It's National Gorilla Suit Day

Today's National Gorilla Suit Day! Go put on your gorilla costume and set out in public to make the day more interesting for your neighbors, co-workers, and random fellow citizens and children.

Sale Ends Tomorrow

There's only one more day to take advantage of FREE SHIPPING on all orders of $50.00, or more, in my art store. There are lots of inexpensive pieces available, such as the one above. See the rest here.

The Penguin and Catwoman

The Penguin and Catwoman, the two cut paper collage pieces I made for the "Great Villains of Gotham" show at One-Shot Gallery located inside St. Mark's Comics at 11 St. Mark's Place, New York, NY 10003. The show opens on February 1st, 2014 and will run for the month of February.

Last Week for Free Shipping

If you are looking to pick up some of my cut paper collage work, now is the time. Not only is the work itself very affordable, but any orders of $50.00 and up will also receive free shipping. But this offer ends on January 31st.

Most likely I'll be closing the store here at that time and moving it to etsy at some point in the future.

You can see what's available by visiting my store here.

A Cowardly And Superstitious Lot

I have two pieces in this show which opens next weekend inside St. Mark's Comics in New York City. I'll preview them in a couple of days leaving you to speculate on which villains I rendered until then.

Alternate Midnight, Mass. Covers

Check out these cool alternate Midnight, Mass. covers by Jeremy Darby which he made for a class assignment, including one for a non-existent 3rd story arc.

The Powerpuff Girls Trade Paperback Collection

The Powerpuff Girls Classics - volume 2 is now available at a comic book store near you. This series of  trade paperbacks published by IDW collects The Powerpuff Girls comic book series that was published by DC Comics a few years back. I wrote a number of stories for this series. This book includes the very first of them.

You can also pre-order volume 3, which will be available mid-March, and which contains another one of my stories.

Links for ordering either volume are provided below.

Free Shipping

Now through the end of January 2014 I'm offering FREE SHIPPING on any orders of $50.00 and up at my cut paper collage art store. There are plenty of inexpensive pieces available. Take a look here.

Reboot

Joe also asks:

Are there any heros that if possible you would change anything about them (backstory, powers, personality, morals, etc), if so who would you change, what would you change about them, and why?

I did do a bit of this with the Scarecrow in Detective Comics #835 and #836, but I have two characters definitely in mind. If I could, I would love to take on either Namor, the Sub-Mariner and/or Aquaman and rebuild them from the ground up.

Of the two, Aquaman could use the reboot the most. I like Namor as a character with his arrogance and hot temper. I also like some of his supporting cast and villains, what I don't like, and never had, is the whole underwater world of Atlantis and its environs. These same problems apply to Aquaman as well.

What do Atlanteans look so human? It's not really efficient for living underwater, or swimming around. Why do they wear clothes made of cloth? They'd be a hindrance. They also sleep on beds with sheets and pillows, sit at tables to eat food off of plates and drink wine out of cups which never seems to dilute into the surrounding sea water. They carry steel weapons in the highly corrosive salt water of the ocean. They have stairs for crying out loud. Why? This is stuff that bothered me even as a little kid. It should all be done away with. So should all of the hundreds of other humanoid races beneath the sea. It's like the Mos Eisley cantina down there. Why so many on one planet?

Aquaman has other reasons to be rebooted, he's been reduced to such a generic embarrassment that that's the angle that was specifically played against in the New 52 relaunch. His personality still seems generic to me. He also seems like he'd be the easier of the two to fix without mucking up established continuity.

I actually have a lot of ideas for what I'd do, but I'm not going to offer them up here for someone else to utilize.

I'd really love a shot at rebuilding either of these two characters and their environs from the ground up.

Versus

Joe asks:

1.) If you could write a story or see two heros have a comic series where they fight or team up who would they be and why. For example i would love to see a Batman/Green Arrow team up or VS they are similar and yet very different which makes me want to see it, billionaires with different attitudes that use gadgets. one very serious the other very comedic. seems like it would be interesting.


The idea of speculating on which of two superheroes would win in a fight has never appealed to me. The truth is that depending on the story's needs, any hero can be written to defeat any other. I've also been more partial to seeing someone defeat their enemy by being clever more so than beating each other with their fists. Again, this would all come done to the needs of a story, so I can't say that there are any two characters that I'd like to pit against each other in a fight scene. 

Again with team ups, what you're saying is the essence of what you want to do with one. If you are working with one character, such as Batman in your example and want to bring out certain aspects of his character in a story, playing him off of a character that shares some of his traits but contrasts wildly in other ways, such as Green Arrow, is a great way to go about that. For me this still comes down to the needs of a story, so it would all depend on my writing a specific character in order to determine who I would bring in to pair them up with. I don't have any particular characters in mind that I would love to put together as a duo.

I know my response is probably disappointing, but it's honest and comes from my own personal approach to comics. 

Ask Me Anything #35

It's a new year, and time for some new questions and new answers. As always, the first Monday of the month means it's time for "Ask Me Anything." 

You can ask me any questions you'd like, whether it's about my work, opinions, influences, favorites, least favorites, or anything else you think I might have an answer for. Questions can be posted in the comments section below, and I'll either answer them there, or in a separate post sometime later in the month.

Please take the time to view the previous questions so that we don't wind up with a lot of repetition. I've been asked a lot of good, thought provoking questions in the past as well as some really banal ones, all of which I tried to answer. You can see the previous questions by visiting Ask Me Anything  #1, #2 ,  #3, #4, #5, #6 , #7 , #8, #9,  #10,  #11,  #12 , #13, #14,  #15 , #16, #17 , #18 , #19,  #20,  #21, #22,  #23, #24, #25, #26, #27, #28, #29, #30, #31, #32, #33, and #34.  Answers not found following the questions can be found in the archives section for each associated month under Ask Me Anything.

Now ask away. 

Recondite Pictures Interview

Scott Amundson, writer of the ongoing Survivorman comic book series interviewed me for Recondite Pictures. I talk about various aspects of writing comic books. You can read the interview here.