Comics Experience Alum Launches New Book at Heroes Con!

Rob Anderson was a part of the online intro to writing class just a few months back and now he's debuting his new book ANIMAL CONTROL: SPECIAL CREATURES UNIT at Heroes Con this coming weekend!

Rob worked on the concept while attending the CE introductory writing class in October 2009. He's currently taking the Advanced class and kicking butt in it! He also regularly attends the Comics Experience Book Club where he tells me he's learning all kinds of cool storytelling habits and insight.

The book he's launching under his banner PANDA DOG PRESS contains three short stories and is 20 pages in glorious black and white. If attending Heroes Con, go by the Panda Dog Press booth and pick up a copy! If not attending the con, you can still get a copy through IndyPlanet.com.

And to make it an even more exciting thing for Comics Experience, Rob linked up with Introduction to Comic Book Coloring alum Coleen Allen to color the cover seen here! Congratulations to them both!

Preview pages of the book can be seen here.

2010 is shaping up to be a very exciting time for Comics Experience as we've seen alumni getting professional work from multiple publishers, producing their own comics, creating new clubs online, and even selling properties to Hollywood!

Look for more exciting announcements about new kinds of courses and new start dates for the classics coming soon!

Congrats again, Rob and Coleen!

Andy

Eagle Awards! We need your help!

Back from vacation and what great news! My book (and I guess that means me, too) is nominated for a prestigious Eagle Award! It's nominated in the "Favourite Comics-Related Book: category. I can't explain how cool this is. The Eagles are the British Eisners--this is a truly exciting thing for me and I hope reflects how the book has been received by its audience.

But why stop at nominations! If you can spare the time (PLEASE SPARE THE TIME!), just jump on over to the website and cast your vote for "The Insider's Guide to Creating Comics and Graphic novels" by, well, me.

Here's the link to vote. Just need your name and email address (the don't spam you) and then cast your vote. Takes about 45 seconds.

The book itself I wrote when I was just planning to leave Marvel editorial and go out on my own to start Comics Experience. It was about a year after I left that I finally finished the book. All told, it took about a year and a half to complete.

The Guide is a good tour through the steps it takes to make a professional comic book. It's got a lot of tips from lots of professional contributors like Neal Adams, Gene Ha, David Finch, Klaus Janson, John Romita Jr, and and many more. It's not all interviews though, it is a step-by-step guide. And it was a heck of a lot of fun to write and put together.

Marvel was really cool about letting me use a LOT of art from the Marvel Comics I edited and John Romita Jr. was so awesome to give me unlimited access to his art from his original graphic novel "The Gray Area: All of This Can Be Yours."

It's written for beginners and has been really well received. If you can, please vote today!

And thank you in advance to everyone who votes and everyone who has already enjoyed the book!

Here's the link again!

Eagle Awards! Vote Now!

And if you'd like to order the "The Insider's Guide to Creating Comics and Graphic Novels" just click on the image of the book and you'll go straight to Amazon!

Andy

I Always Wanted to Fly

And now I have, thanks to Kau'i Aero Sports in Kau'i, Hawaii. No posts from me lately because if my vacation this week and last week, but couldn't resist talking about this. So, I'm traveling with my wife, son, and my wife's parents (yes, I like them, so it's okay). And we're on "The Garden Island" of Hawaii and it is beautiful. Hardly a comic book to be found here, which, for me, is a pretty welcome break (of course, being the obsessive guy that I am, I brought several with me).

The place is breath-taking. Now, we'd been here a little over a week already when I decided to try out a form of hang gliding. The vehicle is called a Trike. It's essentially a hang glider with wheels. It has a motor for take off, essentially. But once you're up, your gliding and it's a wonderful experience. No cockpit, no windows, it's you against the open air.

I'm not certified to fly so I went up with Steve from KAS and he is certified and he knows the area and was an excellent guide, doing a lot of fun (but not risky) flying and giving me a view of the island hardly possible any other way. I wasn't all that interested in a helicopter tour, but this, the air against your face and body, the wind pushing you along, this was what I wanted.

We flew along the coast, looking at caves along the beech that you can only get to by boat, we flew INSIDE A VOLCANO! How cool is that? We flew right next to that giant waterfall from "Jurassic Park" where the helicopter lands in the beginning. We flew over a huge mountain ridge as clouds were rolling over the top of it from the other side, right towards us. It was astonishing.
Kaua'i is a beautiful island and a wonderful place to visit. And this flight through and around the island stitched my whole vacation together. If you ever get the chance, you too can feel like Superman. It really feels like you're flying.

PS. I haven't gotten my pics yet, so I pulled these off the Internet. One is just of a trike and the other is of the volcano I mentioned. Really awesome stuff. Check out www.kauaiaerosports.com for more information if you're interested!

Andy