The Red Fez "An American Toilet Paper Nightmare in Southeast Asia"

Last week, The Red Fez has been so kind to publish one of my articles in their 49th issue of their publication. The article itself, one that I did back in university a year ago titled "An American Toilet Paper Nightmare in Southeast Asia", is a fun story about my experience dealing with culture shock when I visited the Philippines for the first time. Short and sweet and it's been a while since I published something. Hoping that The Red Fez puts out another excellent issue for their 50th issue and that they make it to issue 100 someday!

The American Immigrant Pencil Previews

Hey everyone, finally got a scanner! Meaning I can finally post a few things showing what I'm working on lately. Below are a few excerpts from the book "The American Immigrant." They're pulled about midway through the first part of the Philippines book, and illustrate a little bit about the area that I traveled to during the summer of 2011 in the Pampanga province. Hope that you enjoy!

 

Chapter 6: San Juan's Blessing
Page 45 and 46

Chapter 7: Sanctuary
Page 59, 60, and 61

Going to Malaysia, out of work soon, comic exercise

Plans are all set and I'll be traveling abroad again for the first time in year, this time out to Malaysia for a little bit of journalism work and partially for vacation (first time ever?!). Hope to actually produce a comic coming up for a publisher in the next few weeks, so going to keep things under wraps until I can provide more information about that. But I promise this story is going to be a good one!

As far as an update on life, my contract with Taereung High School in East Seoul is coming to an end in two weeks and I still haven't found a job here in Korea. Things might be a bit tricky and I might have to take time off from the bigger book that I'm working on to tend to life problems. I know I keep talking about this "American Immigrant" novel and yet not showing that I'm producing any work for it, but trust me I'm almost already up to 50 pages penciled on it so far and I'm going to be inking in the near future.

Last thing is that I do want to show some art that I had originally did in university, got halfway done on, and gave up. Been sitting on my external hard drive for almost 1 1/2 years and I just took the rest of a day to sit down and finish it off. It feels so good to paint again after pencilling for months. So here it is, pulled from a small prompt I got out of Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics" trilogy (a must read for all visual artists, not just comic artists). Goal was to tell an ambiguous story about a cop, a crook, and a third person and be a bit more complex and subtle at the same time in the storytelling. Figured to add another challenge by rendering the whole thing digitally. Originally had the story called "French 25," but looking back I'm not too crazy about the name, either way here it is...

Korean Students, Wobbly Heads

Final days of being a teacher at Taereung High School are coming up, and definitely makes me sad to have to say goodbye to all of the students. During the last two days of the semester I got some time to do some painting demos for class (my students found out I can do more than just talk in English ;) ) and figured to show some of the better ones that came out. Enjoy!

The "So Mang Ban" Crew -- Taereung High School

Btw, even though people have been supportive of this idea of a weekly comic about recent grads, I haven't had ANYONE submit a story for it! Tell your friends, anyone that's grad recently that has to now pay off some student debt. Have a great day and see you all around.