Yep, that’s a crab playing a violin.

Sweet license plate– IWSHIWR… I wish I were!

The inside looked mustard-and-ketchuppy; lotsa yellow and red with a sky pattern on the ceiling!

They gave me free stickers, which are now proudly displayed on the front of my sketchbook.

That concludes the adventures of the Oscar Mayer Wiener Mobile to the Albertson’s in Fallbrook!

For those of you who find 3rd-grade handwriting illegible, I’ll transcribe:

“Roots are not on tree.

Presents are under our nice tree.

Carots are very nice.”

10 points for getting five solid  syllables in the first line. 200 points for running out of subject matter and delving into the contents of lunch– complete with a misspelling!

Yup, had a few rips in my face.

Gee, you’d think he’s scared of his creations or something! We’re only brain-eating zombies!

Stephen wins for coolest hat.

Yours truly, pushing all the right buttons.

Aaagh! Zombie lurkin’ in the phone booths!

One chef down…

And that’s the wonderwolf — er, werewolf on the right known as Michael, with a beaten-up Carlos keepin’ his cool.

The CalArts Institute of the Insane halloween party this year rocked. Well, technically the first couple of hours were spent getting gorey’d up, but upon arrival… good music, a full variety to dance to, pretty flashing lights, and more unique/scary/brilliant/ridiculous costumes than you could shake a tree at!

And, on a non-Halloween note, John and I got to meet Henry Selick! He’s suuuuuuper friendly, very enthusiastic and overall a crazy cool artist/director.

I Believe! Don't you?

Where else will you find 1" Powerstrip buttons?

Waka Waka Waka!

Feeling Puzzled?

Really. Where else are you going to get hot buttons like these? New designs added as often as I can! I’m open to suggestions for any designs you may want to see, so post your ideas!

And a major-shout out to Daniel and the OC community, this would have been impossible without them!

And man am I a sore, useless lump of animator today….. BUT IT WAS SOOOOOO WORTH IT!

As ComicCon’s got the unique trait of having visitors dress up like cartoon/comic/movie characters, I decided to raid my closet and think of who I could possibly dress up as. I ended up going as Death from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series. (Delerium was considered, but then again, I wasn’t planning on shaving off half my hair and dying the other half bright-orange just for one day at the convention).

I was the designated chauferr and one of my friends, Chris, dressed up as a Spartan from Halo. He drew more attention to his costume than a bug zapper does the moths of the night.

Even some cute little kid got a picture taken with him and gave him a card of sorts for letting him get his picture taken.

Anguel, on the other hand, got scolded by a couple of guards for going toppless… There’s no rulebook for what to wear and not wear! Some girl wrote her number on his arm too, haha.

Once I got down to the booths, my mind boggled– how many art books were to be had! How many comic books to discover! Would I come away with figurines, autographs and drawings in my sketchbook? I planned on making it to several panels, however…. I managed to swiftly lose my list of panels to see as soon as I got to the parking lot.

I got lost in the booths. In fact, I’m pretty sure that the booths shape-shifted over time and converted into completely different booths. It was rare to pass by the same one twice, and I went back looking for several after I figured I’d covered a good chunk of them, but they weren’t to be found– and I found other ones instead.

One booth that I DID manage to find my way back to was a print booth, where they had prints from Pixar film artwork, stuff from TV and… more in specific [to my case], Fox. Well I didn’t plan on coming away with any prints…. But then something– two things– caught my eye: two pristine 22″ Cintiq tablets! The glory! The beauty! The touch-sensitivty! The visual response! Above said tablets was a sign denoting a contest– a drawing contest every day, put on by Wacom, to which the winners would, well, win a prize!

A competition put on by WACOM?? With two beautiful Cintiqs?! It wouldn’t happen to be a Cintiq now, would it?
So I figured I’d go ahead and give the contest my best shot– I didn’t know what the prize was, but hey,  a prize is a prize! And with it being the last day and all, maybe they’d like to get rid of those Cintiq tablets so they wouldn’t have to lug them all the way back home (or so I’d like to wish).  Sunday’s contest was to draw Fox-related artwork. Well, I’m familiar with the Simpsons, and being at Comic-Con and all, I figured I’d draw some Homer-at-ComicCon-themed art. I didn’t have a whole ton of time, so I sat down, picked up a Painter brush and whipped out Homer posing with a busty anime ComicCon-goer.

Later on, I received a call from an unknown number as I was finishing off a sammich (or “sandwich”, to be spelling-ly correct). I had won the drawing contest! After hanging up,  I announced the news (in a hyper manner) to my other fellow sammichers, to which gave the effect of wide-eyes and half-chewed-food smiles. Gulping down our last bites, we ran down to the print place with pretty Cintiq tablets and they saw that Death had entered the scene. I wasn’t allowed to choose a print, but they did pull out a really big super-awesome limited edition Futurama poster!

Yaaaay!!! Major award!

I managed to make it to one panel about establishing your own studio on a small budget, which ended up being a lecture of common knowledge and a good opportunity to rest arms/legs and practice drawing nerds– errr, people. After the presentation, one lady said I was the best Death she’d seen, so I felt pretty groovy about that!

More money was dropped on comic books and art books. I met up with some old friends I hadn’t seen in forever and ran into a handful of CalArtsians, to boot (not to mention one who’ll be a freshy next year!) I decided I couldn’t possibly leave ComicCon without picking up the books that David Colman was selling, so I ran back to grab one (sadly, the other was sold out– well one copy left, that copy not at the booth at the time), and as the floor was swept, ran into another artist whose book I decided I couldn’t leave the Con without, either. After being scolded by the ELITE-wearers, we were swept from the floor.

But oh no’s! What’s this? I had left my Futurama Poster of Awesome somewhere!!! It must… must have been in the very back!

So I dashed back, only to be stopped cold by the biggest, gnarliest woman I ever set eyes on– she towered above me and coulda pulled a Thwomp move (Mario reference) and shattered all me bones. After almost breaking down in tears (an act to get sympathy) she clearly was not to be trespassed. So I ran back down the aisle from whenst I came and turned the corner to go up the neighboring aisle. By unknown miracle, she was facing the other direction and Anguel and I slipped by, to the back– but then an older woman (resembling not an Amazonian this time but rather a stern librarian) barked that we get our booties offboard lest…. lest… I don’t know what they’d do to us, actually, I mean it was the very end of the con, kicking us out wouldn’t mean much. Then Anguel pointed– TO THE LEFT!– rested my Prize against the last booth we’d visited. I darted in and grabbed it, all the while the PA system telling us that if our badge doesn’t say “EXHIBITOR” or “ELITE” or some E-word on it, then we didn’t belong. I told Anguel that all we had to do was scrawl that on our badges and then we should be fine to hang around, right? Well, I decided I didn’t want to get my bones smashed by Thwomp Woman from the Amazon, so evacuation happened, our hands full of swag and bags of art and comic books.

Well, I can say that from all the exhaustion acquired from yesterday’s events, today’s the perfect day to sit around and read comic books. Feels like they really had it all planned out But next year… Next year, I’m going allllll four days (and Preview Night!) I don’t even think I covered a third of what was there yesterday, and I got there at opening and was there until after the last minute.

Next year I think I plan on going in a red shirt with huge white letters reading “ELITE” across the back and some grumpy makeup. We’ll see what happens

In the meantime…. PHOTOS!!!!

Awesomenifferous guns!

Coraline! She was one of the 4 or 5 who recognized me as “DEATH!!!!” and I recognized her, so yay!

COOLEST STEAMPUNK CREW EVER, with Captain Sarah and other awesome people!

….And the most-packed car y’ever seen!

(I sure can tell how much the cafeteria loves me by the loving devotion that the grill guy put into making this the quintessence of the perfect tuna melt, the tuna slopped on with such amazing articulation; and let’s not forget the abundance of onions that he included as well).