Delightful.

But that’s not it at all, that’s just me being an jerk.

The thing is, when I’m working on the book, almost everything in my sketchbook is an incomprehensible mess, visually illegible, often even to myself. Every once in a while maybe I could post something like this thumbnail for the cover for RHO #3.

“Well, hey, that’s pretty cool,” you say, “Why not post thumbnails, those are interesting.”

Here’s the thing, though. That thumbnail was specifically drawn to share. My working thumbnails look more like this:

And that’s a nice one. It’s got little annotations, shading indications, and is relatively organized.

This is more typical. It’s got an itty-bitty panel layout, some numbered panels, group compositions scattered about, and essentially indistinguishable figures.

This is…what is this I don’t even. It’s thumbnails for three pages, one of which might be misnumbered. I… I don’t even know if all of the panels are on there; I may have left some in my head. If they are there, they aren’t labeled in any way.

Character/creature/prop design pages tend to be much neater. The thing with posting characters, which really only applies to this project, is that if you see them here, you aren’t surprised to find them in the book. I imagine that’s part of the fun of RHO, seeing what characters from Oz show up, and what they’re like in this interpretation. So while this sort of material is more presentable, it shouldn’t necessarily be presented, you know? Spoiler alerts and all that. On the other hand, do people look for this kind of material and not expect some sort of sneak peak? I would think that’s the appeal in the first place. It is a conundrum, is what I’m getting at.

So in summary and in conclusion, most things are messy and you probably don’t want to see them anyway.

I…jeeze, I’m happy people have been enjoying it. Thanks so much to everyone that’s given it a shot. Stick around, you won’t be disappointed. Oh, and check out this month’s Previews. RHO #2 has a full dang page, not that I could tell you which page. It’s a thick catalog.

Speaking of which, check out this cover that is OVERFLOWING WITH DANGER AND SUSPENSE:

I don’t know about you, but I am FILLED with purchase intent right now. As far as I know, you can expect to see this one in stores September 29th.

Buy one for yourself, another for a friend, and another (with some pages torn out) for an enemy! Give it a shot, it’s only a dollar.

Also available via Comixology for your various iThings!

Guys.
Gals.
I’m pretty excited.

To coincide with this momentous occasion, I’ve gone ahead and spiffed up this blog too. You learn a lot about a person when you repair all his image links from the last four years, things like: awesome, I can draw a lot better now; Redfern Fairgrounds is something that will never be finished and should probably have, I don’t know, been scripted before drawing each page, maybe; and I never posted a lot, but I’ve been posting even less. I’ll do better!

A little progress update: The Royal Historian of Oz #1 comes out in two weeks, The Royal Historian of Oz #2 is finished and is something I am even prouder of, The Royal Historian of Oz #3 is just getting started, and hopefully I’ll soon have a way to share the untitled haunted house mini online, though it is back in stock on Etsy if you want to see it how it’s meant to be seen.

And that’s about that. If you see any bugs anywhere, please let me know. Tricky little things.

Oh, almost forgot! Pompousoctopus.org now redirects here, to www.aforandy.com/follow, so update your bookmarks and feeds as necessary.

Progress on cover #2

Guys, I promise, these things are really cool to toy around with, and I’m very excited to finally get to show off my handiwork! Suckers are hard to make. Anyway, maybe someday I’ll put some of the content here, but to be honest, I’m not really sure how that would even work.