LIKE OUR WORK? VISIT OUR NEW PATREON PAGE!

That's right. Just today, I signed up with Patreon. If, like me a week or two ago, you don't know what Patreon is, it's kind of like Kickstarter on a smaller scale. Instead of getting pledges to fund a big project like a book, movie, cd, etc., Patreon enables creators to solicit ongoing patronage as the artist releases a page of a comic, a chapter of a novel, a single song, etc. And, just like on Kickstarter, many creators reward different levels of giving with stuff. In my case, if your gift is a dollar - just one U.S. buck - I'll have a desktop wallpaper available for download featuring the main casts of ROADFROGS, G.I.JEFF: A REALLY AVERAGE HERO and PIG-FIST and BACON. Ten dollar and fifty dollar donations to my work will get you actual physical artwork. Please check it out, and tell your friends.

Thanks!

Delays, Delays, and More Delays

Okay, so I didn't make my September 1st deadline to begin publishing G.I.JEFF. No big surprise there. Originally, I had hope to start by the end of July. Oh, well! Unfortunately, getting all my ducks in a row before our family vacation, the vacation itself and the mild flu or bad cold (not sure which) that I came down with on Labor Day all conspired against my plan to go out and scan the pages I've inked and to start coloring and lettering. As they say, life is what happens while you're making other plans.

Just to prove that I have not been idle all this time, here's a photo of the cover and first two pages for G.I.JEFF as well as the cover and first page for PIG-FIST, all inked and ready to letter and color. I've also pencilled and inked four more pages of G.I.JEFF's first adventure, "Dead Men Don't Eat Quiche", and scripted its sequel, "Real Men Don't Wear Plaid" and the entire inagural story for PIG-FIST and BACON.

Anyhow, my new plan is to - sometime this week - scan the pages (unfortunately, as I've mentioned before, they are too large for my little scanner). I will start coloring and lettering by early next week; however, I have another trip scheduled for the weekend of the 21st. Therefore, it's doubtful that I will have anything posted before 9/28, but it's a pretty good bet that I will have at least the cover published by that date.

But please don't hold your breath.

G.I.JEFF Aiming for September 1st!

I posted something about this over at the G.I.JEFF site a couple of weeks ago. It bacame apparent that I would not be ready to start publishing the comic by the end of July. At that time, I decided that early September was more realistic. While I have not yet colored or lettered the cover or any of the six pages of "Dead Men Don't Eat Quiche", I have finished inking the story and I've written the script for the next chapter, "Real Men Don't Wear Plaid". So, if I can get the pages scanned and start coloring the story within the next week or so, I should be able to post the cover page on September 1st.

In other news, I have another new project brewing: PIG-FIST and BACON! I have written a script for the first Pig-Fist and Bacon story and am currently working on character designs. I hope to run the first Pig-Fist story immediately after I complete "Dead Men Don't Eat Quiche" and follow it with the G.I.JEFF story, "Real Men Don't Wear Plaid". Other projects still in the works are a children's(?) book entitled MONSTER BIRD, another webcomic entitled PAWNS and a superhero adventure comic that I started working on back in the mid-eighties, which will need a bit of retooling for the twenty-teens.  Plus, the various short stories and novels I've been trying to finish and get published for the last couple of years. AND another children's book, and a graphic novel (in the stricter-than-usual sense of the term - it's a very heavily illustrated fantasy novel I've been playing around with for years). Plus my 3D modeling and my sporadic attempts at painting. Not to mention my songwriting and recording projects. Well, they say that idle hands are the devil's playground; I don't guess I'll have much time for him to mess with me for a while.

Hopefully, next time I'll have some PIG-FIST and BACON character sketches to share. See ya then, God willin' and the creek don't rise.

G.I.JEFF Update

Just to keep everybody up to date, I have finished pencilling all 6 pages and the cover picture for “Dead Men Don’t Eat Quiche”, plus I have inked the cover pic and the first page. I’m in the middle of inking the remaining five pages AND plotting the follow-up story, “Real Men Don’t Wear Plaid”! I hope to be done inking the first story sometime next week and hopefully have a script for the “Plaid” story by the end of the following week. Once I find a place to scan the pages and save them on my USB drive, I’ll get to work on coloring and lettering. So, even though the sequence of events is a little different from what I proposed last time, I think that I’m still on target to begin posting the comic over at gijeff2013.wordpress.com in late July. I’ll try to keep y’all in the loop as we get closer to (web)publication.

BTW, I happened to watch the "G.I.Jeff" episode of NBC's cancelled show, COMMUNITY, last week. The episode was typically weird (COMMUNITY always is), but it went off in a completely different kind of weirdness from what Jeff and I were trying to achieve with our story. 

G.I.JEFF is Actually Starting to Happen!!

After months of apparent inactivity (believe me, I was ANYTHING but inactive), I finally have some progress to report for G.I.JEFF: A REALLY AVERAGE HERO! I have rewritten the script for the initial G.I.JEFF story, "Dead Men Don't Eat Quiche". Additionally, as you will see below, I have pencilled a cover picture and the first page of the story, which as rewritten, will run six pages.

(I guess I need to add here a disclaimer: My G.I.JEFF comic has absolutely nothing to do with the parody cartoon - of which I only learned this afternoon - that ran on the cancelled NBC tv show, COMMUNITY. Jeff Roberts and I came up with G.I.JEFF back in the mid-1980s, when we were co-workers at Mr. Moe's Subs. G.I.Jeff was a nickname I gave Jeff back then. Then we decided to make him a comic character. I've got the three almost-30-year-old pencilled/inked/lettered black & white pages here at home.)

The first photo is of the cover pencils, the second is page one of the story.

These pictures were taken on my cellphone, since I don't have a scanner large enough to handle the 14"x17" Bristol board I'm working on. Once I have these inked (that's right, I'll be inking right over the pencils -- and then ERASING the pencil marks!), I'll have to take them somewhere to get them scanned so that I can color them and add word balloons on the computer. Unless I can find a really good deal on a large scanner.

So we're still a ways away from actually publishing the comic online, but we're a lot closer than we were just a few days ago. My plan is to (in more or less this order):
1) Ink the cover, get it scanned, color and letter it on my PC and publish it on the G.I.JEFF site;
2) Finish pencilling "Dead Men Don't Eat Quiche";
3) Write the script for the follow-up story, "Real Men Don't Wear Plaid";
4) Ink all six pages of "Dead Men Don't Eat Quiche"; and
5) Color and letter 1 page each week, publishing it online weekly for six weeks.
I'm guessing that it'll probably be at least three weeks before the cover goes up on the site. Then, it'll probably take a couple more weeks to finish pencils on the story. Another week for the "Real Men ..." script. A couple more weeks to ink the six pages. So, we're looking at about eight weeks before the story starts its run. That puts it at late-July/early-August. We'll see.

Let's just pray that I can stay healthy enough to actually stick to this timeline. Last year, once I finished "Froggie Went A-Courtin'" over at the ROADFROGS site, things kind of ground to a halt, first because of my own health problems and then my mother's cancer, which took her away from us last October.

Lord willing and the creek don't rise, I'll be back on this site in a week or two with more news.

BTW, in case you're not already reading these webcomics, check out Eddie Pittman's RED'S PLANET and Brian Shearer's WILLIAM THE LAST. I also recently found Jeff Smith's latest project, TUKI. All great stories. All beautiful artwork. All lots of fun.

As I hope G.I.JEFF will be.