Promises Promises

All right!  As of this post, I am officially caught up to my recovery from the great nasty-virus-protection-racket of March…And it’s only going into the second week of May….Woot!

I’m still doing my best to catch up, and now that all of the T’s are crossed and the I’s are dotted I think it’s ok to announce the big news in my little world.  Just after I got my computer back up and running, I found out we would be moving to a new town.  So I am leaving for London Ontario next month.

Anyone who has ever dealt with the buying and selling of property will validate me in saying that it is a stressful, time consuming, disorganized process.  Every time you try to sit down and work you get the boot so someone can some snoop around your house.  Thankfully, we had two of the best realtors I’ve ever encountered on our team, Shelley Weichel and Blair Patton, who made the whole process as painless as possible, if it wasn’t for all of the house work, I’d actually say they were both a lot of fun, but honestly, vacuuming makes me really bitter.

So, the catch-up will continue through the end of June, after the move is settled a bit I’ll get back to posting the Weekend Weigh-ins and general blogging.  If the comic isn’t caught up by then I’ll just start posting forward. I’m having nightmares about sitting at my desk on New Year’s Eve like Charlie Brown, only instead of reading War and Peace I’ll be inking the Halloween comic.

You may or may not have noticed, I’ve attached a link to The Baroness’s forumspring on the left sidebar.  Thanks to everyone who has sent her questions, she has been tackling the really tough issues, like the importance of not dropping the soap.

The recent back-dated posts have raised some questions from my RSS feeders so I’d better give a little explanation here.

March was an out-of-control month for me.  Which is not to make excuses, because I was still penciling  whenever I got the chance, but finding sit-down inking and Photoshop time was difficult.  So there are a few weeks of blue-penciled comics scattered all over my home office here waiting for my attention.  The reasons I’m doing the back-dating dump instead of just moving forward into April are that the boot-camp comics were pretty time-frame topical and I’m still holding onto my goal to have enough comics made by the end of the year to put a book together and that means I gotta do the make up work.

So, if you’re lost, check back to HERE, that’s where this story line started and read forward, there’ll be some one-of gags scattered in too but the boot-camp bit runs through the whole month.

I’m a big fan of the food network.  It’s my channel of choice at the gym and easily my most-clicked link on line.

Alton Brown of Good Eats has been a favourite of mine and my Dad’s for a while. He’s really entertaining and clearly knows his stuff, but recently he’s lost a lot of weight and did an episode on how he did it without “dieting”.  If you haven’t seen it yet, I’m linking the youtube videos I found below.  He gives a lot of great information about the distinction between eating energy dense  foods, (caloires) and nutritionally dense food, (water, fiber, vitamins, minerals etc)  and that is exactly what will make or break a weight loss plan or transition into healthier eating habits.  If you’re eating nutritionally dense food, you’ll feel fuller longer and once you’re out of the habit of eating the sweeties and the salties, you won’t have that deprived feeling.

In Alton’s case, he broke his plan down into lists:

Things to eat Daily

- Fruits
- Whole Grains
- Leafy Greens
- Nuts
- Carrots
- Green Tea (there it is again! I have to remember to do that tea-post)

Things to have at least 3 times a week

- Oily Fish
- Yogurt
- Broccoli
- Sweet Potato
- Avocado

Things to only have once a week

- Red meat
- Pasta
- Dessert
- Alcohol

Thing to eat – Never

- Fast Food
- Soda
- Processed meals/frozen dinners
- Canned soup
- “Diet” anything

You’ll notice the Never list is all food loaded with salt, chemicals, preservatives and sugar.  Things we know aren’t any good for us and by comparison, aren’t nearly as tasty or pretty as the stuff Alton puts together on the show.

Live and let diet pt 1

Live and let diet pt2

Last Saturday Brian and I did the Graphically Speaking program of the Keep Toronto Reading Festival. This is the second year we’ve done this comics-workshop for kids and both times it was a lot of fun.  We had about 25 in attendance and I’m kicking myself for not taking photos because we had some really creative little people drawing with us.  I’ll remember for next year.

As part of the festival, we’ve been asked to share our favourite books and honestly, it’s really a lot harder to narrow it down than I thought it would be. There are so many great ones out there so I’m doing my top 5:

More people know this book than they realize.  It contains all of the essays that made up the screenplay for the movie, The Christmas Story and many more. I love Shepherd’s observations and almost tactile descriptives.   It’s a very humourous look at life for a kid in depression-era mid-western America.  There is an abridged version simply called “A Christmas Story”, it’s also on a wonderful audio book  read by Dick Cavett.  If you’re a Shepherd fan, itunes has a terrific collection of his radio show The Brass Figlagee.  It’s free and one of my favourite things to listen to while I’m drawing.

You just can’t go wrong with Mark Twain.  I really enjoy his short stories, it’s the most fun to read his stuff with a southern accent in your mental narrative, but I think of all his work that I’ve read, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is by far my favourite.  It’s got it all, adventure, humour, time-travel and those entertaining segways and attention to details that are so characteristic of Twain’s writing.

I think I have read this book every year since the third grade, it’s become a big part of my Christmas traditions.  It’s a children’s book, about a hundred pages so it’s a short read but completely delightful and has by far the best opening paragraph of any book I have ever read;

“The Heardmans were absolutely the worst kids in the history of the world.  They lied and stole and smoked cigars (even the girls) and talked dirty and hit little kids and cussed their teachers and took the lord’s name in vain and set fire to Fred Shoemaker’s old broken-down tool house.”

Robinson’s narrative is a lot like Shepherd’s and so is the familiarity with the characters.  I’m pretty sure everyone knew (or were) kids like the Heardmans in their neighbourhood.  It helps if you’re familiar with the Christmas story, and even funnier if you’ve ever been in a nativity pageant.  (I was the angel of the angel of the lord in mine, anyone who knows me will see the irony in that.)

Moving on to some of my favourite comics and graphic novels, Y The Last Man is definitely one that  stands out.  Absolutely not a kid’s book.  It’s a post-apocalyptic story about a plague that wipes out all of the male creatures (the Y chromosome) on earth except one man and his monkey.  Excellent adventure and not at all what I expected.  When a friend of mine referred it to me I could only imagine what the last man on earth would be up to, but that’s not how it goes at all.  Lots of secret service, secret society, waring gangs and family conflicts really flush out the whole story.  It’s hard to put down and there are at least ten volumes that I know of now.

No comics lover should miss out on Calvin and Hobbes.  It’s a wonderful series of comics about a boy and his imaginary/stuffed tiger Hobbes.  Of the entire collection this book is probably my favourite.  Partially because it was a gift from my best friend but mostly because it’s got the strip in it where Calvin is making faces because he doesn’t like his dinner and that cracks me up…come to think of it, there were quite a few where Calvin didn’t want to eat his dinner so I’m sure there are some in the other books as well, but this one is still my pick of the litter.

That’s it, the top five…I could go on and before I wrap this up I should probably give a shout-out for Robert Sabuda’s pop-up books.  I don’t care what age you are, these books (The Wizard of Oz in particular) are beautiful.  The pop-ups on each page are so perfectly illustrated and so intricately engineered, I find something new every time I open one. Oh! And the Hornblower books, if you like Historical fiction! They’re great too, (the BBC did an excellent job on the series) and on the nautical theme, if you haven’t read Treasure Island yet, stop whatever you’re doing and go get it, while you’re at the library, you’ll also want to get the License to Grill book the food network put out.  It’s AWESOME and Bar-B-Q season is upon us!

The first Toronto Wizard World show is officially wrapped up and although I can’t say it will go down as one of my favourites, we had a good time and as always, met some awesome people.  We’ve been really lucky, every convention Brian and I have worked together we’ve always had great neighbours.  This year I was sitting next to a pulp/horror comic artist out of Milwaukee,  Mike Hoffman.  Incredible talent and a super nice guy.  He did a drawing of Doc Savage for me that I’m absolutely delighted with, definitely one for framing.

I got to have a nice long chat with Gail Simone, one of my favourite writers and all around classy lady, (I love her hair).  She’s going back to Birds Of Prey this year and I am looking forward to that enormously, she is great with those characters.

Brian picked up a copy of The Hunter, illustrated by Darwyn Cooke.  I’m a big Cooke fan, but this was phenomenal.  Beautiful book, excellent piece of work, I couldn’t put it down.  Speaking of phenomenal books, Brian’s latest, Don River did very well at the show and even received a personal endorsement from “Hacksaw” Jim Duggen!  It was a big highlight of the show for both of us.  He actually made a point of coming back and telling Brian how much he liked it.  I think that’s the closest I will ever come to seeing Brian go “squee”.

Don River Heyyy-ohh!

I will post more pics from the show on the Promises Facebook page, but this one is just too cute not to share.

Cpt. Cutie

The costumes are always my favourite part of convention weekends, little kids in particular because they’re usually so few and far between, but this show was very kid-centric.  Lots of little Spider-men and Wolverines, but the Captain America with the curls and the Barbie sneakers definitely stole the show.

One of the great things about a show or convention of any kind is that it draws out the enthusiasts.  Enthusiasts  generally come with a really entertaining set of stereotypes.  While we certainly have our share of Sheldon Coopers, the Motorcycle Show that was also on at Exhibition Place had their share of large, hairy, leather-clad, Harley-people too.  It was way more entertaining to watch the inter-mingling than it really should have been, but it inspired this little Saturday morning warm-up doodle.

My handwriting is terrible so if you can’t read the caption it says, “I don’t think they wanna play “Magic” with us.   If you’re not familiar with “Magic The Gathering”, it’s a fantasy card game and I will save you hundreds of dollars by saying no more than that as it is horribly addictive once you get started.