Thing sketchbook, part 24

I've been thinking a lot about comic book conventions lately. I will say that after more than a year away, I am looking forward to the opportunity to go to shows once again. The New York Comic Con is preparing to sell tickets to their October show soon and others are on the horizon, as well. So with that in mind, I thought it might be appropriate to show off another five convention sketches of the Thing from my personal collection. Let's get to it!

Nathan Kane - Comic-Con International 2018

Nathan Kane, in addition to having a very comic book-y name, also works in the comic book industry. He was one of the head editors at Bongo Comics, as well as a colorist on many of their titles. I had met Nathan a few years before and would always bug him about letting me pitch some stories for different Bongo titles - he outlasted me, though, because it was at Comic-Con 2018 that they announced that Bongo would stop publishing. This is a bummer. But I did get this Simpsons-themed Thing sketch from him! I guess that's some consolation.

 

Dave Garcia - Comic-Con International 2018

Dave Garcia is a fun guy and a great comic artist who has worked on quite a few issues of The Tick - first as an inker of Ben Edlund's pencils, then as a penciler/inker on books like Paul The Samurai, also from New England Comics. I had a nice chat with Dave on the day he drew this really charismatic Thing sketch for me. I hope to see him again at the show in 2021 or '22!

Jenni Gregory - Comic-Con International 2018

I was booth neighbors with Jenni Gregory in the small press section at Comic-Con in 2018, and at the end of the show, she was kind enough to add this broad-shouldered Thing to the sketchbook. Jenni is a fantasy artist, caricaturist and comic book creator on books like Abby's Menagerie and and DreamWalker!

Ben Edlund - New York Comic Con 2018

There's not much to say about Ben Edlund that I haven't said time and again. Ben is a creative genius and a comic book hero, not to mention a really wonderful human. He created The Tick and he was a creative force behind Firefly. And he drew the Thing in my sketchbook! Good gravy.

I saw Ben at the New England Comics booth at NYCC 2018. Season two of Amazon's Tick series had recently wrapped and Ben was as relaxed as I've ever seen him; booth traffic was slow so I got a chance to chat with Ben and NEC art director Bob Polio for a while. As Ben was sketching, Bob mused that "All men struggle with the Thing," and thus this masterpiece was created. This is one of my absolutely favorite Thing sketches.

Tom Raney - New York Comic Con 2018

Tom Raney has had a long career in comics, working for both Marvel and DC as well as many smaller publishers. I love the extreme closeup sketches that I've gotten, and I love the "single crack down the middle of the mouth" look that has been so popular with the Thing in the last 15 years or so. Raney's Thing is definitely a great one!

Well, that's it for now. It's time to get more Thing sketches! Hopefully I can add a few more this year.

RANDOM NOTES strike back: Allegiance Comics, The Tick reunion, a new Funko Thing figure and more!

Sometimes I have stuff to talk about that doesn't really warrant an entire post, but I want to talk about them anyway, so I put them all in a post called "random notes". Also, there's an X-Men character named "Random". I hate him.

And off we go!

I'm still lamenting the loss of the DC's 100-Page Giant Walmart-exclusive comics, so I was surprised to see a new comic book display for Allegiance Comics on a recent walk through the superstore. This one isn't in the checkout line, but with the books and magazines that are usually near the back of the store, and it's got a pretty prominent endcap display going for it.

I didn't purchase any of these, but one thing I did notice is that they all had big Walmart price stickers stuck on the front of each cover.

A little while ago, I posted about a virtual Tick reunion panel hosted by House Seats and featuring cast members from all three iterations of the Tick tv shows. It happened on November 15th and it was wonderful!

The whole thing lasted about 2.5 hours and had different cast members reading scripts from each version of the show, including an unproduced episode of the cartoon!

It was simply incredible to see all of these fine folks together in one virtual space. Between readings, each Tick and each Arthur had their own mini-session to talk about their roles. I had never seen David Burke in anything after his time in the 2001 show, so I especially enjoyed getting to hear from him.

"Crossover", a new comic from Image Comics by Donny Cates and Geof Shaw, came out last month. It features a lot of copyrighted superhero approximations, including re-colored thinly-veiled versions of Captain Marvel and Spider-Man. It also maybe has The Tick show up in one panel? It might just be a re-colored Ant/Giant Man. But this guy is blue, has what looks like antennae, and is causing property damage, so I prefer to think that it's the Big Blue Bug of Justice.

Gamestop released a frightening number of new, store exclusive Fantastic Four Funko Pops for Black Friday (eight in total, ugh) this year. Each new mystery box includes a Pop figure of an FF member with a Venom symbiote. Here's the Thing, and also, I guess, the Dr. Doom/Venom pin that came in the box. There's a metallic version of the figure as well.

Back in May, I posted about the copies of the personalized, mail-in X-Men and Captain Universe from 1994 that I have. I bought both of my copies from eBay, one of which was originally purchased by or for Josh Meinhausen, whose name appears over and over throughout the book.

Well, just a few days ago, Josh himself commented on the original post to tell me that this copy...had actually been stolen from him a long time ago! Yikes! That is not what I wanted to hear. It appears that my copy fell out of the back of a truck, so to speak. Josh, if you're reading this and would like to have a tear-filled reunion with your previous possession, let me know and I can try to make that happen. Or I can just send ransom notes with pictures of this book in peril.

I've been working on a few lettering projects recently. I made these weird balloons and I like them. Here, look at them, too!

So what else have I been doing? Well, I'm staking out potential press conference locations, and I stumbled upon this little-known gem in North Philly.

Also, someone please update my IMDb page to reflect my recent appearance in the Hulu-streaming "Happiest Season" movie. Hey there, K-Stew.

All the Ticks! (Plus...more Ticks)

There's some exciting new Tick content coming your way very soon, in the form of a Tick reunion featuring every television iteration! On Sunday, November 15th at 7pm EST, House Seats will stream the gathering in which each cast will read unproduced scripts. All three Ticks: Townsend Coleman, Patrick Warburton and Peter Serafinowicz, all four Arthurs: Micky Dolenz, Rob Paulsen, David Burke and Griffin Newman, and plenty of co-stars like Val Curry, Yara Martinez, Liz Vassey and Cam Clarke will be there! And to top it off, creator Ben Edlund will be there, leading the charge.

This is obviously a big deal, and it's the first time that all three casts will be together in the same virtual space. Best of all, the ticket proceeds for this event will benefit food banks across the country. If you haven't yet, you can get your tickets here: https://houseseats.live/2020/11/15/all-the-ticks/. And if you worry about missing the event because, say, the 8-0 Steelers are going to be playing at around the same time, don't worry, because the video will be available to view until November 22nd!

I'm really excited to see all of these fine folks again.

While we're here, let's look at a few new Tick items that I recently picked up!

The first is an original sketch by Chris Schwartz, who drew this classic Tick for his 2019 Inktober challenge. There's a lot of blue line that the scanner doesn't pick up, too. The artist certainly got the square jaw down.

Next up, here are two more props from the Amazon Tick series that I managed to grab recently. This one is The Terror's world domination speech from the end of season one!

And here's an annual report for the Terror's Brown Tingle Cola company. This is a folder that has a lot of actual, very official-looking graphs and charts inside. 

It looks like BTC's market share is increasing exponentially! I wonder what the secret ingredient is?

Here are the two branded certificates that came with the items!

That's it for now. Spoon!

The Tick prop auction from Heritage

Oh, what a shame it is that Amazon's The Tick series has been cancelled. It had so much potential and I think its 22-episode run will be well remembered. I'm holding out hope that a broadcast TV channel picks up the series to show in the fall, as there won't be a lot of new, scripted content out there for the foreseeable future, and a channel like SyFy or Comedy Central or, hell, Fox, could do worse than showing a full slate of these episodes to folks who hadn't yet given it a try.

Bringing the series back for new episodes will be more difficult, of course, since the show's production company recently auctioned off a lot of costumes and props on the auction website Heritage. This happened back in May, and when I heard about it, I was naturally interested. Now that it's all finished, I thought I could write a little bit about the process and show a few pictures of the items I managed to buy.

 

I had never participated in a Heritage auction before - I was familiar with it, but it always seemed like a place that would sell, I don't know, Picasso paintings to blue bloods living in a Manhattan skyscraper. That is to say, it seemed from a distance like a place that would sell things to rich people, and let me tell you - that assumption was not incorrect. Some of the items sold in the Tick lot went for outrageous sums of money. Several of the costumes went for five-figure sums and a small collar charm, worn by Midnight the dog, ended up selling for over a thousand dollars.

I had my eye on a few items that I hoped might fly under the radar. I didn't want to break the bank, but I realized that this was probably my only, or at least my best, chance at getting an item from this show, so I went in and bid on quite a few items.

One of the things that surprised me about this auction was just how it was conducted. Bidders were able to browse and bid for around three whole weeks on the main Heritage site. And at the end of the bidding period...everything went to a live auction, with the previous high bids setting the opening marks for the items. This seemed rather superfluous to me - why not just jump right into the live bidding? What was the point of bidding early at all? But I'm sure it served to increase the overall sum that Heritage and the production company ended up with. Still, I maintained a steady level of anxiety the entire time the items were listed online.

I managed to win three items, when it was all over with. No, I didn't win any costumes or any of the bigger pieces, but I'm still happy with what I got. Let's take a look!

First up is a notebook used in a season one flashback scene with Dr. Karamazov, who invented the growth ray that created the Very Large Man. I got this for a really good price, probably because the main image for this item was just that of a simple brown notebook cover.

When the book opens up, though...you can see a lot of mathematical and science-y equations and drawings.

And they go on for a number of pages. These aren't hand drawings, unfortunately, but stickers made to look like notebook paper, stuck onto the existing notebook paper. They repeat in sequence eventually. Still, this is a lot of detail for a notebook that barely made it into one scene of the show.

I'd love to know who drew the original images for this. I'd love to think it was Ben Edlund, though I'm sure that's not the case.

Up next is an item I paid considerably more for. It's a "surveillance device" that Arthur used to spy on Miss Lint in the first season.

The opposite side had a sticker on it that is no longer there - I have no idea what it once was. I will probably try and get a case for this item, which has the benefit of being very display friendly. Maybe something with a small stand for it to rest on? I guess we'll see.

Lastly, here's an item that I couldn't let get away. These are two chair backs from on-set folding chairs. I will admit (with only a small amount of shame) that I almost stole one of these on the day I got to visit the set in Brooklyn. I thought better of it, thankfully, but it would've saved me almost $300 if I had. There were three of these lots that were auctioned off, and I bought the second, after the first sold for quite a bit more. This was one of the few branded items being sold, and I'm really happy to get one. Maybe this would look good framed, hanging above a door? I'll think about it.

Each item came with a certificate of authenticity, which will be helpful when someone sees these things and says, "what the hell is this?". The back of each is branded with the show logo. I guess these might be the last "official" items to use this logo?

Here's the other side. They're all signed (okay, I guess) and they include a description and picture of the items.

In all, it was a weird experience. I felt a little out of my depth to begin with. I know the ins-and-outs of eBay, but I had never tried to use this auction site before. One thing that will stick with me is the amount of unseemly fees that Heritage slaps onto everything at the end. I understand that the company is going to get its cut - or else they wouldn't be listing the items in the first place. But in addition to a 25% fee added onto the final bid, they also charged sales tax and INCREDIBLE sums for shipping and handling. I expected my items to arrive on the back of an elephant with how much I paid, but in the end, they came in a simple cardboard box shipped through the post office. It also took over a month for me to receive my items.

This is all to say that I won't be a frequent Heritage bidder - but as I mentioned earlier, I realize that I'm not really the type of client they're trying to draw in.

OTHER TICK NEWS!

The Free Comic Book Day issue of The Tick is still on its way - Diamond recently announced that the issue will be released on August 5th in comic shops, along with a few other free books, like Invincible and Lumberjanes. I don't know if New England Comics has anything planned for that day, but as it's only about a month away, I have to say...I doubt it? But I'm glad that we'll all be able to read the book in just a few more weeks. I hope you'll all (safely) grab a copy in August! 

Pictures from the 2019 Comic-Con International, part 5 (Friday, 7/19)

It's time to finish up Friday's pictures at Comic-Con!

I feel like this might be the best group shot I took during the whole convention. Everyone looks really good!

I spent a good portion of my Friday afternoon getting three autographs that happened to take place at right around the same time. The first was from the team of "They Called Us Enemy", a wonderful new graphic novel based on George Takei's time in WWII Japanese internment camps. I thanked him for continuing to stand up to injustices, and he responded by saying, "it's my life's work". It was great to see him.

Back at the New England Comics booth, I managed to take a shot of this original page of Ben Edlund art from The Tick #2; it sold later in the show to some lucky dog.

While I was signing at the booth, someone asked me to draw in his sketchbook. I've only been asked this a couple times, and I'm always pretty hesitant to do it, because, well, I'm not an artist. But if someone insists, I'm not gonna refuse, so this is what he got. I did, in fact, see this bug the day before.  I signed the page differently than I usually do comics, and I immediately realized that I should change my signature to this, but I'm kind of locked in now, right?

Hey, it's David Ross, who dressed up as Cowboy Santa Tick in 2018! Now he's Aquaman.

It needs to be known that the new She-Ra cartoon is really great - a perfect show for today's audiences and one that I didn't know I would love so much. And what an incredible job this person did with her Catra costume!

Hey, he's a people alien.

Someone came by the booth later in the afternoon to show off his newly-purchased commission from artist Ryan Ottley. Heck of a job by the former Invincible and current Amazing Spider-Man artist!

I recently lettered a graphic novel for Dead Reckoning Press, an imprint of, if you can believe it, the US Naval Academy. Gary Thompson edited the book and he stopped by my table in the small press section to say hello!

DC Bombshells!

April's jumpsuit will never get old. Casey Jones also offers up an important opinion.

I don't...know what these costumes are supposed to be. Is that Velma from Scooby Doo on the left? Either way, these guys were enthusiastic about having their pictures taken.

Mary Marvel!

The fog in the fishbowl (really some well-placed fabric) was a very nice touch!

Here I am, awkwardly holding onto the table, as if I am about to pass a kidney stone or something. The person on the other side of the table is Chelsea Monroe-Cassel, who wrote the new Firefly cookbook, which went on sale at Comic-Con (and came with an exclusive apron)! I bought three! Chelsea was kind enough to sign all of them.

My last autograph hunt for the day was for the legendary Frank Miller, who did a limited signing at the Dark Horse booth near the end of the show. Miller's autograph can be tough to get and usually comes with a pretty steep price tag, but I was lucky to be able to get him at one of his few free signings. I got my copy of Marvel Two-in-One #51 signed!

He also signed a 300 poster-print for everyone in line.

As the show ended, I made my way up to the panel rooms on the second floor of the convention hall. I got there early enough to get a front row seat to the panel I was looking forward to the most: the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine panel, featuring members of the cast and crew talking about the new documentary that recently came out.

Did I shout the whole time? Yes! Can you distinctly hear me in videos taken of the panel? Also yes! I love DS9.

One of my first con experiences was seeing Chase Masterson at the Pittsburgh Comicon back in the mid-'90s.

There were a few fans who showed up in costume, including a "Take Me Out to the Holosuite" Kira and the "Trials and Tribble-ations" couple that I had seen earlier in the day!

After the panel, I turned a corner to use the restroom, only to find that...the staff exit was right next to it. That was something of a surprise.

And so I was able to get a picture with Cirroc Lofton, the actor who plays Jake Sisko!

And also Aron Eisenberg, who plays Nog!

And even the heart and soul behind DS9, Ira Steven Behr!

As the crowd eventually dispersed, I found myself in a conversation with Louis Race, an assistant director on DS9 whose credits also include Indiana Jones and Knight Rider! Louis and his wife hung around and chatted about the show and work in the industry for a good half hour, which I really appreciated. It was great to hear stories about his time on various productions.

He also was wearing a crew jacket from Knight Rider, which actually lit up (and still works after over 30 years! Several people ran over just to compliment him on his jacket while we were talking. I can't blame them.

There was one more stop to make on this long, busy day at Comic-Con. And more pictures of costumes to take.

I capped off the night with a screening of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, followed by some Dr. Horrible karaoke! I signed up for a song without taking into consideration that I had spent the last two hours shouting and had lost my voice. Did it go well? No! Should I have reconsidered? Yes! Would I do it again? Absolutely!

More pictures to come.