d_morris

In Florida right now. I'm with my parents and we're visiting my grandmother for Thanksgiving. We've stopped in Orlando for two days to visit Christa. We went to Disney which went well since Christa was our tour guide and kept us from being bored. I wasn't wild about the enormous crowds but it was a nice day to spend with my lady and my parents. I don't know if I'll be online for awhile but I thought I would update and say hello.

I think I'm going to ditch this comics thing and go into lawncare so I can turn people's lawns into Jack Kirby panels.

Hello folks, how are you? Sorry, I've been busy with school and haven't updated in awhile. I should update more often really. I tend to feel kinda pretentious and egocentric updating

Probably going to be stuck in Savannah one more quarter. I don't operate under pressure very well and I put a lot of pressure on myself to do well that I probably shouldn't have. I should have learned awhile ago. I'm leaving the place I've been for the last few months. It's not put me in a positive mental state. Ironically though the nicest roommates I've ever had. Hopefully my friend will be able to get out of the dorms and I will move in with her to an actual apartment. If not there is a back up plan or I stay in my current place of residence. Huzzah.

Anyways, I've been busy drawing stuff. I've started a daily sketchbook where everyday I'm drawing a different superhero. I need to get into the practice of drawing people everyday, not to mention inking, and practicing placing type in conjunction with images. So I figured this would be a good way to practice. Here are the first five I've done over at my Flickr account. Trying to vary the body types and figures that I'm drawing though I don't know how successful I'm doing there.

That's about all that's been going. How are you?

 "Chicago is New York for people who hate New York" - Graham Carswell, 10/27/09

For now though, let's get me posting pictures!

The first ten people to comment give me a request for a picture to be taken of something in my life. My favorite book, my workspace, and so on and so forth.

The only catch is-- no pictures of myself. It has to be of objects in my daily life. Then I will take pictures of the requested things, and post them in a separate entry.

My rule- no pictures relating to my home.  It's kinda embarassing.

Then those 10 people who requested photos have to post this same challenge in their own journal, with 1 additional rule (of their own choosing). The 10 people who comment on that entry, have to add ANOTHER rule of their own, and so on and so forth.

And the pictures spread.

AND GO!

So I've been quiet lately because I've been working on my Senior Project here at SCAD.  It's taken me awhile (and I went through two other ideas before I got to this) but here are the pages I turned in at the end of the quarter.  It's from a sci-fi story that I'm currently working but I'm not sure if I'll even use these pages because I think I might take the story in an entirely different direction.  Or maybe I'll keep them.  I'm not sure.  Anyways, here are my pages. 
( The world needs more mundane space comics... )

1. Leave me a comment with "Sancho Hernandez" in the subject line.
2. I'll respond by asking you five questions so I can get to know you better.
3. Update your journal with the answers to the questions.
4. Include this explanation in the post and offer to ask other people questions. (But only if you want!)

( Answers to questions! )

I would write something about the passing of John Hughes but this blog post by a long time pen pal says more than I could. That blog says it all, basically Hughes was a storyteller of utmost sincerity.  That's why his teenage movies have stood the test of time when so many others we've forgotten.   His films while not cinematic masterpieces or deft uses of form but they still said something about the experience of being a teenager, both ups and downs.  I haven't cared about any of the other celebrities who have passed away recently but Hughes death means far more to me than those others honestly.  I should get a copy of Ferris Bueller's Day Off and watch it.

I found out this morning that my friend Deacon passed away after I had only found out on Wednesday that he had an advanced stage of cancer.  This summer has not been great.

Hey folks, I thought I would let people know that my friend Jon (aka jonio) and I have started something called Iron Sketch which can be found here ironsketch .  Basically we're trying to outdo each other and come up with some interesting sketches.  This week's theme is GAINAX's latest giant robot show Gurren Lagann.  Hope people enjoy what we put there so feel free to check us out.

Something I'm working on at the moment.  Has nothing to do with the last art I posted up.  Drew it at 18in x 24in so you're seeing the edited and compressed for TV version I guess.  There's an 18 x 24 scanner on campus and when I transfer the whole thing to bristol, I'll show it to you guys.

So when I was like 17 I got my first job which was at Blockbuster video in Charlotte, NC.  It was sort of the dream job for a 17 year old kid who loved watching movies, reading comics, and listening to loud mopey music.  Working at the video store was great because I got at least 3 free rentals a week and 20% off buying things.  I used this opportunity to watch a whole lot of anime.  At the time (the far away land of 1999), Dragonball Z and Sailor Moon were pretty much at the apex of their popularity.  Pokemon had more or less exploded into this weird fad that's still lingering on today.  Anyways, as a huge fan of all of the above as well as reading Carl Gustav Horn's column at the time in Wizard, I used this as an opportunity to delve further and further into this weird phenomenom about which I wanted to learn more.

So it was there that I exposed myself to the like of such classics as Ninja School (I think this was the name of it) and Fushigi Yugi (long before I had any concept of Shoujo and Shonen).  I wish I was kidding but I pretty much watched most the anime they had in stock.  Luckily though they had titles like Ninja Scroll, Akira, and Ghost in the Shell (which to this day I will argue is better than the source material it came from) that I watched voraciously.  Those anime continue to influence me to this day (for better or for worse).  However, I want to talk about one anime that until recently I hadn't thought about in years.  A series that I'm sort of flabbergasted I had not thought much about in almost 10 years.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am of course talking about



The Guyver.

See for me the more I think about it, the more this series was sort of a transitional thing for me.  It was this transition from watching more kid friendly stuff like Ronin Warriors and Dragonball Z into far less kid friendly stuff like Akira.  Now I should warn you The Guyver is not particularly deep nor is the plot particularly original.  In fact, the reason I haven't thought about the Guyver in 10 years is that it's a pretty generic anime at this point in my experience as viewer.  However at the time, this series came to me at just the right point in my life.  You see it had all the elements of all the things I was really, really into like Spawn and the X-Files.  It also was the kind of show that a 17 year old boy would love.  It had a teenage protagonist who had the hots for a cute girl, a trust friend, and he was a superhero.  Of course the most important part was that it was super, super violent.  How violent?  Well here's the opening to the OVA.


Now imagine 30 minutes of that.  That's pretty much what the Guyver was and I loved every violent minute of it.  Heck I even watched the really short one part OAV that was probably even more violent!  For me, this was like mind blowing.  Looking back on it, I can see why I thought Guyver was awesome.  Like I said, I liked that it was violent.  The main character gets obliterated in one episode only to come back to life.  Kill his own dad (I think).  The whole story was werid and convoluted.  The monster designs were completely freaky to me at the time.  Like I said, this was all stuff that as a 17 year old kid I loved to death.  It's for those reasons I am pretty sure I also really didn't remember it until just recently.  It's big, it's dumb, and doesn't require a lot of thought.   I was reminded of it because I found out they did a new series.  The new series is about twenty times less violent (or at least the first episode was).  No Zoanoids (the bad guys of the series) get dismembered radically or vaporized but there's a enough disturbing imagery in it that I hope it inspires some youngster to eventually discover the likes of Ninja Scroll, Akira, and Ghost in the Shell.  Also it reminded me that at one time, I really, really liked this show and I'm glad that I could have that fond memory return even if the source doesn't quite live up to what I remember it being.

Schedule is so weird.  I have class two days a week and work the other days.  Having too much too much time in the afternoon and just general dissatisfaction with most things I've done on my senior project has led to procrastiation.  Script for Chapter One is written and I'm happy with that.  I've done thumbnails for the first few pages but I need to do more.  I need more research photos which I should have taken when I was in Charlotte last weekend.  The character designs I'm still not happy with though I guess they're getting better.  Here's one of them



Maybe I'll feel better the more I work on it.  Part of me wants to scrap everything and do something else but more of me knows I need to stick this through.  Frustration is building.

Everything else is okay though.  I like my 19th Century Art class and while I'm not wild about my roommates, I could be living somewhere worse.  Broke at the moment but got my job at the library back which works out well and I'm working in special collections which has been interesting so far.  Yesterday I held an actual Kirby Fantastic Four in my hands.  It was a great feeling.  I've also enjoyed looking at all of the really old books the library has in it's collection.

Back to work.  Maybe I can muster up enjoyment for this project?

Going to do more updates from now just to get back in the habit of writing.

Senior project has begun.  I'm working on a love story set in high school. It has kung fu fighting and revenge.  To show my commitment to this project, I am going to keep my head shaved and my face bare.  I am in essence the anti-Alec Longstreth.



Doesn't come back until the first 24 pages are done.

Be back soon with some preliminary images for the comic.

Quarter ended a few weeks ago and I'm really glad that it did.  This was both a good and bad quarter.   It started off awful and ended okay.  I worked my ass off and in some places it showed, in others it didn't so much.  In that way, I'm glad it finished.

Christa graduated and my parents and grandmother Griffith came down to celebrate.  Her parents met my parents for the first time and things seemed to go well.  After graduation, I went up with Christa to Massachusetts for a week and a half.  We spent a lot of time together and I met a few of her friends up there.  I had a wonderful time and if had been up to me, I wouldn't have come back down.  However, I have summer classes once again so a return trip was unavoidable.

I miss Christa and finishing school is going to be very lonely without her.  She's the best thing in my life and my rock.  Nobody cares about me like she does and I can't wait for the day where we just get to spend our days together.

After the adventures in Massachusetts, we celebrated my grandmother Morris's 80th birthday in Myrtle Beach.  It was a mini reunion and I saw family members I hadn't seen in years such as my cousins and my aunt and uncle.  It was great having that half of the family all together for the first time in years.  I got to ride down to South Carolina in a RV with my cousins Robyn, Beth, and Robyn's husband Chris.  That was an adventure.  I do want to point out that I hate beach traffic.  I love my grandmother but seriously, I need to visit her in winter months when people aren't driving like maniacs and it doesn't take half an hour to 50 feet.  If South Carolina disappeared off the map tomorrow with my grandma's house intact I would not shed a tear.

On my way back to Savannah, I found out about Professor Mullins.  I've already posted my feelings on that but even now I'm still conflicted about it.  It hurts but I think I'm feeling less stunned.  It's hard looking at pictures of him and knowing I won't see him again or hear his ridiculous laugh.  All I can do is soldier and make great comics.

I think my way of coping right now is listening to a ton of hip hop and dub.  It started off with relistening to Enter the 36 Chambers and I've been listening to Clipse, Aesop Rock, Company Flow, and most anything else I can.  The Madvillainy album has been on repeat frequently.  I need to dig out Cannibal Ox because that album is a classic.  When it comes to dub, I've slowing been working my way through that.  I've given a few  King Tubby albums and Black Uhuru's The Dub Factor listens, loving both of them. I really needed the change since I've been listening to a lot of noise rock and indie stuff over the last few months.  I think it's been taking my mind off of things that have been going on lately which is good.

Off to Heroes Con this weekend.  Going to get my portfolio looked at and hopefully get my name out there with Marvel and DC.  Wish me luck friends.

In honor of Mullins, I'm going to start posting about comics I've been reading lately and enjoying.  I don't write enough about comics anymore and I don't talk as much about comics I enjoy as I should.  So I'm going to make it a goal everyweek to talk about at least two comics I've been enjoying.  Here are this weeks comics

The Calculus Affair by Herge
Amazon.com listing

  I've been on a Tintin kick lately after I was doing a cartooning project where I figured Tintin would be a good basis for to pattern the kind of stories I was interested in doing for a set of particular characters.  One thing I've noticed lately as I've been buying Tintin books that seems to be a shame is that Little, Brown, the USpublishers of Tintin, seem to be focusing more on the smaller collections with several adventures over the over sized single albums.  It's a real shame because Tintin is meant to be read one adventure at a time.  It's a lot more easily disgestable that way at least for me as a reader. What really gets me is that the collections of adventures are printed at a smaller size thus loosing some of the impact of the adventures.  I found it harder to be excited for some of the stories I think because of the smaller page sizes.
 
But that's not what's important.  What's important is the comic.  Of all the Tintin comics I've read over the last month or so, The Calculus Affair is possibly the best of the bunch, if not the best Tintin adventure ever (I am sure there will be some people here that will argue with me about that). 

The plot is simple; Professor Calculus, Tintin's scientist friend, has invented a sonic device that if developed properly could be used as a weapon of great destruction.  Two countries are after him to develop one for their country while Tintin and Captain Haddock try to rescue him.

What struck me reading it is Herge's sense of balance when it came to the storytelling.  Something that's always struck me about the earlier Tintin strips that I've read is that while they're all wonderful to look at was that sometimes the humor might seem out of place or the exposition would slow everything down when the action needed to be at 11.  This works okay in stories like Tintin in Tibet where it's more about characterization but some of the earlier stories tend to plod where they should be zooming.  It's always kind of bugged me when it came to Tintin as I've always wanted them to be the adventures that were a little more exciting.

Yet for me, The Calculus Affair solved all of these problems.  This was the story where Herge was firing on all cylinders.  There's this great balance to the humor, the action, and the exposition.  The humor adds comic relief in all the right places, the action is brisk while the narrative isn't distracting from that.  The running gags in the book from the wrong number gag to the annoying inusrance salesman pop up in all the right places.  Everything in this book moves at such a brisk pace and I couldn't help wondering what was going to happen next.  It was very hard for me to put this comic down once I started reading it.  This comic has one of the most page turning narratives ever in comics. 

This comic is one of the finest pieces of storytelling that I've ever read.  It works on so many levels; an adventure story, a detective story, a spy thriller, and a social commentary on the Cold War.  As I said before, none of this ever gets boring.   I think what really helps is that unlike some of the other Captain Haddock stories, this is a single story where some of the others are two parts.  That's where things became plodding for me is that I thought some of those stories could have been much tighter and leaner than they were.  This possibly the leanest Tintin story that I've read.  Nothing feels extraneous or out of place here.  Characters don't over stay their welcome nor are they distracting.  It dawned on me that Thompson and Thomson only show up for a few pages pages and I'm okay with that.  Adventure comics don't get much better than this.


This comic is two things that the majority of comics coming out of DC and Marvel are; it's exciting and it's fun.  It's also really easy to get into as it explains why certain characters are in the positions they currently without dwelling on the recent events that have been going on in Batman.  For those unfamiliar here is a spoiler filled update.  Batman (Bruce Wayne) has presumably died during DC's most recent event Final Crisis.  Gotham has since been without Batman while all of Batman's various allies have been trying to keep up with the rampant crime.  After a big battle, Dick Grayson has taken up the mantle of Batman while Damian Wayne, Bruce Wayne's sociopathic illegitimate child, is now Robin. 

The comic never gets caught up in this set up.  Grant Morrison as a writer one trusts his audience to know what has been going on in comics to not let his narrative get bogged down in these details.  One thing that I think is putting people off superhero comics is their current tendency to get bogged down in the details of what's happened in the immediate past or even in the far past.  This is a story that's only interested in what's happening in the comic now and what's happening is pretty awesome.  Batman is doing what he does best in here; catching crooks, doing some detective work, and keeping Robin out of trouble.  What's more impressive is how much this feels like a Batman comic without actually having Bruce Wayne in it yet feeling distinct on its own.  A lot of this is owed to Grant Morrison's skill at characterization and putting a new spin on old concepts.  Dick Grayson isn't Bruce Wayne but he pulls it off so well because he's known Bruce for years.  He makes it seem as if there has been no change whatsoever while he has the costume on but out of it is a man who wonders if he can hold the legacy to which he is beholden.  Damian on the other hand takes the notion of Robin as a touble maker and puts it on his head. Morrison puts a sense of entitlement into this character and while he's a likeable enough character it's hard not to see him as anything other than a sociopath that needs Batman to keep him in line.  That's one of things that I think makes this comic interesting is that you have a genuine ying and yang between Dick and Damian; a character who has been raised to expect to be part of this legacy (Damian) versus a character who has fought to have his own identity yet now must take up the legacy he's tried to escape (Dick), the adopted song versus the biological one, etc.  Yet at the same time, Morrison has the characters fill the familiar roles because I think it's pretty obvious that both of these characters need each other to survive.

One thing that's always struck me about Grant Morrison is that his stories either sink or swim based on who his collaborators are.  Some of the earler Batman stories were marred by artists who took the subject with far more gravity than I think Morrison was injecting into his scripts.  Here though he's working with Frank Quitely who generally does wonders with Morrison's scripts (see JLA: Earth 2 and All Star Superman).  On this book, it looks like Quitely has gone back to traditional inking rather than the digital inking he's used for All-Star Superman and the book We3.  The change has given the book a look that's a little grittier than he's usually given us but it works for this book.  His action scenes are fantastic (his use of sound effects is fantastic) and always zipping yet never getting confusing.  What really strikes me was that every character had their own mannerisms.  Quitely in the past has had figures with oversexualize positions and body language but here it's really subdued.  Each figure has their own manner of looking whether it's Dick false confidence in the Batman costume to Damian's over posturing with every step he takes.  It's one of those things you don't register immeadiately when reading the book but shows up on subsequent rereadings.

Seriously, I wish more superhero comics were this smart, well writtern, and excellently draw.

As a lot of you know, Jeremy "Sweetwater" Mullins died this past weekend.  I'm still trying to gather my thoughts on the issue.  On Facebook and other forums, I keep trying to have this brave face but deep down this is tearing me up inside. He wasn't much older than I was and that got to me.  I called all of my family members yesterday from Christa to my brother to let them know how I felt about them.  I cried for about 20 minutes after I started telling my brother the news.  He's gone.  I didn't always agree with his opinions on comics or on creators but Jeremy was someone who genuinely loved comics.  It was hard not to see that.  The man was honestly one of the good guys and someone our department needed dearly.  He was someone that never settled for doing things simply.  He wanted to preach the gospel of comics and boy did he. 

On top of all this, he was a fantastic cartoonist.  The sole comic that I've seen in any form of his is his web journal comic Sweetwater is an Asshole and that seems like too few.  Mullins had a way with expressions and caricature (probably helped by his tenure as a editorial cartoonist) that really helped him capture the viewpoint in his comics.  His comic really captured his particular kind of energy not to mention his use of that obnoxious highlighter color palette.  As much as it is a loss to lose him as a teacher, it's just as great a loss to lose him as a cartoonist.  That kills me most of all.  As much as I like him as a teacher, I think I liked him even more as a cartoonist.  Now this is all we have but man it's a killer legacy.

I always felt like I disappointed him in that I never really lived up to my potential.  I had him for Cartooning in the fall and I bombed on the last part of the quarter.  He knew I had the drive for comics but I think it pissed him off that I never let my drive overtake my fragile ego.  That's what I think is killing me most of all.  He knew I could be great and now that I can see that in myself, I will never get to show him.  That's what tears me up on a personal level.  I am glad thought I told him one thing though months before he died and that was he gave me confidence.  He made me realize I could be good at this and that I needed my drive to get things done without letting the ego get in the way. 

I'll miss him.  Here's to you Sweetwater.  Time to make some damn fine comics. 

Hey guys, thought I would update.  Life is weird right now.  I don't feel like going into the details but things haven't gone the way I wanted this quarter.  That's life. I'm just grateful for my friends, family, and of course Christa.  However, saw Dinosaur Jr. and that was a great show.  Also really friggin' loud but that's how J Mascis rolls.  Anyways,  I'm trying to pick up the pieces and trying to turn things around as best I can.  Trying new things not to get overwhelmed drawing a page.  Here's something from the sketchbook.


Time to draw comics.

I want to go to SPX this year.  I missed it last year because I began planning for it far too late but this year I am starting now.  I'm looking for someone to share a table and a room with so that the trip is more affordable.  I'm putting this out there now so that I can get a table now.  Is anyone interested?