Spork in the Road

So a few years back, while I was in high school I took a summer class at RMCAD in Colorado on comic books. It was something like a week long for like 6hrs a day. It was taught by Jon Holdredge, who is currently teaching there now, and Mike Barron. I just looked it up today, interested in finding specific details and the names of the guys who taught it. Barron taught the writing portion in the morning while Mike taught well everything else. When I came across Barron’s site he publicly “dissed” the whole student body and even went into intimate details about some of his student’s home lives, so I will not sink to that level and do the same here with him but I will say that Jon was more helpful and was a lot more structured in his use of the time we had in class. He’s the only reason I felt a little more justified in paying the money. Jon is a professional inker but also was a good artist and had kind of made his mark on Deadpool in the late 90’s. Anyhow I generally got the feeling that he thought the industry was dead, and was discouraging us from getting into it – when we were there for a class because we wanted to. So from there I set my sights on 3d animation, stopped drawing and didn’t really pick it back up until Vicky suggested I change my major, and to do that I’d have to move and go to SCAD or Joe Kubert school, which I’ve heard mixed things about. I had originally chosen SCAD because it gave you a BFA with a emphasis in sequential art where as the JKS only gave you a certificate, but professionally neither one would have meant jack, its all about your skills. I really started when I heard Rags Morales had graduated from there and he had gotten work doing a graphic novel Identity Crisis for DC, anyway I thought he had just graduated. The just today I just found his bio on wiki and thought I read he graduated in 1998, and I thought hey 9 years to work at DC that’s not bad, then I reread it and saw it was 1988. Anyway, the class was a fork in the road, I wonder were I would be had I kept on drawing and stuck to it, but I’m here now at SCAD, graduating in less than 6 months and intimidated but more optimistic than most about finding work in the field once I graduate. I went from one end of the fork to the other with some rough edges and thus made a spork. Editor’s day should give me a good indication of my chances are and how much farther I need to come to be able to work professionally. Do I try for the smaller companies where I might be able to get a job and impress them or head to the big dogs and see if I can keep there attention? I’ve heard most the guys that come use it as an excuse to get smashed anyway so well see, I may be the one taking it the most seriously in the room. Let’s hope this spork is good enough to feed me while I pay off loans.

Things are getting rocky with my friend/co-writer and artist for Maelstrom, so I’m staying on the ship till the end of the month and if he sinks it I’m jumping. I have a story about a firefighter I started for 24hr comic day I could work on but I’m currently and will soon be contractually (grade wise that is) obligated to work on what would have been our 3rd issue of Maelstrom in Senior Project Class.