Stick 'em Up!

I honestly don't know what this is, or where it came, other than that it emerged from the tip of my pencil over the course of a late night with friends at Denny's. Nothing like 24 hour service and burnt coffee to release the cyborg bunnies from their cages within your imagination.

The Worthier Part

Well. Last weekend was...interesting. With a new truck sitting in my driveway and an old friend in town for a short while, the idea of doing an impromptu, weekend-long roadtrip to San Francisco was spawned: three days, 1800 Km each way...what could go wrong?
We made it to the US border without incident, at which point we were asked to pull into a garage and step out of the vehicle with our hands in view and relinquish the truck keys. Marched into a locked waiting area, we were instructed to removed all items from our pockets, take off our jackets, and prove that we had nothing strapped to our bodies under our clothing, while through the window two armed men with drug dogs headed towards the truck. Two hours later, with the truck completely unpacked and our bags thoroughly scoured, they let us into the United States. Two young, bearded guys in plaid and baseball caps driving a truck that was purchased four days earlier to San Francisco and back for no apparent reason...come on, people, that's not suspicious at all!
With our driving time severely injured, it was decided that the best course of action was to take shifts driving through the night. I fell asleep with visions of reaching the Bay just as the sun rose and lit up the Golden Gate bridge before us...visions shattered by the wail of the cop car that pulled us over for a burnt-out headlight. The female cop who came to the window, though, seemed to have other priorities. In a tone that suggested he was concealing a weapon, she barked a question at my buddy in the driver's seat: "Why is your zipper open?" Right.
When she cleared out, leaving us with a warning, we decided to switch spots. I took the wheel, and five minutes later our engine died. No gas, was our diagnosis. Nothing for it but to wait til morning to flag someone down; we were both pretty sure we'd passed a sign a couple miles back that said "Entering Middleofnowhere, Oregon". So...sleeping in the truck.
Woken up by yet another cop, this one interested in why we were way the heck out here and sleeping on the side of the highway. Anyway, two tow trucks, an $80 jerry can of gas, and one jump-start later, we're in the next town having a new part installed for free by a mechanic who decided to befriend us and do the work for free. We bought him lunch, said many thank-yous, and were on our way.
We never made it to California. The south Oregon coast was as far as we got, found a hotel with wide beds and a hot tub, and hit the road early the next morning for the 12 hour trek back home. Cruising up I-5 we both agreed: we may not have got where we were going, but it was a good trip. We made some friends, ate some good food, saw some breathtaking country and listened to good music while doing it. And I got to thinking that maybe San Fran wasn't ever the real destination, or that we didn't really care where we got to because, in the words of Shepherd Book, "how you get there is the worthier part." And those words hold true.

May There Be A Road

There are times in life when you feel suffocated. Or at least, there are times in my life when I feel like that, where it seems that I need to be somewhere less structured, more wild, somewhere...else. Luckily, I have friends with those same feelings, and so sometime this afternoon we're loading up my '89 GMC and heading south. San Fran if we can make it, wherever else the road leads us if we can't. "Yol Bolsun!"; may there be a road, in the words of Louis L'Amour, a man who perhaps understood the open road better than any. May there always be a road  between you and where you are meant to be. I doubt that I'm meant to be in San Francisco this weekend in any spiritual sense, but that where I'm headed. Keep 'er between the lines and greasy side down. Yol Bolsun!

What You Make of It

I've heard it said (as have we all, at some point, I'm sure) that the world is what you make of it. Which it really, really isn't. Not anymore. We adults know that world is what it is, and it will continuie to be so, and so we must learn to survive within it and adapt. Some of us decide to just go with the flow; others decide to fight that flow, in an effort to not become some sort of mindless capitalist zombie. But children...well, children have it good these days. Their worlds truly are what they make of them, absolutely anything that exists in the mind of a child, which leaves rather a lot of options open. I miss those days. I miss the times when I walked out my front door into the snow-covered battlefields of Middle Earth, or clambered over the back fence, cap gun in hand, and dropped into the gunfire-laced jungles of my mind. In my back alley, I was Indiana Jones, or James Bond, or Aragorn, or whoever. Now I'm pushing twenty-one, and so much of that is gone. People wonder why I'm such a geek, why I would bother with comics and most of all, why something like roleplaying would be so important to me. Why? Because sitting around a table rolling dice with a bunch of guys and pretending to be a Half-Elf ranger or a gunslinging smuggler in the Old Republic is a last ditch attempt to hold onto the childhood wonder that is Imagination. Children are the best storytellers, becuase they never run out of ideas. I don't want to lose that. And so I game.

And on that note, I'll toss up the preliminary sketch for a screenprint I'm working through titled Return to Imagination. The final print won't look anything like this (and I'll post it when I'm done, no worries), but I rather like this image on its own. Sort of an unintentional homage to Bill Watterson, I guess. And if you don't know who that is, get on it.

"My character has the highest charisma score! I'm a natural leader."

"One: "charisma" does not equal "knowing what the hell you are doing". Two: You can't be our leader; you have no pants."

- Marcus and Chuck, "Chainmail Bikini"

Bateman's Dragons

I remember a prof telling me in my first year of art school that he knew my type: I was the kind of student he'd been weaning off dragons for his entire career. All these kids showed up to art school, he said, with this penchant for drawing scaly, fire-breathing monsters and his job was to snap us out of it. I was just another Lord of the Rings who was going to learn the merits of true art. I believe I wished him good luck, and kept drawing.

And so here I am nearly three years later...still drawing dragons. That's the trouble: if a kid who with a pencil and a love of fantasy decides he's gonna make his living as an illustrator, there are certain things you'll never break him of. Like dragons. They're just so versatile, you know? Big and scary, murderous, practically made of teeth if you want them to be, but with the potential to be cute and just a little dysfunctional (thinking specifically of the dragons Paul Kidby draws for the Discworld novels). So yeah; I figure I'll draw dragons until the end of my days. Like these ones, which were originally mountain goat sketches by Robert Bateman adorning the cover of my sketchbook, but were deemed lacking in character and originality. So now they're dragons.

The goal here was to post a sketch a day, something that's successfully made the journey from my imagination through my pen to the page, but that hasn't really happened. Art school, y'know? So while you wait for the next one I'll send to a man I greatly admire, a certain Skottie Young [http://skottieyoung.tumblr.com/]. As storytellers go, he's among the finest. Enjoy.


"Pinfeathers and gollyfluff!"
-Archimedes (the owl)