Sta.sh
Total prizes reach 1000 
!!!! 
But of course there are always the rules......
Please please please fave the journal!
Make another journal about this giveaway and provide a link of that journal in the comments (this will help spread the word about this giveaway)
Rules
Should be about School Times!
, comment and watch!
oints:
i haven't written a real journal entry in such a long time, i wish i had something good to talk about that isn't comics-/job-related. i can't believe it's almost July, i'm going to have to start thinking about this year's Halloween Movie Monster pretty soon!
i won't be at San Diego Comic Con this year, my next show will be New York Comic Con in October, but i'm thinking about going to Small Press Expo (SPX), not as an exhibitor but as an attendee/fan. there are a bunch of people there i want to meet and hang out with.
right now i'm working on Glory #29 and trying to make time to start thumbnailing Shadoweyes 3. juggling projects is tough.
see, all i have to write about is what stuff i'm working on, blagh. here's some other stuff: i pre-ordered the new Ninja Turtles toys (just the 4 Turtles) which supposedly come out in August. i was debating whether or not to do it, several years ago i used to be a toy-buying fiend but i haven't gotten anything new in a long time and got rid of most of the ones i had except a handful, and i made a loose vow that i wouldn't buy any more. which was easy to do because the only ones i really would get were Gamera, there aren't any new Gamera movies being made so no new toys or at least no toys that aren't monsters i already have, and the Four Horsemen-designed He-Man toys & statues which they stopped making and i don't like the new Classics line (snore). i think the last figures i got were the NECA Ninja Turtles back in 2008, so it's been quite a while and i never thought anything new would come out that i would care about. plus my apartment is one room and i literally don't have the space for anything else. but other than those practical considerations, the biggest thing is that for the past several years i've been wrestling with what it means to be grown-up or an adult or whatever and how i still feel like a kid at age 32 and i'm still invested in all this "kid" stuff like Ninja Turtles and Final Fantasy 7 and Gamera, i dress pretty much the same as i did 10-15 years ago (i even still wear a couple shirts i had in elementary school, they still fit), i'm still a "nerd/geek," i work at home drawing comics in my pajamas which sure doesn't help since i've never had a real "grown-up" type job (sure as hell not complaining about that, though! haha), while the rest of my family is pretty traditionally "adult," including my younger sister, and most of my friends are that way too, so i feel like sometimes they've grown and changed while i've stayed the same.
sometimes i look around my apartment, which is probably really tame by nerd standards, i don't have a lot, and i think "where did i make the wrong turn? what kind of life is this?" and i think it needs to be time to put away childish things and all that. i wonder why my friends and family don't get invested in something the same way i do, like if there was some biological process that normally should happen that didn't happen in me, so i'm left still for some reason giving a huge shit about, say, Tifa Lockhart, a character in a decent video game from 1997 that i don't think i've even played in over a decade. and here i am planning a Ninja Turtles fan-comic, like will this be the final threshold? the point of no return?! it seems like i'm getting "worse" over the years, like i'm getting LESS adult, haha. BUT, all that said, i've had some good conversations with friends about all this, and my friend Zach said that i can't gauge myself against a made-up social metric like this and i just have to be myself, which sounds like the most obvious, corniest lesson ever, but when he said it to me last weekend it was what i needed to hear. then my friend Kelly said that i reject or question so many other societal standards, so why do i embrace this one? i couldn't really answer that. i suppose it's also wrapped up in being an artist and writer, constantly surrounded by characters and stories and ideas and stuff like that, in my own work, friends' work, the field i work in professionally/my job, everything. so i feel way better about it now than i have in a while, and i guess it says something that even though i've been dwelling on it i also haven't taken many steps to change it. i still feel like i'm grappling with it but i think throwing my hands up and hitting the pre-order button on those new Turtles toys was probably the way to go. just gotta accept myself and forget about the societal conventions!
do any of you ever grapple with anything like this, too?
That's pretty deep in the discount cliche bin, I know, but it's still legit.
Also, to put things in perspective, you may not have a closet full of suits and an east side suburban address, but you CAN (at least as of a few weeks ago) go to Barnes and Noble and pull something you created off their shelves. And to that I say "You go wit yer manchild self!"
If I were you, I wouldn't concern myself with comparing what you spend your money one vs what others do. We all have different tastes, likes and dislikes. People I work with would laugh their asses off if they found out how much money I'll spend on a piece of paper just because you put some ink on it(The page is no longer "mint" yet I'm paying for for it than when it was new. WEIRD.) But I'll do the same thing when I hear how they spent their money. Is it better if they bought a gun, or truck parts (How AWESOME is a LIFT KIT for a truck, huh? just AWESOME) or every pay channel on cable? If that makes them happy. And if you buying some actin figure is what you like to do, no harm in that either.
And, let me touch on living at home as an adult. Sure, I never did it, but I've mentioned this to you before, I envy the person that does and lives in the same town(or close) to the one they grew up in. There is no shame in living at home IF it is helping facilitate a goal(get ahead financially, school, kick off a career, save to buy a house) The 'tough love' parents that kick their kids out as 18 not only shouldn't have had kids, but do them a disservice. In most cases it pushes them into a cycle of renting and debt because they have to work so much harder to get stability in mid 30s that the person that lived at home until their mid 20s has. And the hard headed kid that can't wait to leave home at 18, well the parents should have raised a smarter, more appreciative kid. Or go back to plan A and not have kids to begin with.
And as far as being mature with a 'normal' life and job. Not only do I love your comics, but I love the fact, like Col Kurtz, that you thought it up and DID IT. Having grown up in the 80s, with a thriving punk scene, I LOVE the DIY attitude. The only reason WET MOON (up to VOLUME 6! ! ! ) is here is because of your maturity and determination to get it done. What has the guy that just bought the new golf clubs so he can brag to his buddies done?
O.k. I think I lost my ramble. But one last thought. You know what's worse than buying an action figure as an adult? Giving a shit that ANY celebrity is getting married or divorced.
Mike
still trying to figure out what I want or can do for a living
I'm still a geek (at age nearly 44
I recently turned 25 and people are always saying,"Well by the time I was 25 I started two businesses. By the time I was 25 I got married and pregnant with my first kid. By the time I was 25 I was moved out of the house and had a stable job." Well I haven't started a business (at least not a legitimate, pay hundreds of dollars worth of dues kind), I haven't married anyone or stood in a kitchen barefoot and pregnant and I haven't been able to get a job that hasn't tried to work me to death just so I can make a livable wage so that I can finally move into an apartment that isn't in ghetto-ville where a blonde, young female like me would be assulted within five steps of the front door. I'm bombarded with this, constantly....con-stant-ly. But that's not how I work. I've tried. I started taking business classes, worked myself like a dog at a traditional job and dating but things eventually got out of hand, rules changed, health problems sprung up, people went crazy and each route I took looped back around to me working on writing my stories, drawing my art, and working on projects that I had first started back when I figured I would try to see if I could be the next James Cameron, with boobs.
I think the only big different between the me now and the me five years ago is that I can now see the possibilities of being able to put into effect all the business tips that I learned from class, helping my dad run his business and improve my already existing talents so that what I couldn't do before is now possible. Turn my fun into work, but not just work, work. Instead it's fun work. Fun work that, if done right will ultimately become decently paid fun work. And I'm slowly getting the people around me to realize that I can in fact do something significant with what they just thought was a "phase" in my life.
I totally get the feeling you're talking about, though. I felt like a total failure while I was unemployed, while all my friends were off at jobs with 401ks. I don't even know what a 401k is, but it sounded impressive. Even though I'm doing the 9-5 thing now, I still feel like I'm just pretending to be an adult, because I spend most of my work day spinning in my chair with my shoes off, barely suppressing the urge to roll on the floor and respond "lolwat" to every email I get. I guess you have to decide what road you want to take. You can go all out 'I don't give a shit' eccentric or you can go more stealth-geek. Stay true to yourself, but decide what you really want to spend your money on, and don't feel guilty when you do--kind of what you've been doing, basically. Also, it's not a betrayal to some artist/geek code to get a decent shirt and pair of shoes. Don't be that creepy scruffy 30-something year-old guy who goes out in public in sweat pants, bro, ahahah.