D.J. Coffman - Sequential Artist, Thinker

 Yesterday Jason Embury (colorist) and I completed 5 complete pages ready for print for an educational style comic thing that I can’t really talk about any more than that. Here’s the first splash shot of page one though…

- So yeah, that was really fun. Honestly I don’t know of anyone else who could have pulled off the workload we did yesterday. So, high fives to Jason on this too. My kids already want that to be an animated show or something. (I wish!)

LIFE:

I didn’t get much sleep at all last night. My dog was spooked by something outside and was barking all night. I went outside to try to calm her down, but to no avail. This morning my wife and I smelled a skunk though… hooray! But yeah, while yesterday was a juggernautic output, today’s workload has suffered. I’ll be lucky if I get one page inked like a normal human being should.

WORK:

I deleted some bastard’s comment about me having delusions of grandeur about Hero By Night. He mentioned we only sold like 2000 books to shops or something, which is not true– you have to account the fact of reorders, conventions and online sales, etc etc… - But screw all the number talk… what I meant was THE STORY.  Which, I’m sorry if it seems big headed of me to say it’s something special, but it has been. From the all the great reviews of the book which you can find online (not a bad one in sight that I can find, believe me, i looked!) to all the NEW and OLD comic readers who come up to us at shows to sing our praises for it…. I’m STILL not use to it, but I’m glad that OTHER people have witnessed this. Jason knows… anyone who’s sat near my table or hung out at the past shows this year knows what I mean and have witnessed the weird glowing praise. Has it made my head or ego big? No friggin way.  but it IS something special. To these people I’ve talked to, the retailers I’ve talked to.. THEY think it’s important. So that feels nice, but it’s also terrifying.

Terrifying how??? Well you just worry that you might have told your ONE great story there. Can you top it? Can you keep those people happy? Keep em guessing, intrigued? Hooked? It feels like a challenge. Just like when I won that contest I thought ‘–”Oh man, now I’d better deliver!” — same feeling when someone comes up praising HBN at a show, or the hundreds of emails we get… I think .. “Oh man, I’d better KEEP delivering.”

Anyway, just wanted to explain a little about where those comments come from. It’s not just me sitting in a room saying “DUDE, I’M SPECIAL! EVERYTHING I DRAW IS IMPORTANT!” — I do know guys like that though! I’m definitely NOT that.

Odds and Ends-

DEAD STUFF- I was snooping around at old haunts after old collaborator Brian Lynch posted here and saw the link to his project “EVERYBODY’S DEAD” which is coming soon from IDW. Heres some sample art. To the best of my memory, that was a movie script Brian had in the Hollywood machine for years and years– it’s going to make an outstanding comic book series. The art on that looks killer. Said it before, I’ll say it again, IDW puts out some of the best quality books around. Check out their Everybody’s dead myspace page. 

 Go SOX! - Bob and I have a bet on baseball. He says Cleveland will go to the World Series. I say nay. So we have a whole dollar riding on that.

Screw you internet, I’m going to enjoy my weekend.

 I’ve been quietly working on some “educational” type comics for Platinum Studios, we’ve sort of co-branded these with Hero By Night, making this particular age group called “Hewo By Night” - Anyways, I have 5 pages to ink up today on a rush deadline. I’m on page 3 now, here’s a peek.

“Hewo” started as a little sketch by Brandon J. Carr in my sketchbook at Wizard World Chicago. (by the way, check out Brandon’s new strip!)

In other news, Fleen linked here, in reporting that I was done with Yirmumah.  Awh, thanks Gary! Gary Tyrell has the MEANEST MUSTACHE on the east coast. He reminded me that I said I’d draw Yirmumah until I’m dead– which I’m still fond of that idea… but for now– 10 years is enough of that for now. Plus, I’m kinda sick of the douchebaggery around “webcomics” at the moment. I participated in it, for sure, because it’s fun. I think people should just go and be cartoonists and produce GOOD (maybe important?) work before sticking their flags in the moon. Of course, I never really have ever taken a break of any kind for a long long time. This pencil is always moving.

Thinking about the web stuff yesterday– I thought how crazy it is. Just because ANYONE can publish their comics now, doesn’t make them good, notable… or it doesn’t mean they SHOULD. I saw a couple blogs about SPX, where people were saying comic “pamphlets” were dead. (RRRRrrr I hate that word) But the reason they thought that was because the art and mini comics around them were selling like hotcakes. I love SPX for that too, but it was odd to hear an independent publisher say he was abandoning the format completely because of the SPX experience, and claiming said things to be dead… but you look at his work, and it’s clearly something that Comic Shops would never pick up… but back to the point about the web… I guess it does make people feel like they are EQUAL to the big publishers or level of quality. That might be true in like VERY few cases… but for most people, they’re just lying to themselves. But hey, if they LOVE comics so much, they’ll find it to be an AWESOME hobby. Just because you CAN publish… doesn’t mean you should.

That’s the flipside I suppose… I love WEBCOMICS for finding those diamonds in the rough. Unfortunately there’s always going to be a whole lot of “rough”.

I ran out of glue stick, so I had to stop… but here’s a look at the second wall section in the office. I decided on Jack Kirby’s “Mister Miracle” because it’s the wall where my Harry Houdini poster hangs. Both were masters of escapism!

Also, I had the idea for bigger splash images to somehow be casually leaping out of the wall for a 3D like effect. My wife suggested making an accordion shaped attachment so if you pushed it in, it would bounce around. So here we have “Bouncing Big Barda”

All in all, this is working out great. It’s giving the room a sort of antique look now too.

I’m all out of gluestick…. and I’ve got TONS of work to draw, but this is going to be really cool environment to work in. It’s intimidating / challenging knowing this greatness is staring me down.

So I have these big thick Marvel Essential collections of like HULK and Silver Surfer, and they’re in black and white. I like to look through the old Kirby and Ditko art in there to inspire or infuse the composition into my head… but then I thought one day, man, I wish I could walk into a room and have this stuff all around me for creative inspiration or a sense of comic history all around me as I work. So I got the idea to cut out the pages and make them into wallpaper.

First I needed a way to quickly stick em up and something that wouldn’t be a pain in the ass to take off if it looked bad. I found a Jumbo GlueStick which belonged to the kids and tried that and it worked perfectly. Decided to do the one wall section to see what it looks like…

You can see below that this particular section is made up of HULK work from the first run. Most of the art is Jack Kirby, but with some Steve Ditko sprinkled in since he was the artist who took over Hulk after Kirby’s run.

I’m lacking the time right now, but it might be interesting to do the entire room, maybe with different sections being different characters. I have some Mr. Miracle trades here in black and white with grayscale, and I also have a Marvel Essential Spiderman Vol 1 on the way which is chock full of Steve Ditko art. The majority of stuff I put up will likely be Kirby pages If I can.

Productive day here. Did some work on some “educational” style comics, worked on the webcomic, cleaned up some writing, and now I’m about to sink my teeth into some pencils on the Hero By Night book too. Yeehah.

Odd that on day when I REALLY want to push to get a lot done, I end up not doing as much as I’d like– but on a day like today, I got an early start, actually took an hour nap or something, AND went to lunch with my wife.

Speaking of the wife, she’s supposed to go back to work on Wednesday, but I don’t want her to. I like having her here even though she’s probably bored. I can tell she doesn’t REALLY want to go back now, and she deserves the time off after working so hard all these years and helping to support my dreams… now I can afford to have her CHILL. She’s restless though.  Stay home woman!

Back to thinking about work and productivity… It’s a trip to think about the range I’ve covered here in the past week. I’ve written and drawn a classic adventure style comic, then work on the classic super hero type stuff– did some kindergarten- second grade level educational comic, and then wrapped the week up writing some humor and horror style comics! — It’s really good to have the opportunity to utilize these skills or whatever it is in my head.

Life is good. I can’t complain.

but not much time to do it. The limited “free time” I have, I’d like to go spend with my family here.

The bad news (good news?) I think I’m OFFICIALLY done with Yirmumah. Thinking about it frustrates me and sickens me sometimes. It was a fun thing at times, but yeah. 10 years.

The good news? (bad news?) I think  the REAL story is that the team of “Coffman and McDeavitt” is back creating again. Even if it’s not Yirmumah. Bob and I spent  a few days writing on a new project for a publisher– it’s the first time really that we pulled the “GOLD” out knowing  that we’d be paid to do so. And honestly, we created something SO friggin cool and hilarious…. wow. I almost look forward to just writing as a team like that for long periods to come. It really does beat the feeling of despair and frustration that would often come with other projects. All those years doing Gravity, Zombieopolis, Yirmumah… we were just honing our skills that we can now put to good use. It almost feels like we’re a company or “studio” for good ideas here. Just give us ANYTHING and we’ll turn it into GOLD. Guaranteed.

Still psyched in my head about all the cool stuff going on with Hero By Night too. Such an awesome opportunity to really reinvent a genre. It’s so much fun. If you haven’t checked out the adventure comic yet online, you should. 

Rest of the night OFF for me…. I think we earned it.

So I’m in the ol’ office busting out some inks on webcomic strips for Hero By Night this morning. This afternoon I have to go to a surprise party for my father in law. Don’t worry, I didn’t ruin the surprise because he’s an old school, tough as nails railroader guy who won’t go near a computer. And I doubt he has google alerts or twitter set to send messages to his phone.

Yesterday I had a great conversation with Sean O’Reilly, the new publisher at Platinum Studios. It was refreshing, because honestly it was like talking to a clone of myself. He knows what’s up, that’s probably the only way I could put it. I’ll be honest, I was a little weary of a new guy coming on board who is also running another comic company and didn’t know how that would work, or I was worried maybe it would be a conflict of interest in some ways. But I can sense the guy is dedicated to doing the right thing for Platinum and for Hero By Night, which in turn is amazingly awesome for me. I never really stop to think how awesome things are right now… a week or so ago I did a radio interview with a new show called “Geek Nation” and the host said something like that… if he could go back two years ago and tell me I’d be producing an ongoing, acclaimed super hero series, what would I say? I don’t know what I would have said… but right now, I’m thinking along the lines of… life is awesome at the moment.

One thing about Sean that juiced me up… he GETS my plan I’ve been talking about for years now. Maybe because he’s been a school teacher (I think?) at some point, but I’ve been wanting to reach a NEW generation of kids with Hero By Night. Give the new generation of kids a new super hero icon of their own… when they’re 14 or 16 and think “super hero” I want them to think HERO BY NIGHT. And guess what? We have a way to do it and we’re working on it as we speak. It’s pretty exciting stuff.

It’s no offense to the current super hero icons out there. It’s not like I wouldn’t love to draw or write Batman or Spider-Man or something… but honestly, Jack Kirby is telling me that we need something NEW. So that’s what I’ve been focusing on in my work here. If anyone read my old blog posts on the other blogs, when I was writing and creating Hero By Night, I was trying to instill something CLASSIC in it, a classic origin…something EVERYONE gets. And we did it.  My other friend says “WE??” it was all YOU. Well I just don’t think that way. If it had just been ME creating Hero By Night on my own and putting it online and doing all the coloring and writing and promotion myself, it wouldn’t have gone as far as it has. It was an alchemic recipe of its own….  The stars aligned with Comic Book Challenge, winning that… finding my old inker friend was now an amazing colorist with the speed and passion to produce– Platinum’s backing, plus allowing me to fully pursue my complete vision for this project… and now it’s a continuing build on this recipe as I bring on another old friend and great writer, James Patrick, who is helping to write out all the crazy plots in my head and make them into a cohesive thing. So when I say “WE” i mean everyone who had a part in making HBN happen, including the people who voted for it in the CBC.

Alright– enough mind-dumping. I have stuff to ink, then an inlaw party to go to. Wee-hoo!

Way back in 2000 I started my first blog. “blogging” wasn’t even really a THING. I actually started the blog there as a way for readers our daily comic strip “Gravity” to sort of peek into the mind or daily life of the cartoonist. Back then, many other cartoonists I knew thought it was a dumb idea, and they liked the idea of having a “private” life. But I was always pushing for transparency of some kind for some reason. So, over the past 7 years I’ve been blogging all over the place at most of my project sites– it got to the point where there were TOO many places to update, and I couldn’t decide where to have just thoughts FOR ME or not pushing a project. The YIrmumah blog became a pimping place for the Hero By Night project, and the Hero By Night blog was just for that…. and all in all I had no place for me to just TALK or write out the thoughts that were in my head.

So here I am at djcoffman.com - where I had setup a blog ages ago but never updated it, just a simple “contact” me sort of place. I’ve been very busy over the past year working on the Hero By Night project, which many of my “blogs” would end up being about. But i was recently having a conversation with someone I respect and we were talking about being in the business of this and that… the comics business… the marketing business… the hollywood business… and I said, hey, I honestly just think I’m in the “D.J. Coffman” business, first and foremost. So that’s when it dawned on me that I have a blog at DJCOFFMAN.COM that I never use.

I’ll let people find it here themselves, ego surfing in on google alerts about their own names, or alerts about “Platinum Studios”, whom I gladly work for– I won’t be pimping this site out. I think of it as me talking to myself at my tiki bar. If you’re a friend and want to know what’s on my mind, or maybe what’s going on with my work or family life… well then bookmark this page or subscribe to the RSS feed or something.

It’s funny, that many of the same cartoonists who thought “blogging” was stupid, now it’s just a common thing. Not that I pride myself as an innovator of such things, but I’m always trying to use new tools to better stay in touch with my readers, fans, friends and family. I feel lucky to have them all. In fact, I’ve been trying NOT to blog about my personal thoughts because they would often get me in trouble or start “drama” online that would interfere with my work time, etc. I’m not going to participate in that at all, but I do find myself blogging inside my head while I shower or draw… conversations… contemplating things… thinking about the future.

It’s also a trip to think, ages from now, when I’m long dead, that my own kids and grandkids will find these writings pretty easily on their holo-computers or brain chip implants and be able to read what I thought. I find that as a fascinating thought. So once again, I’ll do this as a kind of therapy to get the thoughts out of my head.

I also have a FACEBOOK (i hate myspace for some reason) and I have a Twitter feed which I update occassionally with random thoughts.