Blue Moon Blog

Tom Richmond has an informative post about motion comics on his MAD! blog, covering various approaches at adding motion and sound to already-drawn comics. While if taken from a purists’ point of view these seem like aberrations of the comics medium, some work better than others and the explorations are intriguing. He’s right that these experiments are in an early or transitional stage, so we’ll see how they evolve and develop.

In addition to these, iVerse has a Comic Reader now ready for the iPhone. My friend, Alex Grecian’s Image comic, Proof has been adapted for the application, the first couple issues available at iTunes (#1 for free). Here’s a quick demo of how it works:

I find this to be a more pure method, because one is still reading the comic themselves, not reading along while someone is speaking parts, augmented by sound effects and/or music. It’s still comics, but in a different format.

Regardless of which (if any) someone prefers, it can’t be a bad thing for comics to be available to people in many forms. Why not? Give ‘em a try.

From our summer trip to the North Pole, it seemed appropriate for the girls to don Santa hats so we could use this photo for our Christmas card. They leapt free and unfettered into a huge snow drift over and over again until we got just the shot we were looking for. What troopers! We’re so proud of our little polar bears!

Merry Christmas! God keep us toasty, every one!

Merry Christmas from the Blue Moon Crew!

Last year this time I wrote a comprehensive post of my Christmas favorites. Adding to the list this year are a couple books:

Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story by Paul Auster is a short and simple little ditty, and quietly moving. The book is a nice package with a cool cover and illustrations inside, but a tad pricey at $15, so I’d try picking up a used copy, or read it for free online at the link above.

Larry Marder’s Beanworld just last week made its first appearance in print in more than a decade with a full color holiday special. For long-time fans, this book will whet the appetite ’til Beanworld makes a big return in 2009 with two big books: the first reprinting early material; the second of all new stuff! For new readers, it will serve as a great intro, as this Beanworld review makes clear. I ordered several copies to give as gifts, but have not yet read it. I’ll post an update here later.

I’ve added some songs to my iTunes Christmas playlist, but my favorite is a new song by Florapop, Watchin’ it Snow, which can you can listen to at the new Florapop MySpace page. This is just the first taste of a planned Christmas album for next year. Mark Flora and I are already planning the art for it, which I’ve done for previous albums, like Sunshine Saturday.

Happy Christmas!

Our Christmas card from 1991 featured this long, horizontal tapestry of weird elves. A mini-elf and li’l mouse were thrown in for good measure. I designed this piece to fit a sheet of letter-sized paper cut long ways, which fit nicely into a standard envelope. I’d copied this onto some nice blue/green paper, but present it here in its original black and white.

Another piece discovered in the files, this was our Christmas card in maybe 1992. A black and white illustration, I used zipatone for Santa’s suit, and boy, that doesn’t scan well! To add color for our cards and keep costs down, we copied them on red paper, so I’ve tried to replicate that effect here.  I’ll have another piece tomorrow, and if you haven’t seen them before, I posted several Christmas-themed illos on this blog last year. Best viewed in our holidays section, just scroll down about halfway.

I just found this cute little elf in the files. Only distantly recalled, I think I may have done it for a clip art outfit in the early 90s.

I’ve dressed up my Christmas presents over the years with homemade gift tags like these. Trying to keep costs low, I copy the line art onto colored paper, usually red, gold or blue-green. In this way I could still personalize and customize my gifts to friends and family without doing separate drawings for everyone, as I had for years. Time consuming! One of these tags features Jerry, one of the Trollords, from the comic book I self published in the 80s & 90s. For the blog today, I threw on some quick spot color for most.