Haha, of course I forgot to write about this last week: CANNONBALL FIST IS NOW ONLINE.

I launched the comic last Thursday with the first ten pages of the comic, with new pages coming in every Tuesday and Thursday. And hey, today is Thursday so that means a new page has gone up! Go check it out!
I need to start hustling on this, promoting it and spreading the word, but…I’m not really sure how to do that just yet. Other Sleep was more of a serious graphic novel thing, but I never really figured out a good way of promoting it either. Basically I'm terrible about promotion, as evidenced by the fact that I'm a week late announcing that the comic is even online!

I'm looking forward to see how people respond to it. This is so different from my other work in so many ways.

In other news, HeroesCon is next weekend! Holy crap! I’m tabling by myself this year, a terrifying prospect, and I will be at table AA526. Here’s a guide to finding me:
I put together and ordered a limited print run of Shouting at the Void which will hopefully arrive before I leave next week, otherwise I’ll just have the same things I’ve had at other cons this year: Other Sleep trade plus the first chapter by itself, Burst Reach 3 and 4, posters, postcards, and of course as always I will be doing my glorious mutant portraits and other sketches!
Girlfriend (pictured above) and I are also going down Thursday morning so we can hit up the aquarium, which will be pretty awesome and a nice way to loosen up before the con takes over.

So that’s it for now. Lots of work to be done. Get off my lawn.

My last three entries were about Godzilla, sheesh. I guess I overdid it there a little. Sorry. As an apology, here's some stuff I've been working on lately. IMAGE DUMP TIME!!

Back in April, I teamed up once again with Xylon Otterburn on a single page comic they'd written and illustrated to submit to the Locust Moon Little Nemo tribute book. I colored it and placed the lettering they'd done. It was rejected, alas, but I'm still rather pleased with it, and I think they are too. May need to do some zooming in your browser to read it, sorry.

I did this three-page comic for Burst Reach 4 that I decided I wanted to share online so that it'll reach a much larger audience than the handful of people who will buy the thing. It's called Feeling Human, and it's about people abducted by an alien that wants to understand them. More than that, it's about the way we tend to single out, exclude, and hate one another for any difference we can find, and the absurdity of it. It's not as visually interesting as the other stories in BR4, and it's way too much to cram into three pages, but I'm still very pleased with it.
 That's my girlfriend's dog, by the way. Or well, one of them.

I wasn't kidding when I titled this post No Godzillas, BUT I DIDN'T SAY NO KAIJU. The week Godzilla came out, I did new sketches every day as I got amped up for it. Here are my two favorites. First off, an utterly deranged drawing of Hedorah the Smog Monster:
Followed by two of my favorite dudes, Gigan and Megalon, which I didn't get time to color. Just...just picture this: you're watching wrestling, it's a tag team match, some ridiculous hairmetal song starts playing, and these two come out. Everyone boos.
See? Godzilla isn't in either of those sketches.

Memorial Day weekend, my girlfriend and I camped and hiked in the Smokey Mountains. Specifically, we camped at Cades Cove and hiked the Alum Cave Trail. I took pictures, and did this sketch from one of those pictures, which I'm rather fond of. The whole trip was a wonderful experience and I feel like a changed man after it.
Last Saturday, the 24th, there was an event held at the William King Museum of Art. Charles Brownstein, Executive Director of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, came and gave a lecture on the history of censorship in comics. There was barbecue, kids could make superhero masks, the Heroes Aren't Hard to Find and Out of Step shows were still up, and I was there doing my mutant portrait thing. I drew a LOT, but didn't get to take a single picture of what I made. However, a former teacher of mine whose studio is there in the museum and a couple of her friends had me take their pictures to draw them when I had more time, and I finished the first one of those today:

Finally, it's JUNE! That means Cannonball Fist is coming soon!

How soon, you ask? Really soon. Like, VERY SOON. Sooner than you think.
 ...Well, okay, not right this moment, you can and SHOULD go ahead and eat, but still.

Soon.

I can't wait, can you?

That's all for now. BE BACK SOON.

SOON

MORE SCATTERED THOUGHTS ON GODZILLA. This one's spoiler-heavy, so DO NOT READ if you haven't seen the movie yet and don't want to be spoiled, okay?

I feel like nobody is talking about how wonderfully shot and edited this movie is. Transitions from shot to shot make sense, and while things get wobbly, we never get any full-on shaky-cam crap. You're never confused about what's going on, you're always aware of where everyone is, where the humans are in relation to the monsters, et cetera. Just a tremendously good use of scale and space. Probably the best movie I've seen this year so far next to Noah.

That shot that opens on a closeup of a chameleon seems like a sly "fuck you" towards the Emmerich Godzilla, and I appreciate that. And I feel like the plot point about the analogue timer on the warhead was a bit of a playful jab at the analogue line in Pacific Rim, like, "no, THIS is what analogue REALLY means."

I'm really okay with them cutting away to the kid watching TV and giving us those quick little glimpses of the first fight, it doesn't bother me at all. Actually, it seems like less of a fight and more like Godzilla stumbling around like "what the fuck is this thing?! It keeps flying around godammit KILL IT KILL IT FUCK"**

**I don't know about other people, but when I watch a Godzilla movie, I imagine he's just constantly cursing in anger and confusion at the military and whoever he's fighting, just all the time. The fact that it was so easy for me to do that in this new one was the big thing that let me know they got him right, heh.

People are hating on Aaron Taylor-Johnson's performance, but I think he does a pretty good job...when he's around other people. He's a great counterbalance to his insane father, and he does really well with his wife and kid, and even the boy on the train, but on his own, or with other military folks, he kind of goes dead.

Admiral Stenz doesn't fully work for me, possibly because he's not the angry, hard-headed stereotype military commander I'm used to seeing. He's compassionate, open to suggestions, not butting heads with Serizawa or anything like that. Interesting choice for his character.

Like a lot of people, I was a little annoyed they killed Bryan Cranston off so early, but I feel more like it was a good move in that having him in the rest of the movie would have been too much. He would be stark-raving mad and annoying, wouldn't he? I also feel like they front-loaded the movie with all the heavy emotional stuff just to get it out of the way and move on to the carnage, which...maybe it doesn't work, but it's a decision I certainly would have made, and similar to a decision I made with Other Sleep.

The birth of the male MUTO in the plant is probably my favorite scene. I love that wire grid they had set up to contain him, the weird electronic chirping sounds he makes, stomping on not one but two poor dudes.

I'm into the MUTOs in general. The female mimicking the walkie talkie at the bridge scene made me grin, and while I'm getting tired of giant monsters with tiny arms on their torsos, at least these two made use of them. The male is like a mosquito crossed with a bat, I feel like, and the female's more like...I dunno, a gorilla? I like how she's so freakin' huge in comparison to her mate. The size difference made their showdown with Godzilla more interesting.

Favorite shots: Godzilla in the water, spines wobbling a little bit back and forth like the old Showa suits, flanked by aircraft carriers. He doesn't care that they're following him, he just wants to stomp MUTO after that embarrasing first encounter. Elle on the road, running from MUTO as he's just landed, only to turn around and see Godzilla rising up, caught between the two huge monsters. Definitely an "oh SHIT" moment. The team, shortly after landing in the ruins of San Fransisco from the halo jump, heading towards the warhead, and you see in the distance, up top, the female MUTO's head coming out of the smoke, briefly, and as the camera pans down you see they're heading RIGHT FOR HER.

And of course...

GODZILLA'S BREATH. First viewing, I wasn't quite sure how to feel about it. It doesn't seem as unstoppable and powerful as it is in the Millenium series, but now I'm really into it. It's more like his breath in the first movie, a blue flamethrower, than the beam that it became in the Heisei and Millenium series. Also, the glow starting at the tip of his tail and working its way up like it's charging? Brilliant.

Oh, and when he kills the female MUTO, the music swells triumphantly. A perfect "FUCK YEAH" moment. Yeahhhh.

Okay, yeah, I'm done talking about Godzilla, I guess. Next post will be a return to regular programming...maybe.

I barely remember the last time I saw a Godzilla movie in theaters. It was Godzilla 2000, I was in 6^th, possibly 7^th grade, and while I had actually enjoyed the awful 1998 Emmerich Godzilla movie at the time (note how young I was), I was absolutely thrilled to see the REAL Godzilla again, for the first time on the big screen.

Since then, I’d been waiting, hoping for another theatrical release of a Godzilla film. Other giant monster movies came and went, sure, but it wasn’t the same. As much as I absolutely loved Pacific Rim last year, it wasn’t the king of the monsters himself, you know? And this past weekend, it finally came, a new Godzilla movie, directed by Gareth Edwards. After the first trailer or two put a lot of my doubts and worries to rest, I could hardly contain my excitement. Thursday came, I went to the first showing, and it was immense…

…But it was also a little disappointing. I had mixed feelings. I had, without realizing it, developed so many expectations for this movie, and in the space of two hours those expectations were met, surpassed, let down, and outright avoided all at once. I felt like the trailers had set me up for a completely different movie. You’ve probably already read plenty of reviews, seen the valid complaints: poor characterization, not enough Godzilla, too much teasing. But still, I couldn’t shake certain images from my head, certain sounds, the music. I complained to a number of people about the movie’s flaws, nodded in agreement with others, but I had to see it again nevertheless because there was something undeniably wonderful in there that I simply couldn’t ignore.

Why do I love giant monsters so much, especially Godzilla? I can never really answer that in a satisfactory way. It could be that the genre was imprinted on me at such a young age, Godzilla Vs Megalon being my first movie, which I’ve watched so many times I have the whole thing practically memorized. Power Rangers came soon after, speaking a language I was very much familiar with, and in 1^st grade I met my best friend, and we bonded over our mutual love of giant monsters, though he had seen far more movies than I, and had all the Trendmasters action figures that were coming out at the time.

It could be a psychological thing: I’ve always been this tiny, scrawny, weak kid. Godzilla and the monsters he went head-to-head with were invincible giants who smashed through cities like they were nothing, surviving military assaults and bombs and everything else thrown at them. I was bullied, not too badly, but enough to get on my nerves, while Godzilla didn’t take shit from anyone. He refused to stay down.

So I went and saw it a second time, catching a matinee showing by myself. Right up until I left for the theater I was talking with a friend, the both of us detailing all the problems we had with the movie. But a weird thing happened: the opening credits came up and all of those complaints I had went right out the window. Maybe this time I was able to set my own feelings and expectations aside and just let the movie do its own thing, I’m not sure, but I enjoyed it so much more this second time around, appreciating it more for what it is than being bugged by what it isn't. None of the movie’s issues bothered me, outside of giving Elizabeth Olsen absolutely nothing to do in her role. The smaller crowd in the theater was more into it than the Thursday night group, cheering along, laughing. I heard a man say to his kid “there he is!” when Godzilla first showed up in Honolulu. I smiled a little when a woman in front of me went “awww…” as Godzilla, exhausted after a huge fight, collapsed to the ground. He connected. They nailed him so perfectly, his behavior and mannerisms, who cares if Aaron Taylor-Johnson can’t seem to emote when he’s not around his family?

There’s a scene in the new movie that has me grinning any time I think about it: Godzilla rising out of the water next to the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, moving alongside school buses full of excited and frightened children. I can remember sitting on the bus, heading to or from school, staring out the window, imagining that: Godzilla or some other giant monster rising up in the distance, traveling in the same direction as me. My imagination at odds with small-town mundane life. Those kids in the movie are experiencing the kind of thing I wanted to experience myself when I was that age.

Honestly, I went in hoping the movie would avoid that kind of thing, Godzilla as the hero, the one people cheered on and got excited to see, but now I’m so glad they included that element, because it really is a big part of those movies. They could have easily gone for a darker, grittier, reboot like the Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy or Man of Steel, the trailers made it look like that’s where they were going, but they didn’t. That’s a crazy thing to realize, but it works so well, right? Or is it just me?

It’s surreal that this movie is doing so well and is so popular. It’s bizarre seeing people talk about it on Facebook. It’s weird that people have actually been genuinely asking me what my opinion is, and that they’re already hyping us up for a sequel.

That’s another weird thing about Godzilla when compared to other franchises: they can crank these things out year after year until society collapses and I’d be cool with that, and yet I shudder at the sheer number of superhero movies we’re being hit with. Four Transformers and seven X-Men movies feels like way too many, but twenty-eight, twenty-nine Godzilla movies isn’t enough. Rebooting Spider-man so soon and announcing spin-off titles? What’s the deal with that? And yet Godzilla has been rebooted multiple times, heck, the Millenium series is just reboot after reboot with one exception. Outside of the Heisei series, Godzilla movies just give the finger to continuity. Those movies are all across the board, some good, some great, some mediocre, some terrible, but Godzilla just doesn’t stop. None of them are perfect, they go in so many directions, and that’s one of the most wonderful things about them. Godzilla endures. The monster has been through so many decades, different genres, designs, directors, not even Roland Emmerich's failure could stop him.

I can’t…I don’t know that I can come up with a nice, solid conclusion to these thoughts, a way to wrap them up nicely. The movie isn’t perfect, there are plenty of valid flaws, but I can’t get over how well it was shot, the scale of it all and the excellent use of space. I’m thinking of seeing the movie one more time tomorrow. I’m getting the library to order the prequel comic for me to read. I’m annoyed at how lousy all the action figures are because I really want one. I'm bummed that NECA made his head so small when their Pacific Rim figures were so perfect, but I’m ordering a set of the chibi figures of him and MUTO because they’re kind of great. I’m sad they didn’t make stand-alone MUTO figures because they’re pretty cool monsters. I’m living in a world where a Godzilla movie currently rules the box office, outperforming Captain America 2, and people are really enjoying it, and they’re already talking about a sequel. That’s just the greatest.

Alright, we made it to part two of my favorite kaiju movies, the best of the bunch! Or, well, my personal favorites at least. You can read part one over here.

Godzilla Vs Hedorah (1971) - This movie has a bit of a bad reputation among fans, and even I hated it the first time I’d watched it. I was sick, I had a headache, I wanted something light and cheesy to watch (most Godzilla movies are perfect for watching while sick in bed, for some reason), and well, this is anything but. More like an all-out assault on the senses. In some ways, it’s a little obvious why Toho outright banned writer/director Yoshimitsu Banno from making another film after this one, but the reasons why are kind of why I love it so much: it is such a gross, ugly, mean movie. Hedorah may be the most bizarre monster Godzilla has ever fought, a rapidly evolving pollution-devouring sludge beast from space, and the movie wastes no time whatsoever showing him to you, along with the devastation he causes. For the bulk of the movie, Godzilla doesn’t even know how to fight the damn thing. Hedorah’s stench is so awful that Godzilla hardly wants to go near him, not to mention his attacks just cut right through the sludge, doing nothing but getting himself covered in burning, acidic ooze. Even his beam is ineffective. He just doesn’t know what to do. News broadcasts throughout the movie keep you updated on the amount of damage Hedorah deals, as well as a running body count. People choke on toxic fumes and pass out, stray sludge burns them away to nothing but bones. It’s grisly, not the kid’s film that Toho expected at all.
But it’s the times where Banno DOES remember that this is a kid’s film where fans get the most upset: this IS the movie where Godzilla uses his breath to FLY, after all. Seeing him soar across the sky is up there as far as ridiculous moments in Godzilla movies go, but it’s really just a drop in the bucket when one considers all the other bizarre imagery in this movie. I think that’s another reason I enjoy it so much, it’s so unabashedly WEIRD, the most outrageous of all the Godzilla movies. Banno flew too close to the sun with this one, it‘s more like those batshit crazy Shochiku horror films from the 60‘s than anything else. And now I want to do a double feature of this movie with Genocide.

BONUS: This past Saturday I was at the comic shop for Free Comic Book Day, discussing Godzilla nonsense with anyone who stood by my table for longer than 5 seconds. One guy, who I’d met last year and talked with a lot, told me about how Hedorah was the first Godzilla movie he saw. He was 6 years old, and his father worked at the Eastman in Kingsport, 30 minutes from here, a HUGE industrial area, and he watched it THERE at one of the factories as part of some summer thing that the Eastman put on for the kids of employees. Not only did the movie rightfully scare the shit out of him, but when he got out of the movie he was absolutely convinced that Hedorah would descend upon the Eastman, devouring smoke and murdering people. BEST FIRST GODZILLA EXPERIENCE EVER.
Gamera 2: Advent of Legion (1996) - A lot of kaiju fans state that Gamera 3 is the best of Shusuke Kaneko’s Heisei trilogy, and I don’t really know why. I guess because it’s so dark and grisly? But it’s also dull, with the interesting bits like the Gyaos invasion and Gamera starting to go feral set aside in favor of a boring revenge plot with the unimpressive-looking Irys. For me, Gamera 2 is where it’s at. It’s quite a bit of a throwback to old 50’s alien invasion movies in a lot of ways, with more old-school charm to it than the other two films in the trilogy. And then there’s the Legion themselves. I’m a sucker for insectoid kaiju (see: Megalon), and the Legion insects are just so cool looking. Then there’s the giant queen herself, a massive thing, towering over Gamera, resembling a cross between a crab and a grasshopper, unstoppable. Gamera doesn’t even stand a chance against her, with most of the fighting between the two coming down to Gamera just struggling to hold Legion back. The special effects get a huge upgrade with this movie, and Kow Otani’s score is just fantastic as usual. This is really one of the finest kaiju movies ever made.
Godzilla Vs Destoroyah (1995) - The final Godzilla film of the Heisei era (Mothra got her own Rebirth trilogy after this), with Akira Ifukube’s final score. Godzilla is dying, on the verge of a catastrophic meltdown, his body glowing bright orange and yellow, hissing steam. All anyone can do is sit and watch as he rampages in blind pain, this unstoppable giant that’s persisted for years finally at death’s door, and not from any of their efforts to bring him down. And then enters Destoroyah, a cackling red hellbeast, spawned in part from the one weapon that could stop Godzilla, the Oxygen Destroyer, come to drag Godzilla into Hell. And his son, too, actually. Destoroyah’s sole purpose of existence is to wipe all life off the face of the planet, with a particular emphasis on the kaiju. The one thing about this movie which really bothers me is the scene where it tries to be Aliens, with the JSDF trying to fight the Destoroyah Aggregates. It just feels a bit too silly and low budget compared to the apocalyptic doom that hangs over the rest of the movie. Luckily, it’s over pretty quickly. This movie, especially in its ending, carries the most emotional weight of any Godzilla film since the first. It’s tragic, watching this monster, this awe-inspiring colossus, die such a painful death, realizing that his reign has come to an end. It may have been short-lived, but it was an incredibly well-done and respectful send-off for the king of the monsters.
Pacific Rim (2013) - Yeah yeah, this is the third time I’ve written about it, I know, but I can‘t help it. Guillermo del Toro made the monster movie I’ve been wanting to see since I was 5, warts and all. Del Toro made Pacific Rim with a lot of love, and it’s palpable. It has a heart, the same way a lot of movies on this list do, which is more than a lot of big action movies in the past few years can say. It isn’t about any one character in particular, it’s about everyone working together to fight off monsters invading from another dimension, regardless of age, race, language, whatever. That’s inspiring. There are a few nods to the original Godzilla in both the movie’s structure and in a couple particular shots, such as Mako’s flashback as she hides in the alley from Onibaba. If the movie’s heroic theme by Ramin Djawadi doesn’t get you pumped up, you need to check your pulse. The Hong Kong sequence is one of the greatest giant monster throwdowns I’ve ever seen. As many times as I’ve seen the movie, I still get excited when I hear that music and see Gipsy Danger collide with some huge monster. It just pushes all the right buttons for me in almost every way. It’s hard for me to really criticize, you know?

Gojira (1954) – The first film, the one that started it all, and still one of the greatest. A tension building horror film, less about a giant monster and more about the immediate effects of nuclear devastation. There’s a scene on a train where a woman makes the  remark: “I barely escaped the atomic bomb in Nagasaki, and now this?” The man next to her says, “I’ll have to find a place to evacuate to.” The next guy: “Evacuate AGAIN? I’ve had enough!” That’s when you realize that every actor in this film was there when we dropped the bombs on them in World War II. Holy crap. For the bulk of the movie, Godzilla doesn’t really do much but show up, scare the pants off of people, and wander off. No one knows how to handle a giant, irradiated monster. When the JSDF finally try to take him on in the harbor, that’s when his destructive nature is fully unleashed, and what follows is roughly 20 minutes of Godzilla rampaging through Tokyo while the population struggles to just get the hell out of the way. It’s phenomenal that the music in this film, and Godzilla’s roar, both created by Akira Ifukube, are still used to this day, though I feel like it’s here in this movie that they’re at their most powerful. Maybe it’s because of how it was all recorded back then, but the music is darker, heavier here than in any other Godzilla movie, and his roar so low and quaking, it makes your guts churn. Nearly 60 years old and this movie still hasn’t lost any of its power. Simply the best.

So. The new movie is out next week. Upon seeing the leaked Wondercon footage and the new Asian trailer that came out last week, I’m more excited than I thought I would be. I’m still a little worried, I have my concerns, but at the same time I’m just excited to have another great big kaiju movie to go see in theaters.

And hey, if it sucks and it fails terribly, there’s every possibility that Toho will start churning out more Godzilla movies themselves like they did after the Emmerich film bombed, right? Nothing wrong with more Godzilla movies!

At last, I think I'm ready to announce my new, upcoming webcomic: CANNONBALL FIST!
 
This is what I've been working on to the detriment of everything else lately, an all ages fight comic about a young boxer named Clara "Cannonball" Jayne, who comes to Southpaw City in order to train to become the world's greatest fighter.
I'm having so much fun building the world of Southpaw, coming up with characters, and drawing the comic itself. As you can see, it's bright and colorful, heavily influenced by 16-bit fighting games and tokusatsu shows. It's so different from Other Sleep in nearly every way.
The plan is to launch the comic in June, starting with at least half of the first chapter, then from there updating with a new page every Tuesday and Thursday. I want to work ahead enough that I won't be killing myself the way I did with Other Sleep. And, clearly, I want this to be way more consistently updated.

Here's the website that I spent most of Easter weekend building. It still needs quite a bit of work, but it's getting there. I need to put together a roster page for the main characters and do some other work, but at least it's semi-presentable, yeah?

So there we go. I can't wait to launch this thing, and I hope you all enjoy it too. Now, BACK TO WORK.

Hey kids! My birthday is tomorrow! To celebrate, I put the first three issues of my comics anthology Burst Reach on Gumroad for free! Go get them! Spread the word, tell your friends! They’re free for this week only!

Also, one of the stories from Burst Reach 3, Stranger Rains, can now be read here on the website for free, so check that out too!
All I want for my birthday is for people to read my comics, so while we're at it, don't forget the OTHER short comics on here. And Other Sleep can still be read in its entirety over here. Oh, and then there's Shouting at the Void, of course, which I plan on doing a small print run of soon.
On top of that? BURST REACH 4 LIVES. I couldn’t decide between yellow or orange for the cover, so I just had it printed in both. Let the customer decide from there. I’ll be at Mountain Empire Comics here in Bristol this Saturday for Free Comic Book Day, selling my books and doing sketches. And hey, I got a sneak peak at some of the free comics that’ll be given away, and it’s pretty impressive stuff. The Transformers Vs G.I. Joe book by Tom Scioli is gorgeous and insane, and 2000 AD’s offering is jam-packed with thrillpower. Don’t miss out!
Oh, and Thursday night is the opening reception for the Out of Step show at the William King Museum in Abingdon, the same place where my show for Other Sleep was exhibited back in February! You’ll get to see some badass original art by some favorite artists of mine who belong to the Out of Step Arts collective, including Paul Maybury, Toby Cypress, Liz Suburbia, and Nathan Fox! The show will be up all month and admission is free, so go check it out!

And finally, I'd like to point you in the direction of the We Are Comics project, which was set up to show just how diverse the comics industry and fandom can be. There's been a lot of ugly, gatekeeping, sexist, racist crap going around lately and this is an effort to step away from that and make the comics community a better place. I've taken my own picture today, but I'm still figuring out what to write before I submit to it...
Expect an announcement on my new webcomic at the end of this week. I’ve been chugging along with it and it’s just about ready to be revealed…

That's it. Gotta go celebrate my birthday with my girlfriend, yep. Everyone have an awesome week, yeah?

So it’s occurred to me that I haven’t really shown off any new artwork on here lately, despite being hard at work on multiple things. Let’s fix that.

I was planning on doing a series of illustrations of characters that I made up when I was a kid, starting with this guy, Saber Moon.

In the 3^rd or 4^th grade, there was a group of girls in my class who’d play Sailor Moon when we went outside. I was friends with the head of the group, the one who got to be Moon herself, but I REALLY had a crush on the girl who played Sailor Venus. Knowing little about the show, but enough to know that I didn’t care about Tuxedo Mask, I decided to join up with these girls by making my own character, who’s a bit of a ripoff of Servo from Super Human Samurai Syber Squad, known in Japan as Gridman. You guys remember that show, right? Also, I devised other Saber characters to bring a few of my male friends into the game, but they weren’t that into it. Despite being a cyborg, android, whatever, I insisted that Sailor Venus was Saber Moon’s girlfriend, and the others kind of went with it. However, the girl herself was not interested in dating me. So my most elaborate plan ever concocted to get a girl to like me failed, as it goes.

I still want to do more of these, but I just haven’t really gotten the chance.

I colored a couple of pages of James Lyle’s art for a comic he’s working on as practice for coloring other people’s work more. The comic is called Game of Horror, written by Shane Berryhill. I think their plan for now with their publisher is to release it in black and white, but it was cool getting to do this. James didn’t really give me any directions, just told me to go nuts, so I went for a giallo look, like Argento’s Suspiria or a Mario Bava film.
 

I got to color another thing for Xylon Otterburn, but I’m not sure I can show you any of that yet. If it gets published, we’ll be in the company of some big names that, really, I probably don’t deserve to be in the company of.

Next up, here’s a piece of fanart I did of Kamen Rider ZO.

I don’t know anything about any of the Kamen Rider series, really. But I found out that Keita Amemiya, director of Mechanical Violator Hakaider and the Zeiram films, directed and did monster designs for two 45-minute movies, Kamen Rider J and Kamen Rider ZO. So I watched both and was really into them, especially ZO, which had all the same crazy elements that I love Zeiram and Hakaider for. Seriously, check those movies out, they’re great.

I’m also working like crazy on my new webcomic, which I’m JUST about ready to announce. Here’s a quick little promo thing I threw together for fun. You’ll recognize some of these faces from the FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT poster I did a few months back.

I started inking the first page of the comic today. I’m really excited for it.

And finally, Burst Reach 4 is nearly ready! Here’s the cover, which showcases what you’ll find in the book itself. Gonna try to have it ready and printed in time for Free Comic Book Day next weekend, just lacking the inside and back covers as well as putting the whole thing together.

Many thanks to Alejandro Bruzzese for helping me out with this. Dude has a really good eye for design and composition and is a killer artist himself. He also provided a blurb to go on the back cover that I can‘t stop grinning about.

Okay, enough talk, back to making comics.

So the new American reboot of Godzilla less than a month away, and to sort of gear up for it, I decided to write about my ten favorite kaiju films. This is admittedly somewhat of a pointless exercise seeing as how Chris Ready already reviewed EVERY SINGLE GODZILLA MOVIE last year and nailed the Gamera trilogy this year, and it's possible I won't be saying anything he hasn't already said, better. Dude’s an exceptional writer and you really should be paying attention to his work. Oh, and I might have taken a screenshot or two from his extensive Tumblr.

Anyways, here’s the first five, in no particular order. Absolute favorites are being saved for the next entry.

Godzilla Vs Megalon (1973) – This is my first Godzilla movie, the one I grew up with, the one I have two VHS and one DVD copy of. I’ve watched it so many times I practically have the whole thing memorized scene for scene. Megalon is one of my favorite kaiju. It’s also one of the worst Godzilla movies, but that doesn’t stop it from being pretty zany and fun. This movie explains a LOT about what kind of person I am and where my interests lie, to a level that’s maybe a little embarrassing. This is where my love of monsters and robots fighting began, ladies and gentlemen.

Return of Daimajin (1966) – The Daimajin trilogy is maybe the ultimate example of a studio just cranking things out to make money and little else. All three movies were released in the same year, and they all have virtually the same plot structure, where an evil warlord rules over a peasant village and blasphemes their god, only to awaken him in the last 20 minutes or so. They’re interesting though, as they’re the only movies I’m aware of in the kaiju genre that are samurai period pieces, and Majin himself isn’t as tall as other kaiju, which leads to more interaction with people. Or well, people interacting with large feet and fists, I guess. This one, the second one in the trilogy, is the most entertaining, with some great visuals like the statue of Majin bleeding when the villains hammer a giant nail into his forehead, the waters parting when he’s awakened, and the evil warlord getting impaled onto the mast of a burning ship. Good times.

Godzilla Vs Biollante (1989) – I feel like this movie has the best human drama to it, or at least the most interesting plot, out of any Godzilla film. Bioterrorists are after Godzilla cells from his last attack, threatening to release the monster from his volcano prison if their demands aren’t met. Meanwhile, a scientist splices those cells with the cells from a rose bush, which somehow merges with the soul of his dead daughter (killed by the terrorists) and forms the most wicked looking opponent Godzilla has ever faced. Biollante is a massive beast, especially in her second form, and the special effects are top notch, with Godzilla also getting a makeover, his most recognizable form. All the trappings of the previous Showa era films are thrown out the window. This, moreso than Godzilla 1985, is what ushers in the Heisei era, laying the groundwork for the rest of the movies to follow.

Gamera: Guardian of the Universe (1995) – Following the success of the Heisei Godzilla series, Daiei Studios decided to bring back their own Godzilla knock-off, the flying turtle Gamera, but not without a big update. They gave writer and director Shusuke Kaneko a small budget, but free reign to go along with it, and the movie he made was a game changer. It’s so different from the Godzilla films (and arguably better), with an engaging plot and simple, real world approach to the monsters. No sci-fi tech here, only tanks and fighter planes. Set designs are incredible and the destruction is much more intense. Gamera isn’t indestructible like Godzilla, and takes a lot of punishment, leading to some extraordinarily visceral battles unlike anything else in the kaiju genre. Plus, Kow Otani’s score is incredible, that dude's one of my favorite composers.

Terror of MechaGodzilla (1975) – The final Showa Godzilla film, Ishiro Honda’s final as well, and one of the best looking to boot. For the American release they tacked on a weird 5-minute prologue detailing Godzilla’s exploits from the previous movies, which I’m actually really into. The plot is no nonsense sci fi action, with the alien villains from the first MechaGodzilla film wisely discarding their ape forms and dress a LITTLE more sensibly. Plus, this is the movie that gives us Titanosaurus, one of my favorite monster designs with one of the greatest roars. The destruction he and MechaGodzilla cause is just fantastic work, and they throw down on Godzilla when he shows up. Also: cyborg girl. I dig cyborg girls.

I don’t think I wrote about it here on the site because everything was happening so quickly, but my first published work came out this week. There’s a single page backup comic in issue 5 of Pretty Deadly. It’s written by Kelly Sue DeConnick, illustrated and lettered by Xylon Otterburn, and colored by, well, yours truly.
 

So there’s my name in the back of one of my favorite comics currently coming out. How crazy is that? I can’t believe it. Xylon’s a good friend, and he’s the one who brought me in on this. We’d chatted before about working together, but I don’t think either of us imagined it being something as big as this. More people will see that backup this month than will have ever even glanced at Other Sleep or any of my other work. That’s…it’s kind of staggering.

And hopefully it’s just the beginning.
 

Koku Manga was this past weekend, and well…it didn’t go so good. I knew it wouldn’t quite compare to the glory that was ETSUcon, but still. Maybe two anime conventions in Johnson City in the same month is just way too close? Not to mention the big draw for the show, the costume contest, having a $25 entry fee, which coupled with the ticket price meant you were already spending 40-50 dollars before even stepping into the smallish dealer room and even smaller artist room (which even fewer people came through). Sales didn’t go too well for me, at all.

It wasn’t a total downer, though. I had my first ever panel on Saturday, called the Creative Process of Comics. Moderated by good friend Big Daddy Voodoo, we discussed my work and my somewhat counterintuitive process for making comics, breaking things down step by step. We also kept getting sidetracked and talking about kaiju movies, which is what happens when you put BDV and I in a room together. About a dozen people showed up for this thing, which was pretty awesome, and a few of them asked some really good questions too after my dumb presentation which was missing a slide! I got a nice round of applause after bemoaning the lack of diversity in American comics, which came as a bit of a surprise. Afterwards, some of them came up to chat, shake my hand, and even a couple took my picture! I could get used to that, you know.
 

I want to do something like this again, maybe at the next ETSUcon? I think there was a panel this year about making web comics, so this might be too similar? Who knows?

Burst Reach 4 is chugging along. I’m doing an 8-page comic about a girl and her doppelganger at the end of the world that’s largely done in charcoal, with some watercolor washes here and there for good measure. It’s driving me crazy, but I’m nearly done with it. And I think the way it looks is quite worth the messy hassle.
 

I’ve also been working on some other stuff, and talking with people about doing other stuff. Exciting times, these are. Planning ahead on how I want to tackle HeroesCon this year, too. I’ll be tabling by myself this go around, which is a little scary, but I also want to try and be more sociable too, which even more scary. Meeting people and making friends is incredibly important in art and comics, yeah? I need to get better at that, I really do.

So to recap the first quarter of 2014: Art show, my own panel at a con, and my first published work. Not too shabby. Let’s see if I can keep this momentum going, yes?

[Brett]