Excuses, jeeps, and mantid updates.

Well, hopefully these posts have made up a little for the long absence.

Sorry about the lack of Captain Capitalism material. I have not had a chance to work on the poor bastard much lately. Things have been very busy at Powerhouse, and much of my recent evenings have been spent working on materials for a big PR job we have been working on at Powerhouse.

I also have been working on a pitch for a dream project for me...which I can hopefully talk more about soon. I have been wanting to work on a project like this for 7 years, and have pitched it several times...but it is actually going to happen this time.

Also, I have had to work out pretty heavily recently. I recently advanced to being a red belt at the Kung-fu school, and the classes have gotten hard enough that I need to go to the gym on the nights that I don't have classes.

That and the wife and I have been playing lots of Rummy...

In other recent news; my jeep finally died. After 140,000 miles the transmission crapped out, and we had to decide between paying thousands to fix it or to get another used car. We elected to get a Saturn for Mandy, and to turn the Jeep into spare parts. This car held a lot of memories for us: it took the epic trip to NY, with a U-haul filled with arcade machines for Kevin Smith, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez amongst other reminders of good times.

Good bye, jeepy jeep. We hardly knew ye:

Also, those Mantids that I hatched about 4 months ago are now pretty close to full grown. Affectionately named by my wife, I have two large females who are about 4 inches long now: Grasshopper and Drunken Master. I also have 1 3 inch male: Foo Man Chu.

Here is a picture of Grasshopper doing what Mantids do:

Say a little prayer for Foo...I might try to mate these guys soon, and that usually does not work out too well for the male of the species.

In other news, the office recently attended the Clerks: II regional premiere here in Austin, which was a lot of fun.

Mandy is also having her 30th birthday this coming Wednesday. Her friend, Leann and her fiance Chad, came down this weekend and we had a great time seeing them. Leann was the maid of honor in our wedding and we don't get to see her that often.

Here is an unfortunately blurry photo of the happy couple.

And the two ladies.

Friday night we went to the Oasis, an Austin must for out-of-towners and on Saturday night we went to Kenichi and had some great sushi. After dinner, we went and saw Paul F. Tompkins at Capital City Comedy Club. Although the crowd was kind of lukewarm to the comics, we thought it was a great show. Paul Tompkins put on an especially good performance.

That is all for now folks...hopefully more drawing and less chatting soon.

Run with your ideas when you first have them...

Another funny thing that happened at the licensing show...

Ever since I started taking Kung-fu a couple of years ago, I have tried to come up with an idea for doing a cartoon based on the different animal forms. The type of Kung-fu I take is Northern Praying Mantis and I thought a great thing to do a cartoon about was all of the different animal forms. Most of my ideas revolved around kids invoking the different animals, but one of the ideas was actually using the animals as characters. I had actually just shared one of these ideas I had with Mike Daubert after we went to a licensing class.

5 mins later we walked upstairs and I saw this:

I had not heard of "Kung-fu Panda" until the licensing show...but it also has a mantis character, amongst other characters who represent the different animal forms in Kung-fu.

Now, I am not saying my idea was terribly original...but, unfortunately, now if I do anything with it, I will just be "copying Kung-fu Panda."

Oh well...maybe I can still adapt it somehow to still work.

NY Licensing Fair 2006

Another thing I wish I had blogged about, closer to when it actually happened was the NY Licensing Fair. I took the trip with Mike Daubert, President of The Animation Farm. The Animation Farm is a 3d studio in Austin that Powerhouse has a really good relationship with, and we share contacts and work on projects together from time to time.

The show was kind of crazy. We talked to a lot of people and did a lot of schmoozing. Here is Mike schmoozing with Curious George:

and me schmoozing with the Backyardigans:

I have to admit a show like this is slightly bittersweet. I really enjoyed seeing some of the booths and loved talking to so many people about animation. That being said, licensing can really be the dark side of our business. That may sound strange coming from a guy who has a character named Captain Capitalism, but that was part of the initial idea behind the character...more on that on another day.

There was a Tweety bird merchandise booth with designs by Nikki Hilton. Nuff said?

And is it just me, or does this guy "resemble" 2d from the Gorillaz by Jamie Hewlett:

Here are a couple of more images that I will let speak for themselves:

Funny thing though, the highlight of the trip for me did not have much to do with animation...well not yet.

While walking across the floor, I could have sworn I saw Pat Miletich. I followed him for a second to be sure, and he ended up at an IFL booth. I had heard of the IFL from reading websites and a magazine article, but did not know much about it. Then I saw Gareb Shamus, Editor of Wizard Magazine at the booth as well.

Now my "career" has been coincidentally inextricably linked to both Wizard magazine and mixed martial arts too much for me not to recognize the synchronicity of it. Let me explain...

I have been a fan of MMA for years. The first 3d character I modeled in graduate school was Tank Abbott. One of my first jobs as a young freelance animator was doing some really bad animation for a documentary called "Blood, Sweat, and Teeth" which chronicled a young man trying to enter the then more extreme world of Mixed Martial Arts.

Then after starting Powerhouse with Bruce and Frank, I wrote and we created a short for the Wizard "Direct-to-Video" called "Heroes" which got our little fledging studio noticed by Kevin Smith. This led to us producing animation for a couple of video games for Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, (which an article was written about in Wizard.) Since then we have done animated film tests, and shorts for Mr. Smith. So in a way, Wizard magazine is somewhat responsible for some of our studio's success.

My wife and I are still pretty hardcore MMA fans now, and we spend many nights watching Pride and UFC and wasting hours on sites like Sherdog and MMAweekly.

So talking to Mr. Shamus again, and getting this picture with a former UFC champ, who now coaches the Heavyweight, Welterweight, and sometimes the Middleweight champion was a high-point for me:

I had a lot of fun on the trip with Mr. Daubert. We got along very well, despite me continually getting us lost. I know Manhattan pretty well, but I think this trip proved that Mandy is really the one in whole gets us where we need to go when we visit. After full days walking around the show and proselytizing the need for licensors and licensees to use our services, we would do some minor site seeing, (though we were pretty beat each night).

We went to Tao, Michael Jordan's restaurant in Grand Central, Midtown Comics, and walked around Time Square. Though the excursion I will remember the most was visiting the World Trade Center. Although I have been to NY 3 or 4 times since September 11, this was the first time I visited ground zero. Construction is progressing so much that we were able to go underneath the site, and walk to the recently completed subway system. We had an odd experience in the cab ride down though, with a cabby who seemed to be talking to himself, then started chanting loudly till we made it to the site. It was very surreal.

Animal Farm

Memorial Day weekend, Mandy and I took a trip down to Johnson City. LBJ's ranch was here. I have a soft spot for LBJ because of one story I heard about him holding important meetings while sitting on the can. That is power.

We went to the Exotic Resort Zoo. It is a pretty cool place that you ride around in a sort of caged trailer on the back of a tractor. All sort of large mammals approach the trailer and you can feed them by hand.

Here is Mandy with "Omar" the camel. Omar was quite a friend for the whole excursion. He followed the trailer throughout the entire trip and licked Mandy a lot.

I took a lot of photos of the animals. With the intention to then come home and do some life drawing of the animals. But like keeping up with my blog, it never happened...maybe one day.

I guess it would not really be life drawings...as much as drawing from ref... So now if you ever see my portfolio and you see gestures of musk oxen, you'll second guess whether they were drawn "from life."

They had a lot of interesting exotic deer and sheep...unfortunately it has been so long now, that I do not remember any of the species. They also have a pretty nice petting zoo, with many of the animals available to see closer up."

They also have a bed and breakfast, that allows you to stay amongst the animals and have access to some of their other critters like kangaroos. It sounds like it would be a lot of fun, especially if you brought a sketchbook and were actually able to do drawings "from life."

Four score and four days ago...(standard apology for not-posting, post)

...was the last time I wrote a blog entry. Not that anybody reads it, but I am still pretty disapointed with myself for not keeping up with.

It seems "comme il faut" for the cartoonist blogger, to become bored with blogging only to come back months later with a self-effacing, remorseful and repentant post about how they have not been blogging,(see above).

Since I don't really qualify as a cartoonist blogger, considering most of my non-recent posts (and most of the ones I am about to post) have nothing to do with my cartoons...this post is probably my lame attempt to seem more like a cartoonist blogger.