Burton, Suess, Recuperation, and Do-overs... sort of

I had to take a trip to NY City this week for some animal rescue stuff that my wife and I do, so I dragged my diseased and barely recovered ass to the train station along with the wife, two friends, and a precocious French Bulldog named Rako.

We all went into the city for a couple of days to see the sights and eat the food. I thought that maybe walking around would help me hwark up all the snot and mucous that my body has collected from my bout of bronchitis, but really, it just made me make even more lung glop. I still toughed it out, and we got a chance to see the Tim Burton exhibit at the NY MOMA, which was insanely crowded but wicked cool. I know a lot of people have mixed feelings on Burton, but it was really damn awesome to see all of the corpse bride and Nightmare Before Christmas figures and all sorts of wacky sculptures and stuff. I didn't realize how large some of the models they used are; Jack Skellington is about a foot and a half tall, and Oogie Boogie has got to be two feet high.

If I was still contagious at that point, I'm sure I infected about five hundred people, but I'm pretty sure the antibiotics took care of that part. Ah well.

We also saw some really famous works like Van Gogh's Starry Night, Wyeth's Christina's World, and Monet's Water Lilies. I think I was the only one who was into that part.

We also saw some cool art at the Animazing gallery, with work by Dr. Seuss, Schultz, and others. Good stuff. And, of course, a stop at the Carnegie Deli for some awesome food. The bacon there is so good that it may in fact ruin bacon for me for the rest of my life.

The other bit of news I have is about Steamvolt. This is good news though, so don't panic, all five of you who follow my comics XD.

I had a bit of a discussion with Quaz72 on DeviantArt, which came out of the blue, about the content and direction of Steamvolt. I have to say, he made some damn fine points. The fact that someone picked up on things that had been eating away at the back of my brain without any prompting makes me think that my concerns were 100% well founded.

So what this means is that I'm going to make a few tweaks to the previous pages. This is something I generally try to avoid; I think it's always best to just work and keep moving forward, but there's room for exceptions in serialized work, I think, especially when it's new and you're just getting it established. So hopefully everyone can forgive my minor retconning and revisions ;)

Here's what I plan on doing: I need to go back and redo some of the font based text by hand, since all of the feedback I've gotten indicates that people like my messy hand written text, for some odd reason. While I'm doing this, I'm going to actually tweak some of the dialogue and imagery to make the story less tightly linked to the 'real world'. I always like alternate earth and alternate history type stories, but for my own work, I need to separate what I'm doing a bit more. I've got it too tied in with the alternate timeline stuff, and it's distracting from the characters and other things I'm trying to work on. Trust me, this will be good. It gives me a lot less restriction on where I can go with things, and the imagery and stories are going to be better for it.

Anyway, you can read our helpful little exchange here.

The little onion dude is my first real sketch since I've started to feel human again. Now back to work!