Anatomy of a Boy

Mostly, this post is going to be about Other people. And yet somehow, will still end up being about Me. Settle into the buttgroove on your swivel chair, the rambling begins.. now.

First, about that little inspirational blog I mentioned earlier. It belongs to a couple of insanely talented brothers, Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba. Lets say I was... unhappy... with my situation. I decided it was time to stop f*cking around, but I wasn't sure... how? Then I came across [http://fabioandgabriel.blogspot.com] just around the time when Fabio was posting the last of these brilliant stick figure strips he was doing, all about the craft of and dedication to comics creation. He'd include his own thoughts afterwards. Things that are so simply obvious, but escaped my grasp.. or maybe really never *clicked* in me until I was there, reading the right words at the right time at this particular blog. Things like how failure is inevitable, how the only way to get ANYwhere is to start going there. Simple, monumental things.

Click [here] to see the archive of strips on storytelling. At the very least, they're bound to make you smile. Since then, I've drawn more pages and probably more often than I have in my entire life.

Now of course, it's putting it simply to say that everything changed overnight, but this was definitely the immediate catalyst, and more importantly, right when I needed it. A few months early and maybe nothing would have clicked. There's a quote from Eduardo Risso that I've used before, but here it is again, for posterity. To me, it sums up how I feel:

"Advice can only go so far. Each must become an artist through their own experience. The only question a person needs to answer for themselves is whether they really like the career they're about to embark on. And that's true of any profession. Because there will be moments when the work surpasses your expectations and there will be moments when it doesn't meet them, but once you reach a certain level of maturity, your work will be mobilized by the passion you feel for it."

I'm bound to fail. More than a few times. I've given up this notion that the first book I put out will be an Incredible Masterpiece. The grown-up in me knows there's long hard work ahead. But that same grown-up also knows that success is inevitable. The only person that can deny that to me, is me.

Now I figure while I'm plugging a blog, I might as well plug sommore.

My buddy Jason Latour is trying to drum up some interest in the book he's been doing with my Jackie Karma/76 writer B. Clay Moore by posting the first 4 issues of Expatriate on his blog. Yeap, to read. for free. In serialized bits! Bits are yummy. It's beautiful stuff, [check it out from the beginning].

Also, friend and mentor Eric Canete is back online with his blog [Discard], which you all need to see and be in awe of.

No doubt swept up in the feeling, superstar Sam Liu has updated his site for the first time in... 4 years? [GO SEE]

Ok so maybe now you're wondering... "mentor"? Who talks like that? What does that even MEAN?



So here I was, a 17(?) year old lil punk with these godawful Battlechasers sample pages. I *thought* I was doing this really rad John Byrne/Jim Lee/Joe Mad thing and also, that I was awesome. None of those statements turned out to be true. It's my first San Diego Comic Con ever, and I'm getting all these pros to sign or draw on my portfolio folder. I find Eric Canete's table, who I was a fan of only by virtue of being semi introduced to him online and seeing all of.. ONE sketch. It was a pretty awesome sketch. So he's drawing this awesome Cyclops (which he got so into he started drawing on top of the James O'Barr Crow doodle) - and I'm just making lame fanboy conversation:

me: "Where do you work out of?"
e: "Podunk"
me: "...!"
me: "I live in Podunk too!"
e: "oh yeh? here's my card, come over sometime."
me: "...!!"

Turns out we lived less than 5 minutes drive away from each other in "Podunk." Those years were in no small way shaped by the generosity of this man. I could go on, but it would just be embarrassing to start gushing, so I won't. Let's just say if fate hadn't intervened, I could be a lot worse off than I am now. So yeah. The least you could do is check out his blog.




Ok. Here's some art. These are a couple tiers of the 5 page story I did for Ellipses magazine. The issue hits next month, and I'll probably post the pages at some point after that.

Pencils -


Inks -


Final -


And that's that. If you've made it this far, Congratulations! Come find me at SDCC this year and I will buy you a cupcake.