 2015

Today is Jack Kirby’s birthday. Or, as some prefer to call it, Speak Like Thou Wert Ye Odinson Day. Lots of people drew stuff for it. And this is cool.

I got to thinking. I’d kinda like to remember that beforehand and maybe do it the evening before. And do the same for a few other master cartoonists whose work is important to me. So I did some googling and put together a calendar of Mostly Dead Master Cartoonist Birthdays. And gave them all silly names while I was at it.

If you want to subscribe to it, it’s <a href=”webcal://p01-calendars.icloud.com/published/2/82-teDvzQEdo9hc3VEoU4zjtRuCDJOL6l3EIbpyiK-XH3l46bwf_Gj72Kchx9voZlNE_vqWNk8cMhzXlrd1zpRx6FVD5tXCS9ZMi2EOlt6U”>here</a>.

If you have subscribe to it and have suggestions for other days, let me know and maybe I’ll add them. Nobody born before 1965 or so, I think.

pondering Nick/SPX show pitches, the second

Peggy
August 28, 2015

I think I just found an idea for an ongoing kid SF show I think I could get behind.

So: Imagine Star Trek from the perspective of an away team. A starship on a several-year mission of discovery and propaganda into unclaimed territory, spreading the good word about the United Federation of Planets.

But every other episode is another show. About an away team on a Klingon starship on a several-year mission of discovery and propaganda into unclaimed territory, spreading the good word about the Glorious Klingon Empire.

They’re not actually the Klingons and the Federation, of course. I’ll come up with good names eventually. For now it’s enough to know that one of them will be quietly “leftist” while the other will be quietly “rightist”. Neither will ever make a big deal of this.

Sometimes they have their own separate adventures. Find a planet with a problem, help them out with their problem, another win for Their Side, whichever one that is.

Sometimes they run into each other. At first always as adversaries. Who see each other as nasty caricatures. But as the show goes on, they occasionally find each other thrown together in a situation where they have to put their mutual hatred aside to survive in the face of some kind of Outside Context Problem, ranging from the small (on from each side stuck on an inhospitable planet with each other) to the large (oh shit we accidentally woke up the Creepy Ancient Anti-Life Robots and now we have to stop them from destroying both homeworlds).

So on a basic level we have “woo, spaceships, explosions, aliens, friendship, whee!”. But underneath that there is a serious attempt to get people to sympathize with the other side of the cultural conflict that’s going on in America nowadays. Not to necessarily agree with each other on everything. But to spend some time maybe rooting for the other side, and see a caricature of themselves through their eyes. Ideally I would get some right-wing people on the show’s staff to help make that side more believable, and to make the caricature of the lefties a bit sharper.

I feel like if I’m going to attempt to put together something aimed at kids, it behooves me to think about what I want to say to them. Now that I have this worked out, I think I can bullshit enough details to make a worthwhile pitch in the time between now and SPX, while also making a serious dent in the end of Rita.

upcoming cons

Peggy
August 27, 2015

I’ll be at SPX in Bethesda, Maryland for the first time this September. If you’re around there you should come say hi. Maybe give me money for a book or a Tarot deck, maybe just tell me you love my stuff.

The next weekend I’ll be showing up for a day at Rainfurrest, to do my usual panel on How I Illustrator, and a team-up panel with Dana Simpson about makin’ webcomics. Then I will probably hit the dance for a while and go back home the next morning. Because next weekend…

I’ll be at APE in San Jose. Sorry, no map this time; they haven’t given me a table assignment yet. I’ll have the same stuff I’ll have at SPX, unless I run out of Tarot decks there – I’ve got about a dozen left, and haven’t heard back from the US distributor on getting more yet.

And then the weekend after that, because I am apparently a glutton for punishment, I’ll probably be sharing a table at Geek Girl Con here in Seattle.

The four weeks spanning the end of October and the beginning of September are going to be pretty damn busy. Especially given that somewhere around there I’ll probably be done drawing Rita, and starting to set up the volume 3 Kickstarter…

One of those moments of loving my tools.

Peggy
August 26, 2015

“It’ll be great,” I told myself. “An endless plain of black eggs, stretching off into infinity. An awesome image to open the last chapter of Rita with.”

Yeah, sounds great. Until I have to draw them all. Or cut and paste them. Eh, screw that. I made a scatter brush (sorry, no video of that, I did this a while back), drew a couple of lines, and blended between them. Instant egg-field.

I faffed around for another twenty minutes or so after recording this video, and have a nice horizon line of egg-piles developing, with some aerial perspective as well. It’s mostly done. I’ll probably spend like another hour finessing it before I’m really happy with it.

I am so glad I don’t draw comics by hand. Making this happen in traditional media would take forever.

Table upgrade time.

Peggy
August 24, 2015

I’ve been meaning to upgrade my sign for a while. I really felt the lack of my awesome quotes on the sign while I was at Worldcon. So instead of lying in the living room playing video games all day, I fixed this.

I mean, those are some pretty good quotes right there. I’d be a fool to not use them. I’d put them on revised price signs for the books, but they’re kind of tiny and won’t pull you in from the aisle.

And while I was at it I decided to put together a second sign for me. Having two signs will mean I can hide more of whatever’s behind me at an artist alley table.

These should both be very useful next month, when I have two or three cons coming up. (APE, SPX, and maybe sharing a table at Geek Girl Con.) I’m going to actually order them tomorrow; Nick is here and we’re going to watch some video and get me properly petted.

Florence Unfortunate Nostrils

Peggy
August 23, 2015

I’ve been spending this weekend sharing a Worldcon table with Dana, selling our stuff. At one point she mentioned that there is a character in the strip who is a disheveled unicorn who sneezes spiders. And I was all like “oh I have to draw her”. So I did.

The spider is probably named something like Cleopatra Golden Spinner.

a pre-breakfast conversation

Peggy
August 23, 2015

Dana and I were talking about acquaintances who have big plans for their art and never really get around to, well, actually drawing on a regular basis, and getting better, and getting somewhere on those big plans.

Dana: “…they’d think about drawing, and think that was making progress.”
Me: “Sometimes thinking about an idea IS progress when you’ve got a knotty concept to untangle! But then you’ve gotta put pencil to paper and draw it, instead of, you know, sitting back and playing Bloodborne for three days.”
Dana: “That’s not speaking from personal experience, of course.”
Me: “Oh, no. Never. Not at all.”

a note from Worldcon

Peggy
August 23, 2015

This has been a weird weekend.

Also holy shit I am mind-numbingly terrible at figuring out how to do much of anything else at a con besides sit at a dealer table if I don’t know people to trail after. Someday I must try to remedy this.

Pronoun Trouble

Peggy
August 21, 2015

so i am at worldcon right now and my friend orbus has a table where he is trying to introduce old-school sf fandom to the concept of pronoun labels, in the form of ribbons you stick to your name badge that tell everyone what pronoun you wish to be referred to as.
he has a handout that explains the whys and wherefors of this idea, but it is a wall of text, and he would like to break it up with some drawings that help convey the concept of different people preferring different pronouns.

so i drew this: three people with a mostly female form and a clear indication of A Bulge between their legs – rather like my own body configuration – who desired different pronouns. one of them may not be taking this that seriously, and that’s cool too. gender doesn’t have to be drop-dead serious 24-7 in my opinion; nothing does.

also i am tired and drunk and a little stoned right now so i can’t be arsed with proper capitalization. so there.

a moment’s backwards view

Peggy
August 18, 2015

Every now and then I think about how far my digital art setup has come since the days when I was a kid with a Commodore 64 and a Koalapad and I’m just amazed. Every bit of pasteup lore I learnt in college is superseded by throwing stuff together in InDesign and sending a PDF off to the printer. I can throw together a reference model in a 3D package and pose it over my roughs in Photoshop, then dump that into Illustrator to draw over. And I can take the computer off to the park to work.

I’m fuckin’ spoiled.