I was looking at my calendar for the month of August and holy crap is it a good time to be a comic artist living in Minnesota. With gallery shows, a special all comics City Pages, and a new comic convention this month promises to have a lot of attention on us cartoonist living in the twin cities.
First up is the Lutefisk Sushi D Gallery Opening at Altered Esthetics this Friday, August 6th. Open to anyone who wants to stop by. Lutefisk Sushi is the bi annual mini comic project put on by the Cartoonists Conspiracy. Over fifty Minnesota cartoonists have participated by creating mini comics and printing copies for each box available for purchase at the show. Once the first run of boxes sells out though there will be no second printing.

My contribution is the twelve page mini comic The Midnight March. This is my first time taking part in the event and I had a blast. So come and mingle and look at some cool art. You can even buy a mini comic from the old cigarette vending machine.

Hope to see on Friday and keep watching this website for more updates on the events planned for the rest of August.

Brent

Comic fan, podcaster, and all around good guy Brion Salazar of Around Comics fame has started up a cool new side project called Fanboy Scouts. Brion has picked some great elements of familiar geek universes and crafted some spiffy merit badges to apply to your favorite fandom. The coolest part is you can help him create future badges by sending in suggestions for future designs. So if you got a jacket or satchel that is in some serious need of some geek street cred, you need some Fanboy Scouts.

Brent

I’ve been out of town for the last week or so. Still trying to get all caught up with work and emails. So this blog had gone a little silent but I wanted to mention that if you are ever shopping around for original comic art, you can’t go wrong checking out Cadence Comic Art.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned it too often but I now sell all my original comic work through Cadence. You can still contact me through this site about commissions but if you are looking for any of my published work, it’ll be there.

Brent

This weeks issue of local magazine VITA.MN is all about the Taste of Minnesota. Seems this year they are refocusing on the music and entertainment aspect of the event that may have slipped over the past few years. I always love doing covers for the magazine whenever I get the chance. This one was a challenge. We had to figure out how to incorporate the music and food in a fun and interesting way. A couple ideas were thrown out and sketched. Ultimately we thought this was the best way to show it.

Yes, a band rocking out on a gigantic cheeseburger seemed to be the perfect visual. Sadly I don’t think that burger will be available for  purchase at the event. Maybe next year. Be sure to pick up your copy of VITA.MN this week!

Few things I wanted to write about to keep you all updated on the world of Schoonover. It’s a fast and dangerous world I live I know.

1. Jessica Hickman is not just an awesome artist, but she also runs a very cool blog that interviews sketch card artists. She was nice enough to interview me for it and that can be read here.

2. Speaking of sketch cards. Iron Man 2 is coming out on May 7th, and starting next week I’ll be posting all my sketch cards I did for the Topps card set. So check back for those.

3. If you haven’t done so yet, get your butt to a comic shop and pre-order my Vincent Price Presents comic. Should be in stores sometime in June.
4. Finally, a little update on some comic projects. I am currently prepping a 48-56 page one shot comic. I am handling all the creative aspects on this one. It’s in the very early stages but the plot line and story beats have been laid out. Characters are being sketched, and thumbnails are getting drawn. Pretty excited about it but keeping mum on it for the most part. But it is brewing. Hoping to have more info come the middle of summer. On the smaller project side of things I am going to participate in Lutefisk Sushi D. LSD is a celebration of mini comics strictly for artists living in Minnesota. The goal is to have a mini comic done by June 15th and for a gallery show following in August. Just in time for the first ever Minneapolis Indie Expo.

Over the last couple months I have been working on a rather large ad campaign for the Minnesota Historical Society. This summer the MNHS plans on promoting it’s twenty five plus sites all over the state. They will be using the artwork I contributed to the campaign on signage all over the place. Billboards, bus ads, websites, posters, etc. It’s been a rather large undertaking but also very rewarding.

The look and feel we decided to go with on the project is very inspired by the WPA poster movement during Roosevelt’s new deal administration. Between the mid 1930’s to the early 1940’s thousands of posters encouraging the country to do anything from buy a war bond, to visiting a public park. With these tough economic times the Historical Society is encouraging Minnesotans to stay home and vacation in state.

So be on the look out for this poster and many of it’s historical site icons. They will popping up all over the place this summer.

As a bonus here’s the first sketch e did on the project.

Brent

I had this really nicely written recap of my weekend in Chicago but due to lack of sleep I accidentally hit close out on what I thought was a photo, but turned out to be my word press write up. So now I am not feeling like retyping it all. To sum up the weekend I had a great time. Went to Wrigley for an annual Cubs game with the wife. Sadly they lost again to the Brewers like last year. We had awesome pizza, awesome Chinese, and awesome Cajun food. We hung out with friends from Around Comics, Comic Geek Speak, Skottie Young, Ryan Stegman and his wife Erin, and many more people. I shared a cab with Guy Davis and his fiancee who were just too nice for words. Chris Samnee drew an amazing Creature from the Black Lagoon in my sketch book. I met Geof Darrow and Mike Mignola while walking around before the show opened. Having natural sun light in a convention is a marvelous thing. All and all a great show and I think the guys at Reed did a good job. On the down side my table placement was pretty much as bad as it could be so it was tough to get traffic over there. Hopefully next time that won’t be the case. Below is a list of photos and some brief descriptions. In the coming days I’ll post some artwork I did while I was there.

What is this? Sunlight at a comic convention? What an amazing concept.

My booth babe.

I settled for going out for drinks and swapping sketchbooks.

My lovely con neighbors fighting with plastic swords.

One of the many Iron Man movie props on display.

This was our rental car for over the weekend. Only problem was we had to keep it under 88 MPH.

Huge pleasure to meet cartoonist Doug Sneyd. Missed him when I had the camera but caught him later in the day.

The King of Memphis Jerry Lawler

Minnesota based artist Don Ha tried to get too close to my table but my security took care of it.

Little Black Canary came by to make sure there were no ruffians about.

Little Iron Man came by to see if little Black Canary was still around.

On the last day of the show I bumped into a little bulldog meet up in the park. I tried to steal this puppy but sadly couldn’t get away with it.

I was one of the lucky few who was able to nab one of the two hundred limited edition versions of  Joshua Hale Fialkov’s Tumor. This book is easily one of the best designed books I’ve seen in a long time. It’s wonderful and I am so happy to have gotten one. I got halfway through it on the plane ride home and the book really delivers. I can’t suggest it enough.

Finally while I was out of town, the Comic Geek Speak podcast ran an episode going through this month’s Previews and spotlighted my new Vincent Price comic. You can check that out here.

They also did live on the spot email interviews at C2E2 with myself and Nicole which can be heard here.

It’s a very exciting week for those in the comic industry and it’s fans. A new con has emerged and it should instantly become the biggest convention in the Midwest.

The Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo, or C2E2 is taking place this weekend in downtown Chicago’s McCormick Place. It promises to be an amazing event and should boast some huge attendance numbers when all is said and done. I am very happy to say I’ll be at the first ever C2E2 and I think it’ll put the city of broad shoulders back on the convention map were it rightfully belongs. After seeing the stature of the Wizard convention in Rosemont, IL fall pretty drastically over the last few years there seemed to be a void in having a major show in the Midwest. Reed Exhibitions is filling that spot and hopefully it lives up to the hype. I think it will.

Like I mentioned I will be at the con at Artist Alley booth A9. I’ll be splitting a table with my MCAD teacher and good friend Barb Schulz. I’ll have copies of Horrorwood, Astronaut Dad, Toy Story, and several volumes of my convention sketchbooks. I’ll also be doing commissions all weekend.

Speaking of sketchbooks here’s a peak at my newest volume, which will be available for the first time at C2E2.

If you can’t make it to a convention to get one you can purchase them online over at IndyPlanet.com and ComicsMonkey.com

Hope to see you at the show this weekend.

Brent

The latest edition of Diamond’s Previews has my issue of Vincent Price Presents available for Pre-Order. You can go to your local comic shop and give them this order code.

 Vincent Price Presents issue 19: APR10 0806
Pretty excited about this issue for a couple reasons.

• 1. It’s the first time I’ve actually ever written anything in comics.
• 2. It’s Vincent Price. I actually got to use Vincent’s likeness in the story. One of my all time favorite character actors. I’m not delusional, I understand Vincent’s been dead for many years and more than anything this is a licensed property book, but still it has enough charm in it that made me really want to do get involved. For some people it’s Star Wars, or Star Trek, for me, it’s old horror films. So this was in a way a dream come true.
• 3. I was able to collaborate with inker Stacie Ponder. I’ve never worked with someone else creatively outside of the writer position on a comic before. I didn’t have the time to commit to all three stages of the art (pencils, inks,colors) so Stacie came in and did an awesome job. I’ve quickly learned how much more I loved doing pencils when I had more time to put into it.

Overall I had a really awesome experience. Below are some Preview pages from the book along with a brief description for the story.

Popular radio show couple BENNY and BETTY have hit a snag in their off-air relationship. Low ratings and a new romantic interest threaten to put BENNY out of a job for good. With the stress building, BENNY’S inner turmoil finally surfaces in a horrific fashion. Will this be enough to silence the voices in BENNY’S head for good?

Brent

A while back I worked on a project for the University of Nebraska about an ocean virus called EhV. It was a ten page comic that would be followed by an essay about the virus.

The plan is to develop a series of short comic stories and essays to develop a hardcover book for retail and libraries. The University’s marketing strategy was to develop the comic stories to make them into a motion comic application for IPhones.

The motion comic idea was ditched due to money constraints but the comics were released last week as a web application for your Iphone and can be downloaded here.

Overall these experience of making a motion comic was fun, but very challenging. Every panel was developed in two to four separate layers depending on the background. I think some spots become a little stiff due to my inexperience working in this way. I’d love to see it work as a motion comic and we might get that chance down the road. Also it was fun working with my friend Martin Powell again, whom I used to work on a very short lived web comic called The Phantom Shadow that I would love to do again someday.

Brent