Archive for December, 2011
10 items.
Not the last of the phone calls, but probably the last of the inside of the cabin. We have some fun outdoors activities / adventure pages coming in store. Plus, there’s a new year around the corner.
I hope you had a fantastic holiday weekend! I got some great gifts, including:
-A new coat
-Some awesome books and movies
-A new pad for standing on at conventions (very important, mind you)
I got Beth the entire Harry Potter movie collection on blu-ray, which we’ve been watching on a daily basis. I’ll mostly tune out while I work on the pages for the @$$hole! book, which should be out early next year. Now that the holiday’s over, I’m looking for quotes from printers while putting the finishing touches on the thing. It’s going to be an amazing collection – the first 100 or so strips, with original strips and story arcs thrown in for good measure. More details to come soon.
I have more great news to announce soon as well, since 2012 is going to be a HUGE year for me in comics. Going to be a lot of projects finally coming out, and looking forward to sharing them with you finally.
In the meantime, New Years is right around the corner and Beth and I are prepping for a big bash to finish off the year right, and bring in the new year even righter. Until then, my friend, enjoy!
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This is where it starts to get real, folks. The funny is coming. Act I is about to end, and all hell’s about to break lose. But in the meantime, it’s holiday time. This weekend is that special holiday a good chunk of the country – heck, the world – celebrates. That’s right, I’m talking about …
…Trevor’s Facebook Holiday Sale! Today (December 23) is the last day I will be discounting all of my comics so you can give the gift of reading to someone you love. If you want to buy them at this discounted rate, all you have to do is e-mail me your order and address address on facebook. Below are the prices of the books:
1) Reading with Pictures – softcover -
Price: was $18, now $152) Reading with Pictures – hardcover -
Price: was $25, now $203) Hope: The Hero Initiative – softcover -
Price: was $20, now $154) @$$hole! – softcover -
Price: was $6, now $35) Junkyard Chase – softcover -
Price: was $3, now free with purchase of $20 or more
Any orders over $40 receive free shipping*, and all orders will come with a free sketch inside the book.
Payment will be available via paypal. Please reach out if you’d like to give someone you know a great gift this holiday season – the gift of reading!
*(standard ground, only – expedited shipping will cost extra)
The Necronomican. Roughly translated: The Book of the Dead.
Anyone who has seen Evil Dead I or II, or Army of Darkness, you know that nothing good comes from this book. And while this story may not have talking deer heads in it, there may be some flying colored blood and crazy possessed hands. Well, actually (checks the photo bank), alright, there aren’t any possessed hands. But, there will be some fun times. Reminiscent of a cult classic. Sufficiently cheesy and goofy.
So, I’m trying to do more iPad gaming, and there are a lot of “free” games in the iTunes store. Unfortunately, I have to put “free” in quotes, because while they may be free to download, they have a catch. For example, I downloaded a game called Battle Nations. I like strategy games, and it looked fun. Just like a RTS (real-time strategy game), you build up a base and build up an army, and you attack enemy armies. You can even network and battle your friends. Unfortunately, if you don’t pay to play the game, it takes like 4+ hours to build anything. So you find yourself going into the game, scheduling something to build, then exiting the game and you’re done for the day. It’s pretty lame.
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Tell you what isn’t lame, though, and that’s my Facebook Holiday Sale! This week only, December 20-23, I will be discounting all of my comics so you can give the gift of reading to someone you love. If you want to buy them at this discounted rate, all you have to do is e-mail me your order and address address on facebook. Below are the prices of the books:
1) Reading with Pictures – softcover -
Price: was $18, now $152) Reading with Pictures – hardcover -
Price: was $25, now $203) Hope: The Hero Initiative – softcover -
Price: was $20, now $154) @$$hole! – softcover -
Price: was $6, now $35) Junkyard Chase – softcover -
Price: was $3, now free with purchase of $20 or more
Any orders over $40 receive free shipping*, and all orders will come with a free sketch inside the book.
Payment will be available via paypal. Please reach out if you’d like to give someone you know a great gift this holiday season – the gift of reading!
*(standard ground, only – expedited shipping will cost extra)
Two things going on in this page that have a personally funny touch for me:
1) Answering the phone in panel 2. Back when I worked in retail I used to have to take regular calls from the other departments to check in. This happened just about every half hour or so. Over the course of an 8 hour day, that gets pretty old and you have to find a way to entertain yourself. So you come up with fun ways to answer the phone.
The first thing I tried was pretending to be another department – but people catch onto that pretty quick. So then you just try to intentionally mess with people. Hence, some of the quotes you’ll see when answering here.
2) The last line in the 4th panel, this is a quote that comes from a webseries called Twiggers Holiday. It’s this crazy little eccentric series about a kid with a purple monkey on his head. It’s wild and zany and silly (until the end), and it has hilarious (and somewhat offensive) quotes in it like this in it.
Anyway, I’m prepping for holiday time this weekend, and getting the book ready for the printers. Progress is slow bu steady. There’s going to be original content, and the first hundred or so strips in luscious full color. It’s going to be a trip to put together, and I’m looking forward to revealing it at convention season next year.
So have a great weekend, get plenty of rest, and prep for the next two weeks filled with HOLIDAYS!
Peace.
Honestly, the flow of the text on this page could be better. This is the problem you run into when you don’t write your script in advance of taking your pictures. Or at least an outline or something. Despite this, however, I’m really liking how this story is unfolding. Right now is the customary set up. Soon will be when the shit gets real.
So holidays are right around the corner. There are really two camps when it comes to this time of year:
1) The people who planned ahead and got their holiday shopping done well in advance of the holiday (FYI: that’s less than 40% of the country)
2) The people who procrastinated and still have to do some last-minute shopping
Guess which group I’m in? I’ll give you a hint: it’s not the second group.
I tend to be a little OCD about planning ahead. I like to get all the details out, at least in my head. I do this with just about everything. Writing comics. Buying gifts. Figuring out my weekend plans. So when I do comics like this which aren’t planned out by the letter in advance, it’s a bit of an uneasy experience. Fun, but uneasy.
In any case, my point is that if you’re going out this week or next to do holiday shopping, be careful. I worked retail for 9 years…people get crazy when they’re desperate for holiday shopping.
See you Friday!
Holidays are right around the corner, and this means two things:
1) Holiday music is EVERYWHERE
2) Work picks up to a fierce pace
Therefore, this week involved an agency holiday party, a series of late nights at the office, and not a lot of time to work on the comics. But that’s what the weekend is for, right?
Speaking of which, it’s weekend time. So I’m going to get to it. Announcements on some awesome projects coming soon.
So let me tell you about the weekend I had. First off, something you should know: I make this comic on a 9 year old desktop computer, which I’ve had since college and built myself. This computer hasn’t been online in 5 years. It’s only used for making the comic. It has several redundant hard drives to automatically backup the pages, but the thing’s old.
So, Friday night, when I got home from work and started plugging away on the next @$$hole! book (which will be out next year), the computer shut off. Like the power went out, except all of the other electronics in my place were just fine. Strange.
So I tried turning the computer back up, thinking it may be a brown out or something, and before Windows even has a chance to load – power shuts off again.
Thinking there may be some problems with the power supply, I resign myself to several truths:
1) I’m going to have to buy a new computer (and if I want to finish the book on time, I’ll have to buy one soon)
2) I’m not going to get any book work done this weekend
3) I’m not going to get any webcomic pages done this weekend, thus eating further into the already quickly depleting buffer
Now, thankfully I’m pretty sure the hard drives aren’t corrupted, and I have been backing up the files every month or so. However, I don’t have Photoshop on my new laptop, so I can’t work on the comic pages over the weekend. This is fine, because it gives me a chance to focus on some of the other projects I have coming out next year.
However, then Beth tells me her laptop update just locked her out, and she doesn’t have access to her files either. And this frustrates her to no end.
So I make a call and my good friend Brent – bless him – offers to take a look at her computer, and to help transfer all the files off my hard drives. So Sunday Beth and I go over to Brent’s and spend the bulk of the day there trying to hack into her laptop, and then we open up my PC.
Unfortunately, Windows 7 is pretty solid in its security and doesn’t allow for anyone to change passwords without an admin (which she didn’t have), so we recover the files from her laptop and then send the rest back to factory reset. My PC, on the other hand, was another story.
Upon opening the thing up, we hear a jingling around on the inside. Turns out, the bracket that holds one of the motherboard fans to the motherboard has broken, and the fan won’t stay connected. When the fan comes off the motherboard, the computer loses power to make sure the it doesn’t overheat. So we salvage another bracket from an old PC, swap them out, and BEHOLD – the PC works once again.
Now, I’m still going to be shopping for a new PC – this is just the first in what will no doubt be a series of things breaking down with age – but now there’s not so much urgency in the shopping process. And I can keep working on the comics and the book in the meantime. So this coming weekend is going to be spent making up for lost time on the comic pages (and the book), which is going to be a pain in the butt. But, that’s part of the game. Plus, the Haunted Cabin story is a lot of fun to work on.
See you Friday!
Every year my family takes a “camping” trip to a national state park with other friends of the family. These pictures came from that park. The park is gorgeous, and even though we went in the fall this year, the leaves hadn’t really started to change color yet. In fact, they were a very vibrant green. A kind of green I haven’t seen since I’ve been in Ireland.
When going into a story like this, it’s usually a good idea to have the story plotted out first. Unfortunately, everything I had plotted out didn’t quite happen – so instead, I had to change the story in post. This is a good thing, actually, because I think it made the story stronger and funnier. In truth, it also allowed me to play with some new techniques, which you’ll see in later pages.
Until next time, my friends.
Movie Review: The Muppets (2011)
Director: James Bobin
Cast: Jason Segel, Amy Adams, Chris Cooper
Plot: Walter and Gary (Segel) grew up watching the muppets (much like me). They loved them. In fact, Walter – a muppet himself – has always wanted to meet the muppets in person. When Gary and Mary (Adams) are celebrating their 10 year anniversary, Gary decides to bring Walter along to see the muppet studio. Upon arriving, however, they find out that oil monger Tex Richmond (Cooper) is planning to turn the muppet studio not into a museum, but instead drill for oil!
According to their contract, the muppets have to raise $10 million before the deadline, or else they’ll lose the studio forever. It’s up to Gary, Walter and Mary to get Kermit and the gang back together to save the studio.
I went home to Ann Arbor for the Thanksgiving weekend, and one of my goals of the weekend was to see this movie. I grew up watching the muppet movies with the neighbor girl on her laser disc player in the basement. We loved the muppets, and that love hasn’t dwindled in the years that followed. The last muppet flick I watched was Muppets in Space, which was a great celebrity romp through my childhood.
10 years later, this flick brings me back to those childhood days in the basement watching Kermit, Miss Piggy, Gonzo and the gang going on wacky adventures and singing silly songs. I loved this movie. LOVED IT.
There were laughs throughout this movie for muppet lovers and people who have not seen the muppets ever before in their life. The songs were catchy, enjoyable, and silly in their own right. Beth wanted to go out and buy the soundtrack as soon as the credits started rolling. Kids and adults were laughing alike. It was the most fun I’ve had in theaters in a long time, and I can’t say enough about how much I enjoyed seeing the muppet gang get back together again. I’m eager for the next one.
Do yourself a favor, grab a friend or two (or more), and take them to go see this movie.