Overnight went great. Leinil, Edgar and I watched Akira Kurosawa movies in succession. First was Hidden Fortress, then Seven Samurai. By then it was already 3 in the morning so we just played Tekken until the sun came up. Ryan and Richie came by, but didn't stop to stay. They did bring a pizza, which is great! Thanks guys!

So it's back to work!

But I Hate Edgar. Because of him, I'm having difficulty keeping my mind on work! My CD Rom drive was broke for the better part of a year, but I've never gotten the chance to replace it. Diablo 2 was just taking too much of my time back then, back when I was inking other stuff. I didn't want it to happen in inking Xmen and now Ochlocrat, so I just let it be. But Edgar gave me an idea of how to fix the drive, namely, to disconnect the thing, turn on the computer, shut it down, connect the drive again, and turn the computer on again. And holy crap, my drive is working again! Now I can finally play the Diablo 2 Expansion Pack!! Grrrr!

But no, I won't buy the Expansion pack until I finish Ochlo. Because If I do, man, I'm never gonna finish it! he.he.

But I'm glad I got it running again because there are some programs I needed to re-install, like my anti virus program. It was going wonky on me so I had to take it out. What with viruses going crazy lately, I'd like to update it as much as I can. I mean, I'm still getting that damned Sircam virus. I got two of them just today! This virus has been going around now for a month and people still fall victim to it? Jeez...

Roy Allan Martinez just sent me a kick ass Wasted pinup. What he sent me was just a half finished piece so I could determine if I would like it or not. But jeez, anything Roy draws is always impressive to me. I'll share it here once I get the finished piece on Tuesday.

And speaking of Tuesday, Leinil Yu, Edgar Tadeo and I will be meeting up on Tuesday. I've suddenly realized that we spent YEARS together in various studios working, but we've rarely been together just to have some fun. It seems that whenever I see them, work is always involved. We're going to try to make an exception of Tuesday. We're just gonna hang out, drink some beer maybe, but I know Nil doesn't drink. Maybe play some Max Payne on his computer, but definitely we'll be watching Seven Samurai on his DVD. I've told Ed many times how he looks so much like Kyuzo, the master swordsman in the movie. Now he wants to see it really bad. Plus, Ed's a real manga freak so he'll probably like this movie a lot. Seven Samurai is a totally different experience of Japanese culture, if one is so used to Akira, Ghost in the Machine and all those anime stuff.

We're all busy with our own respective projects, Leinil with High Roads for Cliffhanger, myself for Ochlocrat and High Roads later on, and Ed with his several coloring jobs for Marvel. Plus, he'll be coloring High Roads as well. I guess we just all just need a break before we go back and drown ourselves in work again on Wednesday.

My Sony DVD player is on the blink. I can't believe it. It's only been a year and it broke down. SONY may have kick as TVs, but their DVDs still need lots of work. I just recently got UNBREAKABLE on DVD and I'm dying to see it. Some are considering it to be one of the greatest comic book films of all time. I'm wondering why. I also got Notting Hill Ultimate Edition DVD. What can I say? This movie charmed the hell out of me. It's great to finally own it. This coming months I'd be spending a LOT on DVDs. I can't wait to get my hands on the highly anticipated upcoming titles like Citizen Kane, Star Trek: The Motion Picture Director's Cut, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, Terminator Special Edition, Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs, Doctor Zhivago, Forrest Gump (out now I think), and of course, the Godfather Box Set. Whew! Good thing I've got a job so I can afford all this! Now, I'm only waiting for Sony to call to say my player has been fixed. :)

Hello to Isi, Sumida, Mark, Budje, Jonas, Jason, Jenie, Jeca, Laya and everyone else who visits! Sorry if I forgot anyone. My mind is dulled by too much coffee from staying awake.

Need....to...finish.........pages!!!

KATIPUNAN 2000

I just got back home from the K2K comic book launching at National Bookstore Shangrila. K2K is a comic book written by Mark Navarro, drawn by Lan Medina and colored by Gilbert Monsanto. What surprised me about this comic book is that it is being published by traditional comic book company ATLAS, who was responsible for publishing Pinoy Komiks and Espesyal Komiks, all these years. K2K is fully computer colored and lettered, and printed on better paper than any Atlas comic book has seen before. And all that for only 35 pesos.



Like I mentioned before here and in several interviews I've done in the past, I had always thought that the traditional comic companies where not doing to good. The quality is often bad and they're not as prevalent as they were before. But with the publication of this comic book, it's certainly a step in the right direction for them. I applaud their guts in testing out new ground, and being open to doing things in new ways.

I got to meet with Lan Medina and Gilbert Monsanto, and I finally got to meet their writer, Mark, which I thought, at first impression to be quite a funny guy. I met with Roy Martinez, my one time collaborator in many comic books like Loner and Hazard for Wildstorm, and artist of Wicked. We had a nice long talk about many things while we downed some pretty wicked hotdogs.

It rained all day. And me, having lost my umbrella, was pretty wet. I feel like I'm getting sick. Oh NOOOO!

K2K

I was in Megamall yesterday meeting with Leinil and Edgar and when I passed by National Book store I saw a poster of an upcoming comic boook called "K2K" by Lan Medina and Gilbert Monsanto. I worked with those 2 before. X-Force with Lan and Hellcop with Gilbert. It's a superhero/sci fi comic, I think, based on what I saw on the cover. What surprised me was they were able to manage to publish it via one of our venerable comics comapanies, ATLAS. I think that's terrific! For a long time I believed our tradional comic companies to be on life support, and are mere shadows of the giant thriving industry they were before. I hope this book injects new life into the industry, and with these 2 talented people at the helm, I'm pretty sure of that.

So come join them on their launch of their comic book, K2K!! Here is a message I received from LAN today:

Hi everyone,

We are inviting you to the launching of K2K comics.
Me,Gilbert and Mark Navarro will be there for signing
of this book this coming friday August 24.

It will be held at Nat`l Bookstore Shangri-La Plaza Crossing
start around 1:00 o'clock PM.

We are hoping for your presence.

Thanks,

Lan

NEW X-MEN ANNUAL 2001
Out this week!



I finally got a good look at the just released Xmen Annual. All in all, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. I was pretty disappointed by how the last job we did turned out. I'm talking about our 6 page back up story for this year's Fantastic Four annual. My lines seemed to have thickened out and blotted all over the place. In this Xmen annual's instance though, it's just right. There are still a few things I feel uneasy about and can't bear to look at, but those things are my fault. In a few areas, the lines do blot, but that's because the day I inked that page, it was quite humid and really made inking difficult.

So anybody notice the different format? I think it's cool! Sort of like Frank Miller's 300 some time ago. It made for really LOOOOONG 2 page spread. Check out one such spread below.



I still can't believe I've been involved in something like this. 15 years ago when I was still in college, I had already been sending submissions to Marvel, and the characters I drew were the X-Men. Sort of really pleasantly surreal that I've finally worked on the book many years later. And to be working on it with amazingly talented people like Grant and Leinil makes it all better!

Thanks to Richard Starkings. You rule, dude!!

Some interesting discussion on comic book inking in the message board. :)

Haven't been doing much but draw Ochlocrat, and I'm painfully slow. It concerns me a lot because if I'm going to be pencilling and inking for a living for US companies, I better find a way to make myself draw faster. I may be going overboard on the details too much, so I think pulling back on the detail may be the one thing I need to do. I really hope that I could get a handle on it as I go along. I need to finish this book this month, or I'm screwed for all time.

New Xmen Annual '2001

Is finally coming out this week! It's the annual that Grant Morrison wrote, Leinil Yu pencilled and I inked. Grab your copies, kids! Just leave some for me! :) I'll post the cover here or some nice panels when I get my copy.

Why Barry Windsor Smith is the God of Comic Art

http://www.syntheverse.com/images/preview/2365-016.jpg
'nuff said!

Oh ok, here's more....
http://www.dreamers.com/g/psyche1980.jpg
http://www.barrywindsor-smith.com/galleria/mitrasprint.gif

Moulin Rouge: Stunning! Spectacular! Fantastic! Tremendous! Beautiful! Wonderful! One of the rare movies that made me cry, not because of sentimentality, but because of the sheer beauty of it. Strongly recommended. You'll miss a lot if you don't watch it.

YOU MORONS

You Stupid Stupid MORONS. Where else in the world can you see people celebrating the death of innocent men, women and children? Where else can you see them clapping their hands, dancing in the streets because they are happy that one of their people have killed innocent people just wanting to live their own lives?

The parents and relatives of these suicide bombers are even proud, PROUD, that their child has killed innocent people, and that they believe their child would go to heaven because of it. I've got news for you, you moron. Your child will go to HELL. YOU will go to hell. You think your god is happy over this? Don't be stupid. No god is happy when man kills his fellow man, specially when that other one is innocent.

How can I say such things when I don't even live there, I have no idea what politics, conflicts and beliefs that make such things possible in that place? I can say that because regardless of what stupid politics or what stupid religion that propel and justify such actions, all I see are dead innocent people. And whoever rejoices at that is nothing but a bunch of dumb, stupid and idiotic entities masquerading as humans.

This applies to both sides.

THIS of course, is what I'm talking about...

Ochlocrat Variant Cover

I just saw this AWESOME variant cover to Ochlocrat by this artist named Mike Bohatch. Check it out!



Admittedly, it's a bit Dave McKean-ish, but it looks great nonetheless. Check out his entire site HERE.

I just learned that Christopher Hewett died yesterday, August 3, Friday. He was best known as Mr. Belvedere, star of an 80's family sitcom of the same name. Some of you may probably know that I run a Mr. Belvedere website. Without apologies, probably the biggest Mr. Belvedere site on the net. I haven't been able to update it much because of all my work, but I've updated it a bit to give him a brief eulogy. I'll write something longer over there later on.

I should be able to finish another Ochlocrat page tonight. Damn, Gerry step on it.

I'm trying out a new browser called OPERA. I downloaded a free non-Java version from their site and wow, I'm impressed at the many features it has that other browsers don't, like being to load several pages at once. I'm really liking it, but I tried posting on Blogger and I can't! Must be a Java thing. So I'm downloading the Java version now.

I got this online game from a blog that I regularly go to. Check it out because it's fun, simple, as well as mentally challenging.

Bad breath ba ang email ko? E bakit out of 10 emails na ipadala ko, parang isa lang or dalawa ang nagre-reply? hmp!

Ang masama pa, di lahat ng ini-email ko natatanggap ang message ko. Nagtatampo na pala sa akin at hindi raw ako sumusulat. Ba't ganun? Minsan ang labo din talaga.