I'll be posting these Mondays and Fridays from hereon, but I'm heading off to Heroes Con later today, so here you go.

I got some links from the Comics Reporter and The Beat yesterday, that was nice. If you're wondering what the scheme is here, Set to Sea is a "one panel at a time" comic I started running back in, like, 2006? 2005? I got about halfway through, and then I petered out on posting it for many moons. But while I wasn't posting, I kept it on the backburner and thrashed it out into a complete story, thumbnailed it, and realized I wanted to change some things about the beginning. Nothing too major, mostly dialogue, adding a couple extra panels, some minor edits. I'm in the middle of inking the last 1/3rd of the story or thereabouts, and I thought it would be slightly better to reset back to the beginning rather than try and shuffle the changes in retroactively. I'm going to run it now on a biweekly schedule until it's done - panel 134. If you started reading it back in the day, sorry about the reruns (and the George Lucas-style retconning), but stick around for the new stuff!

If you read all that, help yourself to a cookie.

So yeah, Heroes Con! I'll be at table 537 in the Indie Island, nearby my pals Joey Weiser and Stephen Floyd. I'll have 33 Beasties and some other minis, stop on by.

Set to Sea begins anew, and twice weekly. Bear with me, it'll all work out in the end.

My condolences to the friends and family of Jeremy "Sweetwater" Mullins, a SCAD sequential prof who was much beloved by his students.

I think I'm going to Heroes Con this year!

I've actually got a bunch of these monster sketches sitting in my sketchbooks, I just keep falling out of the habit of posting.

Last week Eleanor and I co-taught a weeklong "Comic Books & Manga" camp for teens. Not something either of us had done before, and for the first couple days, incredibly nerve-wracking! I was practically pulling all-nighters, just going through millions of comics and how-to-draw books and scanning pictures for ridiculous handouts - before I learned to just relax and concentrate on what we were actually doing in the class. Not that it wasn't hard - but kids don't care about handouts, its about the experience.

One of the hardest parts was breaking down techniques into the most basic components. It's so easy to miss a simple step, just because you've done it so many times you never think about it. Like, erasing pencils after you ink! Or applying white-out after you erase. And Eleanor already posted something about this, but we were both kind of amazed by just how much the kids wanted to draw. Having both gone to art school, we'd seen 4 years of kids' excuses, half-assery, literal bragging about the lack of work put into projects, and general malaise... We made this set of "inspiration cards" that a kid could draw out of a bag, if they claimed not to have any ideas. And not a single kid needed them!

It was a simultaneously humbling and inspiring experience - I think we're both psyched to do it again.
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Here's a nice review of Set to Sea up to now. And speaking of that, Set to Sea will resume next week. I'm going to do a rather wacky thing, and start running the whole comic from the beginning. During the down time, I thrashed out the end of the story, and found that I had to revise some earlier scenes to bring it all together. Nothing too major, but there are a few new panels, and a bit of minor changes to some existing ones. So the best way to go about it seems to reboot! And I'm thinking, twice weekly, till the end.

I drew this for a guy in Germany who collects comic book artists's drawings of pigs. I don't normally do such elaborate sketches for free, but he had such charmingly broken English.