Capes-n-Babes

For those attending the Baltimore Comic Con… mention this strip any time during the show and get something for FREE!

Today’s strip was greatly inspired by a Facebook post I saw from my good friend – and Baltimore Comic Con attendee this weekend – Amber Love. So, for everyone who reads this blog post and plans on attending the Baltimore Comic Con this weekend, I want you to find Amber Love some time over the weekend and say:
“Four Twitter blocks and eight Facebook denials – yeah, baby!” in the worst Austin Powers impression you can come up with.

Then, I want you to call 911 because soon after that, she’ll probably hunt me down and kill me.

But now, a serious note for a moment…

I’ve often blogged – and mentioned on several Podcasts – how much I love Heroes Con. Heroes Con will always hold a special place in my cartooning heart because back in 2007, that’s where Capes & Babes made its convention debut. But why am I bringing up Heroes Con if the Baltimore Comic Con is this weekend? Because, in reality, when it comes to Capes & Babes, these two conventions are tied together.

Even though I made my convention debut at Heroes Con ’07, that never would have happened if not for the Baltimore Comic Con 2006. That particular Baltimore Comic Con will hold an even greater place in my heart than Heroes Con – because, my friends, THAT’S the show that finally motivated me to get off my behind and make a serious commitment to doing my own strip, with my own characters and with my own imagination and crazy story lines and humor.

Before Capes & Babes, many of you know I was doing a weekly webcomic called “CMX Suite” for the web site Community MX. It was a fun strip to do but it was all based on real people – friends and fellow web designers, programmers and CSS gurus. That meant the humor and creativity of the story lines and jokes was always filtered or pulled back just a little. I needed to break out and explore new characters. I was aching to write in a more bizarre and off-the-cuff style. I probably subconsciously knew this but during the 2006 Baltimore Comic Con, that realization finally hit me and it hit me hard.

With the risk of sounding like a broken record to everyone who has heard me say this before, during that show, I got to talk very in-depth and one-on-one with Brad Guigar and Danielle Corsetto about their career, how they manage their convention schedules, their comic strip and anything else I could think of. I went away full of inspiration and re-charged energy. But I also went away just a little bit angry as well. Not at either one of them, but at me.

After talking to them, I realized I had wasted quite a few years convincing myself I wasn’t quite good enough or ready or financially stable enough to do what they were doing – or so many other artists were doing every year at the Baltimore Comic Con. It was the combination of this inspiration and anger that finally spurned me on to go home and dust off an old graphic novel idea I had and turn it into a humor strip instead.

Marc was already a character in the graphic novel. He pretty much stayed the same – at least in looks. His background completely changed though. So was Joey – but she was called Jodi back then. With some input and help from my wife, I tweaked her quite a bit and changed her name. But even with those tweaks, I knew I didn’t have enough to start a comic strip. Even though I was, at the time, a big fan of Wes Molebash’s strip, You’ll Have That, I was too worried if I only had Marc and Joey in the strip, it would turn into a love-lorn dramatic strip – which was exactly what I was trying to avoid.

I needed some kind of “mascot” for the strip… an Opus, a Hobbes, or yes, even something like a big, fat, blue Troll like Scott Kurtz’ Skull…

I few years earlier, I had designed a t-shirt with a a crazy, highly stylized werewolf head on it. Surrounding the werewolf’s head were the words “Internet Werewolf”. I always liked that character design but it was way too complicated and graphic designy to put in a comic strip but the idea of having a walking, talking, ultra horny werewolf in the strip was just too good of an idea to pass up. So, I took the t-shirt design and started working on sketch after sketch after sketch of making that werewolf more simplified, easier to draw. Twelve or thirteen sketches later, I pretty much had Roy down.

I did all of this – plus drew my first three Capes & Babes strips the day I got back from the Baltimore Comic Con. Usually the con ends at 5:00pm on a Sunday and it’s a 90 minute drive back to my place in Virginia. The ’06 show was the first time I ever left the Sunday show before 4:00pm. I was so charged up after talking to Brad and Danielle – and I had bought and seen everything that I wanted to see the day before – I just wanted to get home and start working. Around 1:00am or so that night, the first iterations of Capes & Babes had been born.

A few months later, I was at Heroes Con, selling Capes & Babes mini-comics and I haven’t looked back since.