Welcome Abel Boddy Readers!

...and, heck, welcome to everyone else, too. And thank you, Mr. Edwards for the guest strip opportunity.I have admired Abel Boddy for a long time and am flattered to be associated with it in this way.

You readers have reached the blog of It's the Michaels, my labor of love that will one day be coming to a book store - or iPad - near you. God willing. Until then, please enjoy the strips I have online. If you like them please tell your friends, and also be sure to check out my comic strip Party Chasers, which appears in NoiZe Magazine. Wait, you don't get NoiZe? Well then, check out this sneak Party Chasers peek:

Mocha Choco Lata Ya

I will be at the Prism Comics booth at the MoCCA Art Festival this weekend in NYC. I am officially slated to be at the booth from 3-4 Saturday but I'll probably hang out longer because hey, when else do I get to hang with other cartoonists? I went to this event last year and it was a lot of fun. This year promises to be even better. It has to be, because last year occurred during a punishing heat wave. And then somebody set off the fire alarm so we had to go outside and sweat until the fire department let us back in. And that can't possibly happen two years in a row, can it? Ok, no that's what I thought. So you see my point: A good time will be had by all.

The 69th Regiment Armory, the site of the MoCCA Art Festival, is located at 68 Lexington Avenue, between 25th and 26th Streets in New York City, New York. For more information about MoCCA and the Art Festival, go to www.moccany.org or call 1-212-254-351.

Update: Prism's table number is 516.

Party Chasers and More

Lots o' stuff has happened to me over the past few months. I was able to make the leap from web page to printed page and got my cartoons published: Prism Comic’s annual guide included an original Michaels piece called Toomey’s Guide to Fire Island. Also in June I started a comic strip for NoiZe Magazine called Party Chasers. In addition to the strip, NoiZe has give me work doing illustrations for the cover and inside their book. I’m happy about the fact that I got this work because their editors liked The Michaels and asked me to create something similar for them. NoiZe comes out quarterly, which leaves me time to do extra (racier) Party Chasers cartoons on the side that I can put into a book one day.

I'm enjoying Party Chasers immensely. Creating it is a very different experience than working on The Michaels. While I have pages and pages of background material on the Michaels characters and storylines, Party Chasers is something I mostly do on a strip-by-strip basis. I just want it to be funny. This is harder than I expected. I can do limited character development in a cartoon people only read 4 times a year, but I'm enjoying the challenge. I also realized that when I come up with strips that more are character and less funny, I can save those for eventual book publication.

Right now I am working on my next Party Chasers and also trying to figure out how to fix the Michaels web site. Until then you might want to view this site in Explorer since it looks a little wonky on Firefox. And probably in Safari. My apologies – I’m working on it.

Status Update

Tackling cartooning as a hobby means that it often takes a back set to the rest of my life. But just so you know that I have not abandoned you, here is a status update on things I have been doing instead of posting fresh, tasty installments of the Michaels for your comic consumption.

Prism Guide
Prism Comics is a nonprofit organization that supports LGBT comics, creators, and readers. I am happy to announce that the Michaels are going to appear in Prism's 2008 Guide. Probably. Until I see it print I won't be sure, but the editors return my emails, which I find reassuring. I submitted some of the cartoons from this site as well as an original full-page cartoon that I'm excited about because you can enjoy the entire comic without needing to click Next Page three times to finally get to a joke.

Party Chasers
Wait! It gets better! I have a brand new comic called Party Chasers! Again I will be published! Party Chasers appears in Noize Magazine starting May 1. I will write a longer post about it after comes out because I am very excited about this new opportunity.

Submission
While I greatly appreciate emails you dedicated readers send me telling me that you clicked on my ads a hundred times, The reality is that A) Those ads aren't enough to pay my bills, and B) Most of those ads aren't pay-per-click, anyway.

The purpose of the web site was to get me started, which it did. Now I am going to take some time to create a submission to send to publishers. My goal is to get The Michaels published as a series of graphic novels because that it the most realistic option I have to make a living as a cartoonist. I will spend the next few weeks working on that submission.

OK, then more Michaels?
Um.. then I will update my ancient portfolio web site to include the Michaels and Party Chasers, and then I will update the Michaels, assuming some huge book publisher hasn't signed me onto my fantasy book deal that is keeping me so busy I can't work on the web site.

As always, thank you for checking in with me.