The Unsinkable Walker Bean!!!
Sun 3/7/2010
BY FAR, the most exciting thing that happened during my month-long blogging hiatus, was the arrival of an advanced copy of Aaron's next book, The Unsinkable Walker Bean!
I guess FirstSecond got a stack of advanced copies back from the printer, so they overnighted copies to Aaron and myself. I'm pretty sure the book won't be out until October, but the amazon page says August 31st? Well, anyway, some time this FALL, this book will hit the streets and let me tell you, it's WELL worth the wait!
Aaron has really outdone himself this time. The story is one of the most exciting adventure comics I've ever read and the drawings are just breathtaking. People are going to be reading Walker Bean on the edge of their chairs! I put over 700 hours of work into this book, coloring each of the 191 pages in Photoshop, which easily makes it the largest (finished) project I have ever worked on. I am extremely happy about how it all turned out - the book looks GREAT! FirstSecond even sprang for a GOLD printing on the title. It's pretty deluxe!
Anyway, I just wanted to let everyone know that the book exists, and it flipping RULLLLLES, so keep an eye out for it in the months to come. I will definitely post more about it, once it's out in the world for real.
www.isleofelsi.com
Sat 3/6/2010
One of the links that I'm really excited about on the new miscellaneous page, is for a site that I built a few months ago: www.isleofelsi.com
"The Isle of Elsi" will be my next big comics project after Basewood. Remember that 8-page story I did for Dark Horse Presents last May? Well, those are the main characters from this world. I'm scripting out a much longer story with them, but I will also be using them for other short anthology pieces and illustration work. So for now, www.isleofelsi.com will mostly be a list of all the places these characters will be turning up.
I'm trying to figure out if I want to try and pitch The Isle of Elsi to book publishers, or if I want to just publish it myself as a webcomic using that site, and hope that someone will want to publish it when it's all done. It's quite a conundrum, but luckily I've still got a lot of time to think about it, while I am finishing up Basewood!
Anyway, the site is up and running if you want to check it out!
a-l.com v5.0!
Fri 3/5/2010
HOLY SMOKES, has it really been a WHOLE MONTH since I last posted a real blog entry??? Well Dear Readers, rest assured that I have been putting this time to good use! During the hiatus I transferred alec-longstreth.com to a new, more reliable (and cheaper) server AND redesigned a few sections of the site!
"But Alec!" you say, "That sounds SUPER complicated! How did YOU know how to transfer the database for this site and set it up again on a new server?" And the truth is I DON'T. As luck would have it, Nate Beaty was in White River Junction for a few days to be the visiting artist CCS. Not only did Nate give a great talk, AND play about $20 of pinball with me over a four day period, but he also worked his crazy web design wizardry all over this site. MyAdminPHP and .htaccess and database files and permissions, and all this other crazy stuff that I have no idea about - Nate did it all for me in a twinkling.
Then, last night Nate helped me implement some SERIOUSLY overdue updates to the site. "WHAT updates?" you ask! Well, there are two main ones really:
1) The homepage. I was getting so sick of constantly (MANUALLY) updating the front page of this site with information about what movie I was watching or what book I was reading, etc. etc. etc. So Nate (bless his heart) told me about FriendFeed.com which is a service that lets you plug in a ton of RSS feeds from your various blogs or other sites (like Flickr, Netflix, GoodReads, etc.) and then it dumps them all into ONE RSS feed, which you can place on your site.
So if you check out homepage of this site you will see that I have a new UPDATES section which autoloads from my FriendFeed account. It's pretty cool! It's also got an easy to use "Status Update" feature, which I can use to post random links to stuff or other small stuff. It's about as close as I'm gonna get to twitter, so if you're interested in following that sort of thing, here's a link to my FriendFeed RSS (which is also linked on the top of this here blog page)
2) The Miscellaneous Section. The Illustration section has been REPLACED! Really, I should have done this back in 2007, as soon as I set up my illustration portfolio site. The new Miscellaneous Section now has links to all my other online activities as well as links to some of the content on this site that for YEARS, has been buried and hard to find. Today I quickly went through and updated a bunch of those pages, but there is still a lot of work to be done. I'll let you know on here as things are brought up to snuff.
I also added links on the side of this blog page and Nate did a ton of optimization stuff around the site, so it's running at top speed. Take a spin around and check out some of the new stuff that's up! And a MILLION thanks to Nate for helping me get everything organized, I'm super happy with the new site!
I've got a crazy backlog of blog entries to post, so GET READY! They're going to be coming at you rapid fire!!!
-- johanna stearly ferko