I debated how to handle to aftermath of the best weekend this blog has ever seen, and I think I should just keep cool and proceed as normal. Thanks to everyone who stopped over to check out the things I wrote about some pretty smart, talented and nice people. I think I underestimated the internet a little seeing how surprised I was that everyone knew what I had said about them before I had made any announcement or anything. I think at the end of the day, even more than the unprecedented number of visitors, I’d say the highlight was Lauren Albert’s comment, saying that my simple observations had inspired her to make more comics.

Moving On

I’ve been doing a lot of things besides updating Spoilers, my beloved webcomic project that is not far from my mind or heart at any moment. Those things include: working on the house; getting ready to teach my Art of Comics class in a couple of weeks; making christmas presents; and lastly drawing a lot of pictures, usually in relation to the previous activity.

I plan on putting an illustration section onto my site again sometime in the future, but for now I’ll give you all a preview of some things I’ve done in the past couple of months.

For my brother’s christmas present, I decided to re-do the landing page for our joint website, The Bros. Czap. It used to look like this:

I did that original one about 4 or 5 years ago when I knew less about the internet than Matt did. How things have changed. I like how the new drawings came out.

I used the picture of me to update my user profiles for just about everything. Kind of a way of showing how I’m moving away from the slick vectorized cleanliness towards a rougher, more lively hand-drawn quality for things. At least that’s what I think.

and the rest

Here’s some other things I drew.

I drew this on commission (my first, I think) for the student I gave private comics lessons for.

Picture I drew for Emily because I love her, you know? (I think this is what she really looks like, by the way)

This year’s holiday card

Birthday card for my dad

I did this for the thank you cards for our anniversary presents. I did another version that was more straight drawing but Emily thought the birds looked uncomfortably orgasmic so it was scrapped.

Picture I did to thank my aunt Ann, who was the benefactor who financed our trip to Comic Con last summer. This is a pretty accurate representation of what it felt like. (I included an Alec MacGarry cosplayer in there for all the literary-minded comics lovers out there)

Done for a Harvey James draw-along. (It’s Doop, the best character from Peter Millgan and Mike Allred’s X-Force/X-Statix comic)

A family portrait I did for my Mom’s birthday because she lives in my hometown of Alexandria, VA and doesn’t get to see us very much at all (sorry Ma).

If you’re still here

I’ll tell you a secret. I’ve been drawing the next chapter of Spoilers (it’s long!) and also a short secret project that I’ll do something secret with. I’ll tell you guys when it’s done.

Hearts!