"Welcome to the Party, Pal!"

Wow. That's a full two months.

So since our last update, as you might have heard, I started an online campaign to raise money to get a new van, as my old one was about to fall apart (in several ways already had) and just the one I needed became available. I had started it about two days before the last 'Times deadline. In the time since, the campaign took off, shot all over the web, I appeared on (count 'em) four different TV stations in Sacramento that were covering the story, I raised right about $25,000, I got a loan for the remainder from my grandmother, I went down to L.A. for a week to get fitted for and purchase the van, got it, drove right down from L.A. to San Diego for Comic-Con, and then drove my new wheels back home. During all that time leading up to the trip, I was averaging 4-5 hours of sleep a night, trying to keep up with my nightmare job (which became even more of a nightmare since last time, since the department was down to two of us, and the other person finally snapped and quit, leaving me solo) and rush home to work on the huge time demands of keeping up the web page and working the campaign. In the end, it all paid off. The van is got. And I'm driving it now.

And boy, am I worn out.

Currently trying to find myself another job, because I just can't deal with this one anymore, but having trouble actually finding the time to FIND a job. Plus, all that license studying I was doing a while back, that I left off when the 12-14 hour days at work started getting too much and the van thing kicked in, has now kicked back in, as I just found out that I have to take the test by the end of this month (I'd originally been told by the end of September. They changed their mind. Great). Still more van follow-up to do (still needing to pay OFF the thing now, so a new campaign is kicking in for that, plus two of the stations want to do follow-up stories now that I have the thing), but with all the studying that's about to begin, don't know where I'm going to find time for THAT.

But, hey. Got the van. Everything else, as was said in the film "Platoon", is gravy.

So, life's about to go insane...again. So trying to squeeze out a submission while I still have time!

This Time Around

In Forte 2000...

Managed to squeeze out some stories for the Adventures section, and, no surprise, there's a bunch of new art. Comic-Con time equeals art, baby!

In the Character Art Gallery, there's a new haul mainly due to a bunch of old commissions finally getting done and starting to roll in. Which was fun, because when the van thing kicked in, I couldn't really be spending money on art, so I wasn't bidding on anything, but the old stuff from back during my big bidding period of a few months ago kept coming in steadily and feeding my jones for that. So that was cool.

There's one new piece from Eryck Webb (the most prolific F2K artist), a pencil and ink work of Nightsable and Dyna Girl depicting a combat maneuver/story moment that Aaron and I had talked about a long time ago. Mr. Webb has dubbed this the "Dyna Blitz". But there are also a couple of pieces marked as "new" from him that are actually old ones...ones that he'd done for me in pencil that are now colored. He offered me too sweet a deal to pass up on very cheap coloring, so I had to take him up on pair. So there's now Dyna Girl and Moondancer/Rainier existing shots that have the Ted Turner treatment.

A girl that's done some work for me in the past, and someone I've had a semi-regular e-mail correspondence going with, came up with a new one for me. Jenni Chasteen did a really nice Nightshift/Moondancer shot in color for me. I really like her style. And a very cool girl.

And it's ALWAYS a pleasure to get some new color shots from the extraordinary David Encisco. And there are four new ones to appreciate...Knightsabre, Cincoflex, Chill and Phantashia. And the Knightsabre one was on the house. He'd told me about new auctions coming up, and, at the time, I let him know I was off auctions due to the van thing, and he decided he wanted to give me a free one for being such a good regular customer. Wotta guy! Plus there's also a little collage I put together there of faces of Forte women off his shots. I get the full-sized huge files e-mailed from him and then reduce them for web use, but I'm always so stunned at the wonderful detail he puts into the faces, detail that doesn't get properly seen when reduced. So I went ahead and put something together showing them at a decent size, just so you can enjoy. Now if I can manage to get just TWO MORE shots from this guy, he will have officially done shots of every female member of Forte. Sweet!

There are some newbies this time around, too. Got a couple of shots from a guy named Jesse Garza, who did the trio of Forte 2000 women and a separate shot of Moondancer (which he did for free because he felt bad for taking so long with the other shot. Free art rules!). I found yet another amazing female artist in Rebecca Ivic, who did a wonderfully unique color Dyna Girl and Nightsable. And speaking of free again...the auction hit a certain amount where a seperate single figure shot would be included for free, and she did a Tinker for me and decided she wanted to add some color to it. Coolness. A REALLY unique artist out there is a guy who called himself Jester, and I got both Dyna Girl and Tinker shots from him. I only got the Tinker one because he practically begged me to let him do one of her, he liked her so much (not quite enough to make it FREE, but I got a deal), and his stuff came back really, really fun. I like a little diversity in the art, and definitely got it from him.

Oh, and YES, some more Hoa Phong! His stuff took a very long time to get back to me this time around, but well worth the wait. He did a Moondancer, first, which was...all right. Funny, but with any other artist it would have been an amazing work, but this guy's stuff is so strong that it kind of ended up being one of the weaker ones he's done for me (he has spoiled me). However, the Nightshift he did, in contrast, blew my mind. Wow. He's another artist that's well on his way to having drawn all the Forte ladies. Again, have to get back to him over time to complete the set. FYI...yeah, I'd love to be getting shots of all the dudes of Forte, too, but all these eBay artists keep specializing in babe art! Which you really don't hear people complaining about, of course...

A very last-minute newcomer is the artist of the indy comic "Gravy Boy", Brian Shearer. Once more, an old commission came in, this one just at the time of the update. As his art was very reasonably priced, I went ahead and got Dyna Girl, Nightsable and Tinker shots from him. Very fun. And a great guy. I hooked up and said hi to him at Comic-Con, bought some Gravy Boy issues, and met the book's writer. We talked a few times during the Con...I was able to offer table advice from past experience.

Got some really cool other stuff from new folks, too. Even if you're not an anime fan, check out this way, way cool color shot of Dr. Jackal's daughters, Passport and Frenzy, by a girl named Coby Cyr. Wow! Showed a copy of that to Eryck Webb (I show him all the art I get of costumes that he designed for me), and he felt it looked like an album cover to an anime movie soundtrack. I see his point. For this awesome Nightsable shot, I went all the way to Japan! Daikon is a female artist out of Japan that specializes in women character stuff, and she really did a SWEET one in grayscale (really like what she did with the teleportation portal). I also got a Dyna Girl from a 17-year vet of the animation business named Ric Quiroz that turned out really fun.

But the BIG win of the gallery...oh, my God. I had found this auction right at the end of my big bidding period. This guy was offering an 18x24 shot, with up to 12 characters in it. I counted, and it turned out there had been exactly 12 women over the years who have been members of Forte. So I thought a shot of them together would be really cool. I had NO idea. This one took a very long time, but he really, really knocked it out of the park. He just loved these characters, and really put in a lot of extra work. I've seen some of his other multi-character commissions, and they're really good, mind you, but he doesn't put THIS much work into them. He was just fascinated by them. He kept checking in with me regularly, asking specific costume details, opinions on posing, power usage, etc. The final product was so, so worth the wait. The scan really doesn't do the full-sized one justice, but you'll get the idea. Beautiful work. Check out the different variances in fabric he did on their costumes. Geez. A real gem of the gallery, and a wonderful symbol of Forte history.

And then came the Con. Woo hoo! You know, I had gone down there with plans to just get two Jeff Moy shots, and that was about it for art. Maybe something from someone else. But if you've ever been to Artist's Alley...come on! Can you SAY kid in a candy store?! I might have kept it saner, but I showed up only 20 minutes after the Con opened on the first day and Moy's list for the day was already full. He does a very fair thing...has a new list every day, so he doesn't fill up his whole list for the week and then people who show up on the weekend are screwed. So I knew I had to come back the next morning even early. But in that interim, I had time to check out other artists. Oops.

First off, I did manage to get the one Jeff Moy, and didn't get to do more than that due to his demand. That's cool. So I got a Dyna Girl from him that turned out SWEET! Love that guy. Sitting near him was a guy named Sergio Cariello who had a really fun style, so I hit him up for a Nightsable (and I really like the neat way he represented her appearing via teleportation). Also, famed Flash artist Scott Kollins was there, whom I'm a huge fan of, and he was doing sketches for $25. So I got a Tinker from him. Not very detailed, just a quicker one, but it's from Scott Kollins! Cool! I found a guy named Henry Liao who I'd never heard of who was doing reasonably-priced stuff in a fun Japan-type style, so I thought I'd get Aaron a Dyna Girl from him. I then found a gent named James Pascoe who's...well...really really good! He did a really sweet watercolor Nightsable for me. And then like a genius, I put it in my art folio before it was totally dry, and it got smudged. But the smudge shows less on the color copy I made for reducing/scanning purposes. But my FAVORITE of the bunch is by current Excalibur artist Michael Ryan. He did a pencil Nightsable for me that's just aMAZing! That's one of my favorite pieces of pencil art I've ever gotten. I decided right then and there that I HAVE to work with this guy on a comic. Going to have to start making that a goal, writing something for him. He rocks.

One of the other bonuses of this trip was my realization that I was going to be damaging this art (most of it too big to fit in my bag) rolling around the Con, so Joel and I tracked down a booth selling art supplies, and I got myself an 11x17 portfolio. It worked out so well, it got me to realizing that it's WAY past time to do this with all my original art...which up until now has been kept loose on the same oversized plastic bag for the past...wow, nearly 20 years (that bag's been through a LOT). I got home and hit Aaron Brothers and found more of these cheap folios, and now all my art is kept safe and much easier to access and show off. So, cool.

On to the Adventures section. With my limited time being what it was, I didn't get to get to the Forte 2000 #149 and Forge #4 like I wanted to, damnit (though I did manage to re-read all the Forte 2000 issues in the Anubis storyline like I needed to to properly get to the next one, so at least that's out of the way...did that on my trip). So instead, I managed to get three sequels done in the "Hotline" story arc that I started a while back. That stuff is MUCH quicker to write, since it's not actual fiction...just phone call trascripts, all dialogue. People seemed to really like the first two, and when I had written the first one, I had a whole story arc come into my head based around the dude that called the Forte base. So this time around, that arc is really rolling. "Hotline 3: 976-FORTE" picks up where the last one left off, with more people that got their hands on the secret Forte police line phone number calling in and causing mischief. But this time around, Nightsable, Dyna Girl and Rainier are ready for them with a fun way to deal with them. "Hotline 4: Midnight Caller" gets back to the arc itself, with Dyna Girl placing a call to Matt, for reasons that eventually become clear. I really enjoyed writing it (this one's a long one) and dealing with the fun (and emotional) interraction between them, and taking the chance to explore Dyna Girl's character and background some more, and get into some Forte details through the eyes of an outsider. "Hotline 5: Dateline" follows up with that, following up on the interesting and unlikely relationship between these two people. And it's all setting up for the next part of the story, which will be an actual fiction piece with some unexpected twists. I hope you have as much fun reading them as I did writing them.

Da Con!

Well, unfortunately, time got away from me (big surprise) thanks to the unexpected arrival of my folks in town over the weekend, and my Con report and Con photos aren't ready to go, but I'm planning to get them together as quick as possible and add them in. So keep an eye out for an update on the CTO page itself for that stuff. In short, had a great time, and blast seeing Joel, Jeff, Ben, Kaye, and Martin and the family. We were all kind of spread out doing our own thing, but had some fun times together where we were able. Check out the details when they're available.

 

Next Time...On "The 'F' Word"...

Monster month of August ahead, so I don't expect to get squat done on Forte stuff, and then September leads me both to Aaron's wedding (woo hoo!) and possibly the Browncoat Ball in San Francisco with Tim (more details on that in the Con report). So I make no guarantees...we'll just have to see what happens. Maybe I'll get lucky and have a new job by then so I'll have more free time. We can hope. Either way, I'll see y'all then.

Michael O’Connell
Forte Fan Club President, Treasurer, Sergeant-at-Arms and Mascot