Entry 95: S.H.I.E.L.D. #1 Fourth Print and Ben Bates

Okay, this is starting to become ridiculous. Shield #1 sells out again and goes to a FOURTH print! What are these print runs like? Seriously, retailers, this book is doing better than you keep thinking it will. Order more copies.

I guess these reprints are good press. And obviously people buying the book is a great thing, but we are running out of things to put on the covers!

No really. Daniel, the assistant editor on the book, called me up and told me that we were going to a forth print. Great news! "But we don't have anything to put on the cover," he says. He mentioned the idea of putting a big image of the shield, and then asks if I have a big image of the shield. "Nope," I say. He says, "we'll have to think of something, let me know if you think of anything." And we hung up.

That's when Ben Bates came to the rescue.

Ben is a studio mate of mine. He's just getting started with his professional career in comics and he's doing a fine job of it.
He was recently interviewed on Newsarama for his work on S.h.o.o.t. First featured in Dark horse presents. He's also penciled issues 217 and 218 of Sonic The Hedgehog, which will be out in September and October. And he's currently working on more Sonic. Here's a link to his sight.

So after my conversation with Daniel, I got to thinking about the forth print cover and I thought it would be cool to have the shield with a reflection of Da Vinci in it. I asked Ben if he would be willing to help me out with getting it done since I was desperately trying to make a deadline and couldn't do it myself. I've helped Ben out a number of times, so he kind of owed me, and he agreed to to it. And he did a great job! He created a perfect version of the shield, colored it, and together we worked on dropping the Da Vinci reflection in.

Ben has helped me out once before, back when I did the 2 page Thing Thing story for Fantastic Four Adventures. He did a lot of the color flatting and made such good color choices I hardly had to do anything since almost all the colors are flat colors.

Just for fun, here are those 2 Thing Thing pages. I posted panels from this but never the whole thing.

Entry 66: Fantastic Four Giant-Size Adventures #1

Here are a couple more panels from The Adventures of Thing Thing which is now OUT! The issue is 42 pages long and only 2 of those pages are by me and are Thing Thing, but I'm really proud of those 2 pages. I'm currently working on a couple X-Men Legacy issues right now that will be out soon, but frankly, I'm more excited about Thing Thing being out. It's just a more personal project. It's also the first published work of mine where the art is completely created by me. I've worked with good inkers and good colorists, but nothing beats getting to do it all yourself. (I should thank Colleen Coover and especially Periscope intern, Ben Bates, for helping me out with flatting) Of course, my contribution isn't the only reason to pick this up. There are 40 other pages that contain some really nice work by a few of my fellow Periscopers, Rich Ellis, Colleen Coover, and of course it's all written by Paul Tobin.

Here's what the book looks like.

Entry 64: The Adventures of ThingThing- The Blue Cheese Affair

That's right, this post is called ThingThing. It's what happens when Ben Grimm eats a whole wheel of blue cheese and reads Tintin before going to bed. Or it's what happens when Paul Tobin has 2 extra pages in Fantastic Four Giant-Size Adventures #1 and asks me if I want to do a short homage to Herge.

Paul is a studio mate of mine at Periscope Studio and has written a whole lot of Marvel books including: like ALL of the Marvel adventures books, or something like that. I don't know. He writes a lot of them. And since I joined the studio he and I have found we have a mutual love for European comics. He has one of the best graphic novel collections I've ever seen.

When Paul mentioned the idea of doing The Thing as Tintin I thought- that is a strange and fantastic idea, and, despite the fact that I already had my hands full with X-Men, I said yes. I had to do it... I couldn't let someone ells do it, right? An opportunity to draw Tintin meets the Fantastic Four doesn't come along to often. Another thing I liked about the idea was that I would get to ink and color it as well.

So I did it, and it was a blast. It's short but I really tried to chock it full of comic book goodness. I hope people check it out. The issue is Fantastic Four Giant-Size Adventures #1 and it comes out June 24. You can see another little sneak peek of it at Paul Tobin (Dot) Net. Check it out.

On a completely separate note I want to thank Robin Bougie for posting about me on his Live journal several weeks back and getting a bunch of new people to start following my LJ. That's pretty damn cool of him. And thanks to all the people who read his post and checked out my stuff. I've been wanting to respond to the comments left on my last entry but haven't been allowing myself much Internet time lately. Anyway, thanks again.