The Work Journal of Artist John Amor

Pantsphone Chronicles VII

Medium View

We are not smart people.

The night of the Watchmen premier, one of my friends asks the table if any of us thought all this knowledge of Star Wars, Marvel continuity, Mass Effect side quests, and Chuck Norris jokes actually meant anything.  There were about six of us, with a beer tower in the middle.  It was as close as we got to quarterlifing, and that tends to shake me pantsless.  “No,” I said.  Coz this stuff is important to me, sure, and I love it… but by no stretch of the imagination does it kick our IQ levels up any.  What we are, are a few of many kids hanging ten on a mortal wave.  I remember tossing the term Creative Zeitgeist out… but I don’t remember why.

See? (Read first sentence)

Been having fun lately.  Got to travel with my girl up to one of the country’s highest peaks to help shoot her music video.  Hummer was a bit cramped with crew and tech, but the view and how the music carried up there was well worth it.  Don’t get a lotta chances to do that, y’know?

PLUCK won Zuda’s October competition, so now Gabe is working like an animal for you people, making sure we give you a story well worth following.  I’m on creature design duty for the next week or so, that’ll probably gimme an excuse to update the blog. Also… FUCKYES!!!

Local comic scene has been gaining steam, and monthly Drink n’ Draws (bastardized DnD for you paladin-types) are proving fun and energizing, to say the least.  Never hurts to be around fellow fanboys to help you feel like a real person. Oh snap. Related to this, in the Public Validation Department, I recently got talked to by a local newspaper about working in comics and the scene in general.  Managed not to curse too much, so I’m fairly proud about that.  Interview should run near the end of the month if they don’t misplace the transcript amid post-Manny fight analyses and 2012 reviews.

Need to see that movie.

Looking to wrap up JUDAH and a coupla other projects and commissions by year’s end, as January is already looking busy.  Not quite ready to talk about the new projects yet, but it’s all pretty exciting.  Haven’t gotten to finish that Glutton God piece either, but it can wait.

*****

Wolfgang Parker is polishing the knobs on a previously discussed project.  Be afraid.

*****

Finally, shopping Tres Komikeros around to find it an FM radio home.  Each podcast episode runs for roughly an hour, which is way too much geek talk than is healthy (trust us, we know), so we’re looking into making only the half-hour review portion air-friendly, while the rest is online bonus stuff that’s bad for your children.

Bonus.  What a funny word.

Pantsphone Chronicles VI

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Pantsphone Chronicles V

They didn’t plan this.

And the fries were soggy.

… … …. …  … … …

Lo.  Pan.

Playing hooky.

Brother’s Grip

Pantsphone Chronicles IV

Ugly jam on the road home today, so I just took the long hike from the mall after stocking up on drawing materials and such.  My feet hurt.

Good Advice

Intervoo

Got together with some friends over the weekend to help some Fine Arts majors out with a paper on Sequential Art Professionalism, or some other equally oxymoronic misnomer.  I just call it that now for lack of a better… uh… nomer.  I can only guess we were selected to be interviewed to add some sense of volume to a subsection about how not to go about becoming overnight successes.

Good times though.  Julian and Isteb (I still say that’s his ninja name), the fine arts guys in question, certainly knew how to get us talking what with the free beers and crap.  It was the shutting up that took a bit of doing.

Right!

Back to work.

The Thick of Things

“That’s crazy!” was one of the first things my high school classmates at Sacred Heart School for Boys told me when I said I’d be doing indies with some college artists.  Wasn’t as into sports as much as a lot of my friends wanted to think, and wasn’t at all excited when that Dreamcast-thing started making its rounds.  I was the comics nerd in the crew.  Sure, we’d hike over to the all-girls school down the avenue practically every day and engage in ill shit, but when the sun went down… we all still went home and played with our toys.  Take that any way y’all want, heh.  The year was 1999, and I was about fifteen.

Somehow got a graphic design teacher at a local university to take a look at my art — I had recently finished a personal project re-telling the origin of the Thundercats (yes, I was that kid) — and after giving me some constructive crits, he extended an invitation to join a gathering his students were planning.  My old man took me to the meeting, probably worried that the college boys would give the geeky high schooler a hard time.  Turns out the lot of them were worlds geekier than I was.  This was Sukol, my very first taste of the local comics scene.  This is where I met artists before they even became artists, if that makes any sense.  Looking back now, I feel somewhat humbled by it.

Tyke Villalonga (the teacher) was there, giving some last-minute project notes to Alexander Cruz.  To the right of the lecture hall, Michael Dizon, John Paul Vicedo, and Ian Areola were making fun of Vinzon Ngo’s (Bleedman) art.  He deserved every bit of it, the bastard.  A whole bunch of artists were there, but names were never one of my strong points (Right, ladies?).

What started out as a gathering of artists eventually became a movement, and we ended up releasing a monthly black-and-white comic, funded by our respectively meager allowances.  We gave these pamphlets out for free, and we didn’t care about ROIs and any of that “responsible” crap coz they were just too much fun to do, and the energy one got from being among fellow artists was just electric.  It didn’t last though.  Eventually some people decided they didn’t care about it anymore, others decided to pickaxe their own way into stardom solo, and the rest sort of just evaporated into creative limbo.  My title, Twilight (yeah… yeah…), which was very Battle Chasers-inspired, sank like a brick.

Then college came around and I went from private catholic school to state uni to take up Political Science; Don’t know if it was pride or a denial thing, but I couldn’t stop what I had already gotten to do.   Somehow convinced myself that this is what I wanted to do, so I kept at it and migrated to Popcorn Comics, a publication apparently inspired by Sukol’s efforts but with wider distribution and actual advertising, owing mostly to Warren Tan’s extensive connections.  But the best part was that the artists actually got paid this time.  This is where I learned became aware of the value of staying on deadline.  I was getting paid to do comics at seventeen.  Shit didn’t get any more real than that.  and here I met Leandro Panganiban, Lloyd Limbaga, James Neish, and Harvey motherfuckin’ Tolibao.  Icelander, my “story” essentially about cavemen fighting aliens (yes, I was a fuckin’ prodigy) saw the light of day.That ended too though, because apparently the market just wasn’t healthy enough for local books, what with people still being burned out by the nineties stunts.   So college went into full swing, and naturally that was a whole different experience in itself… and I may talk about it in the future.  Still, Sukol and Popcorn were both intensely formative experiences for me though — both as a person and as an artist.

My high school friends were right, it was crazy… but I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything in the world.