This could almost go into "Wayback Wednesdays", but not really. Here’s a scene from an upcoming Love and Capes scene. In it we see the Crusader and Windstar. Windstar’s been seen in #4 and #8, and mentioned in #12. He’s a character I created back in my teen years, and some of the slice-of-superlife subplots I created for him have found their way into LNC. This issue is the first time he’s getting any serious screen time, though.

It’s nice to be able to work him in. I don’t know that I’ll ever do a Windstar series at this point, so it’s nice to be able to use him somewhere.

I was a pretty driven kid, all things considered. I’ve known all my life I wanted to be a cartoonist. And I actually made sure to take assignments to teach myself to draw on a deadline. I took jobs that I didn’t necessarily want to do, or weren’t in my wheelhouse, just to train better. Doing a more realistic style wasn’t my strong suit, but I tried it here on my high school musical’s poster for The Pajama Game.

Design-wise, and especially on the logo, I think I did pretty well. In actual drawing, oh Lordy is there a lot to wince at. Bad figures, deformed faces, steroid-induced bodies. But you get better by doing, right?

I also was in the stage crew for that musical, which was a lot of fun, and I wished that I had done that sooner. I waited until I was a senior and had a girlfriend in the cast to get involved. But I loved my time on that show, and still have one of the sewing machine pieces (lovingly referred to as the Satan Desks) that I designed for the show here in my house. I can’t bring myself to get rid of it.

I’m about to send the 2010 Free Comic Book Day issue of Love and Capes to the printer. As such, I’ve put together the alternate cover for the retail version, which I now debut here. Click on either to see them embiggened.

I’m looking forward to Free Comic Book Day this year. I should be doing a signing that hopefully I can officially announce soon. I’ll let you know as soon as I can.

Let’s go back to high school, my days at Lake Catholic. I did the comic strip for the school paper. It was an odd gig for me at the time. The paper came out every couple of months, so it was more a magazine than a newspaper. I was a Bloom County fan, as mentioned before, and deep down wanted to do a four panel strip with recurring characters. Unfortunately, the schedule didn’t let you build anything like that. So, I had to do a straight-up gag strip.

I sed to say that it’d take me one month, twenty-nine days and 22 hours to write the strip, and two hours to draw it.

The name of the strip was "Schooltones". Lake Catholic, you see, didn’t have bells, it had tones. A high b-flat if I remember right. So, instead of School Bells it was SchoolTones. Man, was 14 year old me clever!

The problem was, at the time, I wasn’t funny at all. I hadn’t taken John Troy’s humor class at Kubert, which taught me the important lesson of lower your standards. I wanted to do laugh-out-loud classic comics, and I wasn’t good enough. But if I just tried for a smile instead, I could learn and build to something better.

Occasionally, I did a good one. I leave it up to you whether this one was one of those. Here, in the height of the 1988 political season and Halloween, I took a pretty obvious shot at Vice-Presidential candidate Dan Quayle, the Rosetta Stone of comedy at the time.

In the background is someone dressed as Dr. Crusher, because I always tried to throw some hidden Star Trek reference in my strips. You’ll also notice my old signature, a Klingon"R" lookin’ thing that was my attempt at a TZ. My family had a couple artists in it, and there was a family signature. In my youthful quest for indivduality, I tried to carve my own out, but I was never satisfied with it. Eventually, I went to the familar family sig, and I’m very happy and proud that I did.

The site is back up and looking almost the same as before. There’s still a tweak or two to be had, and some of the older art won’t be up until later today. Those things aside, the Blog should be back to normal and spam free now.