... except for when they forget to draw in Ashitaka's nipples.

You're WELCOME.

The Suicide Girls models come up with some great aliases for themselves.  Two of my faves are “Roach” and “Napalm.”  This chick just wasn’t trying that hard, but I can’t blame her for showin’ some homeland pride.  However, that name which takes the cake as the best to date (imo) is “Fractal.”  Sweet!

I think a really horrible name for a Suicide Girl would be “Botox.”

Okay, so like two years ago I got called upon by the Academy of Art to be one of their Illustration Dept. representatives via these banners they put up on the sides of their 79 New Montgomery building. Here're some photos that Jenn took:

You may notice that beneath my three names (artsy!) and that photo of my swollen, swollen head is an "artist statement" that I drunkedly composed one night, set aside for soberer times, and whittled from like 1,000,000 words down to 150. I wrote:

“I’ll try not to just draw and wait for something to happen. Too often people think that logging hours into a craft is enough to master it, as if skill were a paycheck. Awareness is just as important as time invested – the artist has to be conscious of where his drawings take him, good or bad.

This awareness can be faked to an extent, and even result in financial success. But in its purest form it could be described as love. Love for craft such that the artist treats art as something to fight for instead of a means for self-promotion. Success will come after love by nature, though other people might find it hard to define what exactly that success is.

Sounds pretty naive, right? But still. I don’t think my 50-year-old self would regret that I wrote this.”

I regret the grammar and some of the word choice, but not the cheese. At the end of "Serenity," Malcolm Reynolds says more or less the same thing about flying spaceships (and life - duh), but with much cooler verbage.

You know what's neat, though!? The posters've been taken down since the Academy's fall semester started, but they're up on google streetview! HahahahaHA!

*zzzt*

And by "2007,"  the banner means "December 7, 2007,"  which is like tomorrow.
For the last two years I watched Derek pump out amazing digital art for his game, while also balancing his work with a healthy social-life.  But of late Derek's (and no doubt his compadre Alec's) existence has been all Shaolin.  He's sacrificed life-amenititties like sleep and sunlight to make his final pre-release days count.  And if the game's as good as I seen it mid-development, then by tomorrow it's going to be stellar.  "Aquaria" is an old-school shooter/platformer RPG set underwater with a really immersive environment (i.e. addictive time-sink).  When you're not destroying wildlife, riding the crystal-turtle-public-transit-system or dodging lasers spewed from the maw of some aquatic demi-god, you're probably just swimming around, watching your character grow up, gazing stupidly at your vast and nuanced surroundings.  How does one create this shit?  With love, fool.  With love.  Check it out here.



Volume 1 of the Popgun anthologies is (sold) out.  Hopefully I can get a copy next week.  It's a collection of limited-print/unprinted one-shots by established artists coupled with short comics from people who haven't made it in the scene yet.  My favorite of the internet previews so far is from this dude Sheldon Vella.  Lotsa talent in lotsa book (450 pages)!

A couple years back, a trip to the East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse yielded Jake a box of 1,000,000,000 thimble-vial thingies, Ultimo another item to his “why do I keep driving these retards around” list (Actually, he liked it.), and me this awesome little find:

 

 

I was all like a seasoned forensics guy, except with Novocain running through his fingers, extracting the album’s contents and scanning them.  The pages were a little fragile and maybe I was over-zealous with the exacto-knife when one of the plastic coatings got tore-up, but at least none of the pictures were harmed.  Apparently, they were developed between 1985 and ’86.  Here they are:

For starters, here's Krulos and steed from Dino Riders



I went to New York a few weeks ago to visit some family friends.  I blasted through Ellis Island, the UN, Ground Zero, Midtown, Grand Central, the MOMA (gift shop), Public Library, SOHO, the upstate 'burbs, and Queens.  All in all it's a great city - someday I hope to have more time and scrilla to really soak it in.  While resting at Bryant Park for a while, I managed to sketch these people:



Can you tell that the ladies got up to leave before I could draw their legs?


In other news, Blast Off!



Derek, Hellen, and I helped out at the Asian Art Museum's Blast Off! event: kind of like a family arts-bonanza thing to accompany the museum's bitchin' Osamu Tezuka exhibit.  Hellen did a screen-printing demo while me and Derek hosted the walk-up mural pictured above.  Sooo many cute little kids elbowing for their spot on the paper!  I felt like a pusher-man trying to con the more reluctant tykes into drawing: "Do you like... markers?  Paints, paints, paints, you lookin' to scrawl on the wall?"  It felt really good to see the shysters walk up and really get enthused.  My heart swelled to three times its size that day. 

The museum's also having SF cartoonists come over every weekend up 'til September to demonstrate their work.  Here's the schedule.  I'm slated to demo from July 26th to the 29th, which is why I can't make it to ComiCon:(

And I just discovered xkcd!  So rad!

Okay, see you later.

Aquaria took top honors at this year's Independent Games Festival!  This means that Derek and Alec, in addition to having their industry hookups multiply by a gazillionfold, get to split a cool twenny G's between them.  Have your eyes exploded yet!?  Y'all should check out his developer's blog over here for the deets. 

To begin, here is the tastiest mutherfuckin' blog ever:


My friend James set it upon himself to tour the American South and binge at as many fast-food and soul joints as he could come across.  The result is loads of pics of half-eaten grease-cuisine and mouth-watering descriptions that almost made me cry.  Normal kids use their "in-between" time to travel to Europe or some shit (which James did, too), but James uses his time to remind us why God gave us tastebuds.

What follows are two pages of a comic that I started with George.  His idea for it was really fun: throw a bunch of spacemen in with a bunch of space monsters and stir things up into a space opera that actually turns into some poignant spiritual allegory near its end.  Okay, so the space opera's been done before, but George's concepts and design sense are out of this world.  This comic has been put on hiatus, however, as we intended to put out its intro by APE but didn't feel that that could be achieved without compromising its quality.



And here's a deleted page from Orphans.  I like it for the camera angles and how it shows the weird Ganesh statue presiding over these two dudes' demise, but I couldn't finish its tones for deadline.

Hey True Believers!

So, umm - lots of stuff has been going on around here - life's been fast and good.  I guess to be blog-pertinent, and to sate some of the comments and emails I've been getting, I should spill on some of the goings-on at Tokyopop.

Hey - wasn't Twilight Princess a great game?  I thought Midna was such a well-designed character.  Her polymorphic scarf-thing is like the best concept ever.  I think wolf-Link's left forepaw looks kind of funky.

Oh! And the other day? I committed Hari Kiri.

I helped corrupt a friend in Vegas before attending his wedding.  I also saw a bitchin' monster movie, table'd at a mini-convention, drove a nice car, and drew some.

Here is a house that remodels itself:


Here is a  car that'd never work in real life:

a stolen idea:



and some nudes:


In other news, Derek Yu has oh-so-teasingly titillated the public with a trailer for his upcoming game Aquaria.
And Gene Yang's American Born Chinese has been nominated for a National Book Award!  WOOH!

Okay! Ookayokay.....


Wait fooor it....


Waaiiiit for it.  Steeaaady.  Aaahnd..


BAM!!

So I think RSOM 6 came out this week.  Or it came out in the past month that I haven't been in a Borders.  My entry in it is called "The Orphans."

cons:

1. The meat of my story printed out exceedingly dark.  I want to blame my dodgy laptop monitor, but it all comes down to bad judgement on my part.  I gotta learn how to simulate dark scenes with distinguished, high-contrast elements, instead of washing everything out in 50% grey.
2. One of my commenting editors thinks my name is "Andrew."  Damn.

pros:

1. In the same paragraph, an editor described my stuff as "something we actually discourage contestants from submitting," right after saying it's "simply too good to dismiss."
2. They dug my crazy ridiculous plotting (Mutant Ganesh + ghosts + pirates + familial strife.  Add Monkeys.  Think of backstory later.)  Enough to want to work with me some more, it seems.
3. I got into RISING STARS OF MANGA, baybeee!  WOOOOOOH!  Am I being boastful?  HUH!?  What if I AM!?!

Seriously though - I'm super thankful for placing in this book.  It's a great thing I can pimp out to people and show my mom and all.  But it's by no means a culminating achievment.  RSOM is touted as a good stepping-stone, and that's how I aim to use it.

Here's some concept stuff and sample pages from "The Orphans" below the cut!

So I think it's important to set up little goals for oneself in order to make sure that, holistically, things are headed in the right direction.  Thing is, in illustration, it's becoming more obvious that I shouldn't be too specific in said goals 'cause I could miss out on the many other opportunities that pop up in this extremely dynamic industry.

Like in "Zero Effect" where Bill Pullman gives the low-down on the shakedown.  Paraphrase: "If you are looking for a particular thing, your chances of finding it are very very bad, because of all the things to find in the world, you are only looking for one of them."  But if you're looking for *anything*, then your chances of finding it are very very good, etc.

Tangent.

Anyways, I guess I'm not looking for any particular thing to draw.  But I DID find a particular thing to measure myself by.

Go ahead and type "Anthony Wu" into google.  See my website that pops up in second place? I guess I'm kinda proud of that.  But in that first slot, that thorn in my side, that hangnail I can't pull, that bad game I pitched in little league, that pink on my fuckin' cornea, is Dr. Yi-po Anthony Wu, M.D.: