D.J. Coffman - Sequential Artist, Thinker

Keeping my head down here, lots of work to get done before Wizard World Los Angeles. Might have to pull some late nights here to get ahead.

I’ve been getting some nice emails from people discovering Hero By Night this week. That feels nice, the people who are randomly finding it in stores or just giving it a shot and it surprises them like this:

“Mr. Coffman, I saw your book on the shelves a few weeks ago and I held off on picking it up because I’m usually leary of new indy super hero titles because they usually end abruptly or disappear, but I took a chance because I loved the cover. All I can say is WOW! You guys have a really oddly unique book here. I can’t put my finger on why it’s different than other super hero books I read, but it’s definitely on my pull list now. I started reading the online comics too slowly, great stuff - Ray F.”

“Oddly unique”, he says. That’s interesting. But yeah, there is some sort of feeling after you read our book. A modern day nostalgia, maybe? I don’t know.

I also find it funny that I see the issues showing up on bittorrent sites. Now, you’d think that would bug me, people passing it around for free– but nope– someone took the time to SCAN in each page, ads and all! And I see there are like 60-75 people seeding the files. On one tracker I see there’s 170 people seeding it. (seeding means they have the file and they’re allowing other people to download from them) — and I see random people leeching the files, 30 at a time… so the way I figure it, this is sort of the new TRADE market. Instead of kids showing up at the bus stop to swap Spider-Man comics, they’re doing it online now. And it’s gotta be a labor of love for someone to sit there and do decent high rez scans of the pages. Even though… I’d like people to go read the comics at herobynight.com because the free pages there look SO much better.

I saw a politician of talking head on the tube yesterday saying “times are changing” — no, times have CHANGED. It’s a whole new world out here, and a lot of companies and industries haven’t truly figured that out. Just surfing along trends isn’t enough. That doesn’t make you “new media”. They need to start thinking like pioneers I think.

Yesterday was a bust work wise, I guess my brain wasn’t in it for getting any pages done. Did some layouts, and practiced drawing women most of the day. Getting a little rusty there. So, today I gotta bust butt and make up for yesterday’s lackadaisical slump.  Here’s a brain dump…

- Congrats to the “Croz”, Chris Crosby has bought out 100% of Keenspot and will be making some interesting changes and direction for the company. Now he can become a real entertainment tycoon!

- There’s still time for folks to preorder Issue 3 of Hero By Night. I hope everybody does, it’s a doozy! Seriously, call up a shop and tell them to carry it!

-  I think I may do more life drawing from reference. It’s fun. Just gotta find the time. A Sunday afternoon?

- A tip for good reference of fists and arms, is to tear apart an action figure and have a couple cool arms in your side tray, so you can see fists and hands from different angles. See, those broken toys can be of some use and they take up less space!

- I need to brush up on my ukulele soon. Been neglecting that as well, but it’s like riding a bicycle.

- Still pondering the future of comics here. No matter which way my mind goes, it always ends up on the web. Webcomics will be the savior of the artform, comic strips, comic books– sequential media of all kinds. Remind people in 2038 that I said that and believed it.

- Still wish I had a magic wand to make my wife feel better. No, not THAT kind of wand! Wait-a-sec— I think I have an idea! Hahahhaa..

I think I forgot to blog yesterday. I’ve been throwing myself into work and avoiding things on the internet that distract me. Sometimes I can be dicsiplined enough to muscle through tough times, but some stress lately has just weakened me to the point where I find myself drifting along reading blogs or doing research or learning more about business. It’s easy to procrastinate online, I guess at least while i’m doing it, I’m learning and absorbing stuff.

Our pal Jorge has a cool little “bonus” thing up on his site for Gunplay, they are old timey spoken stories, I guess written by “Priest” (Christopher Priest) that is. And it says it’s read by our old pal, Wiz Rollins, although that doesn’t sound like the Wiz I know! But I digress… this is a very cool concept, so pop it on and listen in to tales from Vega’s old west… http://www.gunplaythecomic.com/blog/?p=26

If i were an EIC or Publisher at a company, I’d want to handle my business like our old friend Chris Ryall does over on his blog: http://ryalltime.blogspot.com/ - You can tell he’s passionate about projects they’re putting out, and he enjoys showing off sample work and talking up the creative teams. Even though I don’t know the inter-workings there personally, it sure seems from my outside view that he brings good, reliable creators together, and they are a good working team there.

I can seriously see myself just taking over a company in that regard and being the number one cheerleader for it’s products. I’d love to do that, while keeping my own title going, and sort of using the way Jason and I work as a model to show to other creators. I don’t think you can just say “hey, do it like those guys do it” — I think it has to be me or Jason talking to creators and being there for encouragement. And we also have the skills to go in and actually FIX or edit things with color, inks, whatever might be off or missed. Any companies out there who want someone serious and passionate about comic books, who knows the history, past, present and future… look me up and make me an offer. I could be your huckleberry.

Hey, there’s a WAY awesome page of Hero By Night up today, featuring Doc Nowhere and another dimension. I want to do a whole spinoff sometime of Doc Nowhere adventures… see here.

Comixtreme says of Hero By Night #2: “These are the sort of stories that actually made Spider-Man a new, innovative character once upon a time. Of course, while there’s a lot of homage in this book, it isn’t simply derivative either…”

and

Comics Bulletin Line of Fire Reviews says: “Hero by Night is an answer to my prayers.”

It’s always good to hear great reviews. I can’t say that it gets old. Especially on a day like today where I’ve felt this impending sense of DOOM hanging over me here, for a lot of reasons. The funeral stuff today? Maybe other things, I don’t know.  I hope I can shake that off. — But yeah, it feels good that people I don’t know who are reading this are GETTING IT. They get what we’re up to here. And honestly, the issues just get better and better too. Issue 4 specifically, i can’t wait for.

I think the universe knew I needed these links today of all days.

Yeah, today is likely to suck. Gotta go to my wife’s grandfather’s funeral around noon. I really hate to see her do down and hurt. It sucks.

I’ve rambled about death before, and maybe I’ve successfully numbed death away by using my imagination… just like many organized religions do! I kinda pretend like the people you loved or cared for, or who cared for you, now they’re like all encompasing energy or spirits that can zip around and help their loved ones by pulling strings and looking out for them. Or people who have done you wrong, they can have a chance to level their karma by doing good to those who they wronged, before they can be at peace or something. They give you little winks and nods and high fives from the great beyond. Beings of the All-Cosmic, now have the answers to all of the meaning of life! They have acquired what Jack Kirby said was the anti-life equation! It’s in all of us!

See? that’s totally more awesome than thinking we’re just “food for worms” like Ben Franklin believed.

When death comes around, it makes me happy to be alive. I thought about that while forcing myself to go longer on the elliptical machine today, and lifting more weight. It hurt… I thought I couldn’t go on. Your lazy brain says stop, relax… but the other part yells… you’re breathing! You’re alive!

Reading over Hugh McLeod’s latests posts from Texas, he mentions how he feels extremely fortunate. He’s got some rad pictures of Big Bend, I guess where “No Country For Old Men” was filmed. When I saw it in the theater I knew it would win awards. In that film, like Hugh’s photos, the cinematography was amazing. The feeling of, as Hugh says.. “being away from all the bullshit” - So open, and grand. We’re all just insignificant blips of life. Enjoy it while you can, surround yourself with people and places you love, and do something you love to do.

Gotta go to my wife’s grandfather’s funeral showing today. One of those things you know won’t be a pleasant experience, but I gotta do it for her and her Dad at least.

Waiting for the haircut place to open, I thought I’d spill some things on my mind.

- Comic Book Pet Peeve. I’m sick of seeing art from licensed television properties, where it’s pretty much just images from a DVD traced over. Some times it looks so lazy, they even kept the choppy color schemes from the actual image and just ran that layer through a degauss blur filter in photoshop. I don’t consider it cheating, but there’s this weird thing in my head that says it doesn’t seem right. If they voice wasn’t there, I’d probably be buying up tons of season dvds. I just think it’s kinda lame. — It use to frustrate me a little when I thought the guys were ACTUALLY drawing likenesses from thin air or some photo ref– example, you take a famous guys face and some reference, but suddenly you can draw him not just in that one position, but acting out original motions through an entire scene. Not just still poses and screenshots. That’s what most “realistic” comics look like to me, and it’s bland and boring. I’d totally rather have my own cartoony style, even though there’s not a demand for it in the market (right now?)

Hero By Night work- This past week of work has been up and down. I spent Monday and Tuesday working out a scene that I wasn’t really happy with, but it worked for the storytelling, but I guess it ended up too talky. I muscled through it thinking I didn’t want to make any changes or bother with that right now. Ironically, my pal/co-writer, Jim Patrick, when he saw the pages on our top secret “process” page, he IMs to tell me that he’s sorry he wrote a bad scene! HAH! It wasn’t that it was a bad scene at all, I just think it wasn’t working visually for some reason. My solution was to actually move this 3 page scene to the beginning of the book, and make it more dynamic and actiony, but still convey the point of the scene…. the tricky thing is, I’m more of the kind of writer who just always wants to spell it out for you. Like I would have it mentioned that this takes place inside David Day’s old mind, as he’s trying to escape Elemento (like in issue one) , or spell out the fact that he’s actually trapped in a “pocket illusion” — but Jim is smart enough to tell me that it really doesn’t matter overall where he is, that the readers who know he’s in a pocket illusion, fine, even better, but new readers just picking it up, don’t need to know that, and he believes the people are smart enough to catch on that this character is escaping his own prison in his mind.  Does that make sense?

Jim is right. It’s not that I don’t have faith in readers or I think people are slow and need things spelled out for them all the time– I guess it’s just how i hear the narration in my mind, like those old school comics that would spell things out for you. But that can be sloppy. I’ve worked with Jim for almost a decade now, and i know he’s really big on making sure the words speak strong, but that sometimes you just need the actions to speak louder than any captions. The emotions on a characters face, etc. Bottom line, I think working with Jim over the years has made me much better with visual storytelling. It’s one reason he was the first person I thought of to come on this ongoing project with me. I knew he’d never allow me to let it start sucking…. so far so good!

Long story short, yesterday was really productive, and I jammed out the 3 page scene in loose pencils and scanned them in for inking and lettering, which I probably won’t be able to jump on until Monday since this is going to be a busy weekend here. I think it’s the first time I totally scrapped a scene that was already drawn, but I’m now really happy with how this issue will open. It’s “Cool.”

All righty– swigging my coffee and headed out to chop my ‘fro off so I can look proper and not embarrass my wife.

I think it should be up there with treason or something. I’m no stranger to having my gags lifted by syndicated cartoonists, or having my art blatantly copy and pasted into Bollywood action movies… but this is a bit ridiculous. There was a t-shirt on threadless with a little bar of soap that says “Rub me on your butt!” – it was so cute, I bought my wife one right away when it first came out…

Well now the artist has discovered that her shirt is being sold at Hot Topic, same theme, same cute bar of soap. Hot Topic seems to blame the freelance company– the company blames their freelance artists… but bottom line? Hot Topic needs to pay this artist all the money from said shirt sales, AND the company that made this shirt ripping off her design, needs to pay her as well. So, I hope she fights with this. I hope she can find someone like threadless to back her and really bring down the legal thunder on Hot Topic and this company. The least Hot Topic could do would be to pull this shirts from stores– but I’m doubting they will. So far, they have ignored the artists emails.

The lesson here? There are a lot of untalented fools on the internet that look to blatantly steal ideas figuring there are no repercussions. Also, Hot Topic is evil, and like the products in their store, you’re a poser if you shop there anyway, so for the love of god, don’t do it. If the suits at Hot Topic (isnt it even sadder that it’s run by suits!?)  aren’t going to step up and defend an artist’s rights being ripped off, so they can sell a silly t-shirt—  Just think of all the other “hip” “cool” things inside their shops who are stolen from artists we’ll never hear of or who will never know they’re being ripped off, because they don’t have internet, they don’t shop there, etc. Something to think about.

Here’s hoping her deal turns out better than most cases do.  Support this artist now, visit her blog. 

Has anyone seen this Old Greg skit? I wasn’t familiar with this, but it reminds me of the humor from something like Flight of the Concords, if you’re a fan of that sort of thing.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=u_hMnT44Etk

It’s been a tough week so far, my kids have been off school and a minor distraction around the house for 4 days or so. It’s the small price to pay for working from home, so I can’t complain at all. Plus, haven’t been getting much sleep, when I can actually fall asleep, my dog seems to like to wake me up half hour before my alarm goes off, which is fantastic. Today my alarm was set for 6am, dog started wimpering about 5:30. I’m beginning to think he does this on purpose. Instead of going back to bed, I got up, had a cup of coffee and jammed out to the gym for the routine.

I won’t lie… the gym is annoying. I’m only doing it because I’m forcing myself to do it and be disciplined. Even if I feel like I’ve been halfassing it there, at least I’m there trying. I just snuck a peek at other people’s workout forms and I see they fill them out differently. The trainer who showed me the equipment, I swear she said you pretty much like, do 12 reps of a set weight, then the next time you come, you increase it a little when you’re comfortable lifting said weight, so that’s what I’ve been doing. My wife and everyone else will lift 3 different weights it looks like starting say for example, 60lbs, then a set of 50, then 40.  So I did that today kinda, but on a few machines it’s not practical. Efh it, I really don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m moving around and lifting heavy stuff, so that’s gotta be an improvement at least. I’m about a milisecond from ditching the stupid sheet and just going with my gut on stuff– but I want to try to follow the program to see if I see any results in 16 weeks or whatever.  So far, the result is, I’m tired and sore. Hooray!

Gotta drop the one vehicle off for inspection and oil change today. I’m crossing my fingers they don’t try to pull the “we can’t pass it unless you get this  this and this fixed.” — which would be BS, because we just bought it from this place a year ago. We might need new tires soon, but the ones on the damn thing are fine. We’ve had bad experiences with this sort of thing in the past, so we always sort of look at each other here and groan thinking they’re going to give us a proposed checklist of 800 bucks. Today, I’ll strangle a man. So… fingers crossed. Something HAS to go right financially here, i mean, the law of averages would dictate that.

Workwise… just sent my kids off to school.. so hopefully today will be a productive day. I may skip the gym tomorrow, but get up super early and get cracking before the buttcrack of dawn. Seacrest, out!

Slept in today, well, not REALLY. My dog woke me up at 4am needing to go potty. He wouldn’t go last night before bed because it was snowing and wind blowing hard. He’s afraid of everything.

I’m in the middle of drawing a scene for HBN, so I want to get back to that.

Fidel Castro resigned today, officially. Hooray. I’m hoping Cuba can have fair elections in the future, and the USA can lift the embargo against them. It seems so 1958.

I hope Obama wins Wisconsin today. I hope CLinton takes what’s left of her campaign money and buys a clue, drops out, but it looks like the more she loses, the more of a sore loser her and her husband become. It’s sad.  I can only hope that the voters out there see this petty garbage, and think to themselves, is this who you want to go against John McCain? Frankly I’d rather vote for McCain.

Side note– I love Bill Maher on Friday nights. Every time they show clips of John McCain at a podium with old dudes all around him, they say it’s McCain and his zombie army, and I love that. It makes me laugh every time and it never gets old.

I’ve been thinking about a lot of other projects this past few days. I have so many of my own ideas that are solid and exciting to think about— I’m actually thinking that maybe I should just start my OWN “think tank” sort of company, where myself and a core team of people I have assembled, would develop new projects for different publishers or production companies. This stems from the fact that my team can take ANY idea and make it fantastically entertaining and awesome. We often look at other projects and see the things that it might be lacking to give it that UMPH! — I don’t think any college or screenwriting class or program can teach you these things, learning that “x” factor for ideas only comes from having been in the thick of throwing caution to the wind and being someone who has constantly created things for decades… then you combine ONE person like that with very like minds, and it becomes radioactive with factor “x”.

Plus– it’s fun to create in a group like that. This is just an idea I’m kicking around. I guess I would have to workout the details of how such at thing would work. It’s fun to think about. And I’m sure there’s more than one company out there who could use something like what we could offer. While I’m at it, I should just include some part of this imaginary company to be a sort of “agency” for representing other creators or specialists in comic creation. I often get people coming to me and asking “hey, do you know how to do this and that?” — “Hey, do you know someone who can draw this style?” — and I love helping out and setting things up– but now i’m thinking maybe I should start seeing that as a business? We’ll see. Gotta put these kids through college somehow, you know?

Playing catchup with a bunch of bills this week. Not fun. Me go draw now.