what now?

Now that Runaway Comic is officially mothballed...

Well, first of all, get your ass in gear and buy one. You don't want to be like the people who missed Darerat/Tadpole, do you? Make sure you get Runaway now, while you can. Make sure you have all 3 issues. It may be scarce as hen's teeth in 10 years.

As for me -

I still have the dayjob. There goes the lion's share of my time right there. But I'm not complaining. I'm lucky to have a good job designing and illustrating.

I still have Nickelodeon Magazine, God bless their enlightened souls. I'm working on a 2-page-spread Teeny Weeny comic right now - Teeny Weeny in the Year 2525! And the Gag Station header every month, and assorted this-and-thats.

Theoretically Sculptor Rick and I will be doing Buddy McNutty #2 soon. We have not heard otherwise, but the Peanut People are late giving us the go-ahead, so we'll see. That's par for them, they habitually run behind. So I think it's most likely a go.

So, in the vast piles of time left after that, what's The Next Big Thing?

I have no idea. I know that I WANT it to be my children's books. There's still that comic strip and the "coffee table" collection of my work. I'm just carefully weighing what I feel like doing, what I should be doing, what others need me to do, what might actually make money, the usual concerns of life in general.

For now, for RIGHT now, I'm booked. In addition to the Teeny Weeny spread and the latest Gag Station header, I'm working on a Real Paying Job for Skinny Benny's agency, assorted honey-do chores at Martin Headquarters, helping re-design a re-launch of Panel-to-Panel (more about that later), farting around on this blog and designing the cover for Mike Dobbs' new book. I'll go ahead and post the rough sketch I just did. I'm sure Mike won't mind the advance publicity.


Oh yeah! And keeping Bissette in line! You can go over there and catch the latest carbon offset blather if you scroll down to the comments in this post.

BY THE WAY! Yapping about what a time-crunched multi-tasker I am reminds me of something I've been meaning to throw out there:

Is there anybody out there who is crazy enough to archive this blog on CD, for some free artwork? By archive I mean copy and organize all text into a simple text format and download all images, and organize it into an organized archive. That would mean re-naming the images, so that images match up to each post in the naming. Know what I mean? Anyone?

I know all of this could disappear if google takes a notion to clean up some hard drive space. I'd kinda like to keep a record of it, and have been very lax in doing so.

6 comments:

eeTeeD said...

i see flip the frog, who was created by ub iwerks (better known for creating mickey mouse, and later the xerox cel transfer process) for iwerks studio.
also scrappy and his dog yippy, who were created by dick huemer (a hero of mine!) for mintz studios.
the other two characters i'm not certain. are they ballon characters from the iwerks ballon based cartoon?

Jed Alexander said...

So this means your abandoning the Montgomery Wart storyline in Runaway? Hey, if you have something cooler in the pipeline you'd rather spend your energy on I'm all for it, but I'm going to miss not being able to find out what happens.

Are you talking about that U.B. Iwerks cartoon with all the balloon people? With the evil pin man? I LOVE that cartoon. That's one of my all time favorites. They just don't make weird stuff like that anymore, at least not without "irony" or something. I miss the earnest psychedelic weirdness of those old 30s and 40s cartoons.

Not familiar with Huemer. Tell me more.

Mark Martin said...

yes, iwerks ballon based cartoon

eeTeeD said...

pincushion man

SRBissette said...

Mark, what's your public stand on the demise of Runaway? I consider it a great tragedy -- and representative of the dire state of the comics industry today. Old timers like you and I just don't have the stomach for this industry's crap any longer...

Colin Tedford said...

"Is there anybody out there who is crazy enough to archive this blog on CD, for some free artwork?" [etc.]

I might be that crazy, if no one else is biting.

rznbi!