I haven’t completely fallen off

Hello everyone I would like to say first and foremost thank you for supporting The Oswald Chronicles. After the Kickstarter campaign I had to take a breather, I was a little burnt out with posting all the time and just needed some time to step back and recharge and letter pages, lots of them My TV died recently and man without the temptation of that evil but beautiful machine around I was able to get a good deal of work done. And here are some of those pages. The pages are from ‘It Came Seeking Me’ a story that was illustrated by Matt Lundsford. The original grey scaling was done by my buddy Benito McCrey but I had made a mistake when sending him the files. I had sent him flattened high res PDFs that were saved as line art that he converted to grey scale. Now what he did which he had to and it’s entirely my fault, is when he converted the file it pixilated the text causing the text to look like it has little ridges when you look closely. Yea, I know it’s really anal but when you’re into printing the way I am these things stand out and stare at you until you fix them, like a waterbug sitting in the living room eating chips and taking control of the remote while you’re watching some MMA.

Anyway I needed a new batch of these pages re-grey scaled so I contacted the awesome Jade Gonzalez who was kind enough to take on the task and she did a great job with them. The thing I really like is that the snafu allowed me to re-letter this book which really needed it. When I first lettered this book it was the first book I had ever done and since then I think I’ve done at least 350 pages so my choices and eye have improved. I’ll never be a master letterer but I only strive to be serviceable.

The top pages are the old ones followed by the new pages, enjoy

Next Daphne is going to lay the whole book out in Indesign and once that’s done it’ll go through a number of editing passes from myself, Daphne and a few friends and then it goes off to Steve the paid pro in the group who will look at we’ve done laugh pull out his mighty red pen and remind me why it is I go to him for this sort of thing.

Now for some reviews

American vampire vol. 3 by Scott Snyder,Rafael Albbuquerque, and Sean Murphy

Scott Snyder and crew continue telling the tale of rebel vampires as they travel through the nooks and crannies of history during WW2 and how they were impacted and help impact some of the events during the war. Great stuff as usual and I’m looking forward to the next volume, I think these are perhaps the best Vampire tales being told today, although True Blood on HBO is way too batshit insane to ignore

Creepy Comics vol. 1 by various

This book has some really good artwork with a few good stories and some forgettable ones. I don’t think I’ll be checking out any more of these. I have the feeling that the people who participated in this book are fans of the original Creepy and Eerie series but I don’t feel any real drive or inspiration in any of these stories and for sure not much in the way of any scares. Unfortunate because I was really looking forward to reading some good horror when I picked this one up.

Pearl Of Pandaria by Micky Neilson and Sean Galloway

Admittedly I have very little knowledge of World of WarCraft games and the stories placed within those worlds and I thought this would be a good entry way into them. It is if you want to read several pages of info dumping something I don’t think the author had a choice to do, the information had to get to the readers. I think it could have been done a bit less obviously. Once you’re past the history lesson you get to the story of a young girl who’s infatuated with her world traveling uncle who has been missing for some time and who she wants to find. Defying her father she leaves her native lands to seek out her uncle. Her father sends one of his greatest warriors to go retrieve her and bring her back, he dies at the end rescuing her and her uncle after reconciling with his lost friend/rival her uncle. Does any of this sound familiar, me too I felt the same, sounds like the plot of many Kung Fu flicks I watched as a kid, not necessarily a bad thing but it just doesn’t work here. The artwork by Sean Galloway is very nice and has an animated feel to it. My only complaint is that he doesn’t draw in the pupils in anyone’s eyes so everyone looks dead in a weird kind of way. I know it’s an aesthetic style thing but it made it difficult for me to connect to the characters on an emotional level. If you’re a fan of WOWC you may want to check it out for the artwork and the history lesson, but not much else.

Starman Omnibus vol. 2 by James Robinson, Tony Harris and Wade Von Grawbadger

In this volume we see James Robinson covering various parts of his lead character’s history and we see him vacillating from larger tales to smaller more personal stories. Great stuff and I’m happy that DC is producing this series in this format for new readers like me to enjoy. I love reading a good super hero story every now and again and I know for the next couple of years I’ll be getting them from Starman, James Robinson, Tony Harris and co.

Well that’s it for now and as soon as I have more news I’ll pass it along, like the new cover

Thank you one and all for being part of this and supporting this dream. It’s going to take a few months to come out but I think the book will look awesome when it does and don’t forget to vote for Oswald on topwebcomics.com.

Best

JD Calderon