JaMiE BaKeR: fallout

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).

Yet another Maverix Studios art-auction fund-raiser has come and gone and I think this may have been one of their best yet. I certainly had a very good time. You can see here the 5 pieces that I won in the bidding (From top to bottom: Ted Mathot, Ronnie Del Carmen, Mike Murnane, Louis Gonzales, and Bill Presing). I am VERY happy to own each of these, and I certainly wasn’t the only person grinning from ear to ear while clutching recently acquired artwork, at the end of the night.

Despite being on the same day as the famous Bay To Breakers Marathon, the auction was well attended, and there were a great number of quality art donations, which inspired some pretty heated bidding over certain pieces. I have no idea of the amount of money raised (they were still adding it all up when I left) but I predict that it may have been one of the more financially successful Auctions that Maverix has yet held.

Most of the artwork was sold to whoever had written the highest bid on the bid-sheets beneath each piece. However, a few hot-properties were selected for the BIG BID-BATTLE SHOWDOWN at the end of the event; a live auction hilariously adjudicated by Auctioneer extraordinare, the mighty Mike Murnane. Being a natural born button-pusher well qualified Mike for the task of needling a few extra dollars out of bidders who had their sights set on the most contested pieces, which in this case were by Rhode Montijo, Patrick Awa, Tadahiro Uesugi and Steve Purcell.

But these shows aren’t only about the artwork and the fundraising, they are also for having fun, socialising and meeting new people. This time I got to meet someone who I had only known before as his avatar in online forums and through his blog; mr John Hoffman (AKA MonkeyFeather). He had done one of the art pieces that I had targeted, but in that case I was out-gunned by some other lucky bidder.

To make a great night even better, someone suggested going to Mitchell’s Ice Cream in the Mission District. Their tasty, exotically flavoured ice cream is made on the premises and they are open till 11pm. Despite it being a chilly Sunday night, plenty of other people had the same idea, and there was a line out the door (you should see the line at Mitchell’s on a HOT day). I have a pathological dread of waiting in line, but I will make an exception for Mitchell’s, only because Mexican Chocolate ice cream served in a chocolate-dipped, nut-encrusted waffle-cone is just such a civilized way to end the day.

Here is one of the pieces that I have been making this week for the latest art-auction being held by the good hearts at MAVERIX STUDIOS. The auction is this Sunday May 20th and I have two more pictures that I am trying to get ready before then.

Maverix Studios have held several such auctions before, and they have raised a lot of money for worthy causes, $47,000 was raised in 2005 alone. This time the proceeds will go to an organization called “EMERGENCY: Life support for civilian war victims”

Most of the art-donors are Bay Area animation-artists, cartoonists, visual-development designers and comic-book artists, so it is a pop-culture, low-brow scene. Not high falootin’ but very fun. Typically the art goes for bargain prices as we know people who can MAKE pictures but we don’t know many people with art-collector sized deep-pockets, so a lot of great original artwork goes for less than $100. The auction is done by sign-up sheets under each artwork so the bidding is not obnoxious, and it is possible to socialise and party during the bidding process.

SOME of the submissions are online in a gallery. After I looked at the marvelous artwork there, I almost threw away what I was painting for the show in a fit of shame and frustration, so I am not looking again until I am done… but if YOU see anything you might like, then come by… and BUY! This Sunday’s show starts early, 5PM with bidding closing at 7.30 PM, so don’t be “fashionably late”.

Maybe see you there?

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.

I am still working at SONY PICTURES, which is on the properties of what used to be called UNITED ARTISTS, MGM and COLUMBIA. One of the novelties of working at this particular animation studio is being across the road from a real Hollywood movie backlot, the CULVER STUDIOS, where a lot of classic films have been shot, including “Citizen Kane” the original “King Kong” and “Gone With the Wind”. Sometimes we animation geeks go to the backlot to have lunch in the studio cafeteria, where all the movie crews and movie extras get their lunch. (I guess the big wig directors and movie stars get fed elsewhere) Supposedly a TV show about LAS VEGAS is currently shooting and sometimes the cafeteria is frequented by extras dressed as dancing girls in skimpy costumes. So far I haven’t been fortunate enough to witness that spectacle myself.

This part of Los Angeles, known as Culver City, is where a lot of the earliest studios set up shop when LA started to become movie land in the 1920s and is consequently full of movie history. Not far away is the Culver Hotel, which was once owned by CHARLIE CHAPLIN and accommodated the midgets who were cast as MUNCHKINS while the movie THE WIZARD OF OZ was being filmed. According to the local lore they were a pretty rowdy and raunchy mob. Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and Laurel and Hardy shot many of their films in the streets around where I work. The HAL ROACH studios used to be nearby but I haven’t figured out exactly where yet. the TOM AND JERRY cartoons were made a few blocks away on another SONY backlot (what used to be the MGM lot).

Although I am slowly starting to find some of the charms that Los Angeles keeps so well hidden, my initial impressions of this town were anything but positive. The very first time I came to LA was as a tourist, years before I ever settled in the USA. I was visiting my pal TONY in San Francisco and we took a greyhound bus to LA, arriving at 5 AM at the downtown bus station in the heart of the notorious skid row; a place which makes San Francisco’s Tenderloin seem quaint by comparison. The scene around the LA bus station I will never forget. Bewildered foreign backpackers huddled within the light of the run down and filthy bus station, as a horde of predatory lowlifes swarmed around outside in the dark, like zombies on the make. We had to plunge into the seething filth and wade several blocks to connect with another downtown bus line, and I simply could not believe the desolate scene that we passed along the way. It was so decrepit, creepy and seedy that it could have been a scene from a post-apocalyptic movie, such as Escape from New York. But this was no movie set; it was a real place in the town where they make those movies. We passed buildings bashed to pieces, their scraps used to make bonfires that raggedy people hunched over in the morning cold. We were shadowed by a sinister little band of scumbags trying to sell everything from heroin to useless pieces of old bicycles. By that point in my world travels I was certainly no stranger to poverty and decrepitude, having spent several years traveling in a lot of the 3rd world. But that scene in downtown LA rates as one of the grimmest I have ever seen.

Consequently, the first time I ever worked in LA (about 10 years ago) I was absolutely dreading coming down here. My initial bad impressions had by then been fortified by years of living in the Bay Area, where one of the favourite pastimes is LA-bashing. Surprisingly, I enjoyed those several months in LA, but I think it was because I spent the whole time in Santa Monica, which is an easy part of town to deal with for those of us who cannot drive; there is a decent enough public transport system and there are several neighbourhoods were you can get around just fine on foot, which I did a lot of. I spent most of my free time walking around, because I didn’t really know anyone down here back then.

This time however, I have quite few friends living down here, mostly cronies from my years spent working at Colossal Pictures and ILM. Although quite a few of them used to participate in the LA-bashing game, they all seem to be living happily down here now, and in one case there is even some San Francisco bashing going on (”San Francisco is SO provincial”). Hilarious.

Along with Tony and Gale and old pal Anne, I went to see the Scottish comedian BILLY CONNOLLY live on stage in a one man show. He opened his act by addressing the issue of rampant LA-bashing, noting that he has never understood why everyone hates the place so much. Thereafter, he stood up and rambled on for over two hours in a shapeless but hilarious, meandering performance that was really no more than a long winding string of reminiscences and parenthetical observations evoked by those memories. Normally, I am a fan of these sorts of things having some underlying structure, but he made the whole thing hang together just through the force of his charming storytelling. I later found out that his show was different each night, but the performance I attended ended on the strongest laugh of the show. His story of the time he was trapped in a sleeping bag with a faulty zipper, along with a girl he had been planning to get physical with, but who was going into the tell-tale mini convulsions that indicate someone is about to puke… his description of his frantic, and futile, attempts to flee the scene had me laughing so hard that my face hurt. It felt like I had been sunburned.

Thanks to ANSON JEW, who kindly drove me all over the place, I was able to see some great art shows. This past weekend we attended the Society of Illustrators show, and the weekend before that we saw a MARK RYDEN show at a gallery on Melrose where they had some really huge paintings on display. The biggest of the paintings on show (pictured here) sold for $800,000. The brushwork and finish on these pics was really something to see. Many of them had some very elaborate and whacky custom built frames.

Then we went to La Luz de Jesus gallery and then on to Alhambra to visit the GALLERY NUCLEUS, which is actually a bookstore but with a good portion of the space devoted to art display. That night the place was jammed full of hipsters throwing money around, at a book launch by some of the Pixar crew. LOU ROMANO, DON SHANK, NATE WRAGG and SCOTT MORSE have just put out a book called THE ANCIENT BOOK OF MYTH AND WAR. I was happy to see them and some other Pixar friends who had come down for the weekend.

For my slice of LA outdoor splendor I made sandcastles on Santa Monica Beach with the daughters of my friends John & Carol, and last Sunday Anne introduced a group of us to the huge, yet lovely Huntington Gardens near Pasadena.

I am still trying to wrap my mind around what (or even where) Los Angeles actually is… but I have begun to see it as a group of smaller cities rather than one big one. This vast urban sprawl without a focal point is mostly bland and in many cases even downright ugly, but there is a lot of history and culture here if you know where to look. I am beginning to think that is a terrible place to visit but it might be not a bad place to stay, once the ground-rules have been figured out…

Here is the final cover for ELEPHANTS IN THE NEWS, very similar to that used in the mock-up shown to the publisher back in 2005, when the working title was “Pachyderms in Limerick”.

In a classic good news/bad news situation, the publisher has already sold out of all their Australian stock even before the book has been released. That is clearly good news, especially if they are prompted to do a reprint. The bad news is that my own order of books got passed over in the rush to fill orders from bona fide customers.

Thankfully, there were a few remaining boxes in a warehouse in New Zealand and, even as I write this, 144 elephants are flying through the air over the Pacific Ocean, somewhere between New Zealand And California. My plan was to have ordered twice that many copies, but fingers crossed that there will be at least some elephants waiting for me in San Francisco when I return next month.

For those of you who live in Australia and New Zealand, you should see this cover appearing on the shelves of your local bookstore starting on April 4th. If you want one, it might be a good idea to pick up a copy as soon as you see it, because they wont be able to re-order, at least in the short term.

Otherwise, it can be ordered ONLINE right now from the Pan Macmillan websites in both Australia and New Zealand, or from Piccadilly books. (Note that the cover graphic used in these online catalogs isn’t the FINAL version).

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.

Almost a year ago I posted the sketch that formed the basis for this illustration. The book contains a limerick that references a beauty pageant held each year in Thailand for bigger ladies (to raise money for elephant conservation) known as the MISS JUMBO QUEEN PAGEANT.

The latest news about the ELEPHANT book is that it is finished being printed in China and is now being shipped to Australia for its April release down there. While I was busy finishing the illustrations on this book, my Father actually wrote a SECOND book (about a famous Australian racehorse called PHAR LAP) that will be released at around the same time by the same publisher. I hear that my Dad is already being lined up for radio interviews as part of a double-pronged PR blitz for the two books in Australia and New Zealand.

More news as it comes to hand!

Even though it is about a very grim subject, the hunting and poaching of elephants, this is one of my favourite illustrations that I did for the book, mainly because of the colours. Choosing a colour palette is something that I always wrestle with, but in this case I was rather happy with the way that the limited palette came out.

It remains to be seen whether it will reproduce in print the same way it looks on my monitor… but I should find out soon enough; I am expecting to see some advance copies in of the printed book sometime in February.