D.J. Coffman - Sequential Artist, Thinker

I’ve joked to friends before, that if they want to know what I really think, they should ask me before coffee, or really late at night. Before coffee in the morning, I’m either like a zombie, and my answer to just about any question will be “Who really gives a crap?” or “Scram.” or “Auugggh.” Or I’m opinionated and end up really speaking my mind at the times I should probably be biting my tongue.

So, for the fun of it, here’s what’s on my mind this morning, as I’m technnically before coffee…

- I decided not to go to Mid Ohio comicon this year. It’s a week after Wizard World Texas and I think I’d rather be working. The only reason I would go at this point is if friends wanted to meet up there for old time’s sake. That is a great show though. Maybe next year.

- I have… 8 pages to finish up here this week on some Hero By Night stuff. I thought up a new grassroots, secret promotion thing which we may put into effect after I get the actual book work done for this month. I was inspired by Hugh McLeod’s “social object”yammerings. That man is a genius.. it deserves it’s own bullet point here.

- If I owned a company like Platinum Studios, I’d hire Hugh McLeod to work his magic there. He’s great at making me want to buy 10 dollar wine from South Africa, remembering the name– I wonder what a man like this could do for the antiquated comic book industry?

- Speaking of bloggers… I don’t like that term anymore, I haven’t for awhile. It’s become hokey. I have a bookmark list on my iphone that I check that’s called THINKERS. Right now it includes dudes like Guy Kawasaki, Seth Godin, Robert Scoble, Joi Ito and Hugh Mcleod among others. I prefer to call them “thinkers”. I don’t know why that is, but I like it better than blogger. Maybe because today’s “blogging” doesn’t have much thought?

- I listen to Webcomics Weekly podcast. I like those guys, and they’re thoughtful and give out great tips. I often end up feeling like a know-it-all though when listening, because nothing has been covered yet that I didn’t know, but it’s not for guys like me… I do get reminded of things though. it’s a great help for new folks I bet.

- In other Webcomics news, my old pal Joey Manley is merging his webcomic companies with Comicspace.com, to make a one stop place for webcomics hosting, community, and all sorts of other doo-dads in the works. They’ll be trying to get some monetary backing from an investment firm in New Jersey. Sort of like DrunkDuck.com has been doing I guess?

- It’s been interesting to watch the growth of Drunk Duck.com since Platinum Studios hooked up with it. I usually hate even mentioning Alexa since the stats are often screwy, but they have a nifty graph analysis– even if it only partially shows growth and value.

- Keeping with the thought flow here, It was just announced that Broken Frontier, a comics news site that was acquired by Platinum was pretty much given back. I had a chance to meet the owner, Frederik Hautain back in 2006 at Comic Book Challenge. If you look around you can find a video of him interviewing me, and all the other post and pre interviews for the challenge, come to think of it. I like that guy… I never quite understood why Platinum would want a comics news site, and they took some heat when they did acquire it, jerkoffs saying they’d just report good things about their projects all the time— but I do have to say in the short period that they owned the site, they never did any of that and usually posted disclaimers stating their affiliation with BF. — This news came of no surprise to me yesterday as I’ve known about it from Frederik for awhile now, July? It never worked out, because in the end it never made sense really. That’s what I have gathered. But alas, Frederik is the owner again, and all is well.

- Coffee is almost gone…

- Facebook tells me that it’s the birthday of WORLD RENOWNED WEBCOMICS HISTORIAN tcampbell. Happy Birthday, T.

- My wife has come into my office to visit. Tomorrow will be our anniversary of the day we met, 11 years ago.  Now I don’t feel like blogging anymore.