Hello fans! While I normally post a blog here every month, it’s been very hard to maintain alot of schedules this year with everything going on in the world today. I also suffered some physical as well as mental exhaustion in these past two months since my last blog, coupled with late remote hours at my day job (including over a weekend). Now that things have calmed down a bit in that department, I can get back to informing you about my art projects and any other related happenings. Recently I made some fantastic progress with my latest comic in production, and went back to my childhood art roots which resulted in three times the social media reactions I usually get. So, let’s get started:
BACK PAIN: Not much happened in August outside of the usual timelapse art games, Mongoose Mondays, Live Art Agendas, and Comic Creator Zoom meetings. That all changed in early September (the week before Labor Day weekend to be exact), when I threw my lower back out one evening by simply overreaching to check my phone charge. Even though the worst of the pain wound up lasting about three days, I took a full week off of my art games to fully recover, which gave me time to actually relax and catch up on some favorite streaming TV shows. In hindsight, I think this was my body telling me that because I don’t relax like I should when I mentally burn out, it had to teach me a lesson physically. Rest assured, I won’t be defying what my body says ever again.
COMPLETION OF MY 4TH COSMIC FORCE CHARACTER PREQUEL: After my back fully healed, I made the slow return to finishing my latest comic: “Act Your Age,” the fourth out of a 5 total set of character prequels chronicling the early lives of the current Cosmic Force members long before they meet in the field that night to watch the meteor shower that changes their lives forever. As of this typing, all 12 pages have now been illustrated in some medium (pages 1-6 are fully colored, while pages 7-12 are pencilled). The purpose of these prequels are to help flesh out the five members of the Cosmic Force, who in the parent series, are stuck together dealing with their self-isolation from missing two years of their lives with the rest of the world declaring them dead, as well as trying to get a handle on each of their new abilities. Add in the newly formed government task force hunting them down with advanced weapons to eliminate what they feel to be an alien threat, and there’s not alot of time to focus on building one character, let alone five. For this prequel, we take a peek into the life of one of the two younger members of the group: Kevin Simons. Born in 1968 to parents Deborah and Wayman Simons, Kevin suffers a tragic loss early in his life when his mother dies of sudden heart failure when he is only seven years old. Now it’s up to just himself and his father to try and move on as best they can. Moving from a spacious house to a confining apartment, we see Kevin grow up over the years, graduating high school and landing the college internship at the local TV station he is seen working at in Cosmic Force #1. By the time we get close to the issue 1 timeline in the Prequel set the day before the October 1987 meteor shower, we find the nearly grown-up Kevin in a heated argument with his father, who is now pursuing a long-term romantic relationship with a woman for the first time since his wife passed 12 years ago. As father and son became much closer after the tragedy, it upsets Kevin greatly that a new person (who could possibly wind up as his stepmother) was entering the picture and ruining the relationship he has with his only living natural parent. Much like the previous three prequels, I had alot of fun building and expanding on certain character traits based on dialogue from the firth issue of Cosmic Force, where I first introfduce the estranged families of the team. The most fun to me was doing research in attire and technology from previous decades (mostly the 1960s and 1970s) to help illustrate their early lives more accurately, as most of these characters range from their late teens to mid-thirties in the late 1980s to early 1990s timeline. This story should be finished and ready to print by the end of October, which leaves me with just one more Prequel to complete: “It’s a Hologram,” about the early life of the second youngest member of the C-Force, Brandon Quitog.
THEBUS LIFE COLOR ILLUSTRATIONS: This new art project started last week at the beginning of October, but because nothing else happened at the end of last month, it’s getting mentioned here anyway. For those that have known me since my elementary school days in the 50th State, my first drawing subjects at the age of six were city buses. A big reason for that was how colorful Honolulu City Buses were painted, with tan, orange and yellow stripe designs on them. Also, the island of Oahu’s public vehicle fleet, simply called “TheBus,” had an assortment of different vehicle models that were assigned to specific areas, giving the fleet alot of variety (some had air-conditioning, others still didn’t). With that setup completed, I recently posted the first two of what will be many Honolulu City Bus color illustrations on social media. Not just the buses itself, but also capturing what life was like using TheBus as a main source of transportation growing up in the mid-to-late 1980s. So far, the first two illustrations that I shared from my Carter Comics fan page to Hawaii FB pages garnered three times the response I get posting my comic or timelapse art. Lots of additional likes to Carter Comics, but most importantly, alot of comments from current and former Oahu residents speaking out on their bus riding experiences through the years. It feels great to know that I was able to create something that struck an emotional chord with so many people, and it’s definitely something that I would like to continue, as I have started work on a third Oahu TheBus life sketch.
Well, that is it for now. As a change of pace, I will be back here in December for an update on both my life and art projects. By that time, I may have my final prequel book almost finished, and possibly several more Bus Life sketches finished. Hope you all had a great August and September, and will have a great October as well. See you all in two months!
Regards,
Allen Carter
Carter Comics