T-Rex Jones ( Photo by Bruce Moyle - Joffre Street Productions)
What have been your personal cartooning/comics highlights of 2012?
Two highlights -- I finally started writing AND drawing my own stuff. It's been a long time coming and a lot of confidence issues booted in the arse thanks to the tremendous support of other professionals (and great friends) out there in the industry, but I'm finally doing it! The second highlight is meeting those folks and finally finding myself connected to like-minded individuals, many of whom (as I said) are some of the best friends a guy could ask for.
Who are some of the comics creators that you've discovered and enjoyed for the first time in 2012?
There are a few. Rob Paolucci's a dude from Western Australia living over in New York now who has a really great sense of style and design. His layouts are particularly impressive and sense of movement from one frame to the next is something I find myself trying to emulate a fair bit now. He helped layout a fairly prominent book this past year and I got to see a bit of it. He's also got a real eye for dynamic movement in characters.
Guiseppe Camuncoli is an artist I'd been reading in Hellblazer for ages now, but really only just switched onto earlier in the year. I really love the way he details features -- hands, faces -- it's extremely emotive stuff. REALLY emotive stuff.
I've really only just started stepping outside of my safety zone recently, so a lot of the newer stuff -- the different stufff -- I've been getting has been from creators most people already know, but in doing that I've started finding new people and new things. I really like want Brent Schoonover and Jason Copland are doing. I really only got a solid look in on Emily Smith's work this year, too. All three of them are on to big, big things in the future, you watch!
What is something non-comics that you have enjoyed in 2012?
Adventure Time has basically validated my somewhat ridiculous thought processes. I'm loving X-COM: Enemy Unknown. I've been buying up a lot of film scores on vinyl. I always like having things to listen to when I work, and it's usually film scores, but over the years I found that there were soundtracks and scores that were only ever released on vinyl or were better on vinyl so I've been slowly accumulating a nice little library of obscure film scores.
Have you implemented any significant changes to your working methods this year?
Yeah, I switched mainly to digital, then switched again and went from digital pencils to inking traditionally. The range of experimentation I get working digitally is amazing and it's really made me much more aware of what I'm doing and how I can achieve certain things visually in other ways, particularly traditionally.
What are you looking forward to in 2013?
Getting my first creator owned material out into the wild! I'm also planning a fairly dramatic shift in geographic placement sometime next year, so it should be interesting... See how it all goes.
