When the cat is away...

...the other cats spend the company dough.

Zander is on vacation up in his family compound somewhere and we can't reach him to tell him:

1. That we got a really cool gig doing an interactive thing with J. Otto Seibold thanks to our interactive sugar daddy...Ham in the Fridge design. We're huge fans of Jotto..so this is an honor.

2. That we bought a really shiny box to help it (among other things) along. The processor power on the G4s here are lousy for all the vector stuff we've been doing lately, so we blew some money. I've been really proud of BTA's stingy-ness to this point. It's really easy for start-up firms to want to outfit themselves with the latest stuff, but we've been pragmatic and suffered through slow filter rendering and long opening times to keep our overhead low and pass the saving on to....us.

Zander, if you're reading this...this is what you have to come home to...you can name it.

Action Bike Cop Exposed.

This is another one for the ladies. Kevin straps on a patriot bicycle helmet on occasion to slip out of the hum-drum world of a working cartoonist into Action Bike Cop. He has a gun, he needs a bike. What is Action Bike Cop all about?..Zander and I don't know either...but he seems to have replaced "Alaska Kevin."

More on Kevin's many personalities later.

New Superhero of the Day:

24 Hour Comics Link

Someone sent a nice email about Kevin's 24 hour comic today, and I remembered we never had a link from our own site. Zander and Kevin had their comics chosen to be in the big national collection. Every year, people from all over the world try to create 24 pages of comics in 24 hours. This is no small feat when "a page a day" is a great rate for most cartoonists. Check them out:

http://www.bigtimeattic.com/comics/24hour/

"What are you working on?"

We do run-downs in our newsletter but haven't talked about any projects on the blog yet.

Here's what's confirmed over the next couple months:

-A follow up to the "Space Weather" comic called "Space Junk" commissioned by the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration.

-A comic on Geomagnetism for the US Geologic Survey.

-Finishing appendix art and book design for "Bone Sharps, Cowboys, and Thunder Lizards."

-An unannounced comic writing project for one of the big two.

-Layouts for a short comic story and complete art for another short comic story.

-Design/animation/illustration of a Flash game for a TV network's website.

AND

-Design of the Action City family fun center.

Here's a peek at what Action City is all about:


Click for a larger image.

The foundation is in and walls should be up when we pass through Eau Claire, Wisconsin on our way to Wizard World Chicago on August 5th. We've been working on Action City for a few months now, so it's exciting as heck to hear word that "your volcano hole has been poured."

The next two months are going to be intense for BTA, and we should come out of them with publisher lined up for our next graphic novel.

Disease

It's culling time in north Minneapolis. The big tree in front of Zander's house is marked for take-down and his camera phone caught this one coming down in front of our neighbor's house. It's heartbreaking to see mature trees felled. I'm feeling like this tree. I've been having sweaty fever fits and coughing up death every since San Diego and want to lay down too.

Zander and Kevin are on vacation so no one is answering the phones when I try to call in sick. I'm hacking while I hack.

Daily Pic: Car's B**tch.

Car the Cat on a way-too-long make-out session with Kevin's hair.

San Diego Comic Con last batch.

Kevin boogies with the bird people.
CAKE CAPTAIN AMERICA! It was great to see Cake Captain America again this year and Kevin and Sarah got a taste of his delicious frosted veneer.

Day off.

We're trying to take a day off.

I surrounded myself with books, movies, and laundry but still can't help but think I should get a jumpstart on tomorrow's work. We're doing some game design that we can't talk about and I've found myself in front of the computer TWICE already ready to work on projects. INSTEAD, I'll post pictures of my wife.

She woke up at 6:00 this morning to begin making a dress out of phone books for a recycled fashion show charity thing. She called me in San Diego to see if I wanted to go, but I declined, it's hard to think about having fun dressing up when you're surrounded by sweaty Klingons.


Jessica wears astroturf and curtains?, Jolynn wears VHS tape, and Anna in the yellow pages.


Yellow pages shoes.

I hope they're having fun. Jolynn's dress wasn't the mess it looks like here, there was a really cool pattern to it, and the tape thing is appropriate as she's a film editor, check out her new movie The Fearless Freaks.

San Diego Comic Con

San Diego Comic Con

San Diego Comic Con

Daily Pic: San Diego Comic Con

Don't cross the streams.

Daily Pic: The Bone Sharps Crew.

We were glad to have dinner tonight with Jim Ottaviani, writer/publisher of "Bone Sharps, Cowboys, and Thunder Lizards." It's great fun to give away free preview copies to the San Diego crowds. It looks like we're on track to get the book out a month earlier than we thought it was going to be published, so we might need to have a combo Kevin/Shad birthday Thunder Lizards release party in September...right?

San Diego Set-Up

While our new graphic novel "Bone Sharps, Cowboys, and Thunder Lizards" will not be printed in time for Comic-Con, we're going to start selling original pages from the book as well as buttons, a new poster, original art, and books from the pre-BTA era. We've also got a big binder of interactive projects, posters, and commercial work that people should stop by and check out. Some of this stuff can't be shown online due to non-disclosure agreements but we're proud of it and are allowed to show it off in person.

We'll have two locations this year, one at Cold Cut's Indy Island booth #1901 which is RIGHT NEXT to the entrance in Hall B2. We'll be sharing a table with our Writer/Publisher on Bone Sharps, Jim Ottaviani. We've been working with Jim for nearly a year on the book, so we're eager to spend some face time with him. (In fact, Kevin has never met him!)



Zander was offered an Artist's Alley table this year, which is too good to pass up, so you can find us rotating between the two tables. It's table GG-05 in Hall H. Zander will have a TON of original art.



Rotating to two different tables sound like a great idea until you map it out.



I worked it out to 1440', that's a little over 1/4 of a mile between the two! It's one heck of a scenic walk though, Storm Troopers, Klingons, Super Heroes, and Nerds!

One Year Later...

Like everyone else in our line of business, we'll be at the San Diego Comic-Con from the 13th to the 17th. It was at last year's Comic-Con that Zander flew in directly from Japan to meet Shad and I at the Hotel Coronado for our first real-life Big Time Attic meeting.

I remember last year's Con like it was only 360-odd days ago: I picked up Shad and Zander outside the Con in the car I was borrowing from an old high school buddy. We drove to the Hotel Coronado and sat down in their fancy restaurant overlooking the Pacific. The waitress was visibly irritated when we only ordered milkshakes and talked about comic books and other non-rich person things for hours on end. That was our first official meeting as Big Time Attic. Tax write-off!

Daily Pic: BTA Headquarters Under Attack!

A week ago someone drove a stolen car up to the garage behind BTA and lit the car on fire. Luckly, there wasn't much damage done, but it made for an exciting evening. I was startled while working on the Action City brochure, Action City indeed!

Daily Pic: Last Page

Zander puts the final touches on the last page of our graphic novel (with Jim Ottaviani) "Bone Sharps, Cowboys, and Thunder Lizards." Woohoo! The lineart is done!

Daily Pic: Electric Frankenstein

A camera phone picture of our hand screen printed Electric Frankenstein poster on the drying racks. Our exposure unit is on the fritz so Lonny Unitus helped us pull these prints at his not-in-the-basement studio he shares with Amy Jo and Burlesque Design. Thanks Lon! These posters are limited to an edition of 90 and will be for sale at the San Diego Comic-Con. We'll have a better image of the poster after the con.