I'm back from a long & eventful week in Amsterdam and I'm still limping!

   Seriously, I don't go anywhere! I was at home, working vigorously on the ultra-detailed pencils of Barry Kitson for Legion of Superheroes #10. At the same time, I was finishing some overdue commissions. Another item on my Things To Do List was finding a window of opportunity to cut the grass between rainstorms!

   Speaking of weather, don't buy into all the hype of the weather reportings on cable and local chanels. They seem to have really gone overboard with their alarmist coverage this year ("As you can see, the trees are blowing!"). I'm not saying there wasn't terrible danger in isolated areas, but I suspect they're hiring former drama school students to present any and all storm coverage as End of Days. Two things I found objectionable:
   1) They would continue for an hour or two announcing the hurricaine as a catagory four, when you could see on the internet coverage, it had been downgraded to a three, for anyone and all to see.
   2) Empty-headed anchormen and women in front of the camera, telling the rest of us: "It's brutal out here, but the rest of you, stay in your homes!", almost misleading you with their tone, as if their statements are government sanctioned! Just give me the sattelite footage and the cheezy jazz music and I'll figure it out! I don't mean to sound dismissive of their good intentions, nor trivialize those hardest hit, but the ratings-grabbing news coverage tends to muddy the waters a bit, informationally.

   Last Tuesday, something had to give, and my blog seemed to take the least priority, so I skipped last week. Plus I had nothing noteworthy to say. I can already hear the tittering as you wonder when I ever HAD anyting to noteworthy to say(my patented Drew self-effacing line of the week)!

   If you want my Fantastic Four review, check out my message board. I'm not going to recycle it here, except that I loved it. I went into the theater muttering under my breath "Strap yourself in-this is gonna suck!" But the movie quickly won me over! It's not grand scale drama like the excellent Batman Begins, but I equate it to a perfect three-minute pop song in it's enjoyment level.

   Where'd that comparison come from? A question I'm often forced to answer!

   Everytime I hear The Human Beanz "Nobody but me" or a Sam & Dave song on an oldies station, I marvel at the compressed brilliance captured in a mere three-minutes. By contrast, 90's Band Oasis started out cool, but quickly got so in love with Noel Gallagher's production abilities that every song on Be Here Now, the second (or third) disc was six-minutes long, three minutes consisting of codas that never seemed to end! It's as if the Beatles wrote an album where every song was like "Hey Jude".

   That said, The FF movie got in, entertained the hell outta me, then got out. Didn't linger, but left me hungry for more! Particularly if you loved the FF since childhood. I broke down and ordered the FF Omnibus, the 848-page, oversized reprint of FF #1-30, even though I have those stories in Marvel Masterworks form. Now I'll have to trade those in for store credit.

   It's a testimony to the work ethic of my fellow former Crossgen creators who chose to stay in Florida, that I couldn't get anyone to go with me to see FF Friday, mid-day (I prefer matinees). "I've got deadlines" is our common excuse to not get together, and it's generally true, so finding the time when you and another freelancer are free to see a movie spontaneously is impossible in our neck of the woods. At least with the crew I know. There's others I've known in the past who look for any excuse to avoid work, but not here! I don't even bother to ask those in Studio Blam! (Butch Guice, Mike Perkins, Laura Martin and Drew Hennessey) because they are all business during business hours. When I meet them for lunch, they still act like they're punching the clock at Crossgen (okay, we never had a time clock, but the receptionists kept track of our comings and goings- a less-offensive time-clock). Then again, their leaving right after lunch motivates my ass back to the art table! Top inker Matt Ryan lives two minutes from me, but is forever busy inking Greg Land!

   Changing gears a bit: DC has two kinds of original art paper, slick and rough. I'm delighted that Barry Kitson uses the rough DC drawing paper. It's been many years since I inked on DC's rough paper, as most pencillers and inkers prefer the slick paper. The rough paper has a particular grip that allows for a wider variety of textures I can add. With the slick paper, I have to go over the pages for hours after erasing, to add effects or beef up lines that have washed out, because the slickness doesn't absorb the inks very well. I'm back to using a brush on larger figures, which doesn't happen very often on a team book like Legion, but it's nice to keep up on my brush chops . I have more control of the quill on rough paper than I used to, probably due to years of using the quill.

   Some of the best ink lines I ever pulled were on the rough paper (sounds like pulling pints in pubs!) - The recent trade paperback, Nightwing: On The Razor's Edge reprints some of my favorite work when I last used that paper. So everybody, me, Barry, and most importantly, my editors, seem pleased with the results.

   Barry lives in a small town in the UK, so the timezone difference makes for interesting email correspondence. When it's 3:00 pm eastern here in the states, it's 8:00 pm there, so if I want to ask him a question before mailing pages out, I have to remember to do it early in my day, since he wraps up around 8:00 pm. I haven't asked yet if he's a day ahead of me, or I, him. Well, either way, he's always a few days ahead of me on pages, and that's the most important way to tell time to us freelancers!