July 2006

Ohio and San Diego - Here we come!! As I mentioned before I'm still playing catch up on my journals. To facilitate this, I'm gonna keep the journals short and to the point but I promise not to leave anything cool out.

The beginning of July marks our trip to Ohio and the Great Lakes Medieval Faire. This year we moved to a new campground as our last one closed down. The owners wanted to retire and sold the property to a developer that's building highways in the area. The new Campground was charming and the owners, very nice. I think Ronn had some power issues, but we were fine.

The show started out just fine with its new entertainment director. John Davis of Hack and Slash fame (he's the big one) took over for Brooke Hall. I think the ownership wanted to try another direction and get some "new blood" involved. John's a great guy and an awesome director. They decided to go a much more "family friendly" route. I think that's admirable albeit misguided. They think that the reason numbers are down is due to the fact that there weren't enough family shows there. I think it's just because they're marketing to the wrong crowd. The area around the fair is very depressed. Nobody has any money, especially families. They need to focus their energies on marketing to the areas closer to Cleveland and in the more ritzy - "well to do" neighborhoods. Anyway, time will tell.

 

 

San Diego Convention Center

Darth and Jef fool around

Me and artist Monte Moore

Our other big adventure this month was our trip to The International Comic-Con in San Diego. If you've been following, we had a writer from Heavy Metal Magazine write a nice little blurb about us in the June issue. Since then, I've contacted him and he said we'd make a great comic book. Since it's something we've thought about for years we decided to fly out and hob-knob with the industry.

Riki and I flew out for a couple of days to shop artists and meet some of the industry folk. Little did we know we'd meet and become friendly with the man that inspired our characters names. The man I'm speaking of is Kevin Eastman. He's the editor/owner of Heavy Metal Magazine, but back when Riki and I created the "Twins", he was the co-creator of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. When we decided to use the name Tortuga, we also needed good renaissance sounding first names. Well TMNT, were turtles and they had cool names, so I used Donatello and Riki used Raphael. Later, when the underground comic became and international success, I changed my name to D'Angelo to thwart any comparisons. Other than the first names there are no other similarities between us and TMNT but, we got tired of the jokes. This is a story I'm still waiting to tell to Mr. Eastman. I think he'll get a kick out of how we've come full circle. From him inspiring us with his comic book to a writer of his suggesting that we do a comic of our own.

 

Jef and Riki meet Kevin Eastman

Ruth, Todd, and Allen with the new book

Me and Miss Dita Von Teese

Also, our good friend Ruth Thompson has a booth there every year. She shows her fantasy art and was debuting her new "Book of Angels". If you don't remember, Ruth is the Artist that my wife Sharon works for. So, we had lots of friends there that we ran into in addition to the amazing people we met for the first time.

The show was amazing! The San Diego Convention Center is gigantic!!! Everyone who's anyone was there. I'm working on a new video travelogue of this trip. I'll try to get it up as soon as possible. I know that'll make Andy our web guy happy. For now, these are all the cool stills from the trip.

 

Me and Rosario Dawson	Me and Eric... something...	Rosario with her Tortuga DVD	Me and John DeLancie
[That's actually Brian Posehn, not "Eric Something" - your helpful webmaster]

We wandered around the convention hall for hours, trying to get the lay of the land. I can't describe how big the show is. You'll just have to wait for the videos or visit the show yourself. Along the way we met all kinds of celebs. The cool thing about this show is that it's not just about comic books. Presenters from television, film, art, and collectables are in attendance also. It's a geek's paradise! Here are some pictures of the people we ran across in the 3 days we were there. There's more that I'll have in my video version, if I ever finish it.

One of the highlights of our trip, other than meeting Kevin Eastman, was getting invited to the Heavy Metal party. Apparently, heavy metal is working on a film project. So they wanted to have a party to announce this. There were some real characters there. Actors, producers, investors and of courseDita and Kevin were all in attendance. It's a whole different world but I'll tell ya, we were very comfortable in that west coast crowd.

I also got to meet the guy that designed and built all the weapons for the "Pirates of the Caribbean" series of films. His company is called Sword and Stone. We hung out with his protégé Mikey. What a character he was! I tried to buy one of the many prop swords but they're very tight with that stuff, Disney licensing and all. But, don't worry they didn't say no exactly, they're gonna get back to me.

 

Me and Mikey from Sword and Stone

Me and Riki meet the chief from Galactica

Me and the boys at dinner

All in all, trip was very fruitful. We found several artists and met lots of industry professionals. We've got a game plan now and can move on with storyboarding the comic and getting our character studies underway. Wish us luck!

Next month we're off to Minnesota and I'll tell you about the new addition to our family!