D.J. Coffman - Sequential Artist, Thinker

I woke up and came to turn on my computer and was greeted with this at my station…

It’s an origami Llama. It had a note with it that said “Happy Early Father’s Day Dad” - It appears as though my son Dillon is some sort of origami savant of some kind. He tells me he could have done a much better job if he had official origami paper, I didn’t even know such a thing existed, but I think it’s absolutely awesome the way it is. It’s funny that something so small can bring me such overwhelming joy inside, and this is the type of thing that will stay in my office until I’m old and gray and an official “curmudgeon”

I treated myself to a set of Prismacolor markers. I use to use them ages ago for commissions, but moved all digital around Y2K. I’ve been pretty jealous of the awesome little pieces I see done at conventions or the sketchcards I see around, and I’ve been itching for almost a year to get back into that. Now I can.

The future of Hero By Night is still up in the air. All is quiet on the western front. I won’t lie and say I don’t find it a little bit disheartening, but I don’t expect them to drop everything else they have going on to address my wants and needs. I’m honestly just very happy that I’ve been paid some of what I’m owed, and that was what was most important in the here and now. I just wish things could have worked out differently or on time and schedule. I won’t speculate any further on that, I’m going to just give them some time, about a month at least, before contacting them again about these things, but hopefully everything gets caught up and resolved sooner than that.

I also should have, but was not aware of all the people who actually cared about Yirmumah. I have quietly fired that back up again, and I’m doing it “for fun”, the way it was originally intended. But I’ve already had old Club Members ask if they can begin paying their club fees or supporting it in some way. I’m reluctant to do anything like that until I can prove that I can deliver or won’t be flaking out or quiting in a couple weeks. Yirmumah seems to have been my “constant” over all these years in comics, so it feels good to kick those tires again, and LAUGH. I might warn that there will be some naughty language there and more mature humor. It’s up at a new URL, http://yirmumah.com — a clean slate.

The Flobots comic is quietly up and running as well at http://flobots.net - I’m in what I call a “beta” launch there because I don’t want to heavily pimp it until I get to a certain point of content where new people can come in and get the jist of the stories. Flobots the band are out on tour right now and pretty busy, but they’ll be popping up some ads and pimping it on their sites too– in fact, behind the scenes they asked me to do concept and designs for merchandise like shirts, they’ve also given me work on various websites and cool fun projects. I’m really honored to be working with them. Again, it blows my mind, because just a couple months ago, I was emailing them blindly not knowing they were about to blow up on the charts. The two things I truly love about these guys is their Do-It-Yourself work ethic and the fact they have a heart and care about a lot of social issues and making the world a better place.

Another odd thing I noticed… I had a headline on the Newsarama Blog without even trying. Jason and I would often wonder why we couldn’t get Hero By Night news releases on there, and we always got the feeling that people liked US and OUR work, but distrusted our publisher. I thought it might just be paranoia, but there were many times we sent in releases or previews and they were never posted. The only time we could make “comic news” there was when drama with the publisher was going on, and it use to frustrate the hell out of us. But suddenly, unprovoked, I get the headline about the Flobots comic, and it felt really good to have that acknowledged without trying so hard. So thanks to Newsarama for help in getting the word out for me.

In a way, meeting the Flobots and seeing what they’re up to made me miss the days of mailing out stacks of fake bricks in the mail.

Tim Russert Dead. I can’t really believe it, and it makes me sad. I know I didn’t KNOW the guy or anything, but I’m a fan of awesome journalists, people I know I can turn to to get the straight dope. He was one of, if not THE best. He had that devilish irish twinkle in his eye, and I always loved hearing him tell his personal stories on TV. Really sad to go, and to go on the beginning of a Father’s Day Weekend. They should build a statue of him in front of NBC, and give out awards in his name. He was just that type of journalist and human being. The world, our country lost a great patriot on Friday.

As if that weren’t shocking enough, I heard from Jason Embury, my friend and colorist last night, he was just at the ER where they think his Dad had a heart attack. Last I heard he was okay, but WOW, Jason’s family has been in our thoughts last night and this morning. Heart attacks are scary things, they make me worry about myself. They seem like they can come from nowhere, like the roll of the dice. Anyway, best wishes to the Embury’s this Father’s Day Weekend.