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Well – 2012 is upon us, and with that – new exciting opportunities, enthusiasm and motivation to get us going! I enjoy the new year, but it doesn’t truly start for me until the 3rd (it’s my birthday). Having a birthday so close to the start of the calendar year allows me to reflect back on all of the crazy stuff that happened 365 days ago – and start with a clean, blank page. rather than spout on and on about what I did, how about I tell you all about what I’m going to do. That’s more exciting!

WHOA BABY! Check it out!

I’ve told a number of you that my wife and I are expecting a baby. It’s our first, and we’re pretty excited and nervous at the same time. The good thing is, we have a lot of family close by and on-hand to help out. The bad thing is, our little one will be taking up most of my time for the first few weeks. Just giving you a heads up now, in case you’re wondering what is happening later.

I tried to create a large buffer that would carry us into the end of The Betrayal, but sadly I couldn’t get enough time to sit and work for a decent period of time. It takes me about 2 hours to do a page from thumbs to uploaded render, but I didn’t even have 2 hours to spare in the days leading up to the Christmas/New Year break. I was very adamant about NOT doing any work over the holidays, so the only updates I had to cover were a couple of splash pages and some new pages that I burned through very quickly.

Most people didn’t really care – holidays are for family. But the new year is for pulling up the bootstraps and getting to work. As much as I’d love to commit to a schedule and do it up right, I’m basically in a holding pattern until the baby shows up and we get into a proper routine again. My plan of attack this month is to sneak in updates as I complete them, and post to G+ and Twitter to alert all you readers out there. You may get one in a week, you may get 5 (that would be AWESOME!)

So – I direct your attention to the left hand side of this post. There is an RSS button where you can pick up my updates in your RSS reader. You can also subscribe to have El Cuervo arrive in your email inbox. Or you can follow the Google+ group I’ve set up by clicking on that fat G+ button.

— So what else is new?

Well, I have a few other things to mention. I’ve been a part of the Webcomic Alliance for a few months now. I was more of a fill-in during the podcast and a regular article writer. Since WA has decided to scale back to three times a week to allow for members to get their personal lives in order, you probably won’t hear me on any upcoming podcasts for a little while. Sorry to disappoint the long form serious comic types looking for my take on issues. I will fill in as needed, but it seems that we have the core four back in the saddle to discuss topics for the week. I will, however, still be contributing to articles on the site – so make sure you check them out when they land.

The next thing to mention is a strip based project I’ve been working on since last summer that is set for launch this fall – hopefully to coincide with the puck drop on the 2012-13 NHL season.

It’s called: The Majors.

The strip revolves around two brothers – Alex and Eddie, who end up winning the lottery and buying their favorite hometown hockey team. They soon find out that ownership isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

It’s going to be more of an all-ages arc driven strip featuring an ethnically diverse cast, using the hockey ‘life’ as the central backdrop. It’s not terribly complicated, and it’s not going to be extremely deep. Just some good fun at the arena, with a crazy bunch of characters.

I had started previewing characters during Tyler James 30 Characters challenge, but I grew frustrated with the connection errors to the site. I’m guessing it was from a rapidly expanding database and the huge number of participants. I will probably start previewing some characters on my Google+ account to build hype for the launch of the comic in October. I’m really excited to put this type of work out there – since it is such a radical departure from El Cuervo.

While we’re on the topic of El Cuervo – The first book is set to come to a close. Now, I’m happy with the art style and this past year has been a great way to develop a fluent, efficient workflow – but I’m not 100% content with how the story has been told.

As a written novel, it works. There’s a lot of exposition and dialogue and interaction between characters. But it’s been too simplified for the translation to a graphic novel. I do enjoy producing El Cuervo as a graphic novel, but I think I may revert back to a regular written novel that I started with. I have to say, this has been an interesting experiment and fun to produce, but I’m dissatisfied with the way the story is being told. The only way I can express what I’m visualizing is through prose.

SO – it looks like Eddie’s continuing adventures will be of the written form. Now that the world of self-publishing for mobile devices has been cracked wide open, I’m really interested in writing again. Rather than beat my head against the wall to try and get printed books out to the masses and worry about inventory and shipping, I’ve been lured by the siren song of epubs and digital books.

I’ve been tracking a few young authors in my neck of the woods who have been making things happen with their writing. I went to school with this strapping young lad and he has produced quite a number of sci-fi novels for the Kindle and other e-readers. Randy has been doing it for quite some time now, and has gained a nice following from his body of work. Another person of interest is Blake Northcott who is the author of Vs.Reality. and has been writing screenplays for TV out of Toronto.

I’m not looking to write the next biggest thing – I just want to write something that people find enjoyable to read in a genre we share a common interest in. If it gains notoriety – then that’s awesome. If it’s panned, I’ll just pick up the pieces and make something newer, stronger and better.

Will I give up creating comics? The answer is – NO. That’s the reason why I’m shifting gears and releasing The Majors. Its a strip that is easy to rattle off, enjoyable to write for and doesn’t require any deep thought. I can save that for the novels I’d like to write. :)

Wanna know what else your friendly neighbourhood author is up to?

In a deeper, darker corner of the internet, hidden away from the eyes of most webcomic reading folk is a tech-jock site dedicated to hockey gaming. I used to help run the site – it’s called The Breakaway, and it was a big part of building my online persona from 2001 up until 2008. Lots of good folk there, lots of good times.

Other than moderating and being an administrator, I used to make graphic mods for the EA Sports NHL series on PC. There hasn’t been a new game since 2008, but there are a small few who continue creating mods for this game, and keeping the game on life support. The odd time, I’ll get the desire to put out a small mod here and there. There are times where I’ve come up with bigger plans, but have left them on the back burner. One of my goals for this year is to complete one of the biggest mods I’ve ever made. Its a complete transformation of all the menu and ingame overlay graphics to mimic the TV presentation style look of the iconic Canadian broadcast – Hockey Night in Canada.

So far, I’ve changed a bunch of the ingame menus and done a ton of hex editing to the scoreboard and player overlays. There’s still a lot more to do, but this is one legacy project I want to complete before the year is through.

They’re not identical due to some graphical limitations, but folks who watch the broadcast will recognize some of the consistent visuals you get while watching the actual game.

 

So that’s going to be MY 2012. What’s yours gonna be like?