TORCTOBER: Haunted Mansions and SPACE and Alice

New Quixote Coyote.  Oh!  I have a story about this one!  Click on Image to Blahblah.

So, this strip is actually the Genesis of the whole Quixote Coyote thing.  A few years back, Conventions were starting to get more and more expensive.  Table prices were going up, and I was trying to come up with some ways to make my money back on the overbearing table prices.  One of the ideas I came up with was to create a series of Fancy Drawings and Paintings, which I then framed in very nice frames, and set a price tag of around $75 a piece.  The idea was that I would sell maybe one very nice piece per show, and that would cover a significant chunk of the Table Price, which meant that I wouldn't be in a blind panic trying to sell comics for $1 to $5 a pop.  Needless to say, this plan did not work at all.  The Paintings were too big, they took up too much space in my vehicle and my table, they were cumbersome to lug around, and it took close to two years to sell the bulk of them (a lot of my plans turn out this way).

Aaaaaaanyway, one of the Cool Pieces I did during this period was designed to look like an animation cell from an old cartoon that never existed.  I took watercolor paper and did a grey inkwash of the background, which was designed to look like a Haunted Mansion.  Then I painted the characters of the piece onto a transparent overlay with Acrylic Paint.  The characters on the piece were a little Mickey Mouse type character and a Skeleton with an Axe lurking behind the corner (it was virtually identical to the last panel of today's page, except the character wasn't Quixote Coyote yet).  When it was done, it really did look like an old animation cell.  People would point at and go "That's so cool!" and then not buy it.  Raven, the Pro Wrestler, actually saw it and liked it.  He didn't buy it though.  Didn't hit me with the Evenflo either.  I know it took over a year to sell that piece, which sucked because a lot of people thought it was cool.  If I had sold it earlier I might have considered making more pieces along that vein.

Anyway anyway, when I was piecing together the ideas for Quixote Coyote, I thought it would be neat to do a shout out to my old Animation Cell from a Cartoon that Never Existed.  So I did.

In other news, and speaking of Cons, I'm not working very many Cons next year, because I am getting married to my lovely Darlin my Darlin Mei.  The only show I'm definitely working next year (because I just got signed up for it) is SPACE in Columbus, OH.  Ironically, the show is exactly one week before my wedding.  Odd.  Anyway anyway anyway, as I have raved before, SPACE is my most favorite show of the year, it is awesome and fun, I always have good sales, I meet lots of cool people, I get to hang with people I only get to see once a year and talk comics, and I do excessive run on sentences.  So, I'm excited for that.

Speaking of appearances, I'm gonna be at a Local Authors Signing at Frontier Community College in Fairfield, IL on Friday from Noon to 5.  Should be fun.  I'll also be at Halloweenfest at Comic Quest in Evansville, IN on Saturday from 10 until whenever I get bored.

Last up today, we've got another sneak peak of "Lost Alice" which is available in the Online Store at http://www.torcpress.com/store/.  We're slapping up another page today.