OCTOBER 2018: DRAWLLOWEEN/INKTOBER

Friday, Oct 5, 2018  9:38 pm

Dear Diary:

So... the difference between “theory” and “execution,” “imagination” and “reality.”

Ugh.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

For the last few years, every time October has come around, I’ve thought about trying to participate in either the Drawlloween or Inktober challenges. This year is no different. In fact, I’ve mentioned that I was going to attempt this drawing quest to Lady Bleudragon, my fellow comrade in comics creation (theoretically... maybe more on that later) and Zombie Dawn, a horror movie blogger who I’ve met on-line this year thanks to Mermaid Heather, another horror movie blogger. Dawn has been discovering her inner artist this year, and considering the Halloween themes that come up during Drawlloween (well, duh!) and Inktober, I thought she might be interested in these interactive events, hence.

Anyway, getting back to me. In the past, I’ve talked about doing one or the other challenge, but I really never produced much at any time. This is similar to my attempts at doing the NaNoWriMo challenge in November in past years, not much has come of it. But, hell, what else is new (for me)?

But, this year was a sort of weird moment in my life, partly triggered by my having my 40^th high school reunion over the summer. In addition, last September I started a new job as a "shopping cart attendant" at a local grocery store. After over a year of unemployment (July 2016 – Sept. 2017) after the company I worked at finally went under (a weekly shopper paper that I worked at since 2003), getting this grocery store job was an interesting experience. It was humbling because it was a sort of entry level job, at least that’s how I thought of it: usually high school/college age students work the job and here I was some 57 year-old doing it. But, it was also kind of great to be working with younger people. And interacting with customers. And working outside constantly. And walking a LOT. So, all these elements combined into an intriguing dynamic. And after a few months, the physical aspects of the job made an impact: I lost about 15 lbs.

So, anyway, all that made me feel like I was starting over again. I was leaner, I was working with youthful people and feeling some renewed confidence in my abilities at work. Plus, my 40^th reunion made me extremely nostalgic for those times I went to college: first, to the Art Institute of Pittsburgh (a 2 yr. Associate's Degree in Visual Communications that I didn’t finish) and second, to Buffalo State College (a Bachelor's Degree in Design, which I also didn’t complete... hmmm, a running theme through my life, it appears).

AUGHHH!!!

I’M writing this and I'm boring the SHIT out of me!

Maybe I’ll get back to what I was saying, but right now, know this: I had all sorts of plans to draw and/or ink every day this month and it’s Day 5 and I’ve done ZIP so far.

This diary exercise is meant as an accessory document to chronicle my efforts, besides just posting these supposed drawings, etc.

Tuesday, Nov 20  8:04 am

HAHAHAHAHA!

Really? A month and a half later?

Well, I'm just looking at some unfinished posts I've started (oh, this isn't the ONLY one).
Let me wrap this up real quick.
I didn't draw ONE DAMN THING all October.
Lots of ideas. No follow-through.

However, not to end on a completely (and typically) depressing note, last night was the November meeting of the Buffalo Movie-Video Makers and I actually finished an entry for our annual Shorty Film Contest!
The film was called THE MAGIC ROOM.
Whenever there's a film contest at BM-VM, I always have some sort of idea of a contest entry leading up to the deadline, but I rarely follow through. Part of this is my traditional inaction, but part of it is also my tendency to always have large, impractical ideas and not really enough time to properly complete the idea.
Anyway, like the one film I did for a Shorty Contest years ago (NOTE: A so-called "shorty" is a short film no longer than 5 minutes)(and it turns out it was five years ago. Holy crap! Time freaking flies, yo!), this turned out to be another effort where I'm mostly shooting documentary footage (i.e. birds in the backyard feeders).

Ultimately, the positive takeaway from this was; I FINISHED AN ENTRY (technically) AND SCREENED IT AT THE MEETING LAST NIGHT.
YES!
That's always the biggest hurdle.
I need to keep jumping over this first hurdle: finishing an idea, following through on an idea.
the next step is assessing what I've completed and improving on it.
As it is, I'm already thinking of "remaking" THE MAGIC ROOM, because the film I finished (barely) last night before going to the meeting was deeply flawed on several levels, technically and aesthetically. But, I won't go into that now and especially on this blog. If I do post something about me kvetching about the film's "defects", it'll be over at THIS blog o'mine.

Alright, I'm going to end this now before I go meandering in another direction needlessly.
Maybe my next post I'll actually get around to discussing "the difference between 'theory' and 'execution,' 'imagination' and 'reality.' "
Although, hell... I feel that's a running theme through my life as well, not so much the difference but the creative tension between both... what?...disciplines? Methods of approaching things? Let's go with method of approaching things. The constant creative tension between my methods of approaching things and only focusing on the safer and comparatively lazier activities of theorizing and coming up with ideas and rarely exerting myself consistently to test/practice these theories or make tangible these persistent but non-existent ideas.
More later.

HAPPY NEW YEAR, 2018! aka I’m Still Trying to Get My Shit Together

January 25, 2018

Ugh! I hate everything!

Well, okay. Not everything…

I’m just frustrated because so many bad habits I have are so ingrained in me. And I don’t realize it sometimes until after the fact. For instance: recently I bought some batteries for our bathroom scale. They’re these disc format batteries and for the longest time we (my wife and I) have been intending to get these batteries. A couple times we’d go to Walmart to get them and they’d be out of the ones we needed. My wife finally ordered some online only to realize when they arrived that she ordered the wrong ones. They’re number CR 2032 and she got something else.

Well, in my travels, back in late 2017 (November?) when I was running around trying to film scenes for my impulsive film* featuring John Karyus (before he moved back to L.A.), I was at Walgreen’s buying a memory card for the video camera I was using (and borrowing) and, coincidentally, I saw the batteries we needed for the bathroom scale. However, I barely had enough money for buying the memory card so I couldn’t buy the bathroom scale batteries at the time as well. Finally, weeks later I made a point of buying these damn batteries.

I went to Walgreen’s. They still had them. I got them.

YAY!

I brought them home, I told my wife, and I was a conquering hero (yes, apparently there’s a lot of leeway in the definition of “conquering hero”). I put the batteries somewhere to be dealt with later. Now it’s later and I HAVE NO CLUE WHERE I PUT THOSE FREAKING BATTERIES.

ARGHHHH!!!

Typical Kimmel situation. No organized manner of putting things anywhere. I just… put them down… somewhere.

Hence, my mature Ugh-ing and Arghhh-ing here.

January 27

Still haven’t found those damn batteries (of course, I really did only a cursory search of them).

Meanwhile: Holy crap, only a few days left in January!

Time waits for no man.

January 28

I still hate everything.

But I got a couple things done today.

Well, one thing, so far. I moved the little fridge out of the far corner of the basement and moved it closer to my bed. Yes, I live in the basement of our new house. This clears space for the other three file cabinets to come from our old house (we moved in August but still have to finish moving crap out of the old house and getting it ready for sale). Also, I now have a side table (aka small fridge) for my bed! I also moved my dad’s telescope (actually my telescope when I was a kid, but I never really used it) out of the far section of the basement as well and stuck it in another corner of the basement, but a corner which I’ve cleared up a little to accommodate this damn dusty astronomical instrument and where it’s a little more conveniently situated in terms of being actually out of the way now. It’s just some re-organizing and a little bit of actual organizing some of my junk where it’s supposed to go. Although, to be honest, really not that much and there’s so much more to do. But moving this fridge was something I meant to do for at least a week and I kept putting it off. So, that’s one less thing…

I’m trying to better appreciate the fact that I have a much more convenient situation conducive to creating art than Pam does and I should embrace that advantage and run with it. Oh! Who’s Pam? Have I mentioned her before? Pam and I have been supposedly working on a comic book for well over a decade (!) with no comic book to show for it yet (!!!). We call ourselves the Apple Corps Comic Book Club. She lives at home with her parents and an older sister who has two kids and Pam has far less space available to her in order to create. So, I have no excuse to be wasting time is what I’m saying.

So, I’m trying to enjoy this luxury of having my own living space and, therefore, my own creative space.

I SHOULD BE MAKING ART.

God, I hate me.

January 30

Alright, this post is all over the place, so let me attempt to wrap things up here.

Tomorrow is one of my rare work days where I start in the afternoon and get out in the evening. So, I’m going to take advantage of not having to work tomorrow morning by watching at least one of the several movies I’ve DVRed tonight. Our DVR queue is at over 30% full and I’m continuing my (bad) habit from our old house of impulsively recording movies and never seeming to actually getting around to watching them. So, I want to try and address that.

I’m also suppose to re-read a chapter of FROZEN fan fiction that my friend Laszlo sent me in order to send him feedback. I already offered him some comments and then he addressed those comments, so now I want to re-read the chapter with that in mind.

I’m also supposed to be doing this drawing as a challenge that me and a guy from work are doing. The work dude’s name is Tim and we showed each other some drawings we did. He has some ambitions to be a tattoo artist. We decided to try and do some drawing together, so to speak. This is our first attempt. Right now, we’re alternating who suggests what to draw and Tim got the first choice. Channeling my days at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh (AIP)(and ca. 1978-1980 – cripes, I’m old!), I’m considering these challenges as “assignments” as I try to get into a mindset and routine of drawing and ultimately re-doing my art portfolio.

Everything in my portfolio is really from decades ago and for good reason: pretty much everything I created of any value to show anybody was from decades ago. Except for an unexpected epic drawing I did as a poster for a local film, MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE, by writer/director Rhonda Parker, a friend of mine. I did that at the end of last summer, finishing it in September, barely in time for the film’s premiere. But, seriously, that’s it! Everything else in my portfolio is from the 80s or 90s. It’s pathetic!

Anyway, our first drawing “assignment,” courtesy of Tim, was to create an alien landscape. Well, we talked about this almost two weeks ago, like, Monday, Jan. 22. We gave ourselves a week, so theoretically, finishing these drawings by Monday, Jan. 29.

Well, I didn’t get mine done at all. The most I did was actually draw the outline of the box on the paper to define how big my drawing was going to be. Then I lightly penciled a couple lines horizontally to supposedly indicate where my horizon line was going to be and then maybe half a dozen words scribbled in around the page (and in the box) where I thought some things and details should be. That was the extent of my “drawing.” I finally showed Tim this on Tuesday and he said, “Well, you did more than me.” He then admitted that he rather impulsively suggested this “alien landscape” subject, that it was the first thing that popped in his head. I admitted landscapes are not really my thing, that I was focusing on aliens foremost and sticking them in a supposedly alien landscape. But I do have some specific ideas. I just have to see how it translates in the execution.

February 2, Groundhog’s Day

SIX MORE WEEKS OF WINTER!?

Ah, nuts to you, ya chubby rodent! NOTE: Specifically, the chubby rodent in Pennsylvania, a groundhog named Punxutawney Phil. Apparently, there are almost half a dozen other meteorologically-minded mammals who have achieved some sort of regional celebrity status in North America who predicted an early Spring, so who knows?

Getting back to drawing.

I started off this post annoyed and with good reason: every New Year’s day I am hopeful for a new start to re-invent myself as someone with less foibles or downright character flaws and also to have made some more creative accomplishments. It usually seems a futile ambition.

But having said that…

As of this writing, I have been to work on time 13 days straight, something I’m proud of and also rather astonished I was able to pull off. And believe me, there were a handful of days that were really close calls. But still, I have a solid streak going on here.

As I mentioned above, I did do a brand new piece of artwork last summer. Considering the stressful circumstances it was created under (i.e. our move into a new house), there was no way that piece of artwork should have come into being, but it did; and on top of that, it turned out to be one of my better and detailed drawings. It isn’t perfect and it still seems somewhat unfinished to me, but only in terms of my original ambitions, so that is also a positive accomplishment by me.

So, those are two specific items I can list (and somehow have pulled off!) in terms of both creating better routines/habits and also achieving some creative goals. I just want to be more consistent at maintaining both and achieving even more in each category.

Is that so much to ask for?

Hahahaha!

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

(to be continued...)

Well, look who decided to stop by..! A fragment of the past.

March 15, 2014

Wow.
I'm really pretty bad at maintaining these blogs...

But, I'm always optimistic that I'll finally get my shit together with these things. Or I'm living in denial.

Anyway, here it is St. Patrick's Day weekend (Mar. 17 is the holiday), and just three days ago, we had about a foot of snow drop on us through the day. I don't know if we still have significant snowfall left in there rest of our Winter (according to the calendar), but counting today, there's only 5 days left of it: the first day of Spring is Thursday, March 20. We'll see what happens.
And we'll see if we get  snow when it becomes Spring.
Cripes, it's been a pretty brutal winter this 2013-2014 season.
Well, let me amend that. For the first time in about three or four years, we've had a pretty consistent, snowy winter, which sounds strange since I live in the Western New York (WNY) area, it's most famous city being Buffalo. There are areas to the south of Buffalo that are traditionally known as the snow belt regions because they pick up snow off the Great Lakes. We live north of Buffalo, and in past years, we may have a couple times during the season where we have some significant snowfall but mostly, we've been dodging the bullet in terms of constantly shoveling. Which is good, because I drive an itty bitty Chevy Aveo. I like the car (my wife HATES it, in terms of driving it or being a passenger in it. I think she can live with looking at it.) but come the snow, it's really just a toy car and I can easily get stuck if there's any real accumulation of snow. So, I've been lucky these past few years.
But this season, with the so-called Polar Vortex, etc., we've had more traditional snowfalls, and the guys at my work who live in areas like Orchard Park, Springville, Collins, boy, they've done their share of shoveling over multiple days.

So, this past Wednesday (3/12), we were having predictions for a terrible storm coming through through the night before. As it turns out, my wife didn't have to go to work, so I was able to go to work in the "Supercar," her Subaru Outback. And at work, we wound up just tearing through all our printing jobs and leaving as soon as we were done to try and beat the snowfall that was to come up in the latter part of the day. We wound up leaving about 3 hours earlier, plus, all schools and most businesses were either closed or closing early, so when I left for home, it was kind of cool and weird, because it was like the SuperBowl was on or something-- not many cars were on the road.
It only took me a little over an hour to get home (versus a good 45 minutes during regular rush hour traffic) and later that night, I shoveled our driveway and sidewalk before going to bed. I waited until late in case more snow fell, and I didn't want to shovel too much in the morning before work Thursday morning, especially since I'm really NOT a morning person. Fortunately, we have a fairly small driveway, but we did have about a foot of snow, so it was a solid hour of sweating for a fat guy who doesn't exercise as regularly as he should (uh, I'm talking about me).

April 17, 2017

...And, uh, yeah.
There you go.
I wrote the above three years ago and left it. I just re-read it and have no idea where I was going with it. Sorry.
In hindsight, it’s interesting to know that the following happens in my life, though:
A month later, in April 2014, the place where I work (Metro Community News, which printed weekly shopper papers, like the Pennysaver, although we didn’t print Pennysavers specifically) will be sold to James Austin, the publisher of the Angola Pennysaver. This isn’t a complete surprise because ad sales had been diminishing prior to this. That is, it was a complete surprise that we were sold; I had never heard of James Austin prior to the sale.
Metro’s president, Bernard* Bradpiece (and also president and CEO of Strategic Publications), and Metro’s upper management had been struggling for a while to figure out how to deal with the impact of the internet on classified sales. And at the first company meeting with Austin, my department learned that we were eventually going to be out of work because his plan was to find another printer rather than print our own. We just didn’t know when that would happen (it would be mid-August, 2014).

So, that’s one thing I can add after re-reading this. But, I really don’t know or remember at all what my actual point was. Was it about snowfall? Maybe. Was it about how out of shape I was which I realized when I was shoveling? Maybe.
I have no clue.
However, later that same month, this happens...

Anyway, I saw this draft sitting here (along with at least three other unfinished posts), so I thought I’d formally "tie up" at least one loose end here.

April 19, 2017

You know, it occurs to me that one clue about what I might have been wanting to write about was either comic- or art-related because, hey! This is (supposedly) my comic and art blog! Hey, and also, duh! So, maybe I can figure out what I was going to talk about... maybe I did some drawing? Or was working on a comic book story? If so, I was probably writing...

(To be continued?)


*pronounced BIR-nerd, emphasis on the first syllable.

DAY 19: UPDATE - Work and Art Project Status

When I got laid off Feb. 5, one of the things I wanted to do was kind of overhaul my blogs in an attempt to get back into some sort of regular posting. Seeing it's been two damn weeks since I last posted anything here, I can see it's easier said than done.
So, that's why I'm here now.

WORK UPDATE:
Actually, this is a good day to post a work update because... I'm going back to work tomorrow!
I got a call last week from one of the managers in the Distribution Dept. where I used to work. I got laid off from our Maintenance Dept. Well, some of the personnel and hour cuts I knew were going to happen after I got laid off (conceptually speaking, I didn't know who was actually going to be cut) finally happened in Distribution. Two people were laid off outright, and at least a couple positions were cut down from full-time to part-time (2 days = 16 hours). Well, one of the guys who got cut to 16 hours decided to just leave, that part-time wasn't going to work for him. So, that's why they called me, to see if I was interested in working only part-time. In my case I was, but my situation was different than the other dude's. Part of me was interested in trying to make money creatively via freelance/self-employment, although you wouldn't know it by anything I've done since being laid off, other than cleaning up some blog infrastructure among my three Blogger blogs and posting a couple times here. But, I still am interested in trying to pursue that avenue. However, the possibility of having some stable source of income was very attractive compared to having zero income, so I said yes. So, I'm going back to my old company, but I'm working part-time and in a different department. Meanwhile, I have also filed for unemployment and will be theoretically collecting a portion of that as well.

ART UPDATE:
Meanwhile, as I described in a previous post, I hoped to create a mini-comic as one of my first art projects. Thus, in typical Kimmel fashion, I'm not focused on working on one story but I'm actually juggling two different comic stories. In addition, part of me wants to publish these stories in a mini-comic format, but part of me also wants to send it to Ka-Blam Digital Publishing so I can hold a genuine comic book in my hands that I can say I created.
Ugh! I can't fucking decide! (what else is new)
Which is also why I'm working on two stories.

FIRST: There's one very strange story that I'm doing for a comic book title I'm impulsively calling:
A FISTFUL OF THIS!
I've been toying with this story for the last month (or two-- hell, maybe longer! Time has no meaning for me, even when I was working full-time, but even moreso now...). It seems to be a pseudo-Superman parody but then it goes... elsewhere. Originally I was thinking it was going to be a one-off sort of deal-- my attempt to just crap out an 8 page mini-comic and get that off my back. But as usual, once I started thinking about it, I could see how I'd be able to continue the story into a series or even a multiple series. And that notion segued into me remembering Canadian cartoonist Chester Brown's YUMMY FUR. YUMMY FUR was this very strange 80s comic of odd tales that after a couple issues, the tales started connecting into a more deliberately longer and continuous narrative which became ED THE HAPPY CLOWN (and if you're unfamiliar with this book, believe me, the adjective "happy" is ironic). Stories that originally seemed to stand alone in early issues of Brown's comic as short, absurd, non-sequitor sort of ridiculous things (such as "The Man Who Couldn't Stop" where a man is shown sitting on a toilet, and then after a few panels of the same image he finally thinks, "I don't seem to be stopping.") started to actually be part of the narrative continuity of the other stories. Until, soon, each issue was focused on telling this bizarre story with Ed as one of the main characters. So, with that thought in mind, I'm toying with using this first FISTFUL story as a springboard into other tales. I guess I'm envisioning FISTFUL as a loose anthology of strangely related tales, for lack of a better term.
Meanwhile, a few days ago another artist friend of mine linked me to one of the products she was selling on Society 6, a website I was unfamiliar with. I had heard of the online Etsy store, and I actually thought she was selling stuff through there, but I guess I was wrong. Anyway, I took a look at some of the things she was selling and, looking to support her, I decided to sign up to the site as well and then "like" her various designs. Check them out yourself (she goes by Lady Tanya Bleudragon). I like this design in particular.

SECOND: After looking at the S6 site and signing on, I wondered about submitting a design myself. My first idea was to use something old, something I've already done, simply to expedite things. I started considering comics or illustrations for concepts I originally began in college. I went to Buff State (Buffalo State College, part of the SUNY system), and although I never finished my degree, one of the great experiences I had was working on the Buffalo State RECORD, the school newspaper, for a couple years. The last year I was there I was Co-Graphics Editor with Joe Wocjik. Anyway, there was this weird sci-fi romance parody I had done to fill up a big space on the comic page one day and it was a personal artistic highpoint for me, not only in terms of creative accomplishment but also because I finished it in time for the deadline. It worked on it 11 hours straight from blank page to finished product. Yeah, I was a totally different person back then!
Getting back to this Society 6 site and coming up with design ideas to sell, the idea of selling T-shirts with my comic designs has been very seductive to me as a goal for a while. What the hell. I'm going to give it a shot. You get a small commission for everything you sell, but you don't have to create the products ahead of time, the site creates the products (art prints, T-shirts, tote bags, etc.). They're the investor.  So, I'm going to do a re-make of this one page comic story and try to make a T-shirt design out of it.
The initial idea is to do a full 10 x 15 page of the comic artwork that stands on its own story-wise. The original story was a square image because that was the space I had to fill for the paper. Here it is:

Photocopied from the Buffalo State College RECORD circa... uh... early 80s, maybe 1983? The direct inspiration for this comic was there was an unexpected snowstorm in early spring that year, and while I was home (snow day!), all I did was read my Silver Age FANTASTIC FOUR issues by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. I was so energized by reading them that it directly led to me creating this comic story at a single sitting when the opportunity presented itself. Okay, the same day deadline I had bearing down on me also forced me to finish in a single sitting as well.

My decision to remake this story as a T-shirt design was also inspired by a few favorite T-shirts I own. One is an off-white T-shirt that I got from Walmart which has great B&W line art by Leinil Yu depicting a visually busy collection of various Marvel heroes engaged in battle, with Spider-man in the center. Also, I have this amazing Paul Pope shirt that has various panels of his artwork on the front and a single character drawing on the back. So, with these brilliant examples guiding me, I'm plunging into this damn enterprise.
Right now, I'm in the re-writing stage of remaking the above little comic story. The title's already been changed from KAREN'S DILEMMA to PATSY'S PASSIONATE PREDICAMENT and I'm creating a "host" character to introduce the story, a la the Cryptkeeper, etc. Part of this overhaul is to improve/update the artwork. Plus, fix up the writing. Like, make the Victorian romance elements in the story a little more obvious (or actually existent), and especially strengthen the end of the story which shouldn't be hard because it's ridiculously inane. Even from the viewpoint of using absurdity as a means to getting a laugh -- the ending is rather stupid and disposable.
Also I'm trying to think/develop other possibilities for designs/self-marketing, like using this host character as a mascot in at least a couple ways: 1) as a recognizable character from an anticipated portfolio of my work; and 2) to also promote the possible existence of an infrequently published series of a space romance comics anthology, which may or may not still be called INTERPLANETARY ROMANCES. I keep going back and forth as to how good or bad a title that is. "Interplanetary" seems like a big, clunky word, but I don't know. Big and clunky is part of my verbose charm...
Meanwhile, in the original comic (above), the story is presented as the concluding segment, but I only did this one installment. For the remake I intend to make the story complete (beginning, middle and end) but if that's the case, I really won't be able to contain it on one page. From a comic book story perspective, multiple pages is fine. From a T-shirt perspective, well, no. But, I think I can work with that, too. Once it's done, I'm thinking I'll just "cut up" the various panels and make a 10 x 15 collage of the story with perhaps the coolest images, etc, in the mix. And maybe I'll draw a new image of the hostess character to superimpose over the whole collage and that might make a cool T-shirt design. So, I got some ideas here...

All I need to freaking do is clear off my drawing table, be able to WALK comfortably in my "workroom" to get to my drawing table, and start drawing.

*takes deep breath*

BUT, I'm going to eat something first.

DAY 4: Holy Crap! I'm 56 today!

If you're wondering what "Day 4" is in reference to, you can look it up here.

Meanwhile, I've been very slowly trying to correct what little personal infrastructure I've already established on the internet.
A few years ago I considered starting a website and actually purchased a domain name for a year (I think) and enlisted the aid of a friend who did websites. Well, I never followed through on the content, so nothing came of it, and then I never renewed the domain name.
Which is fine, for a couple reasons: 1) it turns out the name I chose was being used by someone else, a business, actually; and 2) I didn't have any content, just ideas.
If I ever decide to attempt the personal website route again. I do have another name in mind. But, for now, I'm just going to work with what I've already started: three blogs (well, at least three...) that have been poorly maintained (to various degrees) since their various inceptions.

I've been trying to do some basic maintenance here the last couple days. Besides attempting to post some new content, I've tried to clean up and also make consistent some of the links and layouts of these furshlugginer things. Like, all three blogs now have easy links to each other in the top of the margin. My one blog had it, but the others didn't, so I fixed that. Then, during that process, I realized the one link I had to my film blog (Behold! The Wanna-be Filmmaker!/Full-time Name Dropper!) actually went to my OLD film blog at Livejournal. (But, what I really want to do is direct). So, really, a few very basic things have been neglected.

But, today IS my damn birthday!

So, I'm focusing on some other things today... like maybe going back to bed!

Stay tuned.

DAY 2

...of my unemployment, to be specific.

Tuesday, February 9, 2016

Yesterday my wife had the day off, so my first day unemployed I didn't really do anything because we were both sort of goofing off during the day.
And to further nit-pick, I didn't count Saturday and Sunday (even though I got laid off Friday) because, you know, the weekend. Yesterday (Monday) I would've regularly gone to work if I was still gainfully employed.
So, today I'm officially considering this my first crack at living unemployed. Got it?

I have a list of things to do today, and some of those things I've been letting slide for months. Because I'm a procrastinating bum.
So, I'm trying to update my three blogs on Blogger and set to work on doing a mini-comic, something I've always wanted to have in my portfolio/resume, but never seem to accomplish. So, that's something I'm going to work on this week. I'd love to be able to "spew it out" in a single week, but I can't seem to set boundaries on: 1) how many pages I want to do (8 minimum) or 2) what size page  I should make the comic, either standard comic book size (6.75"x10.25") or mini-comic size, which in this case is an 8.5"x11" sheet of paper folded in half (ie. 5.5" x 8.5" page).

Reasons to work at mini-comic size: The actual mini-comic size is what Jason Karns does self-published comic FUKITOR at, and I love FUKITOR. Some issues/stories are more inspired than others, but the artwork is always tremendous. Also, one of my main inspirations to do a mini-comic was because of a mini-comic that Dan Clark worked on as a kid with his friend, Adam Owen. I worked with Dan at Great Arrow Graphics from 1998-2003. Towards the end of my stint at GAG, a few of my fellow employees and myself formed a group called the Crabapple Club, with the hope of creating a comic book. These founding members were: Dan Clark, Pam Cichoki, Josh Hrizak, Will Rice and myself (Terry Kimmel). We never did put out a single issue, but I remember Dan showing me this little B&W comic book he made with Adam back when Dan was a teenager and he was heavy into the guys who created Image Comics (Rob Liefeld, Jim Lee, etc.). The cover itself was black line art printed on red paper stock. Adam wrote and drew the 8 pg. book and Dan inked it. For the life of me, I CANNOT remember the name of the comic but it was about a superhero who had flamethrowers built into his suit sleeves and he burned criminals to death (with the distinctly evocative and awesome sound effect of "FREEEAWWWW!!" as the flames whooshed out of his costume's wrist tubes). Maybe superhero isn't the right word; vigilante is the more accurate word. But the dude did wear a costume and mask. His origins are vaguely suggested: a criminal element destroyed his family and his life (disfiguring him in the process in the final panel reveal--oops! Spoiler alert!) and so the reader is expecting to follow further adventures of our anti-hero as he exacts vengeance on the villains who wronged him.
I actually started writing and drawing a special edition of this comic, a so-called International Version, fueled by my viewing of Italian writer/ director Renato Polselli's DELIRIUM starring Mickey Hargitay and Rita Calderoni. I saw the DVD around the time I first saw Dan's comic, and there are two versions of the 1972 film. There's an additional sequence for U.S. audiences - a framing sequence actually - set during the Vietnam War, and in the International Version, there's more explicit and weird, lurid material. In my idea for re-doing the comic, I was going to create a whole new page (sometimes more than one in a row) that would be inserted between EACH page of the original 8 pages of the comic. These pages were supposedly "cut" from of the more explicit International Version of the mini-comic. In fact, I debated translating the dialogue into Italian or Spanish also, whatever language I'd be able to do. It was a conceptual thing!
I left GAG in 2003, four years before Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's GRINDHOUSE double-feature was released, so I wasn't actually thinking and articulating in terms of "grindhouse" but essentially, that's what I was doing.

[NOTE: BTW, I "blame" the group name on Dan-- I mean, credit for the "Crabapple Club" moniker goes to Dan, ha! Meanwhile, Pam and I still meet semi-regularly in hopes of finally putting out that FIRST comic, which sounds extra pathetic since I haven't worked at GAG for TWELVE AND A HALF FREAKING YEARS now. In fact, Dan is the only GAG member still working at GAG. But our new "splinter" comic book club name is the Apple Corps., in deference to the original name.]

I actually e-mailed Adam a few times asking him if he minded me doing this with his character, and I think for the most part he was fine with it, but as I continued alluding to the possibility of how over the top I might go with the additional pages I think he backed off a little. So, I may do a variation on his anti-hero but make it mine, especially since he's not following through on continuing this comic he created years ago. Actually, Adam started doing another comic, GREEN PIECE, a sci-fi comic with a lizard detective who solves interplanetary crime. I can't remember if he created the character himself, or in conjunction with writer Jason Degroot. I want to say Adam was friends with Jason, and Adam actually created GREEN PIECE, writing and drawing the comic. But I remember Adam sometimes having guest artists? Inkers? But Jason wrote a few of the comics. Well, you can check out some of these comics on Smack Jeeves webcomics hosting here. And although the last GREEN PIECE comic was posted four years ago, Jason seems to still be creating work on the site with other titles, part of his Repercussion comics line.

Alright, I've been wrestling with this damn blog post all morning and there's other crap I should be doing. So, more to come.

Stay tuned, y'all!

Hello? Hello? Is this on?

Holy crap.
Has it really been over five years since I last posted here?
That's beyond lame.

Just this past Friday (Feb. 5) I got laid off at work. The place I worked for had been having trouble for a while, so something like this was a possibility for several months. In fact they filed for Chapter 11 about a month ago, so leading up to that event there was already a lot of "writing on the wall." I figured it was a race between either me being cut to save money or the company just going under.
In this case, it was the former.
But I'll be honest, the two guys in charge still have a big challenge in front of them trying to get the company to make enough income to stay viable. So, we'll see how that works out.

But, as for my new unemployment status?
Well... que sera sera.

I'm now going to look at this new "freedom" as a temporary opportunity to catch up on some things, especially trying to do some more drawing and some more writing
We'll see how that goes.

So, basically I'm just saying: I'm back!