JaMiE BaKeR: fallout

When I recently bought some books from HERVAL, this great Sephi sketch was inside the front cover.

Because I have the bad habit of flipping art books from the back, I didn’t realise that he had done this neat pic for me until I’d had the book for a week!

I have some other pinups of the same character (Sephilina the NAUTI GIRL, AKA Squid Girl) by other artists that I’ve been collecting, and you can see them here.

In the years that I’ve played around creating my own characters I’ve had quite a few instances where despite my best efforst to be original, I’ve come up with something that someone else comes up with at almost the same time.

Sometimes the similarities are in the concepts, but more often it is in the names, which is the disadvantage of choosing names with alliteration or based on puns; someone else is bound to think of them too…

Sephilina was originally to be called SQUID GIRL, a name that cracked me up when I thought of it. The character actually grew out of the name rather than vice versa; I tried to visualise a character that would combine the cute ‘n’ slimey aspects of the name.

At that time (early 2001) I did an internet search and found nothing else with that name out there, and got cracking (in my slow fashion) on drawing her first comicbook story. So I was bummed out to discover that JUST as I was getting ready to publish her first story (mid 2002), someone else had beaten me to it… hence her new name. So, the moral of the story is:

A) think of TRULY unique names, not puns, or combinations of words where one of the words is “girl”, “boy” or “man” (think of how many characters are “somethingMAN” or “whateverGIRL”), and:
B) Once you have an idea, move on as quickly as you can. Dont leave it only in your head or sketchbook, because once it’s floating around out there in the ether SOMEONE is going to pick it up…

I just returned from San Diego where Maverix Studios members held down a table, and tried to sell our books at the Comic-Con. Here is a sketch I did for Dave Morris’ dancing girls gallery:

This year ALL the members of Maverix studios made stuff to sell and we all had some hassles with the printing process this year (to say the least). There was a lot of late nights, file corruption, frantic trips to Kinkos and high blood pressure all round… but we prevailed in the end, and each of us achieved what we set out to do; get a book ready for the convention. So that amounts to quite a success.

Our neighbours Enrico Casarossa and Ronnie del Carmen took it to the next level of success, and sold out of all their stock of books! This on their first outing as exhibitors. Very impressive. Speaking of Ronnie, he has an OFFICIAL website of his own now, and I have updated the URL in the links section so be sure to visit him at www.ronniedelcarmen.com.

I’m back at Maverix and working on comics. A character named SQUID GIRL who appeared in the Rocket Rabbit story in Nerve Bomb Comics last year is the star of the yarn I’m working on at the moment. You can see some pics of her in the Projects section. Her story will be my contribution to Benton Jew’s “Babes in Space” anthology. In addition, I will be working on some more stories with Rocket Rabbit and the Professor, and those will go into the next issue of Nerve Bomb which will be on sale at Comic-Con.