We at Floodworks want to extend a happy holidays to you and yours. I am currently visiting family out of town, so Fat Baby and Light Years Away will update on New Years day instead of on their regular update schedule. We hope you take the time off and use it to give your family members a call and let them know how much you have forgotten about that time that they held a knife to your neck for ransom money. See you in the new year!

We may or may not have spent too much time on our costumes this weekend.

Well, it’s finally here.  Everything’s a go, and the comics are launching. We’ve been working on getting a robust webcomics line-up going since April, and the fruits of our labor are now here for you all to enjoy every week.   Most important of all is the strip that launched today:  Lightyears Away.  It’s our long-form space opera that stands in contrast to the short storytelling exercises of Floodworks Presents, and the silliness of Fat Baby and Friday Funnies.

Work on Lightyears Away started for me in June, though it’s been one of those projects that Ethan and I have discussed at length ever since our first collaboration years ago in Ghosts of Floodtown.  Artistically, its very different from my usual work.  From its conception, I knew that I wanted to use the project to flex a very different set of storytelling and aesthetic muscles than I’m accustomed to using on our print projects like Breaker, Breaker and The Troubleshooter.  In those projects, I try to maintain a very grounded approach to my design work.  If something appears on a page, technology or otherwise, I’ve often given it more thought than any reader would likely realize just looking at it.  I think “Ok, this ship is a cargo ship.  How would a cargo ship function in a zero-G environment?  What kind of propulsion systems would work best?  What would be the best way for a cargo container to be offloaded or on-loaded?”  Asking myself these questions as I work refines the design and cuts away a lot of the useless visual clutter.  I also tend to think of things such as ventilation systems, deck placement, etc. etc.  This goes for buildings, city planning, pop culture, clothing, everything.

You see where I’m going here.

With this project, however, its a rare foray for Ethan and myself out of the hard science fiction range and into a universe with physics and technology on the rubbery, faster-than-light variety.  This is a chance for us to cut lose and have some fun without that nagging in the back of our heads calling for us to research every minute detail.  And I want the art to reflect that.

Going into the project, I studied the work of Jean Giraud, Enki Bilal, Philippe Druillet, Juan Giminez, and many other 70’s and 80’s bande dessinée artists.  This was the “voice” that I felt best suited Lightyears Away, so I studied the visual language and storytelling used in these artists’ works, and married it with my own sensibilities.  It’s still a bit loose, but as the strip goes on and I get my footing, it will no doubt become an interesting mix. While I wouldn’t call my regular work a particularly American style, I do have a creative voice that has been tempered by growing up in American culture.  So I’m trying to see from outside my own point of view on this book.  I’m attempting to let my lines be freer, as well as my design.  Practicality and functionality is not job 1 in Lightyears Away.  Hopefully as I marry the two schools of storytelling, they work in symbiosis instead of fighting with each other.  We shall see.

Colors are another area where I’m treading into unknown territory.  I’m used to doing more natural colors in my work, so switching to something with a lot more neon-saturated punch to it took a bit of practice.  I did a number of test runs on this first page to arrive at the look it has now.  I’m trying to attain a dyes and airbrush look in Photoshop, so as with the style, it’s a work in progress.  I began to think about what were the various aspects of dyes, and how did they get the color effects that they did using them.  With the next strip, I’m going to try using layers of multiplied color in a limited palette to achieve results closer to what I have in my mind’s eye.  All of this refining will inform not only my work here on Lightyears Away, but my other comics work as well, so it will be a valuable learning experience.

So with that, welcome to Floodworks Webcomics.  While this is a new step for us, we’re glad to have all of you along for the ride.  Feel free to comment on anything we put up, both good and bad.   We’re excited for what we’ve got coming up, and we hope you enjoy the journey as much as we do.

One of our founding members and dear friends, Adam Bennett- know to us as Piles H.W.- has joined the United States Navy.  He leaves on Tuesday the 29th and will be missed.

I first met Piles when he was but a tadpole, and I soon discovered that he is able to do more back flips than any normal man has a right to.  Throughout the years he has been many things to Adam and I -roommate, collaborator, co-conspirator, co-defendant, cell-mate- but most of all he is our friend.

Whilst enrolled in the Navy, Piles hopes to gain many new skills : Knot-tying, whistle-blowing, chainsaw-carving, and any other hyphenated art, we wish him well in this, and we are scared that when he returns he will be able to beat us up pretty bad. I am honestly looking forward to see how he grows and changes over the next five years.  Even more I am eager for him to perfect the skills he will gain as an MC so that we can get to work on our Science-fiction Comedy Puppet web show.

We are very proud of you Adam, and we will miss you.

Slept in late on Sunday, and then went to an Irish pub we remembered from the year previous for breakfast. A lot, it turns out, can change in a year and the food and service were both terrible.

We spent a couple hours aimlessly wandering the convention floor and then crashed a Green Lantern animated movie screening for the seats and the WiFi.

This was the first time I had stayed in town through Sunday, I had always flown out around midday on Sunday before, and I found the winding down con to be a bit depressing. You could see it dying and the town itself no longer felt the same. I began to feel like an unwelcome intruder.

Caught up with Liv and Hillary for sushi and shopping and then went back to the hotel for an evening of post convention decompression and calzones the size of my head. We went to sleep secure in the knowledge that it was the last time we would ever have to bed down, frightened and vulnerable in Hotel Hellmouth .

Overall

Overall the convention went well for us, caught up with all our old connections and made some new ones. By far the highlight for me was watching Jim Mahfood paint live. The hotel situation was terrible but we made do. Having Olivia and Hillary with us was a whole new experience, they attracted a lot of positive attention for us and were able to make connections that I wouldn’t have even seen. Next year I think I’ll try to get them to dress up as space marines and have them hand out ashcans.

Wrote this last section from the Salt Lake City Airport which claimed to have free WiFi although I could find no evidence of any such network. Every so often a large jet with it’s own WiFi network got close enough for me to leach off of, but any kind of solid connection to the net was impossible. The other lovely thing about the airport was that it seemed to have been designed with absolutely zero accessible power outlets. My NC20’s battery was getting low so I wandered away from the girls to see if I couldn’t tap into an outlet located on the roof or in some strange sub basement, and eventually I came across a large partitioned work station complete with power outlets. They looked to have been recently installed when the airport got sick of hearing travelers complain that their human rights were being violated by having no ready access to alternating current.

I had to stab a man in the kidney with a parfait spoon to get a seat at the work station, which was conveniently located right in between a smoking room with a broken and missing door and two women aggressively trying to sell me sky miles (“well I guess if you don’t care about free flights then we can’t help you”.). A combination of angry looks and waiving the bloody parfait spoon at passersby kept my seat secure while I charged the NC20 and tried to get down some notes for a new project.

The flight into Salt Lake was over rough air and solitary puker set off a wave of sympathy vomit throughout the cabin. Even states away from comic-con you could still spot the travelers who were obviously returning from San Diego. Had I bothered I could have probably identified a few more by smell. And that is the true legacy of Comic-Con International, a large persistent group stench- fortunately it comes off with a single shower- unfortunately a shower is a technology that about 100,000 of the attendees of the con has never heard of. Don’t worry guys, I’ll take an extra one for you.

We spent most of Early Saturday standing in long lines and slowly dying of heat exhaustion. Adam and I had a meeting at 3, which ended up getting pushed back until 6 so we crashed a panel for the welcome chance to sit down and surfed the net and then went down to artist alley. In the alley we found Jim Mahfood and talked to him a bit about the Boise comic book community and then talked to Steve Lieber about the recent optioning of Whiteout for a movie. Lieber had given Adam his first portfolio review back when Adam was still in high school and we usually spend a few minutes talking with him at every convention.

After our meeting we made our way to the Bondai Bar to score some True Blood merchandise for the girls who were stuck back at the hotel.

The girls finally caught a cab ( it seems even cab drivers don’t like going near Hotel Hellmouth) and met up with us. After they had a couple of drinks and checked the place out, we walked up to Onyx to catch music by Murs and Live art by Jim Mahfood and company. We ran into a couple other Boise based comics guys at the bar, that I hadn’t met before. I didn’t talk long because I was so excited to see Mahfood paint live. The live art absolutely blew my mind, at one point there were 4 artists jumping back and forth between six canvases- building these amazing, layered, multi-artist creations. Murs killed it live as well, sporting a Black Lantern t-shirt fresh from the con.

Made it back to Hotel Hellmouth in one piece and fell into the shower. I could have slept there, and it really would have made no difference if I had, since the hotel’s beds appear to have been fashioned out of concrete and pigeon down.

Got up early Friday morning because the girls wanted it to be their dress up day, they did their hair and built outfits centered around tank tops that Adam had painted with pictures of them in science fiction gear. It took long enough that the same videos started to replay on VH1 but this is really more of a criticism of VH1’s programming. We handed them the majority of our business cards because they do a much better job promoting us than we do and called a cab.

Cab driver decided to let us off in the middle of the street and let us deal with the subsequent traffic. Inside the convention hall we split, Adam and I had the majority of our meetings on Friday, so we went off to do that, and Hillary and Olivia disappeared into the crowds.

Adam and I shamelessly abused a few connections to get our feet in new doors, and managed to lighten our bags by a few pounds handing out our leave behind pitches with several companies we hadn’t spoken to before.

When we caught back up with Olivia and Hillary later in the day they had somehow given out our cards to Gene Simmons, and by then Adam and I were toying with the notion of letting them pitch our books instead of us.

Most of the day burned by, we grabbed some dinner, and a couple more cab’s rides with drivers who preferred to travel and unreasonably high rates of speed and then made our way to 4th and B for the Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job tour. In line we met a guy who seemed pretty decent, however once he got inside and got some drinks in him he turned into the worst guy- screaming random insults at the stage, trying to start a circle pit during DJ Doug pound, and just all around doing his best to ruin the evening for everyone in the venue

After the show we grabbed some Mexican food and found that we were far too tired for the second show at 4th and B that night- The Mighty Boosh. We tried our hands at ticket scalping, and found that we were no damn good at it and then flagged down the single angriest cab driver in the world. He screamed at pedicabs, honked his horn constantly and got physically upset when we attempted to pay with a 20 dollar bill.

We managed not to get beaten to death by a cab driver and retired to our room at Hotel Hellmouth for the night. After a brief squabble with a very large and colorful variety of local insect the room was secured and we drifted off to sleep.

The flight out of Boise to L.A. was delayed ten minutes, we probably should have just turned around and gone home. Of course we didn’t, what follows are the results.

The plane flights, while on the tiniest planes -one of them with actual prop engines- were fine, the problems started when we landed in San Diego. For the last three years Adam and I have attended Comic Con international, we pitch as many different books to as many companies as we can and try to land some work for the rest of the year.

Last year we booked a hotel quite a distance from the convention center, it was decorated like your worst grandmother’s house and very expensive. The distance from the convention center meant that if we missed the last train we were completely out of luck, the last train left at just before midnight which kind of limited our convention night life options. Limited them to basic cable in the hotel room that looked and smelled like a rest home.

So this year, Olivia was quite proactive, in January she got online and started looking into hotels and in very little time located us one half a mile from the center for a too good to be true price of 65 dollars a night. She called and made reservations, she double checked the price. She then explained that the dates were during Comic- Con and asked if the rates would stay the same, the hotel people said there would be no change to the rates. They, of course, were lying,

But Liv didn’t stop there, we knew it was too good to be true so she called -several times, over a period of several months- to confirm the reservation and the price.

By the time we made it to downtown San Diego and called for direction it was too late to turn back but the warning signs were starting to scream, starting with the hotel staff’s total inability to give basic direction on how to locate their establishment. Now from the address and a brief look at an online map Adam and I had a pretty good idea how to find the place despite the staff’s best attempts to hide their location from us (hint: if, during the course of your directions, you tell someone to turn left four times in a row in a downtown grid you have just told them to walk around in a big stupid circle).

So despite the worst possible set of directions we forged a path toward the hotel, on foot. San Diego near the convention center goes from touristy destination to homeless shanty tent town in one block and most of our path was spent weaving in between derelict shopping carts and sleep tarps, all while Hillary did her best to convince us that the hotel we were looking for did not exist.

It turns out it does exist, but I almost wish it didn’t. Because once we found the place things only got worse. Olivia and I entered the hotel lobby and approached the front desk where we were promptly informed that reservation that we had made and confirmed at lest three times was now for only one day at 4 times the price we had been quoted.

Tempers were lost, potential hotel patrons were scared off, tiny hotel management staff was intimidated, and in the end we ended up paying twice the price we had been quoted. You see, we were trapped. No hotel in the area had any vacancies and if they did they were at insane prices. But the fun didn’t stop there, no -no no no- it did not stop.

First they booked us in a single bed smoking room, then switched it to a double bed non-smoking but told us the wrong room number. When we got to the correct room the door was wide open and it could not ,by smell, be distinguished from a smoking room, or an ashtray even. There were several grams of sand on a shelf 6 feet off the ground and the mini-fridge hadn’t been cleaned. I don’t mean it hadn’t been wiped down, I mean that the previous resident’s food was still in it. The hotel also advertised free Wi-Fi but a note told me to ask the front desk about it, I did and I was told to just connect to whatever network in the area worked the best. None of these networks, I discovered, were supplied by the hotel. This means that the service they advertised was not a service at all, but rather internet stolen from the surrounding businesses.

Some of us felt like crying, others went ahead and did, and then we straightened ourselves up and went out to get our convention badges and some dinner. The restaurant managed to screw up all of our orders but we just didn’t have the energy to fight any more.

Here’s hoping I don’t catch swine flue from the unwashed masses tomorrow, and maybe score some work. That is, of course, if I don’t get murdered by either a transient or vengeful hotel staff in the night.

Well, we’re here.  Site is live.  This ship is shambling toward toward your internet boxes.  We bring a few kinks in tow, but the most important thing is that we’ve finally got our home on the internet after years of shanking transients for storage space with a melted and sharpened toothbrush in the slums of your deviantarts, bloggers, myspaces, and facebooks.  Long-winded metaphors aside, Floodworks will be the place to go to find out just what the hell is going on with me (Adam Rosenlund), Ethan Ede, Adam Bennett, and Dillon Woods.  We’ll be giving you loads of  content, whether it be here on the blog with frequent updates, weekly on our web comics section, or in multimedia projects that lie outside of our usual comic fare.

In addition to what the others contribute to this section, I’ll be using this blog to show process work, share my experiences in getting the various projects up and running, as well as just talking about comic art in general.  I haven’t really been open about my process before, so it should be a new thing for all involved.

Stick around, y’all.  Things are gonna get interesting.