This morning I got to watch my son take his first ride on the bus to school. Dang, hard to believe how time flies. I have a lot of reasons to be happy, I just so seldom post it because I'm usually out living, instead of writing. This weekend we went Island hopping from Kelly's Island to South Bass Island. Rented golf carts, played minigolf, raced go-carts, bumper boats, et al. Sad to see summer go, but damned if we didn't suck every ounce of life out of it before it's through.

I've not been postin' much because, really, I've not been drawing at all. I don't know if it has more to do with just wanting to take a mindless break watching far too much television (mostly torrented serials) or if it's just that I feel so uninspired.

I'm of the nature where, when I work, it has to have some sort of purpose. And, well, random drawings in my sketchbook seem so purposeless to me. Oh, I love it when friends post their drawings, but I just don't see any value in my own art - outside of drawing pages.

Pages seem to give my less than exceptional art an exceptional context - to me, anyways. Todd McFarlane was so full of shit back in the 90s when he declared that a comic could stand on art alone. Yeah, that's bullshit. A good story is paramount.

I've been hitting head-on-desk for the last few days trying to come up with something half-meaningful to write. It's not a drawing block - it's a writing block. I can't even think of what genre I should be working in. Comedy's out, because while I've got a vicious sense of sarcasm, I'm just not funny. I've come really close to doing something autobio, but I don't think I could deal with the negativity. I sure as shit don't wanna do superheros. I've hobbled on the sci-fi crutch for so God-damned long.

I suppose I'll work it all out soon enough, but you don't mind if I bitch a bit before I do?

Sometimes wish I had the patience to shade properly. (click to enlarge)

One more convention sketch: this one was fun - this guy was passing around a sketchbook with a photo of his kid. I thought that was a great idea.

The muscles in my forearm are killin' me, in a good way. I just spent the last two hours playin Mario Party 8 with Jeremy, and between turns I was practicing th' frailing. It's one of those things you can't just read a book and learn - you gotta put the time in. I'm still no-where close to where I want to be with the technique but I'm finally making real progress, and it's savory.

Prior to that, I wasted the better part of the afternoon watching episodes of Battle Star Galactica. Actually, the last few weeks I've been burnig through episodes of season one and just finished. Why didn't y'all tell me that show was so good? OK, well, you did, for a while now.

And I've been doing a lot of TV watching lately. I just haven't found that comic making magic. But, really, it's fine. The site's traffic is dead as dead; it's the perfect time to live a little. Especially when Jon tells me that he's already near to wrapping up scripting for chapter six. I know once that beast gets rolling again, you'll get nothing but bitching from me about not having enough time for nothin'.

Y'know, here, in Cleveland, the late summer is so different than the beginning of summer. It feels like we're coasting down into the valley of autumn and before too long, Winter. Jeremy is just weeks away from beginning big-boy school. Kindergarten. Wow. He just turned six last week; I just turned thirty two. Life keeps on trucking along.

What a summer this has been.

I made a run to Pat Catan's this morning and picked up some art supplies. Maybe I'll get back in the saddle and try to draw a page or two of this short story Justin sent me.

This one's my first attempt at frailing with the middle finger for the melody. It's a bit rough but has a nice sound to it and is considered the "real" way to frail. Harmonica's in the key of G.

Got the banjo part recorded in one session - I'm pretty pleased with that. Means I might have a chance of keeping up live with folks someday.

http://fabricari.com/music/yellow-jacket.mp3

I think this is the first time I've got that frailing with the drone string down properly: http://www.fabricari.com/music/frail-n-wail.mp3

Don't worry, no singing, just harmonica for melody. :)

I had a grand old time in Chicago at the comic con. I met a lot of artists, hung out with friends, found some great new books and art, and drew some sketches:

My buddy William is going on vacation and needed some filler art to post on his webcomic, Bang Barstal. I really dig the absurdity of this series, so, of course, I just had to draw something up.

Justin sent me a short postcyberpunk script to keep me busy between scenes on The Mystic, so I was warming up to the genre with this sketch. Again, I'm forcing myself to drop in the ink even on these doodles. Those little bubbles are supposed to be little mite clouds. (Floaty nanites.)

Enough of this funk, I have a script and a sketchbook. I'm gonna fire up the web cam and get some drawing done.

I gotta admit, this holding pattern I'm in is killing my creativity. I'm in a terrible terrible funk. Of course, the only way out of it is to force myself to draw something, anything. I just finished a half dozen of what are probably my best pages ever. Usually I'd be riding the inertia but it just ain't there right now. So, I'm gonna make myself doodle until I get something goin' again.

Now that your "San Diego Comic Con" food coma has subsided, I can let y'all know the details about the 2007 Wizard World Chicago comic con! This will the first time I've exhibited at a larger comic con in years, my first in Chicago, so I'm actually pretty excited about it. I'll be splitting a table in Artist's Alley with Lou Graziani - table 3608. (Here's a map.)

I'll be selling copies of Fabricari, Ad Hoc, Surplus: A Book of Drawings, and a bunch of original art. If you happen to be in Chicago next weekend please stop by and say hello!

Over the last 3 years, this site documented a lot of my own emotional roller-coaster ride, fits of depression, and creative surges. As Adam and I knocked out page after page of Fabricari, Ad Hoc, I found myself wound up in the frenzy of self-promotion and hype. And drama.

Along the way I made a lot of friends, but I also pissed a few people off with my flapping mouth. The world got smaller, and I got a little bit smarter. Well, at least, I have a different perspective. Hell, my tastes have changed. Imagine the confusion when you watch a video I made with industrial tracks, then later have to endure my journey into folk music and banjo playing! I've gone from drawing "sexy cyberpunk" to historical adventure comics.

Anyway, one thing that persistencey on the Internet doesn't document too well is growth and maturity. All the crap gets lumped together with your best moments. I don't entirely regret or disagree with everything I'd posted in the past three years, I just don't feel like it needs to be out there anymore.

A little while back, I received an earnest e-mail from someone who read some really old drunken ramblings - stuff I posted on some late Winter nights at the peak of some nasty depression. This person was really concerned about my health. I genuinely appreciated the concern, but we're talking about stuff I wrote years ago! Time to purge!

So, there you go - a clean slate.

Also, there's been a couple changes. Granted, the site's design is horribly dated, but as for how it's organized, I was able to make some improvements. This site's less of a web-comic strip than it is a comic archive and sketch-blog now.

The comics have been moved off of the front page and into easy-to-read archives. For the first time, I've stitched all the partial pages from Fabricari, Ad Hoc together so that you can read them as the full graphic novel pages they're meant to be read as. I think it's going to create a much more pleasant reading experience. I've also moved some of the other short stories I've worked on into their own archives, as well.

I have plans to bring you tons of new comics. It's just that they're gonna be all over the place, and they'll be of a much wider variety than "sexy robot violence". (Ugh, I shudder when I hear those cheap key words intended solely to drive in traffic.) I'm real close to debuting The Mystic - that new comic that Jon Morris and I are already knee deep working on. I'm also working on a few more short stories - one of which Adam's writing.

Since I started drawing comics and posting them on the web, they've come up with that really handy RSS technology. So I figure, at worst, you can subscribe to the fabricari rss feed, and whenever there's a new comic, page or sketch - this is the place to start. Or if you're more of a Live-Journal person, I post everything, and more, over there.

At the peak of my self-promotion frenzy, I really became obsessed with that site traffic. Since I finished Fabricari and started researching the new books - traffic inevitably tapered off, but there's still a healthy group of you showing up, and I appreciate that. I'm sure when we start posting new pages, the frenzy will begin again - I just hope I've learned a thing or two about maintaining my sanity.

I figure, while things are under contruction here, it's as good a time as any for blog purge! I'm rearranging the site to accommodate a better comics archive system, as I'm starting to diversify and draw more types of comics.