I spent a good chunk of my afternoon rescanning and reformatting Rent-A-Thug pages to get their quality up to where they were before they were scanned in the first place. Basically the blacks are actually solid black now, like they are on paper, and not a weird sort-of-grey thing.

This afternoon I managed to cover everything from the first page (“Charlie No-Aim is a Jerk”) to the end of “Protection Rackets & Head Trauma” (which starts here and ends here). In all, the first twenty-seven pages have been improved. Tomorrow I’ll be starting with the Rules For Criminal Success strips, which will probably take a bit longer (there’s more of them and they’re only one per piece of paper, whereas the full pages actually have two comic pages on a single piece of paper).

Also tomorrow will be the usual Wednesday update. Huzzah!

Just thought I’d let you folks know that pages 41-46 have been updated with improved page scans. I should be caught up by the end of next week (I probably won’t do much on Christmas Day or Boxing Day).

Also, be on the lookout for the Rent-A-Thug Christmas Special which will be posted on Tuesday, December 25th in a special bonus update.

In what can only be described as temporary insanity I powered through the rest of the archives that needed to be re-scanned. Pages 47-59 have been improved and updated, which brings the entire improvement process to a finish. Now to figure out how to set up a separate archive for Frank Baron, NSO. Then rescan all those pages.

My head hurts now.

Earlier today writer Andrew Foley and artist Nick Johnson unveiled their new project The Holiday Men, hosted at The Chemistry Set. Having met both of these gents and being familiar with their previous work I highly recommend that you head over and check out The Holiday Men. It’s shaping up to be an action-packed and hilarious romp through the world of evil corporations and holiday icons. Go check it out and tell ’em Rent-A-Thug sent  you.

I uploaded a new drawing to the Illustrations section, titled “Von Blucher and Orc Grenadiers”. I drew it while I was working on a bunch of design drawings for a weird history of the Napoleonic Wars.

Rent-A-Thug: First Offence is finally here! The first Rent-A-Thug comic book arrived today and will go on sale tomorrow at the Edmonton Collectible Toy and Comic Show.

The book is 36 pages of Rent-A-Thug misadventures in glorious black and white. First Offence features four short stories, two of which are exclusive to the print comic! Stop by the Toy and Comic Show to pick up your copy for only $5!

Buy the book, love the book, possibly make love to the book. Here’s a peek at the cover.

Yesterday was Free Comic Book Day, where I was a guest artist at Happy Harbor Comics Volume 2. The artist roster was beefed up quite a bit on Friday, apparently, since Dan Schneider and I were joined by Tammy Lee and Ken… who also has a last name, but I don’t know what it is. We did custom sketches in return for donations to the Food Bank. Included in my sketch output for the day were Halo’s Master Chief, the Predator, Brian and Stewie from Family Guy, Optimus Prime, Scarlet Spider, and a bunch of other stuff that I don’t quite remember. One of the advantages of working next to Dan was that I tended to avoid getting swamped because his portfolio is ridiculously impressive. Which is good because I kept getting requests for things that take a long-ass time to draw. Later in the day as things died down I also had time to pencil a Rent-A-Thug strip, which was a nice change of pace from sketches that almost invariably required reference.

Last Thursday I teamed up with Jay Bardyla of Happy Harbor Comics and Dan Scheider to give a presentation to about 40 junior high students about comics as a medium. Jay talked about the process of making comics, starting with the writer creating a rough storyline all the way to the last brushstroke of the colourist. Dan and I drew comic pages based on characters that were requested by the students. Jay had told us to have a mental bank of superheroes and manga/anime characters prepared, which was quickly derailed when the requests were Sephiroth and Master Chief. Dan hates drawing technical stuff so I took Chief. I then proceeded to draw a ridiculously inaccurate rendition of Chief blasting an even more inaccurate rendition of a Covenant Grunt. That looked kind of like a Koopa Troopa, come to think of it. It was a lot of fun and a bunch of the students came out to FCBD as well, so Jay’s indoctrination plans seem to be working at full capacity.

The online store is giving me crap. The buttons inexplicably don’t go to the pages where they’re supposed to go, despite the code being generated by PayPal for that explicit purpose. Brain ‘splosion may be imminent.

After having it on my to-do list for months, I’ve finally gotten around to creating a Facebook page for Rent-A-Thug.

Rent-A-Thug on Facebook

For those unfamiliar with the system, you basically become a “fan” by adding yourself to the list, at which point you can post on the wall and on the discussion boards to talk with other Rent-A-Thug fans. And, y’know, me. Fun! So yeah, check it out and spread the word.

There isn’t really much more to it than what the title says. I added a new drawing to the Illustration section called Space Grunts – Calm Before the Storm. You should go check it out.

I spent the better part of the day today upgrading the site to ComicPress 2.5. It looks like everything’s functioning, which is good. There were a few moments there where I thought I might start Hulking out. Did I mention I’m bad at computery things?

While everything appears to be functional there are a bunch of stylistic things that I need to tinker with. I liked the red links and the grey backgrounds so I’ll have to figure out how to get those back. Most importantly, though, if you notice something that isn’t working, please let me know. Email jeff@rentathugcomics.com and I’ll try to figure out how to fix it (okay, I’ll probably fail, give up, then findout from the ComicPress support forums that it was something really, really simple).

Anyway, tomorrow will be the real test when I try to post the next comic. See you then!