NEWS/JOURNAL



04/22/08


Click above for larger version.

Hey everyone, Stumptown is this weekend and I've got lots planned for it.

First of all, Gene Yang and I will be officially announcing our upcoming book from First Second Books at the show. Please come to our spotlight panel on Saturday at 3pm in the Alaska Room for more sneak peeks into our book like the image above. Yup, that's a panel from the book. I'll be showing lots more artwork from it at the panel, so if you wanna get an advanced glimpse into our collaboration (Gene writing, me drawing), come on down!

Also, I'll be moderating the Jason Shiga spotlight panel on Sunday at 2pm in the Idaho Room. Come ask the infamous Jason Shiga embarrassing questions about his love life. Or just bring him a drink for his recent Eisner Nomination for Bookhunter. I'll even be showing concert footage of his band, The Cuckolds, so you don't want to miss it.

And all three of us will be sharing a table (#86) with our usual wares and nonsense. Hope to see you at the show!



10/15/07

Hey everyone, I'll be in Canada next month at the Vancouver Comicon! I've never been to Vancouver so I'm really excited to check out the city and the comics scene there. If you live in the area, come on by! I'll have the usual swag you can only get at conventions.

Oh, I also contributed to the First Second blog today.




08/06/07



Watch me stutter and sputter through this video interview for KTVU. I don't think I say a single complete, coherent sentence throughout the entire thing. Awesome.
There's also a slideshow of art and shtuff.



And just in case you're not totally sick of me, I have another interview in the latest issue of San Francisco Magazine (August, 2007 issue, on stands now). Actually there's a couple facts that were incorrectly transcribed in it, so I wanted to point them out here just for the record. It has me saying that I was offered "Spider-Man" and "Mary Jane", but actually it should be "Superman" and "Mary Jane", not "Spider-Man". I was never offered a job on any of the "Spider-Man" titles. Also, just a minor correction: in the BART story, it was a "she" that saw me making a fool of myself, not a "he".



07/18/07

Jesse Hamm (Good As Lily artist and Snarkmaestro), has a fabulous Tip Guide for Nerd Prom (Comic-Con, for you Muggles out there).



07/06/07

As mentioned above, I'll be at Comic-Con this year via the Cartoon Art Museum booth (E11), at 3 - 4pm on Friday and Saturday. I'll have several convention exclusives on sale. They were previously only available at A.P.E.



For instance, I'll have my "Testosterone" poster available which you can see above (click image for bigger version). 18X24, offset. This was a poster I did recently as a tribute to all the pop culture goodness that filled my childhood (and adulthood). Think you can name all the characters?





I'll also have a couple mini-comics on hand, Lowbright #0 and #1. #0 includes "The 10 Commandments of Simon" and "Black Harvest". #1 includes new material as well as all the journal strips you may have seen scattered throughout this site. It also includes many pages out of my sketchbook.

Sorry, the above items are not available in stores or through mail order.

I'll also have copies of "Same Difference and Other Stories" and the usual buttons and knick-knacks. I SO wish I could have copies of "Good As Lily" available, but it comes out a few agonizing weeks AFTER Comic-Con. Sigh....



07/04/07



There's a 10-page preview of Good As Lily up at the New York Magazine website here and here. Click to read!



06/02/07



My next book, Good As Lily will be released on August 15th! Written by me and illustrated by Jesse Hamm. (Check out this story by Jesse to see a sample of his wonderful work) The cover is by me.

Some of you, particularly those of you who may be in the book industry or are attending the Book Expo America right now, may have gotten a copy of the galley (a preview mock-up of the entire book). I implore you not to read it. The galley went to press with a bazillion lettering mistakes - with missing text, missing sound effects, balloons pointing to the wrong characters, etc etc - and also does not include the many rewrites and art changes that were done. I was told that the corrections and changes would make it into the galley, but well, they weren't. I'm really embarrassed to have this work-in-progress version of the book roaming around amongst the public. So anyway, I beg you to reserve your judgement of the book until you've read the real version out in August. Particularly those of you who are reviewers. Many thanks.

So what's the book about? Here ya go:

What if your biggest competition was…yourself? Following a strange mishap on her 18th birthday, Grace Kwon is confronted with herself at three different periods in her life. The timing couldn't be worse as Grace and her friends desperately try to save a crumbling school play. Will her other selves wreak havoc on her present life or illuminate her uncertain future?

Basically, Good As Lily, is my 80's teen movie. I loved those films (and Clueless from the 90's) growing up and I always wanted to try writing something in that vein. As you can probably tell by now, this book is pretty different from the kind of stories you've seen from me thus far. If you're anticipating something like, say, The 10 Commandments of Simon, well, this book's probably not for you. But if you're into things like "Better Off Dead", "Sixteen Candles" (minus Long Duck Dong, of course), and "Breakfast Club", with some "Weird Science" thrown in, I think you'll have a good time. It's got all the classic staples of that genre, like a romantic triangle, nerds, the school play, the hot teacher, but all filtered through my normal writing style (whatever that is). I hope for it to be familiar yet new. But most of all, fun. I'm eagerly awaiting its release.

Now for a little feature on how the cover came into being:

(I should note that the design of the cover was by someone else, I was just told what to draw so they could plug it in.)

(Click the images for larger verisons.)

First it was drawn in pencil of course:



Then inked:



Then scanned in and colored in Photoshop:



And finally the characters were grouped together and a pink hue was put over three of them, to set them apart from the main character. (The pink hue was the idea of Shelly Bond, my editor) Actually, all four of them are the "main character" as they are the same person, just at different ages.



Finally this was then placed into the cover design which you can see at the top of this post.

I wish old Grace on the right hadn't been pushed off the cover so much, but these things aren't up to me.



04/17/07



I'll be at the Alternative Press Expo this weekend, sharing a table with with Gene Yang (Table 124). Please come by, it's should be a great show as always.



01/24/07

COMICS SECTION BROKEN

Hello? Anyone out there? Well, for anyone who may be foolish enough to still be reading this ghost town of a website, I just realized that a lot of the links on the "comics" section are broken. This is not intentional. The host of this site changed servers recently, and I can only assume that was the inadvertant cause. I'm too busy right now to look into it, but I'll fix it as soon as I find some free time, I promise.

Hmm, while I'm here, perhaps I should actually put up some news on my work... Believe it or not, I actually have 2 new books on the way, one this August, and the other one late next year. The first one is in collaboration with Jesse Hamm, and the other is with Gene Yang (now crazy famous -- as he should have been ages ago). I'll put up some stuff about the upcoming book (relatively) soon.



07/14/06

The Abortion of Healing Hands

After much debate and creative wrestling, I've decided to give up on "Healing Hands". It just isn't working for me. It's shit. And I don't want to be knee-deep in shit later. Neither do you, believe me.

In the meantime, allow me to promote the upcoming Fables hard cover graphic novel by giving you a glimpse of the short short story I illustrated within its pages:



Check out the cover by James Jean.
Makes me think, "why do I bother?" Seriously, what's the point? I feel like I'm finger painting every time I see James' stuff. Sigh...



05/08/06



The first wave of graphic novels from First Second Books (publisher of my next book) is in bookstores NOW! Please check them out, they're all marvelous books. Readers of Lowbright will be particularly into Deogratias and Vampire Loves, me thinks.



04/14/06

My sincere thanks to everyone that came by my little half table at APE! I had a blast. And my apologies to everyone whose table I said I was going to visit but didn't. I was trapped behind my table (or at a panel) literally the entire con except for the last 5 minutes on Sunday. Not because I was continually swamped with visitors of course, but because I hadn't made my mini-comic beforehand and I was making them on the spot the whole time. Many times, I was literally binding the copy that a person was buying as she or he was paying for it. It was stressful, but fun. Thankfully, my table mates Jing and Mark, as well as Gene Yang, helped me make them. None of you wouldn've gotten a copy if it weren't for them. If you're reading, thanks a million, guys!

I was very disappointed I didn't get to look around. But I still mananged to come out of it with a surprising amount of swag through trades and such. Thanks, everyone! I can't wait 'til next APE.



01/02/06

HAPPY NEW YEAR!



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