JaMiE BaKeR: fallout

One of the fun things about making my own self-published comic books has been the chance to see OTHER people draw my characters. I’ve put out more pages of Rocket Rabbit comics than anything else but the character of mine that gets the most attention from other artists is SEPHI (AKA Squid Girl or Nauti Girl) and here are two more super new pinups of her. The action pic on the left is by MonkeyFeather (secret identity: John Hoffman) and the relaxed pic on the right is by Atomic Terrier (alter ego: Josh Hughes).

Click on each picture for a closer view, and please check out both John and Josh’s websites (by clicking on their names) for more great artwork.

Seeing these lovely Sephi Pinups has really inspired me to do some more comics with this character. In fact, I have had a few stories roughed out for some time and I just need to knuckle down and clean them up for next year.

To see ALL the pinups of my characters by other artists, (including these) go HERE.

San Diego’s Comic Con is coming up, and thinking of Comic Con reminds me of booth-gals posing in the most difficult-to-wear costume of all time:

The gomer-showdown begins in less than 8 weeks, so I still have some time to prepare new stuff, most likely prints, sketches and maybe a mini-comic. Abismo/Nerve Bomb will be exhibiting in the same great spot as we had last year; BOOTH #1329.

Hope to see you all there!

The Maverix Studios and Sketchcrawl Art Auction raised a mighty $13,000!!!! Not a bad effort for a few hours of honest fun.

All the proceeds will go to the charity called EMERGENCY: Life Support for Civilian War Victims.

This is another of the three pieces I submitted; a watercolor of Sephilina, which was successfully bid on by Derek. (I am not sure yet who got the other two).

Derek also put in the top bid of the night; $900 for Patrick Awa’s magical “Little Dead Riding Hood” watercolour. The next highest bid was for Tadahiro Uesugi’s Watercolour, which was won by Ronnie Del Carmen. He was a very good sport, because his bid was already the winner in the silent auction but then, after live-auction bid-battling, he was obliged to pay another $150, or so, which he did with a big smile on his face (knowing that the extra money is all going to a good cause makes it easier to be philosophical at such times). Rhode Montijo’s Ink drawing was won by Ted Mathot and the Steve Purcell Mermaid was taken home by Anthony Hon.

Visit the online galleries of photos of both the artworks themselves and people having fun at the show (pics by Bosco Ng).

I will be making some GICLEE (which I think is French for “ink-Jet”) prints of the illustrations in the Elephant book to sell at Comic Con. It is a good excuse for me to buy a nice printer, which I have been meaning to do for some time.

There are 60 or so illustrations in the book, including those that are just wallpaper for the text to lay over, but there are maybe 10-15 contenders for prints. Some of the illustrations I was most happy with may not be the kind of picture that someone wants framed and hanging on their wall… People getting stomped and elephants getting shot at for example.

I am having a hard time picking which ones to make prints of… If any of you good people who bought the book have suggestions for illustrations you think might make nice prints, please let me know. For those of you who don’t have the book, you can see most of the pics online here.

And while I am in the market for advice, if anybody can steer me towards a good colour printer, or even give me hints on what features I should look, for then I am all ears.

Recently there were ELEPHANTS IN THE NEWS book launches in both hemispheres, North and South. Dad launched the Elephant book (plus another book he has just written) at the official book launch in my home-town in Australia. The photo here is courtesy of my Aunty Marg who was instrumental in getting the book published, as it was she who who introduced my Dad to the publisher. Without that introduction the book would have been self-published, Black and White, and a mere shadow of the beautifully printed book it eventually became. So thanks, Aunty Marg!

The Northern hemisphere “launch” took place two days later, when I sold the Elephant book to attendees of the APE convention here in San Francisco (photo by Jeff Pidgeon). By a funny quirk of fate, my neighbour-exhibitor was Ryan from ELEPHANT EATER PRESS so I made sure to stack my elephant books as far from his table as possible to prevent my stock from being eaten before I could sell it. I am happy to say that the stampede of Elephant sales made this particular APE my best yet, financially speaking. Sadly, I had no booth-buddy this year as Rhode was at a wedding. Last year he missed Wondercon to attend a wedding, so if the pattern persists, NEXT year he will miss Comic-Con because of a wedding…

It better be HIS wedding next time. I’m just sayin’…

Even though I was running the table solo, I was far from lonely. At one point on Saturday a fellow, who I had never even laid eyes on before, came up to my table earnestly chewing away at a bowl of candy. After a pause, to swallow whatever tasty treat was in the bowl, he demanded a FREE HUG. When I told him that there may be someplace at APE where he could get himself a hug, but my table certainly wasn’t the place, he went away, with a confused look on his face, still chewing on his candy. A few minutes later he gave ME something to chew on when he returned holding the official APE handbook, opened to the Exhibitors page, and pointed to the listing for our table. It said “Abismo/Nerve Bomb, events: FREE HUGS. NO PURCHASE NECESSARY.” Well, this was news to me as I had not filled out the paperwork myself for this particular convention. Rhode and I take turns on that… and this year it was HIS turn.

Next year when it IS my turn I will get him back somehow for these double-punk cheeky shenanigans…. Any ideas for creative-payback? Please add comments below (The winning suggestion gets a FREE HUG).

Without a table-partner, I had to be strategic with my breaks and I didn’t have the chance to walk around and do any shopping. Thankfully, some great books were brought right to me as I sat there. Jennifer Chang and EunJu Lee were first time exhibitors at APE this year and both had made some SWEET mini-comics that I was lucky enough to get copies of. Jennifer’s book stars KITOSAN the food-obsessed little character who was in her AFTERWORKS piece, this time he is showing us how to make TEA.

Blair Kitchen hooked me up with the first two issues of his hilarious goofy-hero comic, THE POSSUM! He isn’t a parody of another hero, he is gifted with his OWN truly silly super power and the comedy comes from him making the best of it. If you like action-comedy comics then take a look at this book full of chuckles and beautifully kinetic action sequences.

Here’s another one of the brush-pen sketches I did while sitting at the Abismo/Nerve Bomb booth at last year’s Comic-Con.

As to THIS year’s comic Con, I am still trying to figure out if I have enough time left to make something ELSE to sell, in addition to the new Elephant book (and selling some prints of the illustrations) especially as my work schedule wont leave a lot of spare time in the next few months…

I have already blocked out a lot of Rocket Rabbit stories, but past experience tells me that I wont be able to get any of them done in time for July and I would prefer not to rush them. So I had thought of doing a little book of pin-ups of established characters, but it seems like a lot of work on something that isn’t really “mine,” so now I am leaning towards a MINI-comic of some kind.

My apartment is now home to a herd of elephants. They arrived from New Zealand a short time ago and they will be staying with me at least until this weekend’s A.P.E small-press comics show in San Francisco. (To see all the elephant illustrations that I’ve posted in this blog so far, go here).

It is such a relief to finally have these books in my hands. I often have bad-luck shipping stories, but this time there were an unusual number of SNAFUs, even for me. Thankfully, that is all behind me now, and the good news is that the book came out very well indeed. The publisher and designer did a very nice job on the printing and binding. It isn’t exactly like anything I’ve seen before. The end-papers are glued to the cover as in a hardbound book but the cover itself is a lighter stock than a regular hardback, so it feels like something in-between. I like the size very much. Even though I had nothing to do with choosing the dimensions myself, it is smallish, roughly the size and shape of my self-published books.

As you can see in the above photograph (all kindly taken by Rhode) the publisher has also outdone himself in the display department, making some neato little customised book-stands that feature a sculpted representation of the elephant on the cover.

I will be selling my copies here in San Francisco at roughly the same time as the official BOOK LAUNCH, which is happening in my Home Town in Australia. My Dad will be launching this book, along with another that he wrote in the time I took to illustrate this one. I am sorry not to be able to attend the book launch myself in person but I have to be here to sell MY copies. This collaboration with my Dad has brought a lot of joy to the both of us and I do believe that some of the fun in making it has been captured on the pages, so I hope that some of you may get a kick out of this book too. After raising these pachyderms, now I am hoping to find some good homes to send them to. If any of you are interested, then see me at APE this weekend, at COMIC-CON in July, or E-MAIL ME.

The book is on sale now in Australia and New Zealand, but many of the stores that were offering it online down there have already sold out. Because of the demands made on the stock, I was only able to get about half the number of books that I had intended to order, so I am not sure how long these will last.

BUY NOW to avoid disappointment!!

I find it hard to be truly original, even when really trying to be. Countless times, I have hit upon what I think is a new and fantastic idea, only to discover that it has either been done before, or that someone else is working on a similar idea at exactly the same time.

In days gone by, if I heard that another project touched on similar territory as an idea of my own, my instinct was NOT to find out any more about the other project. I had an inflated sense of my own innate originality, and simply assumed that I would naturally come up with something different. These days my feeling is the opposite. I have learned that people of similar backgrounds, and sensibilities are likely to have similar ideas at around the same time (probably because we are all drinking in the same influences which inspire similar ideas) and therefore my new strategy is to find out as much as possible about the competition, so as to steer my own project as far away from it as I can.

The bad reviews that I have gotten for my self-published comics mostly focus on two things; my silly sense of humour and use of puns (I am told that puns are the lowest form of comedy) and the fact that my books remind readers of other books that they have already read.

The first critique I make no apologies for; I like silliness and whimsy. The second critique stings but I have no idea how to address it, because I don’t know how to come up with a truly unique idea. Is there such a thing? Even if I do some day hit upon something absolutely original (I live in hope) what do I do in the meantime? If I waited till that singular idea came to me before I started, I may be waiting forever. I do have some ambitious stories that I would like to tell someday, but I don’t yet have the storytelling chops to do them justice.

Although I work these days as a “Story-Artist,” I don’t really have much input in the story itself. That is always generated by someone else, and I know I have a lot to learn about true story-telling. What I DO bring to the game is a childish knack for thinking up and staging physical bits of business; the pratfalling, flatulent stuff that cartoon characters do on screen as they follow the story arcs plotted out for them by bigger brains than mine. The better term for what I do is the older one: “Gag-Artist.” I am not sure why that has fallen out of favour…

On my own projects, my approach has been to go with whatever idea I have NOW for want of something better. Plus, I have consciously decided to start with some silly stories because I think that there is a bit more latitude for learning within comedy. Hopefully, when I am struck by true inspiration someday, I will have already amassed some storytelling skills along the road.

Another quick Super-Heroine sketch done while sitting at my booth at a comics convention. This one is of my new favourite super gal; POWERGIRL.

I got a bit lazy with the hands and feet on this one, so I’ll tidy them up later.

I did this BATGIRL doodle (in grey brush-pen and pencil) along with a bunch of other super-heroine sketches, while sitting at my booth during last year’s Comic Con in San Diego. Rafael Navarro put dibs on this one almost immediately, but in the hectic swirl that is Comic Con, we didn’t get a chance to meet again before the con ended. However we finally got to close the transaction earlier this month at Wondercon in San Francisco. It is nice to know that she has gone to a good home…