San Diego Comic-Con Report
August 5th, 2008
We're back home from attending this year's San Diego Comic-Con. Here are some of the highlights.
We arrived at the con on Friday and made a brief stop at the Gotham Group party where we mingled with industry pros, including wacky cartoonist Angus Oblong featured below.
After the party, we went to the convention center to get our passes and took a quick stroll through the hall to say hi to a few friends. I had a talk with Dark Horse Comics' president, Mike Richardson, about a 200-page book project I just completed and he expressed his interest about publishing the book. Hopefully, I'll be making an announcement soon about this.
The following day (Saturday), I spent most of the afternoon at the con.
I signed for two hours at the Flight booth. I really like hanging out with such a super nice and talented bunch of artists. Kean Soo gave me his new Jellaby sketchbook and that made me really happy! Thanks to Kazu for arranging to have me at the booth.
After the signing, I visited the booth of Kandrix Foong and Laurie Breitkreuz, the organizers of the Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo. Laurie was featuring her two new sketchbooks and from what I observed, they were selling like hotcakes. That's no surprise considering how appealing her drawings are. Here's one of her sketches:
It was fun meeting a couple of my old pals from my Don Bluth Studios days: Len Simon and Donnacha Daly.
Len now has his own animation studio in Arizona. He was showcasing clips from his recent short films and I was really impressed with the quality.
Donnacha is at Dreamworks and he was featuring a couple of gorgeous sketchbooks filled with his distinctive line work. I was delighted when he gave me one of his book. Check out his work here.
As always, it was a pleasure talking with Strangers in Paradise creator, Terry Moore. Terry gave me 3 issues of his brand new comic series, Echo. I'm really excited to see where Terry will take us this time.
Other highlights included:
Chatting up with comics authority, Bud Plant; designer supreme, Pascal Campion; and skate and surf culture artist Randall Christopher who gave me a copy of his new comics, "the FELLOWSHIP of the PARAKEET" which continues the adventures of Kleeman and Mike.
On Saturday night, Nancy and I had dinner with Sabina Spencer and Gary Kurtz. Since the beginning of the year, I've been production designing Sabina's wonderful science fiction/fantasy story. They gave me a copy of the investors kit they've put together and it looks very impressive. I'm really enjoying working on this project and with Gary's expertise as a producer, I'm confident that it will launch into full production soon.
After dinner, we all went to the WGA party (Writer's Guild of America) where we met up with Stan Berkowitz who's currently writing the screenplay for our movie. At the party, I ended up hanging out with an old friend from my Warner Brothers days: effects animator, Julian Hynes. After a few drinks and dessert, we headed back to our friends condo for a good night sleep.
On Sunday, we started our treck back to Washington State, making several stops on the way, including a really fun day in Portland.
