The Perfect Day

Wow! Two weeks since my last post. Is that a record? Am I slacking off? I'm still making art, that is for sure, but I just didn't have anything ready to scan. But, hopefully, I'm back on track.

May 5th. The Perfect Day, for me. Or close to it. This past Saturday was shaping up to be a great day with the weather and a convergence of things to do. Really, TOO MANY things to do as I had to decide what I could do and what I could not. Free Comic Book Day! Creature Features Convention! The Avengers Movie! Figure Drawing Marathon! ¡Cinco de Mayo! Comic Crawl! It's like everyone chose that one day to hold their event.

Traditionally, I usually celebrate Free Comic Book Day by getting together with my fellow comic brethren as we perform our annual Comic Crawl around the Bay Area. It is like a Pub Crawl only with less booze. We would drive around the Bay and hit up about 5 or 6 shops to gather up some free funny books and drop some dime in their register. We'd usually start at James Sime's ISOTOPE COMICS in San Francisco and work our way down to the South Bay, ending with dinner and a comic book movie, which always seems to happen during this week (lucky us!). Last year's turn out wielded only two of us but we swung by three stores and caught the Thor movie. This year, I opted to drop my role as organizer in favor of a figure drawing marathon at my school. I've been much more in the mode of creating art rather than reading comics of late.

Running a little late, I did catch 5.5 of the 6.5 hours of the marathon. Lisa was the first of two models for the day. I really miss live figure drawing so this was a treat for me. I wasn't up for any long poses but we got in many 2 to 5 to 10 minute ones.

There were a few familiar friends at the marathon with Tracy and Darren and we discussed things like exhibiting at APE in the fall during the breaks. Darren and I also conspired to sneak out 30 minutes early to swing by Joe Field's FLYING COLORS COMICS to partake in a little of the Free Comic Book Day festivities. Joe's from my home town, only ten years older, and he is the creator of FCBD. I'd swung by in previous years and use to be a regular customer but the afternoon lines was very long. Fortunately, the line was also moving and not as long as the one earlier in the day.

In retrospect, I think the Mouse Guard hard cover for free was the book to get but I messed up getting it. I concentrated of picking out three children's books for my students during my summer cartooning class. Adventure Time, Yo Gabba Gabba, Tinker belle, along with a New 52 book were what I grabbed. I was also in a Simpsons comic mode so I bought one of those along with Gary Gianni's MONSTER MEN book, which I had somehow missed. I try to make a point of spending money in each store on FCBD rather than grabbing free ones and leaving.

We were in a hurry with FCBD though as a number of us had planned on attending THE AVENGERS movie. In all, 15 of us were there for the movie as we also took up an entire row. If you haven't seen the movie, it is all that one would want with a comic book movie: fun, humor, action, no slow sagging moments. It was a blast!!

After the movie, we had to fulfill our Cinco de Mayo itch and dropped in on a taqueria. And then afterwards, several of us ended up talking until midnight standing outside the theater in the nice weather. Talking about art, we certainly get carried away.

In all, it was a perfect day for me: Friends! Art! Comics! Movies! I'm hoping for a few more days like this during the summer.

Above art: Model Lisa poses for the first half of the marathon. Coming up next time: Randall models.