Entry 138: Back in the Saddle.

Hi. It's me-  Dustin. Thanks for reading this! You are a wonderful person. I mean, this is a whole blog entry you're embarking on by reading these first few sentences. Do you think you can make it to the end? Has the Internet completely ruined your attention span? Can you commit to anything?

Sorry. I don't mean that as a challenge or attack on you. It's really about me. I've been putting a lot of stuff on my Tumblr lately. (Most of it has appeared on this blog, some of it is new.) But it seems like a place that caters to low commitment and short attention spans. All you are expected to do is press a button that says "like" or not do that. I find myself looking at an image for all of 2 seconds and thinking- "yeah, it's good but... no like." It's fostering the most superficial evaluation of art. My positive spin on it is that it's gut level. It's a more true evaluation... but I don't know. Just because it's good doesn't mean that I'll like it, right? But, if I don't like something, how do I know it's good?

Is the internet evil? Do I have a spiteful bias against most things I see, or just good taste? Are all the people who are not liking my stuff doing it on a gut level and revealing the truth of it not being that good? What's going on? Who am I? Why are we here? Is there a god? And if so, can I follow her/him on twitter?

At any rate, if you are on Tumblr please follow me and, for god sakes, like my shit... You don't have to like my shit. Like it if you like it. I don't want to have to add to the list of questions in my head- "are they just liking it because I asked them to?" So like it if you like it.

Anyway, I'm back in the saddle again... Kind of redundant. "BACK in the saddle AGAIN." Makes it sound like I've been out of the saddle before. How bout this- Once again I've returned to being back in the saddle again. Do the math on that.

So yeah, I'm back to drawing again! I spent a few weeks there just taking it easy and I gotta tell you it was nice... Did you know that I have slippers? That's right. I've also got some very comfortable pajama pants. I have CASHMERE SOCKS! I didn't even know that. All of that, along with my bed and a borrowed Kindle Fire made those 2 weeks not bad. The pain killers were also good. There was a moment there where I thought- I could see why someone might want to do this all the time. But really, I'm super happy to be back to working. To be back in the saddle again, once more, for the 7th time.

The image above is my cover for Astonishing X-Men #49. It's the first thing I did after my 2-week break. I wanted to do a cover image that wasn't the ol' "running at you looking fierce" or the "standing there looking fierce" or the "jump attack on an unseen foe... looking fierce" (which was my cover for #48). If you look at the history of X-Men covers most of them will fall into one of those "fierce" categories, which, at best, only tell you who's in the issue. I ended up doing the "hero in danger at hands of villain" cover, which is just another super hero cover trope, but it's one with a bit more storytelling to it. The problem is that you just don't get a lot of info on what's in the issue when making these covers. It's hard to get specific with the storytelling of it, and make it a better, more compelling cover. You end up getting a lot of covers that are characters standing there, looking fierce, on a pile of rubble or rocks, with a dusty hazed out background... Which brings me to my cover for #50...

Till then-
blogged and blogged