A nifty Tron-like ceiling and Star Wars cosplayers were just part of the awesomeness at Emerald City ComiCon

We’re back, kids. And we’re still pooped! This year’s Emerald City ComiCon — our first — has come and gone, and though it was only two days, it felt like being transported for months to a magical world of huggable people, endless Starbucks and male Slave Leias.

Pop! Goes the Icon founder Pj Perez and Omega Comics Presents contributor Jason Copland spent most of the weekend manning the PGTI table in Artist Alley, wedged between the Ben 10 guys and superstar DC artist Dustin Nguyen (not to be confused with the dude from 21 Jump Street). We talked with lots of people, sold some comics and prints, and gave away the two pages of original art from Jason’s OCP story with Dino Caruso. It was an extremely well-organized and pleasant affair, and the crowds were amazing! Seriously, San Diego Comic-Con may be larger in general, but ECCC is growing quickly — even expanding to three days next year to accommodate the increased traffic.

We appreciate everyone who stopped by to chat, buy stuff or find directions. Sorry we weren’t much help on the third part there. Will we come back to Seattle for another round? Most certainly! Will they have us back? We sure hope so! Stay tuned here for updates on future convention appearances.

Did we mention one of the contributors is Russell Lissau, whose story “Greedy” can be found in the second issue of Omega Comics Presents this summer? No? WELL NOW WE DID. Get clickin’!

Your humble Utopian creator here (that’s me, right, with a lizard from the Discover Mojave booth) spent the day chatting with new and old fans, random passersby and Utopian cover artists Mark T. Zeilman and Hernan Valencia. We barely had time to sketch, eat or breathe between all the activity — and sales! We actually sold a lot of stuff, including the very popular mini-poster based on Hernan’s pin-up from the last page of The Utopian #1.

It was fun times, we’ll definitely do it again, and really appreciate all the hard work Suzanne Scott and all the volunteers did to put on a fun little show! Now look at some pictures:

The Utopian crew mans the PGTI table. Sweet T-shirts, fellas.

Local writer Matt Kelemen peruses the finest literature of our age.

The graphic novel will debut during the Vegas Valley Book Festival (Nov. 4 to 8), and an entire panel will be dedicated to Drunk at the concurrent Vegas Valley Comic Book Festival, where not coincidentally, PGTI will have a significant presence. And by significant, we mean possibly drunk behind a table with a stack of crap to sell you. In addition, original art from the comic will be on display at Atomic Todd gallery (1221 S. Main St.) during the month of November.

If you want to support independent artists and get your hands on one of these beauties, just hit up the Drunk website to pre-order your copy now for $25, and you may even get Drunk sooner than you’d think. Check out this nifty video preview, which should get you into the spirit. Or hitting the spirits:

A recent post by Warren Ellis over on his site lauded the continued perseverance of the DIY press:

” …I’m delighted by it, as a toner-stained Eighties kid who still remembers having to bend over staple tines with his thumbs because he didn’t have access to a longarm stapler…”

Five/One Magazine, R.I.P.

For about five or six years in the late ’90s, I published zines and chapbooks, and yes, I used to sit on the floor of my studio apartment, stapling through the center of folded 11×17 sheets with a pulled-open stapler, bending over the tines by hand. To this day, the greatest office supply item I have ever owned is the long-arm stapler I bought in the latter years of my DIY publishing empire. No, seriously, I was called “The Dean of Zines” at some point in my life.

I kind of miss that. I mean, the ease of the internet for publishing and reaching a mass audience is great, but I might write a blog post that 20 people will read, whereas if I printed 200 copies of a zine back in the day, not only would those 200 copies get picked up at coffeehouses, record shops and bars, but they’d also be read by multiple people at some of those locations. And I always like having something to hold, to collect — which is why I’m working on creating printed comics and not doing a webcomic.

I just found it vaguely ironic that I AM now creating a webcomic. Then again, it will be collected in print soon enough, so I guess I get to satisfy both media in which I love to work. And, you know, get copies of my comics into the hands of those who might otherwise never visit the website.

Creator Owned is a cool little blog dedicated to reporting on and promoting small press, indie, creator-owned and web-based comics — so it makes perfect sense that they’d pick up on the ongoings here at PGTI.

Comics Bulletin bills itself as “the internet’s most diverse comics webzine.” And who are we to argue? With reviews, interviews, columns, links and a whole lot more, Comics Bulletin leaves few stones unturned in the world of sequential art. And, you know, obviously they have great taste if they covered the launch of PGTI and our premier webcomic, The Utopian.

If you come across any appearances of PGTI out there in the interwebs, drop us a line and let us know!

Launched in 2002, Free Comic Book Day is celebrated every year on the first Saturday in May. Thousands of comic book retailers offer 100 percent free comic books from today’s top publishers, including Marvel, DC, Image, Oni Press and Dark Horse.

Why? To drum up interest in comic books for the larger reading public, especially kids — you know, those video game-playing, Internet-addicted, text-messaging little people whose literacy is questionable? See, back in the old days, comic books weren’t something just for overgrown adolescent man-children. They were de facto reading material for children everywhere, regardless of gender, class or social status. Whereas only the top-selling monthly comics struggle to sell close to 100,000 copies today, in the mid-20th century, titles sold a million or more copies regularly.

Somewhere along the line, the audiences aged, new ones didn’t latch on thanks to the distracting offerings of a million other entertainment options, and though the intellectual properties associated with comic books became big business (how many of you are feeding Hollywood’s coffers this weekend when you see X-Men Origins: Wolverine?), the actual industry itself has shrunken.

Why is this a bad thing? Well, maybe it’s not, but personally speaking, reading comic books growing up not only taught me to read, but also expanded my vocabulary, opened my mind to be receptive to all sorts of varying viewpoints, inspired my artistry and, yes, served as a connecting point for peers with similar interests. My careers in graphic design, journalism and music are almost all entirely indebted to my rearing on the four-colored panels to which I was overexposed in my youth.

Oh yeah, and comic books are one of those rare things: Like jazz, a uniquely AMERICAN ART FORM.

So visit your nearest local comic shop tomorrow and pick up as many of the Free Comic Book Day issues as you can. Give them to your son, your daughter, your niece, nephew, cousin or, heck, read them yourselves. Because the gifts of literacy, imagination and creativity are timeless … and priceless.

To start with, I’m approaching The Utopian a little differently than other comic projects I’m working on, because a) it’s all me and b) the nature of its presentation is a little more fluid than printed material. So instead of working from a full plot and script, I’m working with rough outlines that hit the major plot points for each page. This is what the plot for this week’s strip looked like:

PAGE FIVE – SIX
Morning, generic high school. Between classes, halls are busy. James narrates.
Establish abusive relationship between girl and football player. Some argument they have – he grabs her kinda hard. James witnesses from behind lockers down the hall. He’s nearly invisible.

This is very general, because I knew it was going to be dialog-heavy, so the specifics came later. However, for other chapters, I worked with a full script. For example, here’s the script for pages 001 and 002 from last week’s episode:

PAGE ONE
Night. Anytown. Blacktop basketball half-court in an anonymous stucco apartment complex. Our not-quite-hero, James Douglas, sits on the ground, leaning against a cinder block wall. He’s smoking a cigarette. Like all good 17-year-olds should.

JAMES (narration): It’s cold. Dark. Lonely.

JAMES (narration): The cigarette burns. It’s warm. Keeps me company.

JAMES (narration): Holy sh*t. When did I become so emo?

PAGE TWO
James wanders apartment complex, passing cars, playgrounds, other mundaneness.

JAMES (narration): I’ve spent four years of high school doing f*ck-all.

JAMES (narration): This thing is coming to an end and what do I have to show for it?

JAMES (narration): I’m not a great student. College seems like a waste.

JAMES (narration): I hang out with stoners, read comic books and find new ways to un-make friends every day.

JAMES (narration): Something has to change. Somebody has to change it.

JAMES (small): Ugh, emo!

Next up comes layout sketches. Some artists call these “thumbnails,” often because they’re very small. Mine are done on a full letter-sized page in a sketch book. Here’s the layout for page 005:

Because I’m working almost entirely digitally (with great help from a Wacom Intuos tablet) on The Utopian, I’m not redrawing the layouts on art boards. Instead, I scan the sketch, then begin laying out guidelines in Photoshop for panel borders, background elements, perspective lines, etc. Then I begin working in a layer on background elements, which looks something like this:

Often, especially for smaller panels after the background has been established, I simply draw in those elements in the foreground art layer. When drawing foreground elements (which usually include the key characters of any scene), I’ll sometimes tighten up the sketch first before digitally “inking” the artwork. But again, because this is a digital medium and I can make changes on the fly, I often dive right in, which gives the strip a more organic feel. Hence, we get this:

Once everything is assembled, we get to my least favorite part: Coloring. I tend to almost always work either in pure black & white or grayscale, so coloring is still a new process to me. I basically keep it simple as The Utopian is intended for online delivery, sticking to “web-friendly” colors and doing old-school cel animation-style shading. Here’s the base colors for page 005:

And here’s the final artwork with shading:

After that, I add lettering (which is more intensive than you’d think — about a half-hour per page, sometimes more!) and WHAMMO: Finished product. All told, each page takes about two to four hours to complete from sketch to shading, which should give you some idea of how much work goes into something that appears so simple.

Stay tuned for more behind-the-scenes goodies, and thanks as always for your readership and support!

MC Lars is the "lost" Wu-Tang Clan member. (Photo by Emily Ibarra)

Whilst Googling ourselves the other day (hey, it’s an important part of … news gathering … and … stuff … and .. shh), we ran across a Wikipedia entry for alterna-rapper MC Lars‘ 1999 self-released album, Nothing to Fear, which features a song called … get ready … “Pop Goes the Icon.” Immediately upon learning of this unintended name swipe, we posted about it on Twitter.

Well, the San Francisco-based MC Lars hit us back on Twitter, pointing us to a download of that song he has available on his colorful website. You may be familiar with Lars’ 2006 mini-hit, “Hot Topic is Not Punk Rock,” but did you know he’s also a collected cartoonist? I mean, it should be no surprise that the author of such gems as “Do The Bruce Campbell” and “Escape from Robot Island” is a giant geek, but still, we’re impressed.

Lars gave us the go-ahead to share a free download of our new, unofficial theme song, “Pop Goes the Icon” with you kids, so get clicking and then bust some funky moves. And while you’re at it, buy some of his CDs and books. Because they’re RAD.

Friggin’ brilliant. All right, kids, keep ‘em coming. “The Utopian” chapter two is just five days away!