D.J. Coffman - Sequential Artist, Thinker

I’m back from New York, and I figured I’d do an extensive recap of some events that transpired, and I’ll try to do it from the beginning to end.

Thursday - PRE-CON - I thought I’d get into the city at 9am, but didn’t get in until 11am after a 2 hours shuttle van trip into the city. I don’t know why it took that long. But I got a good slow tour of Manhattan in different places….. Read more

Follow my trip updates on Twitter: http://twitter.com/djcoffman

I’ll upload photos to my Facebook account…

See you at the show maybe? I’ll try to do drawings and talk about comics way too much - I’ll be at the Platinum Studios table all weekend.

Brian Lynch reminds me via comments “Dude, pimp your book!  It’s out today!”–

Hey! He’s right! It IS out today! I just got back from the local comic shop with some copies here– my comp copies didn’t show up yet here so I was worried that maybe it would be delayed in shops– but yup, Hero By Night #3 is out in shops RIGHT NOW! Run there and grab a copy or five. This was the first time my kids got to read it on the way home and they loved it and giggled out loud a few times at the witty banter inside. (hooray for James Patrick!)

You can catch a sneak preview of the book right now over at HeroByNight.com

Other news I wanted to post about today too, was that my Publisher, Platinum Studios just hooked up with Dreamworks for their book Atlantis Rising! That’s awesome. So they’ve sold a Cowboys vs Aliens, now underwater stuff– now they need a Hero By Night toy line and saturday morning cartoon. … .wait, they don’t have saturday morning cartoons anymore??? Well, we need a Nickelodean series or something! - Hey, it COULD happen– I actually just listened to voicecasting for some of the characters the other day for something else…. it’s pretty cool to hear the big android dude from the mini-series talking down to Jack in a gruff voice.

Back to packing for New York–  and I’m waiting for the debate to start. I’m a nerd.

Will post before I leave for NYC.

Forgot to blog this morning, was busy working on stuffage, and I had to get things ready to go make copies– ate lunch with my wife, got a haircut– general “get ready for New York” stuff.

Yeah, New York Comicon is this week Friday, Saturday, Sunday– I’ll be getting in town first thing Thursday morning. I’ve also been invited to a home cooked meal at Jorge Vega’s parents’ home. I’ll have to be on my best behavior.

Oh– forgot to take a picture of the Obama sign I made for out by the road– I just found out my polling place is the museum at the end of my road, so that’s awesome to know too.

That reminds me that it’s night now, I need to go out an haul that in… but I’m glad it’s on on a very busy road.  I have a feeling Pennsylvania might surprise the pundits and be Obama’s New Hamphsire type surprise. The regular smalltown people I’ve spoken to around here say they know Hillary Clinton is a liar and will say anything to get elected. Her trying to come off like a hunter now is hilarious, and it’s doubly hilarious to call Obama “elite”. People laugh it off here. Dan Rooney, they owner of the Steelers, endorsed Barack. He said Pennsylvanians like to root for the underdog– the voters out here who will count don’t take polls.

Yeah, I’m passionate about my politics. Sue me. I want some friggin CHANGE, goddamit!

More and more frequently I’ve been less cranky in the morning. Tired, sure, but much less angsty. I think this is a good thing. Instead of waking up and thinking about a list of things that are wrong in my world or could be done better, I think about the things I can do or have to do. - This morning there are a lot of those.

Trucking along in a groove on Hero By Night #4- I’ve had a few days in between batches of penciling, and while I don’t like that, I had to do some design work for a couple characters and get revved up to draw something different… girls! Girls on roller skates, kicking all sorts of butt. Yes, that’s right, the Hero By Night lexicon now features giant sasquatch-like monkey men, evil alchemists, giant robots/androids and now tough girls on roller skates. Nuff said.

New York Comicon this week… I’ll have boots on the ground at around 9am on Thursday. This is another reason there’s so much to do Monday-Wednesday, as pretty much Thursday-Sunday will be “out of town” days where not much workwise gets done. Bunch o’ mingling and meeting and hanging and discussin’.

That’s that– I’m off to photoshop to letter some stuff, scan some stuff, prep some stuff… you know, same ol’ stuff!

So the McCain and Clinton camps are criticizing Barack Obama over comments he made about people in small towns in Pennyslvania being bitter and fed up. They said Obama is “out of touch” — but take this from someone who’s grown up in Southwestern Pennsylvania, everything Obama said about small towns in Pennsylvania, and in America for that matter is TRUE. Sometimes the truth can sting a little— but I think in this case, people who are actually FROM SMALL TOWNS here could hear what Obama is saying and know it’s the truth. It’s what THEY say. –

When I was kid in Connellsville, PA, my Dad’s job (Volkswagen) moved to Mexico. And many other factories have followed in it’s path. I have countless friends and their families laid off from different jobs, the plans they had for retirment, washed away to other countries… Anchor Hocking Glass closed and moved away, etc– and it’s no secret this economy is depressed. I had a brief job at the Sony plant, where they have a two week training and they tell you “Don’t even say the word UNION or you’re out of a job.” — The factory jobs that are still here, hire 90% “temp” employees they lay off after 90 days so they don’t have to pay insurance and jump through other loopholes… I’m sure it’s like this in OTHER small town areas. I hope this issue comes up in the debate on Wednesday night and I hope tons of Pennyslvanians are watching when Obama lays the smackdown of TRUTH across Hillary’s smug face. Here’s Obama’s response to the criticism, but bottom line is, he was telling the 1000% truth.

This month is flying by. 6 days until New York Comicon. Hurm.

Comics reading… All-Star Batman and Robin did get better– I guess it was just a kick to my senses seeing Batman so damned “crazy”. I’m starting to dig it, and I think my mind is where Frank Miller wants it to be now when reading this. And I was wrong, it does seem a bit like he’s running in some continuity with the Dark Knight to come, only that Dark Knight was a tad saner.  — Still couldn’t give this one to my kids to read… unless I was… uh, the cool dad, who “accidentally” left t laying around. What’s become of me! Curse you Frank.

I was working on something kinda top-secret yesterday. Here’s a peek. Colors by Jason, of course.

Still hard at work on HBN #4 too. I’m trying to, what’s the word? Step it up a notch as we go here. I started penciling on the 11×17 bristol I have, for no other reason than I have 90 sheets of it sitting that I bought when I first started drawing HBN in 2006, but chose the 11×14 bristol insteady. The Eon boards are pretty cool though, and I hate to see them go to waste. It gives me a little more room to get some details in i guess, but really the REAL work is still done in the inking process on the screen, I can go in and add detail then, and since I can zoom to the panel being the size of my monitor, I guess it doesn’t matter what size I penciled in the rough layout. — Someday I’ll try paperless out of the blue— I’m getting better with the custom brush and pressure tools to where I think I could actually pencil, but I’m still faster on paper.

Done blogging– I have some running to do today and I want to get back to the drawing board ASAP while I’m in a groove.

Go read Hero By Night! 

When I read the headline about “Women in Comics” panel, and the listed names included Jenna Jameson– a pain coursed through the tip of my brain. See this article.

I completely agree with Heidi on this one. I lump it into the category of “what’s currently wrong with comics.”

Ok, looks like issue 3 of Hero By Night is showing up on next week’s comics shipping list. So look for that in your local shops, friends! You can catch a preview of said issue which is running now on HeroByNight.com

Did an interview yesterday with Jazma Online. They’ve been around forever it seems… I think I remember stumbling on their site in the late 90s when I found Digital Webbing too. The good old days of the internets…

So the Pope is visiting NYC the same days as the convention, 18th-20th. Will this make New York City even busier or what? I’m guessing so. I get in on early Thursday morning and I have no plans for the day as of yet, but my old friend from up there IM’d me yesterday and wants to meet up and take me to Midtown Comics to meet the folks there. I don’t know why, but I feel really intimidated about visiting the big big city. In a cool way though. I’ve heard the convention up there is nuts, and it will be nice to be around so many people who love comics like I do. — this reminds me… I’d like to blow up our issue 5 cover as a poster to bring.. it kicks butt.

I’m very very groggy and sleepy this morning… the dog woke me up at 3:30am, then again at 5— sleep was sporadic weird dreams and me waking up going “WTF?” a lot. — you ever have those dreams where you’ve figured out something that could save the world or civilization as we know it, but then you wake up and forget? Yeah. A couple of those last night. I get downstairs at 9:30ish after the dog was threatening to leap up onto me on the bed (a flying basset!) and I find my wife has already started laundry, painted the hallway and built a replica of the statue of David in my living room. She’s peppy this morning!

Me? I’m thinking of the impending doom of planets in far off galaxies, and crystals that are like mega computers and….

Back to the drawing the board…..

The days seem to be flying by with not enough time in them to get done what I’d like to get done before NY Comicon. Hurm. The answer? WORK HARDER!

The Pullbox has a nice review of Hero By Night #2, Grade A+ - It’s always nice to see a good review, and to see it confirms what we are trying to get across or convey with this series. ” Just all around fun comic writing.” - That issue can also be read in its entirety online right now. LINK

Drinking tea this morning. I’m out of coffee.

Last evening, we had a guy come and give us an estimate for our driveway to be paved– it was ridiculously expensive to me for what little we wanted. I think around 4500. The guy seemed honest and nice enough. He said asphalt has oil in it and since the price of oil goes up, asphalt goes up. That MAY be true, but it started to sound like I was being “sold” — I politely mentioned that well, we’d have to look over our finances here (HAH!) and I looked at my wife and chuckled something about her wanting to go on a vacation this year… for that price we would have one heck of a Hawaii vacation package. The guy sort of mumbles about, “well sometimes you have to look at your priorities” — as if to say a vacation of any kind wasn’t as important as a driveway in the scheme of life. — The extra hilarious thing to me was, right before he left in his brand new truck, he tells us “You should see my driveway, it’s not even paved, it’s half busted concrete and…” — then i’m like…. HUH??? If I owned a paving company, my driveway would be the CATS ASS!—- anyway, I think a load of gravel is WAY more doable now and I’d rather save my money than be broke again instantly like I was in February. That’s my “priority”– my mortgage is my priority… a 100 other things are priority.

You know, another funny thought about sales guys or entrepreneurs. This curtails into marketing talk too… I mean, I only just met this guy and I know he takes a lot of pride in his work. I’ve seen his signs on other driveways, which made me want my driveway paved pretty much so our visitors have it easier pulling out of here and it would make the property look much nicer too.. I digress… But he didn’t have to tell me 15 times how his driveways are superior, I totally believe him and trust him in that. He told us his price might be “a little” more than someone else might quote us, but that he puts a 3 year guarantee right on top and nobody else would do that, just ask. I might! — but at the end, he tells us to check out his website— and I did…. and his website is ASS. I won’t link to it, that’s not nice. And I don’t mean to rip the guy, honestly, if I had a choice of who I’d like to do my driveway, it’d be this guy– superior quality, blah blah blah…… but his website was ass. This is a common local website thing I see– the site is poorly thrown together and either they are paying some know-nothing a few hundred bucks to maintain it, or they decided they could do it out of the box with some crappy program from 1999— either way, it’s ass, and very typical of Fay-West business websites. That made me think to him— maybe I should tell him that I’d make him a superior website to showcase his superior quality— we could trade off.– What he doesn’t know is, my wife got his number from his website, through Google. Not the phone book. We went to his site FIRST. Now if we had gone to some slick website with samples and his whole spiel he gave us in person laid out on the site— it would probably make any other paver in this area look like a know-nothing part-timer. — The guy would probably be insulted if I told him his website was a turn-off. I guess you could say on the internet super-highway, his driveway is gravel.

Ok– off to WORK. My commute is 3 feet to the right. Don’t think I don’t count my lucky stars.