Finally home from another Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo! Man, that show is busy. Normally I don’t get to see all that much of it, but this year “Weird Al” Yankovic was a guest. How could I ignore THAT? Of course I couldn’t.

One of the awesome things about the Expo–and there are very many awesome things about the Expo–is the artbook, which is open for exhibitors to submit art to. We can submit as many things as we want, and this year I went with more of a shotgun approach: the more you lob over, the more likely one will make contact!

This year the theme was “Weird Adventures,” which I took to mean a 70s horror comic style. Meet Ironic Reversal Magazine, where the subject matter is never quite what you’d expect!

As it turned out, Surf Bored was the winning entry! Is there anyone who loves pickles as much as he does?

It feels like I’ve been drawing things for Ironic Reversal Magazine for years.

For more photos from the show, check out my Facebook page!

I ordered magnets today! They should be here in a week. I was checking out a local printer here in Kelowna but we never got out of the quotation stage. That’s fine, my current printer has been great! But these things take time; I really should have gotten them printed long before now.

A few people at previous shows have asked if I have a Doctor Who print, and it certainly seems silly not to! I could have made a print out of the magnet artwork but that seemed like taking the easy way. (I’m certainly willing to put it on a t-shirt though!)

So, art that’s new! New art.

You may notice that this wasn’t completely done in Illustrator. Yes sir, there’s good old-fashioned pixels at work here!

Here’s this on a t-shirt!

So I did a recolour on my previous Harley Quinn.

It makes no damn sense but I like it a lot better this way.

You know, if you think about it, our girl’s got a lot of willpower and imagination, and not particularly much fear. This is a thing that could happen. Except I’m not the biggest Green Lantern reader so there are probably reasons this wouldn’t happen–come by table H07 at the Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo next month and tell me all about them! Extra points will be awarded if you bring Keynote slides.

If there’s a dance number you win automatically.

I love Power Girl.  Not because of boobs, although yes, boobs, but because Amanda Conner’s run on the book was just so appealing and fun.

I remembered another picture that was appealing and fun that I saw around 2004: Rod Guen’s Supergirl.  Yep.  Can’t hold a number in my head for more than fifteen seconds, but a funny superhero drawing from nearly a decade ago? That shit is in there.

So, if that’s how Supergirl transports street thugs, how does Power Girl do it?

Probably not like that.

Once again, lots of changes between my pencils and the finished versions. It’s like Slylock Fox; try to find the differences!

“You sure rendered those boobs carefully,” Lisa said.

I was commissioned to draw her at last year’s Edmonton Expo.  Turned out fairly well, except for a couple of issues.

But of course, that’s what post-production is for! Fixed the face, moved the hammer off her head, added an MC Hammer reference because I am old.

I won’t be able to offer computer-generated commissions any more.  Now that I’m half-freelance, my hourly design rate is such that either I’d have to charge a lot more for them, or stop doing them. So it became kind of obvious which I’d have to do.

It’s a real shame. I’m never as happy with my pen work, since the damn thing still doesn’t have an Undo button. Or nodes I can adjust.  I’ve just gotta be able to fiddle with my lines.

This year they’re doing ticket sales in the Big Four building, which should solve the problems they had last year when they only allowed entry through the Corral, the same place they were doing ticket sales. Unfortunately it bottlenecked, forcing them to close the Corral, and therefore the only entrance. We heard from a lot of people who were very unhappy, and they had every right to be. Still, I hope last year’s problems don’t adversely affect this year’s attendance–if you came last year and got annoyed, give it another try!

Right now I’m working on two artbook entries, and this Harley I drew in Edmonton needs her face fixed somehow. And I’m talking with a new magnet printer. April 26 will be here in no time!

But, again, by no coincidence everyone likes River Song, therefore lots of people ask for River Song magnets and so here we are.  This is what you’ve wrought, people.  Reap what you’ve sown.  Sue-en?  Whatever.

I sold out of Doctor Who magnets in October, and I’ve been holding off on ordering more because I wanted to add River and the new Companion, and of course we didn’t really know who the new Companion was. So I figured I’d hold off until after the Christmas Special, since it would introduce her (or re-introduce her, I suppose) and then she’d join the Doctor and I would know what her costume looks like. A decent handle on her character, you know.  An in-road.

Except as it turns out we don’t.  You screwed me, Who!  You screwed me!

Spent the afternoon murdering a couple of trees!

I don’t really get anime.

However, I do get anime commissions from time to time, which is mystifying because my wife’s table is right there. This commission, the first one from the Edmonton Expo last month, is quite appealing: a young girl from one (movie? video game?) standing back to back with a guy wearing implausible and probably compensatory armor from a completely different video game. In a field of sunflowers. Awesome!

It wasn’t hard to find perfectly nice reference material for the girl. But then, of course, anime reared its ugly head. (Mom, don’t click that.) And that’s why anime makes me sort of uncomfortable and itchy. I know it’s not all like that, it isn’t even mostly like that, but when I think of anime this is what I think of.

Nevertheless, commissions are fun! Two more left to go! And then a River Song magnet.

So when the Edmonton Expo was announced last August, our reaction was what you’d expect. As long as what you’d expect involves broken, furious weeping, gnashing of teeth and pulling-at of our hair.

But how could we not attend? Since the first year of the Calgary Expo, we knew two things: first, that the Expo team can put on a mind-numbingly good show, and second, that the city needed and wanted a good show very badly. We don’t know Edmonton very well but we could only assume that Edmontonians like fun.

(What Edmontonians don’t seem to like are Starbucks that are open at 8:30 on a Sunday morning, about which we shall have words, Edmonton.)

To be honest, a lot of the Edmontonians I talked to had already made the trip down to the Calgary show in previous years anyway, so it was not particularly different for them. Briefly I worried that they’d all bought Doctor Who and Firefly magnets already, but no, they did fine. Big thanks to everyone who came by my table, and apologies to everyone who came by my table after they were sold out; I will print more, and they’ll be available here once I do, and one of them will be River Song because no matter how often I explain that she’s a terrible Mary Sue character who can do everything in a show that’s already about a character who can do everything, you keep asking for her so all right already.

It was a smaller show–over 17,000, Tony announced–but that was nice. It didn’t have the people-crush and the logistic snags that Calgary gets as the natural consequence of growing so much every year. There were lots of people but you could still see the floor. It was as if the people in charge of running the Calgary Zoo had been asked to put on a charity llama-petting event in the Wal-Mart parking lot over the weekend: some hurt feelings and a lot of spitting but not, overall, a real challenge for anyone.

I bought my table for next year; we always buy our tables at the previous year’s event. No reason not to! We always go. If the Calgary Expo team held a convention in the irrigation drainage system of South Septic Colon, Alberta, I would go to it.

And it would be a damn good show.

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Here’s a time-lapse video I shot by strapping my GoPro to the top of my magnet rack and shooting a still every ten seconds. Then I took each 11-megapixel frame and wodged them together into one video which was lots of fun for me but which my MacBook Pro didn’t seem to appreciate all that much.