you know what this story’s been missing? some heavier exposition…

mocca, as always, was awesome.  it was great seeing friends and colleagues i only get to see once or twice a year- or every two years- or every once in a turquoise, polka dotted, square moon. ryan and trade were great table mates and we couldn’t have asked for a better section right underneath the air conditioner units.  especially right after all the doors in the place were swung open for a half hour while we all waited outside for the firemen to do their jobs.

met and hung out with a lot of old and new friends- and i hate naming names because i’m bound to forget somebody- but you all know who you were (and all of you can also confirm to how “elephant like” my memory can be).  but hanging out saturday was fun.  and dinner sunday night was a blast (kean and andy make a cute couple).  i wish i could have walked around the floors more (i was pretty much confined to my table) so it was nice to be able to chat and stuff after show hours.  how else was i going to enthusiastically promote speed racer? :)

i didn’t really realize it until i got back and tallied up everything, but it was also my most profitable con ever (thanks mostly in part to the art prints i decided to bring with me this year- i’ll need to get a shop set up for those soon).  reason enough to head back up again next year, but i would be planning to anyhow just because of the amount of fun i had. mocca is easily my favorite convention.  the people there are the best, the amount of quality work the exhibitors are selling is astounding and no one really has to tug at my arm very hard for me to have a reason to visit NY.  even if it is for a quick, kinda stressful couple of days.

so yeah- see you all next year!

this is for a card set coming out sometime later this year.

i actually drew this little mermaid earlier in the year- but just recently got the okay to blog it.

i’ll be at the mocca art fest this weekend! me, ryan and trade all have our own little lunchbox funnies section in the back, tables A17-A19.  i’ll have copies of adventures in sandwich making, it’s prequel/sequel mini, ash: the time traveling kitty, postcards, buttons, window clings, magnets… all sorts of stuff.  i’ll also have a limited number of art prints on me from stuff i’ve posted on this blog, including the mermaid above, as well as a free promotional parable poster for the first 90 people that walk by.

should be a really fun festival this year.  hope to see a bunch of you there!

well, the story broke on this last week so i assume it’s okay to post this here:

this is a page from a story i’m contributing to for Comic Book Tattoo- an upcoming anthology inspired by the music of one of my favorite songwriters, tori amos. you can read the cbr article to read more, but basically we were all asked to choose a song but draw a comic that doesn’t just narrate said song. so what you end up with is a massive 500 page book full of comics that even a non tori fan can enjoy. smart thinking!

i choose the song caught a lite sneeze because, for mysterious reasons unknown even to me, i immediately thought of a story involving two faeries. and you all know it doesn’t take a whole lot to get me drawing pixies. hopefully my little story will hold back the legions of people clamoring for me to get back to drawing more seed (one day! i promise!).

anyhoo- i’m actually still working on this, but i anticipate being done within the next day or so. and then maybe i can get back to some regular blogging. or some cleopatra in spaaaace!

i just wanted to take a quick moment to mention that a few of my books, including adventures in sandwich making, are now on wowio.com- i believe the first successful e-book downloading site. this is good news to those of you that always wanted to buy my books but didn’t want to spend the money- because every book on wowio is free. yup! free! and yet somehow, i still make a little bit of change every time someone downloads something of mine. of course- i still appreciate those of you that buy a physical copy, but this is a nice alternative. so if you want to help out an artist and make sure he can keep drawing comics and other fun stuff- as well as assure that this great service sticks around- then go and download my books right now! just type in mike maihack into the search field. and thanks!

…and all i drew were these lousy sketches. haha.

just a couple mindless doodles of cleopatra while browsing, conversing and selling at the mid-ohio con this weekend. i had a really fun time and it was great meeting those of you who stopped by. a very appreciative thanks to those that bought a book or a print or more. i received a lot of nice compliments which is always a great boost to my ego. ;)

photos to come!

also this started happening while i was gone. i need to retain better control over my comic creations…

last week, a couple of my friends were drawing mermaids. not wanting to be left out, i drew one too, and just got around to coloring her this morning.

not quite as unique or cool as their mermaids, and a bit too ariel looking, but at least now i can add “have drawn mermaid” to my resumè.

and joel carroll pointed me to this really sad news this morning as well… :(

i only knew mike from online- from his blog and forum chatting and whatnot. but from what i gathered, he was an extremely nice guy and an insanely talented artist. you could tell his love of art, and especially the comics medium, in every post and comment he wrote. the news of his passing comes as a shock and is a great loss to both the comics and internet communities. his family will be in my prayers.

i’m back from my NY-MoCCA-Boston trip! and i had a great time. MoCCa is my absolute favoritest convention and the best part about it is meeting so many talented creators and seeing the work they do. there’s just something about the small press comic world that makes me feel so excited to be drawing comics. all i wanted to do when i got back was start creating things right away! unfortunately, jen and i got a Wii instead and have instead spent more time creating Miiis. ah well.

i loved meeting up with a bunch of the lbf guys there who i’ve never actually met in person till now. finding out how nice they all are makes me even happier to be part of such a great collective. but i see no sense in giving any sort of detailed convention report like everyone else who was there has done so much better then me. particularly dean here who created the best convention report ever. here’s a picture of me from it:

yes.  i lost.  the little twerp has super powers!!! also, jen threw a few of her own pictures on flikr if you’d like to see. anyhoo, i’ll be back there next year. thanks to all of those that stopped by!

i wish i had some sort of drawing to post, but this is really more of an “i just wanted to let you all know i did remember i have blog” kind of post. hopefully some new art later this week!

this was a quicky for drawergeeks this coming friday. topic was aliens. not really sure where this idea came from though…..

and with that i’m off to new york! i’ll be attending the MoCCa art fest this weekend, june 23-24. i’ll have cow & buffalo books, some postcards, the very last handful of seed minis i had made and i’ll probably be doing some drawing there too. also really looking forward to visiting some old friends, some more recent virtual ones and maybe meet some new ones while i’m there too. should be a blast.

after that’s it’s off to massachusetts to meet up with even more friends! so i’m really looking forward to this vacation. so many projects have tired my brain.

be back next week!

i just (finally) updated the parable site with the cover for the anthology:

the idea for the cover came from matt yokom and is based on matthew 5 :14-16 :

“You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.”

there might still be some tweaks done to it before it sees print, but this is pretty much it. for those that would like a larger version of it you can download a 1200px version here. while i was at it, i decided to also make one desktop size that you can download here.

sorry for the lack of updates this week, but i’ve contacted a nasty virus that’s keeping me from doing anything but sleep and watch tbs sitcoms all week (which is probably adding to the sleeping). but i wanted to mention, although i won’t be at ape this weekend, my books will. joe fenton will be there with a limited number of copies of adventures in sandwich making as well as his book, journey of decent and some of dean rankine’s incredibly awesome minis. he’ll be at table 208 so stop by if you happen to be attending.

i will be at may’s tampa con this year though because, well… i live here. that’s a few weeks away though, but i’m letting you know now because i just found out.

i finally inked and colored that link drawing i drew a while back. and today, it’s on the awesome video game comic site, lifemeter!

jen and i finally saved up enough money (or rather the government did for us- thank you tax returns!) to go out and buy a wii. and we were all excited to go get one this wiikend until we found out they are sold out everywhere! gah! guess we have to wait till the summer. which i guess is a good thing since i have plenty of work i should be doing instead of the hours i’d be spending in front of my tv playing twilight princess.

also, there’s a nice review of adventures in sandwich making up at digital strips this week. you can read it here.

the reason i’ve been so absent from this blog- and pretty much the internet as a whole- is that i’ve been hard at work on my story for parable for the past three weeks. well, last night i finished it! here’s a sneak peak at the first page:

unfortunately, things don’t wind down for me just yet. there’s still a lot of work to do for this anthology so the blog updates may continue to be somewhat scarce.

in other news, you may or may not have noticed that my website got a bit of a re-design last week. finally got around to creating a links page and some banners, rewriting my bio, and moving some illustrations to the front page.

and for the sake of contrast, here is my drawergeeks contribution for last friday. the subject was sandman- spiderman’s sandman. i wasn’t going to do anything this week because of how busy i’ve been, but one of my coworkers expects me to draw something for dg every other friday and proceeded to tell me so when i came walking into work the day before. so i quickly drew this on a post-it note while my computer was booting up thursday morning.

once upon a time, during the last waking hours of the orlando megacon a couple weeks back, a tired and brain dead me decided to do a little live interview. if you’re interested to hear what i sound like when i’m trying to describe an indescribable comic strip and in need of a long nap, click on over to the gigcast! they also talk a little bit about lunchbox funnies after all the important “me” stuff.

my idiocy aside, they do say some really nice things about cow & buffalo after the interview. a little too nice maybe. don bluth?! i wish! but still, some nice things.

here’s a direct link to the mp3.

i didn’t really have a chance to do much sketching at megacon. i was too busy talking to people (and selling books!). but here’s one i managed to work on this weekend. not really sure what it’s all about other then the fact that a lot of the girls walking around in anime outfits might have influenced it.

i had a great time at the con! it was fun meeting some other local artists and some people from the forums. i’ll definitely be back next year. next time, i’ve decided, with some prints in hand- or maybe a sketchbook of some sort. adventures in sandwich making did very well though! for the most part, i was pretty much confined to my table the whole weekend. luckly my wife jen and my good pal matt were there to go wander around and take pictures for me (and watch my table as i quickly scrounged for comic book signatures). matt’s already posted a whole bunch of pictures from the convention on his flikr account here. jen should have hers up sometime later this week.

thanks to everyone that stopped by and said hi. it was a pleasure meeting you. can’t wait to do it again next year!

i published a book! and it’s awesome! here’s my press release:

Cow and Buffalo’s first book is here! Adventures in Sandwich Making collects the entire time traveling story-arc from September 2005 to August 2006. It also includes two all new strips created just for this publication, a special “facts about cows” by Buffalo, and a giant guest gallery with art by (you ready?) Ryan Spencer, Sarah Mensinga, Derrick Fish, Jerry Shamblin, Bryan Ballinger, Michael Foster, Mike Laughead, Pascal Campion, Josh Alves, Joe Fenton, Tor Harald Blom, Sally Thompson, Trade Loeffler, and Joey Weiser.

It is now on sale at Cow & Buffalo’s new store and available for only $10 (shipping included!).

i’m back from my little vacation! and it wasn’t as stressful as i thought it was. actually, it was very nice. i was able to see many, many family members and visit some old friends. spent most of the time just playing video games (hooray for wii sports and guitar hero!). it’s probably a good thing i decided to wait to buy a wii. i would never get any work done. in fact, you can blame the wii for me not having any art to post from my trip. can’t say i miss january’s weather in ohio though. i’m happy to be back in a state that the sun isn’t afraid to show up in. :)

anyhoo, much has happened in my short absence. the biggest of which is one of those web collectives i mentioned a little while ago went live. this one is called lunchbox funnies and it’s an all-ages webcomic collective which includes cow & buffalo and these seven other comics:

ryan estrada’s aki alliance
dave roman’s astronaut elementary
dean trippe’s butterfly
ovi nedelcu’s lunchbox
ryan sias’s silent kimbly
tyler martin’s wally & osborne
trade loeffler’s zip and li’l bit

i’m probably the biggest fan of these guys then anyone, so when they asked if i wanted to be part of lbf it was pretty much a no-brainer. i feel very blessed to be part of the group. there’s a great newsarama article here that explains what the alliance is all about better then what i can, so if you get a chance read that. but pretty much, lunchbox funnies was formed to generate more awareness of eight awesome comics that can be enjoyed by people of all ages. and hopefully, one day, we’ll be able to manufacture these:

also, cow & buffalo has a new forum because of this. click over there and say hullo!

so for christmas i made jen a blog. she’s been looking for reasons to be more creative with her photography and this was one of my husbandly ways of helping her out with that. i figured since my blog gives me reason to do more art (otherwise i’d have nothing to post), then her own blog might do the same for her. of course, i’m on the internet about 160x more often then her, but the intention’s there. she only just started posting yesterday, and is pretty new to this whole blogging thing, but if you get a chance this week swing over there and let her know what you think. i know she’ll appreciate it!

i hope everyone has a wonderful christmas (or hanakah or kwanza or winter solstice or just a nice end of the year week….)! this’ll be my last post until the new year. i’ll be celebrating christmas and having fun at disney next week and celebrating the end of 2006 as part of two of my very good friends’ wedding (still at disney!). and i have so many fun things to announce the month i get back!!!

in retrospect, it’s been a very great year. one of my best. :) i’ll retrospect more though when it’s completely over.

oh! and happy birthday, Jesus!

every now and then it’s probably important that i mention the parable anthology on this blog (seeing as how i’m spear-heading it and all). well today, as a special chistmas treat, i’ve posted the first eight pages of james mar’s story on the parable site. the whole story clocks in at 35 pages and is without a doubt the best work to date that i’ve seen james do. go check it out here. and if you get a chance, let him know what you think!

there was a time last month when i wasn’t quite as busy as i am now. because of that i was able draw a guest strip for one of my favorite web comics, pirate and alien. tyson smith’s celebrating his first month with his first child so october is officially guest month over there. my silly strip went up today. check it out!